Free Christmas Cards!

So as I've expressed many times before I LOVE pictures, taking them, trying to be creative with them, etc. etc! And this time of the year is my favorite to receive all the fun cards in the mail, with all those adorable pictures all of my friends & family taken of their loved ones! Shutterfly is my main source of uploading pictures and online photo storage--they are the best! I've been using them since Reed was born--so over 4 years now, and I've loved all they have to offer! I've made birth announcements, birthday invitations, calendars, photo books--and they have all turned out so cute! So how excited I was to hear they are offering free Christmas cards! I've already been scanning through to find my favorite--which is hard because I love so many of them. Here are some of the ones I've been looking at.

I love this card

and this one

I also love making our parents a calendar like this, so I've been working on that. These are really cute if you're looking for a party invitation

And I did make a cute Mother's Day card like some of these

We love Shutterfly! They are great & always have such great products!

Turkey Week

Reed at his Thanksgiving feast at school earlier in the week.

We did lots of this.....

and this...

Fun times with cousins

Daddy & his girl

This week....

we've played outside, a little cooler weather & some rainy days here; I've been practicing more with the camera--some shots are good, some not so good--I think this manual thing is sure hard to keep straight; and we've been working, working, working (or rather Casey has been--because we sure haven't seen him much at all this week) on our house! Most everything has been ripped out that is going to be ripped out, we have a HUGE dumpster in our yard for all the trash, drywall got put upstairs in kids bedrooms and hallway, wallpaper being removed in our bedroom & bath--almost ready for painting, & my stepdad is here as I type this so he & Casey can get ready to start laying some tile--so we are moving along!! I really can't believe we are doing this, but we are! Crazy!! I think it's going to feel like a blurr to enjoy Thanksgiving & Christmas this year with all of this over our heads--but amongst the stress we are excited & thankful too!

A New Home

So today we closed on our new home (seen above). It has been almost 2 years ago today that we sold our previous home to live in our current rental home. Moving is always bittersweet, but I suppose we should be pros at it by this point in our marriage. We are about to celebrate our 6th year of marriage next month--and would you believe that this house above will be our 5th house!!! I know 5 houses in 6 years--kinda crazy, huh?! But we do plan to STAY PUT!!! And of those 5 houses 2 were rentals and this is our 3rd to own! But we are excited as we will be still in the same area, and right around the corner from a very dear (one of my besties :) friend from college---so lots of history there! So now we have about 2 months to rip up, rip off, tile, paint, refinish floors, etc. etc. We are thankful and very blessed at how the Lord provided this home, and know after looking at houses on and off for over 2 years now (we started looking when we put our last house on the market in early 2008--but the sale wasn't final on it til Jan. 2009) this is where He wants us--as He so perfectly provided the means and the way for this to be our home. There are memories in this current home--our 3rd baby's first home, and just life with small children in this house! But we will have more room and memories to be made in this new home as well!

Lately.....

We've been playing outside as much as we can! We had some warm weather, then it got cool again, and this week is warm again--yeah! So outside we have been when we can; amongst some on and off sickness. I also recently took an online photo class--but don't judge these photos as my productivity because even though I did shoot them in manual mode I still have LOTS of practicing to do! It's hard to keep all the info straight and really feel like you have a grip on what you are doing....so these are very much that--practice shots! I hope to improve and get more and more comfortable with it, so we'll see.

I love this one! It almost didn't have enough light so I made it black and white and tried to add some more exposure, but it's still sweet regardless of my poor photo skills!

Hut-Hut, Moooo, "Go Dawgs!"

We were SO excited to Trick-or-Treat this year, as you can tell from the pictures here! My pictures are kinda out of order here but we had my mom here this weekend, so on Saturday we headed over to a local shopping center to do some outdoor trick-or-treating. Reed had been asking for days when it was time to trick-or-treat--so he was so excited this was the weekend! Both of the big kids definitely "got it" and loved every minute of it! Here is Emery-Claire so excited with her one of many treats from last night. Even though we are in blue country, she still got lots of treats and was told how adorable she was---even in her Georgia red and black!

We met up with some friends last night to trick-or-treat together---Reed & EC definitely loved going with all the kids! This is the group photo we took of all of them before heading out on our "hunt!"
Our little "moo cow"....isn't she so cute! She was even saying "mooo" by the end of the evening. I just took R & EC over to our friends' house, while Casey kept her home to pass out candy and let her go to bed earlier.

Before heading over to the shopping center on Saturday---we definitely got lots of comments being in TN and GA attire!