Sunday, December 16, 2012

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Merry Christmas Everybody!

I want to toot my own horn for a second here: I took a graphics design class this semester and was able to learn a little about Adobe Illustrator. This Christmas tree, I created from scratch! From the star to the branches to the string holding up the ornaments, I "drew" it all in illustrator. After finishing the tree, I had a design friend, Katherine, take a look at it to help me smooth out a few of the lines. BIG thanks to Katherine!
Anyway, I was pretty proud of this piece!

2012 has been wonderful! 

I have grown closer to old friends, and made many new friends. I've enjoyed a great amount of time with my family and was blessed with a couple weeks this summer to spend with Mike's.
A lot of new changes have occurred in our little family.
Mike received an awesome promotion!
I became the first in my family to receive a Bachelor's degree (well, I tied with my brother-in-law, Jared)!
And the biggest of all big is... 
Mike & I found out we are pregnant with a little girl and are due in May!

I just want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of our lives. We are so blessed to have so many wonderful people to share our experiences with. 

Here's to another great year!

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Gender Reveal Party

December 10th took SO long to get here. It was a Monday, and I'm pretty certain that I have never in my life been more excited for the arrival of a Monday . 
On this day, we had our first ultrasound that would tell us if we were having a little girl or a little boy!
To celebrate our findings, we decided to have a gender reveal party! It was just with my parents and siblings, but it turned out to be such a hit! 
Before the party, we only told a handful of people the gender of the baby, including Mike's parents who live in Minnesota. However, we did NOT tell my family. It was SO hard to keep it a secret from them! By 9 am, we knew the gender and could not tell them until close to 8:30 pm! 12 hours of keeping this in was SO incredibly hard!

This is a picture of the banner I made for the party! (I added some twine to string them together)

The Box Reveal idea came from Pinterest. What would our 21st century lives be like without this website?
The idea is to get a large box, fill it with pink or blue balloons filled with helium, and open it in front of friends and family to share with them the exciting news!!
Its a little hard to tell what this picture is, but I will explain. The creation of this box was due to the fact that we did not have a box big enough to do the job we needed it to do. I had my friend Brelynn come over to help me create this.

 4 smaller boxes and several kinds of tape later, we did it. This box had 5 sides, and no top. 
We left it open so when we wrapped it up in silver polk-a-dot wrapping paper with the balloons inside, we could just punch through the paper to release the balloons! I could NOT have gotten all the balloons in here without Brelynn. Thank you for all your help!

My mom helped me create these gorgeous lips and mustaches. We made 10 of each of these, and let each member of the family, including our little nieces, pick which one they thought that Baby Every would be! 

Unfortunately, we lost the pictures of everyone's guesses, and the opening of the box, so I won't be able to share those with ya'll :[

I will do my best to describe it to you though!
So, most of my family picked mustaches as their guess. You see, in our family, we have 3 granddaughters, and on Mike's side, there are already 2. That is 5 girls that have come into our family in the last 3 years. 
Everyone thought for SURE that this baby would be a boy. Well, not everyone, but the majority. 
We took pictures with each couple/little family of their guesses.
After the guessing, we brought the GINORMOUS box downstairs to where everyone was seated. My dad suggested we all count down from 10 and when we got to one, we would punch open the box. 
10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 ............ PINK balloons everywhere!
I think most of the family was VERY surprised! And maybe I'm just emotional, but it was such a big event, I almost cried watching those pink balloons float to the ceiling!
 I also did not get any pictures of the food... However, all the credit for the yummy food goes to my sister, Dannielle and my sister-in-law, Cynthia.
Dannielle got Hershey chocolate bars and colored half of them with the SHE in pink and the other half with the HE in blue. She also brought pink lemonade and blue Hawaiian punch for drinks!
Cynthia made cupcakes (I did get a picture of that above) in bubblegum & cotton candy flavors (pink & blue)!
They did a fantastic job!