Introducing Ava Mary, my angel!!!

If someone had told me last Thanksgiving that by this Thanksgiving, I'd have a newborn baby, I'd call you lots of names and laugh at you. But guess what........ I have a newborn! LOL! It just seems like last week that I posted about our pregnancy and suddenly, it's almost December! My original due date was December 1st (which is tomorrow), but baby girl is already here!!! Due to some complications, my OB decided to induce me at 37 weeks on November 9th and baby was here shortly after!

(a few minutes after her arrival)

Ava Mary arrived at 8:08pm on Thursday, November 10. She weighed 7 lbs 12 oz and was 21 inches long. Healthy as can be and sooooo beautiful!!!

(getting ready to go home!)

The labor was not quite what I had expected and was a bit rough, but she is here and healthy and I am fine and healthy (though still recovering, so taking it easy), so it was worth it! She will be 3 weeks old tomorrow already (oh my goodness!!) and is growing so fast. I am still trying to figure out life with a newborn in my house. I was blessed to have my mother make it here to Florida from PA in time for her grand arrival, so I had some help for the first week that we were home. Then the rest of my family from PA (father, sister, uncle, stepdad) came down to meet her and to spend Thanksgiving with us all. Sadly, they all went back to PA on Saturday so it's just me and baby now. Someday I'll figure out how to organize my time with her, but for now, I'm just enjoying her!!!!!

Sooooooooooo, hopefully sometime soon, I'll get back to crafting and posting on a more regular basis. The past 9 months have been so hectic and crazy, so for that, I deeply apologize! I managed to get out on Black Friday to get some new supplies to encourage me to get back in my crafting room and I know that for Christmas, I will be getting some more neat crafting/scrapping stuff, so I just have to get to it, eh? :-)

I do want to thank you all for sticking with me through the past 9 months; for understanding why I've been MIA and for all of the sweet comments on my blog and on my FB! It really makes me smile to know that I'm surrounded (even if only virtually) by lots of love and support of all of you that I now consider friends!!!!

I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are preparing for a beautiful holiday season and I can't wait to catch up with you all soon!!!

Hello! :-) I'm baaaaack!

First, my apologies. I've been MIA... again... for far too long. I still do read everyone's blogs and follow you all on Facebook, but the energy to type much more than a quick status update has been escaping me. Except on the days that I DO have the energy, I focus that on doing things around my home that need to get done in preparation for Baby Girl's arrival!!

Speaking of, I am FINALLY in the 3rd trimester! :-) Have had SO many ups and downs with this, my first pregnancy, but I am still so excited for her arrival. We have some new things that we are dealing with, but I am doing well and baby girl is growing well! We had an ultrasound yesterday and she is SUPER active and beautiful already! In less than 3 months (I suspect), she'll be here!!!!

So here's my update on crafting and on life in general since it's been almost 2 months AGAIN since my last update.

LIFE/BABY:

We are getting the house ready for Ava's arrival. This meant packing up my scrapbooking room/spare bedroom and moving the scrapbooking to the dining room.

This was my craft room (kinda before... the table and the storage units were already moved).

This is the dining room after the move, before the set up.

The new set up in the dining room...

Then, a couple of weekends ago, hubby and his dad painted the now-known-as nursery pink and set up all the furniture. I did a pseudo set up of the linens in the room to see how it looks (of course it's not done), but here are the results.

(I had some random character's made up from my niece's visit last fall, so I hung those on the door.)

I still have A LOT to do in her room, but I feel much better knowing that she has a room of her own!

Other than that, it's just been trying to keep up with the regular household stuff and trying to take it easy (since I've been threatened with bedrest... EEK!).

CRAFTING

Now, on to what I started this for... my crafting life!

Well, there really isn't one lately. Besides moving my room and setting back up (and getting organized), I haven't done much. I did a visit with a friend and made some cards back in July, but that's it.

But, in trying to get re-motivated, I did attend the Creating Keepsakes Scrapbook Convention that is here in my city of Jacksonville this weekend today with a great friend of mine! We didn't do any of the classes (we missed the deadline) so we just attended the vendor show, but it was still a great time! Got a lot of inspiration, found a lot of stuff that I wanted to buy (but refrained from.... I've got bigger things to spend my money on for right now and her name is Ava. LOL!), and seemed to have gotten the bug again. Not necessarily like I had it before, but definitely enough to want to get back in there and play some more. Especially with my favorite season and holidays coming up soon, Ava's arrival (and all that will come with that .... thank you cards, memory books for her, etc.), I think it's my season for scrapbooking/crafting!

