Happy Halloween!!

Happy Halloween Everyone! 

I hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween! We are having family over for dinner tonight and then we're taking the kids trick or treating around our neighborhood! 

What are your Halloween plans?

I'm linking up here:

Sweet Baby Sam - A Newborn Photo Session

This past weekend, I had the privilege of taking a few photos of our friends' new baby. He is my sister's nephew, so she tagged along to help. :-) He was born on Oct. 17th. He's so sweet and so cute! It was fun getting to hold a new little baby again. ☺

I have to give credit where credit is due for this photo. I found the idea here, and because Sam's Daddy plays the guitar, I thought this would be a really fun picture to try. :-)

I'm linking up here:

Carving Pumpkins

Once a week, my sister's family, my family and my Papa all go over to my Parents' house for dinner. Last week, we had dinner and then carved pumpkins. My mom had picked up a pumpkin for each of the kids. Unfortunately, my sister's oldest son, Landon, slept through dinner and pumpkin carving. We tried waking him up, but he just wasn't having it. Ha. So my sister carved his pumpkin for him. He is being the Incredible Hulk for Halloween this year, so she carved him into Landon's pumpkin. Then my BIL, Jason, carved owls into Mason's pumpkin and I carved a Mickey Mouse head into Jackson's. :-) Here are a few pictures from the evening.

Jackson and I with his pumpkin.

Mason with his pumpkin.

Mason and Jackson with their pumpkins.

Daddy keeping Jackson occupied while Mommy carved the pumpkin. ☺

My BIL Jason and my Sister Ashlee, carving pumpkins.

The pumpkins all carved for Halloween. ☺

Fall Fun in the Leaves

This past weekend I thought it would be fun to rake up some leaves and let Jackson play in them. He wasn't very amused at first, but when I started throwing them up in the air, he changed his mind. ☺

Here are a few pictures I took of Jackson in the leaves. 

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52 Weeks of Jackson

I found the idea to do this weekly photo project over here at younghouselove.com. I thought it would be so fun to try, and I guess it was for the most part. I'm glad I did it, but I'm glad its over as well. LOL. It was not an easy project to keep up with, I will tell you that. For the first couple weeks I had to try hard to keep him happy and not crying for his weekly picture. Then once we finally got in the groove of it, he started rolling over, :-( Once he learned to roll over, that made this weekly photo session far more of a challenge and with every new skill (crawling, walking) it got harder and harder. Keeping him still long enough for me to get a picture was next to impossible. Thank goodness for my new dslr. It takes much faster photos than my old point and shoot. ☺

I plan on adding these photos into a scrapbook or photo album of some sort and my sister is in the process of making him a quilt using the fabric from each week. ☺ I can't wait til its done. I also plan on scaling back now and just taking a monthly picture from now on. I'm not sure if I'll use fabric or just sit him in the same chair each week, but I'll keep posting his stats monthly with a few pictures for you to see how he's growing.

So without further adieu... here are weeks 1 and 52 side by side for comparison, and all of the rest of the weeks in between!! 

Jackson's Mickey Mouse Themed 1st Birthday Party! {Part 2}

Jackson's birthday party was so much fun. It was a lot of work, and I often felt like I couldn't be everywhere I needed/wanted to be all the time, but we had a great time and most importantly, I think Jackson had a great time!

To entertain the kids, I printed off a color sheet and had a little box of crayons for each kid. I set them up down at tables close to our church's projection screen where we played a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse DVD. Once the food was ready, the kids ate and then a half hour into the party we had a balloon guy come and make balloon animals for all the kids. He stayed for the remainder of the party and the kids had a lot of fun with that!☺

During all of that, the adults ate (my MIL fixed Chili, Chicken Noodle Soup and Hot Dogs), watched Jackson eat destroy his smash cake and then watched Jackson open his presents.☺

Here are the pictures from his party.☺

The kids eating and having fun with their Mickey Mouse Ears!

Pictures of the kids and their Balloons!!

Jackson with his cake!

He really loved his cake!

 After he totally destroyed his cake and had so much fun with that, we gave him a much needed bath in the church sink. ☺

Then it was present time! By the time we got to opening presents, he was ready to just be down and running around, so he got a little restless towards the end. But overall he did great that day and was so happy. ☺

After the party was over, and we were all done cleaning up, I realized we hadn't gotten a family picture from his party. So we snapped a few with the big stuffed Mickey Mouse and this was my favorite! I just adore Jackson's smile!

So many people helped make this party possible and I can't thank them enough for all their help! We have the BEST family and friends EVER!!

Happy 1st Birthday Jackson! You are such a blessing to all of us and bring such joy to our lives!

Jackson's Mickey Mouse Themed First Birthday Party (Decorations)

As usual, I took a ton of pictures of Jackson's 1st Birthday party... so I thought I would split his party up into 2 posts. The first being the decorations. :-)

I got started on the decorations a couple months ago by making his "Happy Birthday" Banner, his "I Am 1" Banner and his "Monthly Pictures" Banner. I just bought scrapbook paper and solid color card stock to make them and I used my Cricut machine to cut out the letters and shapes.

 This was his monthly banner and I also set my pregnancy scrapbook and his 1st year scrapbook out for everyone to look at. I also put all of his weekly pictures on my digital frame and set that on the table as well! The giant Mickey Mouse belonged to a friend of ours and she said we could borrow it for the party! We had a couple extra centerpieces, so I added those to this little table as well. :-)

Then last weekend, I made all of the centerpieces. I just used a black paper lantern, made the ears out of black card stock and cut them out using my cricut. I then hot-glued the head onto a red bucket. The buttons were made just using white card stock and my cricut and the feet were made using yellow card stock and my cricut. It was all hot-glued together and they each sat nicely on the tables. :-) I also (with the help of my sister), made the little Oreo cookie, Mickey Mouse suckers. They were quite a bit of work, but once we figured out exactly how to do it, they were fairly easy. I got the idea here.

Here's a close-up of the Mickey Mouse sucker we made.

I also made several Pom Poms to go over the food table! I just used Black, Red and Yellow tissue paper.

My sister made the cake and cupcakes and I cut out the little banner using my cricut. It all turned out so cute!! I got the idea for the cupcakes here and the idea for the banner here.

I also made some cute little goody bags for the kids. I just used a snack size baggy and filled it with red Swedish Fish. I then cut out the ears using black card stock and my cricut machine. I used Picmonkey to make the poem and just cut it out round and glued it onto the ears. I found the poem online and just changed things around to tie in the Mickey Mouse theme. They were pretty easy to make and put together. :-)

With a lot of help, from my mom, sister our Pastor's wife and my Mother in Law, we got the dining hall all decorated the Friday night before his party! It took us a few hours but we got it all done and it looked great. I used 4 packs of 15 balloons (one in each of the party theme colors) to make the ceiling decorations. We just strung the balloons up using fishing line and a needle. Thankfully I had spent the extra $2.50 on a hand held thing to blow up the balloons. My arm hurt the next couple of days, but it was worth it. :-) The long table in these pictures below, was the kids table. They each had little mickey mouse ear headbands to wear.

I think that about covers all the party decorations. I will post about the actual party tomorrow.

P.S. if you have any questions about how I made something or where I bought something for the party, just let me know! :-)