Our Christmas Gift {It's A Girl}

For Christmas we opened the most exciting gift...the gender of our unborn baby. Everyone was so convinced "it was a boy." What a surprise it was to discover this feminine little ornament lovingly wrapped in tissue paper. Hello baby sister.

Merry Christmas!

Thank you Katherine for taking our family pictures. Merry Christmas everyone!

Tooth Fairy Pillow

Found a free pattern for these ADDORABLE tooth fairy pillows on mmmcrafts.blogspot.com. My nieces, Julia and Corynn will be turning five this coming year and I thought these would make perfect Christmas gifts. As a child, we didn't believe in Santa, but the tooth fairy was REAL. Real, I tell you. Sharing one of my favorite childhood memories for Christmas....perfect.

Advent Calendar {Or Advent Forest}

I LOVE the season of Advent. So weeks before Thanksgiving I began scouring the internet for advent calendar ideas. My favorite was a calendar that another graphic designer, Julie Ree, had created using paper truffle boxes. Our calendar is a variation of her design. When I saw her pyramid shaped boxes I immediately envisioned a forest of Christmas trees.

If you visit Brownie Points, they have a downloadable pdf file of the truffle template. It's funny how a simple box template can inspire so many fun ideas!

To create our advent calendar, I recreated their template and scaled it to four different size templates. Then I traced the templates onto colorful scrapbooking paper I found at wal-mart. Many evenings in November were spent cutting, scoring, folding and hot gluing. Each "tree" is filled with a tiny treat. Stickers, new socks, finger puppets etc. Finding numbered stickers is impossible, so I created my own numbered star stickers.

Today we opened the first of 24 advent trees. Christmas is on its way!