Finally!! Lily's New Room Revealed!

About a month ago, we started this project to move Lily to our then guest bedroom, which was mostly full of lots of junk that was mine. It was the room that all of the leftovers got put in. It was also the bigger room, and we found a great deal on a full size bedroom suite for Lily so this inspired us to begin this task. It was quite overwhelming at times and wow! who knew we had so much stuff packed into one bedroom, but we are almost finished and I can finally post pics.

Her old room is now "the toy-room" for now until I decide to make something else out of it. It is full of neatly organized toys (that won't last for long) so that when Lily has friends over, they can go in there and have a great time. This worked out great because half of Lily's toys were in the guest room and the other half in her room.

It works out great that I finished Lily's room in time to post it for Kelly's Korner Friday Tour of Homes, which happens to spotlight nurseries/children's rooms today. Every Friday, she does a different room in your house.

So first, here is a before shot. I forgot to take pics of the bed and decorations that were in this room before, so all I have to offer is a pic of the room pretty much empty with a big pile of stuff in the middle of the room that still needed sorted when this picture was taken. Looks like Lily was excited about this project. Much more than me or her daddy!
The room was a weird blue/green color that matched the comforter set. After painting the room, I never was too crazy about the comforter or the room color. Here is her new room – Taadaa!!

We (her daddy, mostly) painted it “Sassy Pink.” With her new furniture and some new/old accessories, I am very proud of it. Not proud that it looks like a big girl room for my baby though, lol.. Our house is an older house and since buying it 5 years ago, I have learned it's amazing what a lil bit of paint and creativity will do in a house. Her comforter came from Dirt Cheap for $15. It can be found online at Target for way more than $15. My mom found it and I am still working on getting more pillow and shams to get it just the way I want it.

The picture frames on the wall. I made myself. They were plain brown ones from Wal-Mart and I spraypainted them white and stapled ribbons on the back. They are not perfect and might need to be hung a lil more straighter(they looked straight until I looked at this pic), but the whole project was done for under $10. I put pictures of Lily's dance recital in them.

These shelves were originally in this room, but we arranged them and I still need to pick up some things to finish these, but right now, the "Lily" stitchwork in the middle was a gift to us by a dear co-worker that is a very sweet lady. (Hi, Mrs. Janie ) The mini shoes were from my collection of over 100 mini shoes that I had before we were married at my parent's house. They were spread throughout this room and in a curio before the remodel. I left some of my favorites out for Lily. Do you see the frame on the shelf on the left? That's Elvis stamps - back from when they were 29 cents. My mom is a big fan of Elvis (and so is Lily now) and she bought these for me when they came out for sale at the Post Office. I found them when I was cleaning through some stuff and thought since Lily loved Elvis, I would display them in her room. I painted this $3 frame white from Walmart, too.

This is Lily's book shelf that was a great deal at a local festival right before she was born. I try to keep it neat but she is constantly rearranging it. On the top is a shadow box filled with one of her first pairs of shoes, a pink headband, and baby bloomers. Also, a card from BJ's parents when Lily was born. She also has a couple of trophies from pageants and dance.

On the 2nd shelf are pictures of Lily and her cousins and friends. Also, a plaque that my mom's mom got for me before my mom was ever pregnant. She passed away 3 years before I was born. It says "My Little Girl." My mom always said that my grandmother told her when "she had a little girl that would be for me." It's funny how she knew my mom would have a little girl first. The cat on the floor was my great-grandmother's. My great-grandma, grandma, and my mom all have these cats. Apparently, back in the early 80's that all fell in love with them and got one. When I was under a year old, I tipped out of my walker and cut above my eye open on my mom's. About a week before my great-grandma passed away, she told me to get that cat out of her house and take it home with me. I did and I treasure it today. It reminds me of all of the great women in my life. The doll on the floor was mine when i was growing up.

This is the far side of the room. This room is shaped kind of odd, but is definitely bigger than Lily's old room. The vanity was a surprise Christmas present from BJ one year. I need to change out the cushion to make now, but I told him I wanted a vanity and he and his mom found one and fixed it up for me. so it's special.

This is Lily's chest complete with her Princess tv and entertainment system. I couldn't determine where else to put this, so it ended up on top of the chest. The child really doesn't even need a tv because she very rarely will sit and watch anything at all.

