My version of a popluar repurposing trend

So a while ago I ran across this adorable play kitchen that a grandma had made from an old TV stand. "How CUTE!" I thought. And then the next dreaded words came right out of my mouth... "I can do THAT."

Famous last words...
This summer I scavenged around garage sales and goodwill looking for the perfect TV stand and one day, I found this beauty-

$10. Yes, I'll take it! This is when the DIY gods started laughing their tails off. If there is one thing I learned from this project, its that repurposing is WAY OVERRATED. WWWWAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY overrated!!!!!!!!!!!! I think I said at least a hundred times while spending precious time "tweaking" things on this old TV stand that this would have been a million times easier if I would have just started from scratch. But I didn't. And by the time I realized it, I was in too deep to turn back. So away I plugged at this little project and after about 60 hours total, I ended up with this adorable kitchen for my cutie patootie. I am pretty sure the DIY gods have stopped laughing. :)

I cannot wait for Adri to see this Christmas morning. She is going to LOVE it!!!!!

Special thanks to Grandpa B and Dave Clark for their help!!!!! Without all the right tools, I could have never made this. :)

Happy Birthday Adri!!!

Miss Adrianna Claire Leinwetter blessed our lives 3 years ago today at 12:15am. Her dimple was the first thing everyone noticed about her at birth and its still the first thing people comment on when they see her.
Adri on December 10th, 2008


Here is Adri at 3 years old. I can't hardly believe my baby is 3. It is soooo bittersweet for me. A little more bitter than sweet if I am totally honest. :) It just kills me to see her grow up. She was such a fun baby and an adorable toddler. I wish I could freeze her and keep her just like this FOREVER!

Adri lights up a room with her smile and she has the sweetest heart I could ever imagine. She literally can melt you into a puddle of goo in 1 minute flat. Let me prove this point- today I took her to the mall to do some Christmas shopping. She wanted to bring her new Bitty Baby and stroller and because its her birthday, I let her. :) As she is pushing her baby in to the mall, a couple, about Adri's grandparent's age, stops her and asks to see her baby. She stops, uncovers her baby and like a proud new mom, shows off her baby. The couple, who had already started to melt into a puddle of goo (b/c of Adri's cuteness, which I can't even describe in words, you have to just see her.), oooo's and awww's over her baby and just as they begin their complete melt down, Adri says (about her baby), "i just love her so much. she's such a good baby. but she's getting cold now so i need to cover her back up or move away from this door. i am a good mommy b/c, well, its my birthday." The couple, now making a mess of goo all over the floor proceeds to take out his wallet and hand Adri a $5 bill!!! See what I mean? 100% pure adorable-ness. I have a ton of similar stories. She's just sooooo stinkin sweet.

She is also quite a spit-fire! She's got the eye roll, hands-on-hip, "you just don't understand" act down to a T. She loves to annoy her brother... just for fun. She loves to goof off, be silly, laugh at anything and everything and she has the most ornory grin you could imagine. She would change clothes 10 times a day if we let her. She loves shoes, jewelry and anything princess. Her favorite thing to wear right now are her skinny jeans. And she sadly, knows the difference between other jeans and her skinnies. She also loves anything sparkly. All girl!!! Dare I say, "so much like her momma"??
Here's our Miss Personality! I tried to get a few pics for our Christmas cards but as you can see, I wasn't getting very far.



Adri's birthday party was today. It was a mermaid themed "shell-abration" and she had a blast with all of her friends. Here are some pics from the party-






Tomorrow, I will try to post a video of her birthday interview!

WHAT??? A blog post????

Whose kids aren't growing like little weeds?? I mean really, where does time go?Tuesday was the first day of school in our district and I got a little emotional thinking about how next year I will be putting my little man on the bus and sending him off to kindergarten. (insert sob here) Seriously, I will be a mess. A MESS! But enough of that, I still have a year. :)

Here are a few pics I took earlier this summer (okay, this spring) but haven't posted on the blog yet. Friends (you know who you are) you can stop bugging me about posting pics of the kids now. :)

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer. I can't believe its mid August already. The weather here has been beautiful and we are enjoying the outdoors as much as possible.






