Christmas cards ordered !?!

Yes, this year I am actually ahead of schedule. I decided to order Christmas cards this year and the company I like was running a 20% off special if you order by Sunday night. Luckily we had our Christmas card photo ready. A couple weekends ago we were all ready for Church but didn't manage to get Vivian napped and fed in time to make it there on time. We got an A for effort but didn't make it to morning service (we are trying to transition from evening service to morning service). Since we were dressing up I had us all change into jeans and we went down to the river front to do some photos. It was a really nice day. Here are a few outtakes that didn't make it on the card.photos with a baby were much harder than I expected. She doesn't understand looking at the camera, let alone smiling when there is no one looking back at her. This little fit actually lasted on a couple seconds so it is funny that we caught it on camera. She mostly just looked off at other people.Yum, concrete! I just read an article about how we keep our kids too sterile these days and they don't get to play in the dirt and ingest microbes like kids should. I guess concrete does a body good. I love the skyline in the background.

I love the photos of people swinging their kids in the air so we tried it. It just looks like we are trying to rip her poor little arms off. Not cute at all!

Whenever we hold her up in the air Vivi gets super excited. Gotta love that face. This is on my work computer right now. I especially love the blue sky backdrop.

Who me? Such a sweetie!!!

Happy Halloween

We received this goldfish hat as a hand-me-down last winter. It was way too big so we stuck it away in a drawer and forgot about it. A week ago I was looking for Vivi's winter hats and rediscovered the fish hat. Greg has always thought it was a laugh riot and after sticking it on her head again commented it was practically a Halloween costume in and of itself. We just needed a shirt with some waves on it. I immediately thought, "why not a wave dress!". And our little babe was transformed into a goldfish for Halloween.I used a dress that we already had (and that fit well) as a pattern. I cut both sides out of linen and then cut waves out of cheap felt from Michael's. After piecing it together I stitched down each wave along the bottom using my sewing machine. The next wave down hid the stitches. I added a few seaweed pieces to the bottom and used fabric tack to stick down some of the wave peaks to keep them from folding over or showing too much of the linen. Once that was done I surges around the entire piece to keep it from unraveling and then stitch the front and back together. I was going to stop there but just couldn't leave the edges unfinished so I turned them all and stitched them down. A couple pieces of velcro and it was done. This is not really the most sturdy dress but I figured she would only wear it an hour or so. If she were older and into dress-ups I would have made it more usable since Halloween costumes were a huge source of dress-up material when I was growing up. I loved that.

Here she is in her little costume. White tights, shoes and onsie provided a nice backdrop. You can't tell from the photos but the hat had a fish tail sticking out the back.

Now we didn't really "celebrate" Halloween in the traditional sense. We went over to some friend's house for a little get together and Vivi wore her "costume". It was fun and she sure was cute.