I did purchase a few things that I haven't seen in any of my local scrapbooking stores or big box stores (clear acrylic albums, some awesome embossing powder, etc), so perhaps this weekend I may get to those.

I do hope to get back into this again soon to be posting videos and projects and photos for all of you beautiful people who have continued to follow me, despite me being so absent lately!! I appreciate each of you and I promise that I will be back VERY soon with something awesome to show my thanks!!!!! :-) So stay tuned!

Until then, my friends....

Thanksgiving Mini-Recap

I'm back!

Kind of.

First, let me wish everyone a Happy beginning to the Holiday season!! My holiday season started out with a bang! My first holiday dinner hosting went VERY well! We ended up with 17 guests at our house for dinner on Thursday! Nothing but rave reviews and compliments (though I'm sure family would NEVER say a negative thing to my face... we'll see what's said behind my back! LOL!). It was so nice to have my family and my husband's family all together for the first time since our wedding in 2008! Besides dinner, we have had 6 house guests staying with us since the week before last, plus hubby and I and his daughter, so my life has been quite different than my typical alone time! It was wonderful though! Went to Disney, the zoo, many great restaurants, to see the new Harry Potter movie, the beach, some craft shows... so much to do when family is around! I have so much to scrapbook now!!!

My sister, BIL, and niece left to return to PA on Saturday. My mother and her husband left today to continue their vacation/late honeymoon to TN (Dollywood and Gatlinburg). My great-grandmother, who is 92 (will be 93 at the end of December) was supposed to go back to PA with my sister on Saturday, but she decided that she wasn't ready to go home yet, so she's staying..... until DECEMBER 17th! LOL! My uncle is coming to Florida for work for a few months and is going to be taking her home with him when he flies home for Christmas. It should be interesting though because she has never flown! So I get to hang out with one of my favorite family members for the next three weeks. I think I'm going to take the time that I have with her here and work on some family genealogy and history and get some of her stories on video! She has soooo many and what better time to get them than now! Perhaps I'll have to introduce her to the Cricut while she's here too! She is staying in my "craft room"/guest room, so I know she's been looking through my scrapbooks and card projects because she keeps commenting on how talented she thinks I am. :-) That's why I love her so much!

I digress!

Hopefully, sometime in the next week I will get some projects done and posted. I also need to post the giveaway for hitting 50 before Thanksgiving! I want to do a video of all of our Thanksgiving Day & Black Friday sales, and of course, the photos from my holiday!! :-) Stay tuned! And I hope everyone is doing well!

Weekends and Houseguests

I'm learning that weekends are not my high-point for creative productivity. LOL! Especially the weekends that my stepdaughter is here with us. But I am OKAY with that because I love family time! That's what we've had lots of this weekend, so no scrapping got done after Friday night.

Friday, I made the CUTEST card that I am most proud of, but I used it for my entry for Kassidy's Winter Design Team (over at inkingitupcrazy)! The entry time ends today, so I have been working on some projects until I finally got one that I thought was good enough, so I sent that to her today! I don't want to share it just yet, so look for that in the future!

I have to say though... the next couple of weeks might be kind of quiet from my end. The first part of my family (my sister, brother in law, and 2 year old niece) is coming into town on Wednesday to stay for two weeks! Then next week, my mother and her husband and my 95 year old great-grandmother are coming in right before Thanksgiving! Then my uncle will be joining us right after Thanksgiving. I will have a VERY full house for a few days!!!! I'm hoping to get to sit with my sister and play in my craft room (she only has the Baby Bug and does not have the G or a Cuttlebug), but we'll see how that works out. Plans are already in the works for a visit to Disney, Universal, St. Augustine, and who knows where else! PLUS I will be cooking my first Thanksgiving dinner for (I think) 21 people! EEK! Pray for me (and my guests! LOL!)

I hope to get some things posted, but if not, I'll at least try to stop by and catch up on the blogs that I follow periodically! And I'm still looking for one more follower and then a little first giveaway!!!