Thursday, March 30, 2017

Carpool Book Club {3/30/17}


Well hello Thursday.  I'm joining Narci for Carpool Book Club to talk about the books I've read or listened to this month.  I could easily get in trouble with Audible.  I'm loving listening to books, but I have to pace myself because they're not free.  So I listened to two books and read one this month and found them all inspiring in their own ways.
I listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo on Audible because I figured I'd have a hard time getting through a book about tidying!  Ha!  It was pretty interesting to listen to and quite motivating though.  I'd already been working on going through things in our home and getting rid of excess and organizing, so this book just made me want to continue to do that even more and it has several really good ideas.  Kondo says to go through and discard/keep things by category and not room and to do so in this order: clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous, momentos.  While doing this you're suppose to hold each item in your hands and ask yourself if it sparks joy.  And then it's important to have a place for everything you keep.  It does feel really great to get rid of things we don't really use, want or need and to just keep things we love or need.


I loved The Magnolia Story by Chip and Joanna Gaines!!!  Probably because I LOVE Chip and Joanna Gaines.  I watched season 1 and 2 of Fixer Upper awhile back when they were on Netflix.  We don't have cable and now none of the seasons are on Netflix (I was hoping they'd eventually add the newer seasons), so I'm not sure when I'll be able to watch more.  Anyway, I decided to listen to this book as well because Chip and Joanna "read" it themselves, although it mostly just feels like them telling their story as opposed to reading their book.  It was interesting to hear about their lives all the way from their grandparents' stories to their present day lives.  Their faith, priorities and hard work are very inspiring to me and I can't help but just want to be their real life friend.

This is just a sidetone, but my sweet hubby knew I was listening to The Magnolia Story and he brought this magazine home for me.  He said he knew I'd love it and he was right.  It's been super fun and relaxing to look and read through.  I haven't looked at a magazine in such a long time!  I also had to smile when I read that the theme of this edition of the magazine is simplicity.  The idea of simplicity keeps coming up for me!


Present Over Perfect.  I love the title of this book so much.  It's become a bit of a mantra for me.  I can definitely relate to a lot of Shauna Niequist's struggles.  This book gives the reader permission to be themselves and to remake their life around what's truly important to them.  Although I did find parts of the book a bit repetitive, I also found it inspiring and to be a breath of fresh air.

Uninvited by Lysa TerKeurst is next on my list, but I would love recommendations for after that!  Let me know if you've read anything good lately! :)
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Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Show and Tell Tuesday: Top Ten Pictures


I'm joining Andrea today for Show and Tell Tuesday!  Today's topic is to share our top five (or ten) pictures of all time.  Talk about a rabbit hole...  This is pretty much an impossible task for me, so I'm just going to share ten-ish photos that I love.  The top ten pictures of all time is just too much pressure. 😉

My Grandpa and Grandma Bisson were two of the most wonderful people I've ever known.  They made me feel so loved and were such amazing examples for me.  I miss them both so much.  I'm so thankful my mom took these pictures.  I'm pretty sure my Grandma made me a cake that night and we celebrated my fourth birthday.

Oh my goodness, hahaha!!  I wish I could just freeze time and catch up on all of my picture projects.  One of them would be to go through all of my childhood pictures and scan them all and make digital copies for my siblings.  Can you tell I wanted a sister pretty badly!?  My brothers were such good sports.

I'm not counting this one as one of my 10 since I'm sure there are plenty of other pictures of the six of us that I'd love more given the opportunity to go through them, but I had to include one with Jenna, too.  She was only two weeks old here!!  I was clearly in little mama heaven to finally have a baby sister!

Jenna took this picture of Zachary and Jacob and it's my absolute favorite.  I think they're two and five here.  When Michael was deployed to Iraq, he had an artist there paint this picture for me and it's so incredible!  I still have the painting hanging in our living room to this day.

Jessica, Renae and Keira are some of my favorite childhood friends.  This is us in 2008.  Don't we look so well rested?!  Haha  It's now nine years later and we have ten kiddos between the four of us!

