A Penny for Your Thoughts

It's the most wonderful time of the year! The time when our family has 8 birthdays, an anniversary, 3 major, travel involved, holidays and Christmas programs/parties galore.

It is insane, and busy. But it is also full of love and excitement. I am surrounded by very special people and I have an amazing family, and we all just happen to share the same birthday season, and that's ok.

So I will probably be doing a lot of posting about parties, gifts and the like for the next 30 days.

The season of celebrating really kicks off with Wesley's birthday, then we have Thanksgiving and next Matt and I's anniversary. So you saw the birthday post right? I kinda missed Thanksgiving, but I assure you all it was lovely and we were thankful. Now to the anniversary.

This year marked our 8th anniversary of marriage. Wo-ah. Weren't we here just yesterday?

Can we sidebar and discuss things that didn't exist, or I wasn't aware of when I was 23 and planned a wedding:

1. Trendy bridesmaid dresses...sorry girls
2. Digital professional photography-hence the badly scanned photos
3. Having your dress fitted and altered to your body, and/or not losing 10 lbs the week before your wedding

On with the post.

It was a great day. Perfect to us. Down to tacky Christmas trees on the Chapel lawn and donuts for a wedding cake.

Yes, this wedding was ours and I would do it again just the same, well with better photos : )

Every anniversary seems to get overlooked a little more because there is so much going on. I always tell Matt not to worry about it, we can just go to dinner and exchange cards. But every year he tops himself. AH-hem, new wedding band!!

I like getting gifts according to the traditional anniversary themes. Paper, wood, cotton etc. So as I planned Matt's gift this year I discovered 8 was the copper anniversary. What can you think of that is copper? A PENNY! Well, that's easy enough, but not a very fun gift. So I thought and thought and decided I would search for a penny from each year of our marriage. And ended up with 9 (wedding year plus 8) During my hunting I was also lucky to find both of our birth years so I threw those into the project as well. So I had 11 pennies, what next? Luckily I also had a very creative friend who I bounce ideas off of very successfully! She thought it would be cool to mount the pennies on a canvas. Ta da!

But it doesn't stop there. After working with the pennies for a while I had another idea. Matt and I love to travel. We haven't done as much as we used to, can't imagine why? But we still love to dream, and we have a running list of cities we would like to explore. So can you guess what I thought of next? That's right, we're going to Washington, DC!! So exciting! Here's how I broke the news.

Happy 8 to us! See ya soon Mr. President!

Final Christmas Craft

I know Christmas is over....but I wanted to share the cute teacher gifts I came up with stole from Pinterest.

Now that I have a kid, I must, from time to time, come up with adorable, creative, original, not too expensive teacher gifts for her 2 teachers and 2 teacher assistants at school. I have done gift cards, plants (Thanks for helping Wesley Grow!), ornaments and books. As a teacher I try to think of the things I actually like getting.

This year I found the cutest poem using the colors of M&M's to describe a great teacher. And this is what I did with it.

The letters are the teachers names, and the are ornaments as well.

I followed the theme for the class gifts as well, but they didn't get a poem cause they can't read. They just got fillable ornaments filled with M&M's, you're welcome fellow parents!

It think everything turned out super cute.

And that's the end of Christmas Crafts, now on to New Year:: New Windows......