As Thanksgiving approaches, lots of my friends do “thankful” activities with their kids. The idea is simple, ask the kids what they’re thankful for and display their answers — and yours. This is our take on it. I decided to trace our hands and hang them like a garland in our dining room. Initially I
We didn’t get around to carving our pumpkins in time for Halloween this year. To me, that’s terrible foreshadowing. If I can’t get ready for Halloween in time, then I might as well just forget about being ready for Christmas? Even though our pumpkins weren’t ready for Halloween, I still wanted to harvest the seeds
My mom mentioned the other day that the leaves were beautiful at home — one of the prettiest falls she can remember. It occurred to me that now that I live in Richmond, a relatively flat city, I miss out on the fall colors in the mountains. When I was growing up I took the
Mary Virginia is just at the very beginnings of being interested in coloring. She’ll hold a marker, draw a few lines on the paper, and a few moments later try to climb on the table. The only reason I’ve even started “coloring” with her is because she wants to do whatever her brother is doing, so
I’ve been falling behind on blogging lately. When I started blogging three years ago, I made a loose goal to post at least twice a week. Recently, I’ve been scrambling to meet that goal. One reason is this: I didn’t realize how much I relied on photos for blog content until I no longer had a
This is how things looked in my house just before leaving to trick or treat. David was hiding behind the couch, screaming because he did NOT want to be a skeleton, he wanted to be a bat. David KNEW he was going to be a skeleton, David had ASKED, no BEGGED, to be a skeleton. He
Back in August, I started doing a monthly memory verse with our kids. I downloaded the printables here, and hung them in my dining room. My approach was casual; my kids are young so I didn’t think it made sense to push too much structure. I was just going to say the verse at the beginning
Before I begin this story, I think it’s important to note that it happened on my birthday. There are a lot of other qualifiers I wanted to include, but I decided that was the most important one, because if I’d been at a spa getting a facial and a massage this would have never happened.
Even though I work really hard to limit his screen time, David is a full-on TV-loving kid. He’ll watch anything, anytime, anywhere and if the TV is off, he asks me non-stop if we can turn it on. He tries different techniques all the time: “I have a good idea, Mommy! Let’s watch TV!” Or my
If you follow me on Instagram (if you don’t, I’m amandaleighvt), you know that my family’s version of a trip to the pumpkin patch was a trip to Kroger to buy pumpkins. There are pumpkins on my porch; everyone’s happy. No thanks to me, they did get to visit a real pumpkin patch, too. A