I am proud of the lamp. I found the base at Dirt Cheap for $6 and sprayed it white. I got the shade at Target so I hopefully saved some money on this.
This Lily's window at the foot of her bed. I put this pic on here to showcase her chair that BJ's painted for her when she was a baby. It matches perfectly. At the end of her bed is also her toy box ( I got it from Target before she born.)

There you go, it's Lily new "big girl" room. She doesn't sleep in here quite yet, but I hope she will get lots of enjoyment out of it.

2 1/2 already?

Today Lily turns 2 1/2 year old. This is so hard to believe. Time really does fly and it's hard to even envision that my little baby will be 3 in 6 months. I got this idea to write about Lily's accomplishments and things she can do at 2 1/2 from Allikaye's mom at "Raising Allikaye."

So here goes, a long list all about Lily. I hope that I can save this so she can look back one day and read how proud we are of her.

She is so full of life. She loves to play, run, jump, and dance. Such an active little girl. We are always chasing her.

There isn't much that she is scare of well except for lizards, frogs, and snakes, but her mommy made her that way. She will try anything once and definitely isn't scared of heights. Watch this video of her jumping on this huge trampoline thing in our local mall.

If there is a mudhole or water outside, she is in it. She loves to be outside and begs us every day when we get home to stay outside. Just look at this picture of her a couple of days ago. She dressed herself in one of her dance leotards and decided she wanted to go run through the water holes from the rain. (Excuse the poor quality, some pics/videos were taken with my phone.)

However she has been scared of thunder lately and she puts your hands on her ears and runs inside to get away from the “rain.” We have to work on this!

She is such a girly girl and yet not such a girly girl at the same time. She loves to play dress up in her girly dresses with the high heel shoes and make-up, but then she loves to run around in nothing but her diaper and with her hair falling all in her face covered in dirt and building castles in the driveway.

She is a great mommy to all of her baby dolls. Taking such good care of them. I love to watch her play with her babies. She has recently developed a love for Barbies. She is so incredibly smart! She remember sthings that we only tell her once. She knows her ABC’s and can recognize some numbers, letters, shapes, and most colors, even though she sometimes claims that most things are “pink.” Her vocabulary and sentences are amazing. She speaks so clearly and I cannot think of a common word that she cannot say or don’t use. Some of my favorite sayings and things that she has said include:

“I can’t want that”

“I not need a nap”

“Not by my chin-chin-chin”

“I have a problem”

“I had an accident”

“I ready for bed”

“Cheese-cackers” – (loves Cheese in a Can and Chicken in a Biscuit crackers)

“Move people. I need my burger.” (in the drive-thru at McDonalds when people are in front of us.”

"Mommy, I like your crown" - referring to my headband in my hair

“Mommy, I need a snack”The list could go on and on.. She make us laugh so often with things tsay that I cannot keep up with everything.

She loves nursery rhymes and songs. She can sing everything like“Happy and Know Its (If You're Happy and You know it),” “Happy Birthday,” “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” “Mary had a Little Lamb,” “Row, Row your Boat,” "B-I-N-G-O," and on and on...

She is also so very bossy, but we wouldn’t have her any other way except sometimes her bossiness gets her in trouble.

She love, love, loves to dance especially with her daddy. She keeps mommy laughing all of the time with her constant new dance moves. Check out this video of them dancing over the past weekend. They are both a mess!

She still isn't potty-trained. We are working on this, too, but well, mission not successful yet! Getting there eventually!

She loves food. Some of her favorite foods are anything with pasta, noodles, brown gravy, loaf bread, bacon, ketchup, “puffies” “ritos (Doritos)," "ponies( My Little Pony Fruit Snacks)" and Happy Meals, but who could forget Tacos! I know, I know really healthy..but it could be worse..

She is definitely not perfect and sometimes misbehaves, but she still believes she really is a princess and we plan on keeping it that way as long as we can.

"Cheese!"

We have been busy, busy working on Lily's new room. She is moving to our bigger guest room. It has rained and rained here, which has made it great to work on painting and moving everything into Lily's new room.

We are almost finished and I cannot wait to post before and after pics later this week but until then, here is a cute pic of Lily saying "Cheese!"

Our little dancer!

Lily had her first dance recital this past Friday night! It was such an exciting event. We got her hair stylist to fix her hair pulled up and curled and it was so pretty.

It was at a big Junior College auditorium and I was so afraid Lily would be scared of the stage, but she got used to it at the dress rehearsal on Thursday.

