Awesome Giveaway~!~~

Run! Don't walk and check out the giveaway over at Tatertots & Jello!!

And you can make this!~!!!

Mama’s Holiday Wish List Meme

Mama’s Holiday Wish List Meme






TodaysMama (http://bit.ly/tmwishlist) and GameStop (http://bit.ly/gamestop10) are giving away a sleighful of gifts this holiday season and to enter I’m sharing this meme with you.





1. What is your holiday wish for your family? I have been saying over and over how I want us all to slow down and enjoy the holiday's. My kids are growing up to quickly and I already miss them even though they still live at home.


2. What is your Christmas morning tradition? We start with coffee/hot chocolate and then take turns opening gifts while a Quiche I prepare the night before cooks. After all presents are opened and we eat everyone is free to play with all of their Christmas gifts.

3. If you could ask Santa for one, completely decadent wish for yourself, what would it be? A vacation to a hotel room stacked with books that I could take one very very lazy week to read and relax.



4. How do you make the holidays special without spending any money? We walk and enjoy the beautiful VA trees that have changed colors and admire all of our neighbors Christmas decorations



5. What games did you play with your family growing up? Scrabble, Charades, and many many card games



6. What holiday tradition have you carried on from your own childhood? The kids always are only allowed to open one gift on Christmas Eve and it's ALWAYS pajamas, it really tortures them and I LOVE it!



7. Where would you go for a Christmas-away-from-home trip? NYC to Rockefeller Center



8. Check out GameStop (http://bit.ly/gamestop10) and tell us, what are the three top items on your GameStop Wish List this year?  1. Kinnect for Xbox360 2. Just Dance 2 for Wii 3. SUper Mario All Star bundle

Invitations

I really think invitations set the tone for the whole party. Lately I receive less paper invitations and more Evite style invitations. I think in most cases that is perfect, it's an affordable means of inviting all of your guests and an easy way for them to be able to quickly and easily respond. Every once in a while for certain types of events I think that a "paper" invitation is just a great way to go. For the Tea Party shower I posted below I was very lucky to find someone to design the perfect invitation for me and for $35 spent I had them designed and professionally printed. The price was well worth it to me to be able to set the tone I was looking for.

I highly recommend Tiffany with Mira Greetings! Check out her Etsy store at the link below!

www.miragreetings.etsy.com

Mad Hatter Baby Shower

I recently planned a Mad Hatter Tea Party Baby Shower. I didn't want to go with the new Alice in Wonderland or the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, but more of a messy tea party with strange touches, something a little messy, not stuffy but fun! I saved so much money by using things that I already owned, hitting up many many yard sales, and even buying from Craigslist. 

Beautiful "fake" flowers from Michael's craft store! I was amazed how many people at the party thought they were real! 

We had an amazing amount of food!

Gorgeous cake made by Heidi Varden she spent days hand painting the gorgeous Alice in Wonderland sketch drawings I sent her!! The cake was AMAZING!

Beverage station~ featuring our YUMMY Mango Mimosas

I found these drink containers at a Big Lots store for $8

Yummo!!

I am a HUGE fan of Parmesan cheese crisps

These cheese straws were amazing and fit perfectly in the IKEA vases I keep on hand, they work perfectly!!

IZZE drinks make fantastic accents for beverage tables! Not only are they yummy but they come in amazing colors to coordinate with the party. The beverage tins were bought at Target on clearance for $5 a piece and they had "A" magnets on them which is the baby's first initial. The white makes it so easy for them to be used for many different events~~

Tea sandwiches on my GORGEOUS white cake platters

Gift table!!

Gifts!!

You can see just a bit of the FABULOUS fabric I found on clearance at Joanne's Fabrics for $1.50/yard. It had an amazing exaggerated floral print the really enhanced the look of the table

White roses with red paint dripped on them, total cost fifty cents, found the gorgeous silver footed bowl at a yard sale for $1 and the frame was in the clearance section at Big Lots

Favor boxes full of homemade FUDGE!!! Made by the always amazing Cassie of Goldilocks Creations

Food & Beverage table

Tablescape, the angels I bought a few years ago at the dollar store for a Valentines tablescape I did. I liked throwing in random things throughout the party

What looks like placemats are actually very large sheets of scrapbook paper I found at Michaels in a book of 60 pages. It was in the clearance sections for $8

I found an ad on craigslist that a man had placed saying he was selling all of the tea things from his failed tea house, I purchases 6 3 tiered servers many many tea cups and saucers and tea pots! You can just see a little bit of the amazing wing chair I bought for $30 on Craigslist last year, it was the perfect spot for the mom to be to sit

I like how random everything was, it made it so much easier to put everything out

Messy is fun!!

Me & the GORGEOUS mommy to be (again) :) 

Gorgeous photos were taken by the talented 

Erin of Erin Colleen Photography 

and 

Ryanne of Bzzy Bee Photography

Surprised on my ability to follow through??

"D" and I October 1995

Growing up as kid I pretty much lived in the same house all throughout my school years, I was never the new girl, I knew everyone in my school, neighborhood, burbs, other kids were new, but not me, I was staple on the streets of our neighborhood. I went to Kindergarten through High School with the same set of friends, of course adding new friends to our group as the years went, but they were always new and not me.

All of this was true until I decided to get pregnant... while still in High School, this automatically made me the New Girl. I was new to a whole slew of experiences, new to being the only girl in my high school to walk around with a 9lb baby growing inside me, new to a bunch of questions asked by an OB who was so amazingly sweet an patient with my lack of knowledge and understanding. New to just how frightening having your newborn whisked away immediately upon birth due to complications. New to not knowing how my life was going to work out and how I would be able to provide for another life.

Luckily and thankfully, "V" was much more of a man than I think he ever knew he could be at that time and our lives were made so much better by the fact that he had already joined the Army, which definitely helped to provide a life for our automatic and small little family when we were married shortly out of high school.

All of this of course led me to being the New Girl, for what I now think of as the rest of my life...

part 2 of a million more parts to come...