A Perfect Playspace...

Since Christmas is officially over I felt compelled to get the decorations down. I usually leave them up until after New Year's but to be honest I am kind of tired of pulling the little one out of the tree!

Here she is helping pre tangle the lights for next year.

Overseeing Daddy taking the lights down

After getting the Christmas tree cleared out we decided that the empty space left behind would be perfect for a play area for the little one. Here is Daddy testing it out during the nap time!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Holiday Festivities...

This year for Christmas we went to visit my folks in Wilmington. We had a great time! It was wonderful to get out of town for a few days and for the little one to spend time with Grandma and Grandpa. Here are a few pics from our holiday.

Grandma had an awesome play area set up for the little one when we got there! Here she is helping to create a masterpiece!

Opening a gift on Christmas morning.

Here is Grandma showing off one of the the little one's new shirts, this one was sent by her aunt and uncle.

It is so CUTE!
It has a real sock monkey face built onto the front!
I'm sure pictures of her modeling it will soon appear.

After she tore into all of her own gifts she decided to help Daddy!

Here is Grandpa showing off his traditional gift from Mom a smoked sausage! LOL!!!

A total guilty pleasure for him!

Thanks so much to Mom and Dad for having us!

Totally Baked!

Last night I began my holiday baking. Below is my sugar cookie dough resting in the fridge. Doesn't it look yummy?! Like a big blob of pizza dough!

While waiting for that magic transformation of my dough I made these peanut butter kiss cookies. I have never made them before but have eaten tons of them over the years. They are simple to do, I used the recipe off the Hershey's Kiss bag.

I had a little help from one of the little one's Little People, Maggie. Didn't realize that she was there cheering me on until I reviewed the pics!

I ate the rejects, so the one you see with the crooked kiss was all mine!

This morning I tackled the sugar cookies.

It took me almost 4 hours to bake and decorate them, and that was with me slacking towards the end. Notice only a few of the Santa's have bow ties...

Hubby even helped by putting some stripes on the candy canes for me!

My favorites have to be the Christmas trees. I think they turned out the best.

I used a powder sugar/ vanilla glaze to cover and to hold the sprinkles on and then piped icing around the edge.


Looking at all the pictures while I type this has made want to go eat. Happy Monday! I'm going to go bite the head off a snowman!

Lights and Snuggies, Oh my!

For the first time since moving here we finally made it to the Festival of Lights . In year's past we have been to lazy to go but now that we have the kid to impress we felt the time was right! This was 20th year the park has done the light display and they certainly have a variety!

Love that hubby caught the picture as the clock was chiming and the mouse ran round! Bong!

Noah's Ark

One of the little one's favorite, since she has an ark and animals at home, thanks to Grandma, who keeps trying to get some religion in to her life. :)

Magical elves and even the old lady and her shoe!

In other exciting news, the little one got a super awesome Christmas gift from one of her favorite auntie's! A SNUGGIE!!!!

Here she is modeling it in all of it's neon hot pink glory! This is the kid size so it will be wearable until she is probably about 15 or 5 ft tall, which ever comes first! It also came with matching slipper socks which she immediately put on and the wore as sock/leg warmers for the rest of the night! I think she's in love with her new snuggie!
Happy Friday!

Picture perfect...

Smocked Dress Madness, Episode 2...

For those of you that have been reading my blog since the beginning, you know that I love shopping for the little one, especially if it is at bargain prices! Today was the first day of the twice yearly Rosalina dress sale here in town. Some of you have probably read my posts about the sale before. Rosalina is a wholesale distributor but twice a year they open to the public. It brings out every crazy mommy and grand mommy from all over the state! Some of these women are like vultures, grabbing every outfit they can manage to hang onto. It can be somewhat ruthless! Even though pictures will eventually be taken of her in each and every outfit and posted on my flickr site, I just get so excited about my purchases I have to show them off asap, especially to my mom and sisters!

I think I did pretty good this time, I was on a mission to get a Christmas outfit, which I did as well as a few other cute things. Due to major budget cutbacks in our household this time I had a set spending amount, I showed great restraint and I feel like I made some good choices. It is tough to decide when there are SO many cute things and they are constantly bringing out new stuff. I had to put my blinders on big time!

So here are the latest additions to the little one's wardrobe!

The Christmas outfit!

I love that it is pants not a dress, as my mom said "it will make it easy for her to run around and open all of her loot come Christmas!"

Christmas Outfit #2

Doesn't seem like I showed much restraint buying 2 Xmas outfits, but I really couldn't decide...At least now she will have something festive for Christmas Eve also (that's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

Sailboat Dress

Fish Dress

Little one loves fish!

Chocolate and Pink Dress

Now that the Christmas dress is purchased it is time to go visit Santa! I hope that it goes as well as the visit to the Easter Bunny did. I think we are going to try to tackle that on Sunday, if she screams it still gives me time to do a few photo shoots with her at home once I get the decorations out for the card photo.

Keep your fingers crossed Santa doesn't scare the hell out of her!