The cousins in their Easter outfits

Big Girl Bed

Adri's big girl room is almost complete. Original? Not at all. Its straight from the catalog picture, but Pottery Barn makes things so cute, I just can't help but copy it! Adri loves the idea of having a "big girl" bed, however, staying in it, well, that's another story. Lets just say I am reminded CONSTANTLY of how different my 2 kids are from each other. Anderson thrives off of structure and rules to follow. Adri thrives off of breaking the rules and figuring out how to disrupt our (really her brother's) perfectly planned day. I could go on forever about how different they are, but that's a whole new post. Anyway, here is Miss Adri Claire's big girl room in the making. I bought a really cool old dresser and mirror that I will paint for her room. I also want to make a little reading corner for her and put a small table and chair set where she can have tea parties and play with her doll house someday. :)

Easter

My favorite holiday by far is Easter. I love the spring time, I love the eastery colors and the tulips blooming everywhere, I love to coordinate my family's outfits (I know its dorky, but it was always a tradition in my family growing up. A tradition I loved then and still do!). But most of all, I love WHY we celebrate Easter. HE ROSE, people! Jesus rose from the dead! And because of this, we can have eternal life in heaven. I know this is not usually the theme of my blog posts, but I just want to say that if you have never heard the Easter story, don't believe it or think it is simply "just a story", I STRONGLY encourage you to dig a little deeper or ask around. What you find might change your life!

Our Easter celebration started with a beautiful church service (we actually made it to 8am service. Yes, pigs were flying as we walked in to the church.) Lee's parents went with us. Then we had breakfast and an egg hunt at my mom's house. The kids loved hunting eggs. They wanted to do it again and again. After naps, we headed to my aunt's house and celebrated with my extended family. We all had a great time. There was even a 'minute to win it' competition. Fun times!

Here are a few random pics from the day. In no particular order.

Anderson is 4!

Anderson had so much fun this year with his birthday celebrations. I always make birthday banners for the kids (Anderson crawled through his 1st birthday banner, stopped in the middle, grabbed the fringe and sucked on it) :) We celebrated with the annual Happy Birthday song wake up serenade, pancake breakfast (with a candle on top!) and family over for dinner. Then the next day we had his friends over (he only wanted boys this year) for a Thomas the Train birthday party. More like a glorified play date. He still LOVES trains. It was a lot of fun. This is the first year Anderson really got in to the birthday thing and boy was he IN to it! Everything now comes in 4s. "I need 4 drinks b/c I am 4", "I need 4 trains b/c I am 4", I need 4 suckers b/c..." you get the point. :) Here are a few pics of my big 4 year old and his birthday celebrations.

Birthday Boy!




Family Birthday Celebration. Ice Cream Cake!

Opening gifts



Thomas Party



Orange is Anderson's "most best" (favorite) color. So he wanted everything to be orange. Orange banner, orange cake, orange frosting, orange drinks, etc. These are actually cupcakes that I baked in ice cream cones. If you've never had one, you are missing out!




So after all the fun 4 year old festivities, we ended the birthday celebrations with a Bryan Family (Lee's mom's family) birthday get-together. When we told Anderson we were going to gma and gpa's for his birthday he said, "I'm 5 now!?!" That night he told everyone he was 5. Boy, that 4th year went by fast! I love 4 year old minds :)

Adri's Birthday Party

We had a monkey themed party for Boo's 2nd birthday. It was inspired by the outfit I bought for her to wear for her 2 year pictures. We had just family over this year and it turned out to be a nice little shin dig.

Here's the invite. Created by my friend Sammie at sammiedawnphotgrpahy


The spread. We went simple with cold cuts, fruit, chips and chocolate covered bananas.


I made her cake! It is soooo fun to do cakes!!! Her outfit was my inspiration for her party theme so I just drew the monkey from her shirt on to the cake and star-frosted it. It was easy peasy.


She got a little bashful when we all started singing the happy birthday song.

Lots of great presents!