My other worry was that she would not dance on Friday. Her class performed three songs and the first one, she started out really good and then got distracted by a couple of the girls who went behind the curtain and were playing. For the 2nd half of that song which was a ballet number, she stood with her back to the audience pointing at the girls trying to "tattle" on them..

We changed outfits for the 2nd song and had about a 20 minute break to get ready for Lily's favorite song - "Teddy Bear." It's a cute song that they do some ballet moves, but they got to pick a favorite stuffed animal to bring and dance with. Lily picked a cute stuff baby doll and she did almost everything perfect in this song. I was literally, rubbing my eyes to make sure it was her because she did so good on this one. Her whole class did. We were so proud of them.

The 3rd song was a very cute tap number called "Brush your teeth." They had huge decorated toothbrushes and danced with those. She did pretty good on this one. At least she went on stage and I was even more excited when she danced.

She also got Cover Girl runner-up for selling a lot of ads, so we stayed until the end of the recital which didn't end up around 10 pm. It was a long night, but Lily really enjoyed dancing and watching the other girls.
If I didn't believe she honestly enjoyed all of this, I would never force her to do it.

Thanks to everyone that came out and watched her - my parents, BJ's mom, BJ's sister and niece. We were so proud of our little dancer!

Not me! Monday

I haven't done a Not Me! Monday post in a quite a while, so I thought it was definitely time to talk about things I would never do, "not me!" After reading my post, if you would like to read more "Not Me's!", head over to MckMama's blog and check them out.

BJ and I definitely did not think we were having a great idea of buying Lily new bedroom furniture and swapping her bedroom to our bigger guest room. This would be a total mess and make us realize how small our house really is and that I absolutely have way too much stuff!!

We now have to repaint her new room and find somewhere to put all of my junk! I would never buy scrapbooking, sewing, floral, painting, gift-wrapping, and hair-bow making supplies and especially would never use them. I do not have time to do any of this and why in the world would I think I did? lol!! We spent a good bit of our Saturday cleaning through what seemed to get worse the more we tried to clean.

We spent Saturday evening involved in Amber's (my niece - BJ's sister, Michelle's daughter) 8th grade prom. I took pics and would never say I took over 250 pictures of her. I mean that would be way too many for pics for anyone, lol..the more the better huh? She did look beautiful.

Amber had the great idea of dressing Lily in her life-size Barbie's dress. Lily was so excited about dressing up like Amber.

On Sunday, Mother's Day was great. Church with my mom and Lily brought me the prettiest card and gift that her Sunday School teacher gave her for me. How sweet! I would never almost cry when I saw her precious self bringing it down the aisle at church to me. I am so proud to be her mommy or "mom" as she has been calling me this past week.

We had lunch with BJ's mom and sisters and their families at his sister's house. After lunch, we spent 4 hours on a homemade black plastic water slide...Can you say redneck? Yep, it was fun though. I would never in a million years get on it cause im usually a scaredy cat, but well, they convinced me yesterday and we had a ball. Lily slept 11 hours last night and my body is aching today, but we had the best time! Can't believe I'm posting this pic..but maybe you can see how much fun it was..horrible pic of me by the way :)

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all! I hope that everyone has had a great day!

It was such a special day for me! Being a mother is the best job in the world and I am so very thankful that I had a great mom and have a beautiful daughter that I am "mommy" to.

We had a great day filled with lots of outside water fun! (pics to come soon.)

let's get this summer started..

BJ had some business for work in Mobile this past weekend, and Lily and I tagged along and turned this into a fun weekend.

We stayed at our favorite condo in Gulf Shores that belongs to this sweet, sweet lady that we work with and her husband. It was a short stay but we made the best of it and had a great time.

Every year at the beach is so different with Lily. This year, she loved the sand, seagulls, and the pool, but not so much the ocean or the waves crashing. She was terrified "that water gonna get me" so she stayed far away from the water.

As always, I managed to get a few pics. Surprise, surprise, lol..

We also enjoyed a lil shopping and Lily had the best time at the Track. A small amusement park. She wanted to ride everything and never has any fear. She told us this morning that she wanted to go back to the Track. Can you believe she rode this? It's for kids, but I didn't think it was exactly for 2 year olds?
Riding the go-carts with her daddyAnd finally, is this picture...not sure exactly what she was doing, but I think this pic deserves a caption. Any ideas, anyone? Please leave me comments...