hooked on houses

i was visiting my family in atlanta this weekend to help with a little organization around the house, meet with my sister about a start-up company we're forming, and celebrate my dad's 60th bday a week late, and my mom turned me onto this awesome blog that i hadn't yet heard of..."hooked on houses".  if you enjoy looking at houses and decorating as much as my family members and i do, you'll love it too!  plus, i'm always impressed with people that actually make a living by blogging!!

also, i'll post more about our company as we move forward with the launch, but we're super excited to get started on it! :)

Christmas pics

i never had a chance to post our pictures from the would-be-Christmas-card photoshoot we did with jefferson but thought they were kinda funny and wanted to share...

this was our family Christmas picture (even though i didn't actually get around to sending out cards this year :))

for our Christmas cards, we usually try and get jefferson to do something creative or funny, so this year, billy had the great idea of getting him to be santa with a bag of toys.  read force him into his santa suit that he hates, put a couple of brooks shoeboxes in a pillowcase, and see if we could somehow get him excited about dragging the pillowcase around.  it didn't work quite as well as last year's santa pictures, when he tried to go into the chimney and stood on the roof, but we still had a good time with it.  maybe next year we'll perfect it, and i'll get my act together with some cards too!

so cute!!

we also thought it would be funny to have a picture of santa eating cookies, but this didn't make the cut for our e-card :)

every time i tried to put the hood on, it would just cover his eyes, and he would look ridiculous

very tired (traumatized?) after his santa photoshoot

Christmas 2010

in addition to being a little delayed posting snow pictures, i never posted pictures of our house at Christmas this year, as i was out of town the day the blog i sometimes link up with for house photos did their Christmas tours and didn't get around to doing it afterwards.  i always love getting our stuff out and decorated for Christmas!  the ornaments are especially fun because we have a great assortment of ornaments from our childhoods, ones we've gotten on various trips we've taken, and ones given to me by my mom's and my friends for a wedding shower (one of the perks to a december wedding :)).  it's great to think about the people, places, and memories associated with each ornament, so that's one of the parts of decorating i love the most.  on a side note, i am constantly reminded of everyone's extreme generosity at that shower (and others) when i get to use all of the wonderful gifts they gave us each day in our house!  i feel like i should be continuously writing them all thank-you notes, as i have loved getting to use their gifts over the past 4+ years. 

we kind of do the same decor each year, but i guess as long as it looks nice, that's ok!  whole house:  candles in the windows, front railing decorated with garland and lights, this year billy put up lights on our crepe myrtle; main level:  mantle decorated with the nativity (which stays there year-round) and some other decorative elements, Christmas tree, Christmas books, fall/winter centerpiece in the dining room, etc.; basement: snow village, Christmas palm tree (that also stays up all year round); upstairs:  little decorative items (since basically no one except for us sees that area); porch:  little Christmas tree.

here are a few pictures from around our house...

i made little tags for the stockings this year out of some scrapbook paper we had that coordinated well with the colors in the room :)

jefferson was really excited to get into his stocking Christmas morning!

snow village

living room mantle

mantle after i added kel's gift (the stars for the nativity :))

our tree and large, pretty nativity that was a gift from the hostesses of my above-mentioned shower

i guess i didn't do a great job of getting Christmas photos of our house this year, but we think it looked pretty :) (and still have most of the decorations up...guess i'll get to taking them down this weekend!)

snow days

So with the busyness of my brother's wedding, Christmas, and getting year-end stuff finished up around the office, I never posted any pictures from our several December snow days. We rarely have snow before January here, but this year, we've gotten 4 days of snow so far (and the latest one still has some remnants around town even now, a couple of weeks later!).  And it's supposed to snow again today, but so far, it's just rainy and super cold. 

Here are some pictures we took from the snow days...

digging in the snow

billy built jefferson a tunnel so he could go potty and run around a little bit

he LOVES the snow!

what i had to dig my car out of before going to work

our neighbor's snow-covered backyard

Kendall took these when she was hanging out with Jefferson...they're better action shots than we have :)

favorite :)

So I guess we're slightly obsessed with our dog, since almost all of our snow pictures are of him :)  But he does make the snow much more fun!!