My beautiful, sweet Clara was Billy and Heather's flower girl when she was just three.  She couldn't have been more precious!

I think this is my favorite picture of Michael and me.  It was taken in fall of 2014 and I just love the colors.

Another bonus photo!  This one popped up on my timeline today from two years ago.  This was taken at like 10 pm so it's amazing how well the kiddos all cooperated.  My family has added three sweet baby girls since then!

I love these two little best friends so much!  I was thrilled when I realized they were both cooperating for family pictures in the fall of 2015.  Adorable!

And I'm not counting this one either because it was taken on the same day as the previous picture.  Haha, I'm totally cheating, but just be glad that I'm not posting 100 pictures, because I could easily come up with 100 favorites!  How handsome is my little man?  Davey had just turned three here.  I'm already thinking about how we need to redo this pose in this spot for his senior pictures and then do a side by side of the two shots.  That will obviously be a long, long, long way off as I have big plans to keep him little.  Love him so.

There aren't words to describe how much I love this picture.  Emma is just one day old.  So so precious!

Sweet little newborn smiles are the best.  Emma is 11 days old here and so beautiful!

And I had to get one family photo in the bunch.  I am incredibly blessed and forever grateful that these four are mine.

Have a wonderful day everyone!


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Monday, March 27, 2017

11 Months, Isaac's Birthday & a Mystery Dinner

Emma's favorite thing to do is to take everything out of the play kitchen... 😉

This little guy must be going through a grown spurt with his impromptu naps and big appetite.

out for a walk with my girls

Michael helped Clara and Davey make bird feeders with pinecones, peanut butter and bird seed.

Clara really wanted to make a birdhouse, so we found this little birdhouse kit for Clara to paint and we helped her build it.  Now it just needs a guest!

So much fun having the Murrays and the Davids over for supper Monday night.  This is the only picture I took all night.  Can't believe those sweet baby girls will both be ONE next month.

We planted some flowers the other day and Michael has big plans to build planters for our deck to grow a few veggies this year.

The kids and I went to see our buddy Sam perform in The Lion King musical that his school put on Thursday.  It was super cute and we got to see a few other kiddos we knew up on stage, too.

Emma is 11 months old!  Just over 3 weeks till her first birthday.  Crazy!!


Davey asked to take a picture with Emma and LOOK HOW SWEET!!!



Clara had dance class Wednesday, and her and Davey had swimming lessons on Thursday.


So precious.  Clara drew pictures of the different kinds of flowers to mark each one.

We celebrated Isaac's 6th birthday yesterday!




Love this little family!

Love you buddy!

Michael and Clara had a fun evening together attending the Girl Scouts Mystery Dinner last night.

It sounds like they had so much fun!  They got to order three courses, but the menu only had silly clues as to what they were actually ordering.  They kept track as they figured out what was what.



Clara's sweet troop leader text me some photos, too!  You are the best, Katie!!


So fun!

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Playing in the Snow, Gymnastics and a Skyforce Game

The Monday before last, March 13th, we bundled up all three of our littles to go play in the snow.  Emma could not have looked cuter in Clara's old snowsuit!





The next night Grandpa stopped by for a surprise visit right at bedtime!  He was in town for work.



Davey is such a sweet big brother and he loves his baby sister so much!  He was "reading" to Emma and showing her how to do her poke-a-dot book.


More outside time!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  So apparently we all need a little kelly green in our wardrobes, but we did our best with what we had.


We loved having supper with and catching up with the Charter family last Friday.


Clara had so much fun at her Girl Scout buddy Piper's gymnastics birthday party last Saturday!  This was Clara's first experience with gymnastics and she loved it!








Happy birthday Piper!

Then our friends gave us tickets to the Skyforce game last Saturday night!  We hadn't been to a game in two years so we were all excited to go.  And Emma was an angel the whole time, just content to sit back and take it all in.

And my brother Jacob met us at the game! 😊  Love spending time with him.



these two sillies 😉

Thunder climbed the stands to our seats to say hi to the kids. :)  We've come a long way!  They used to be so scared of any costumed characters, but now I think they're ready for Disney World. 😉  Someday!
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