Photo from Google Images

This is the first year since having a child that we are going out for New Year’s Eve! Yippee!

Our friend’s band John Paul Keith and the One Four Fives of Memphis are playing with Little Rock native Ben Nichols of Lucero and Cory Branan at White Water Tavern tomorrow night, and I simply cannot wait to see them! JPK comes into town about every six weeks or so, and as I tell them it is our standing date night.

Sound like a good time? Go hereto see if there are still tickets available.

For those at home with children, Family Fun has a list of reader-submitted tips for you to celebrate the Eve with the youngins. From a bubble wrap stomp to a celebration around the time zones,  there’s tons of different ideas for fun. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Be safe out there!

It's the Christmas Snuggie!

Thanks, Memaw, for a good laugh. Secretly, I’ve wanted one of these for a while but I never would have bought it for myself.

Tomorrow, I’m going to roast marshmallows by the fire in my Snuggie. After that, maybe I’ll catch a football game.

For more Wordless Wednesdays, go to Arkie Mama.

Well, we survived the Christmas holidays. Although I felt like I was out of control between all the projects and celebrations for the few weeks leading up to Christmas, I was able to settle down for a bit for the days leading up to Friday and enjoyed lots of family time.

I did, however, get the time wrong for our Austin family gathering on Sunday and nearly missed the whole thing. I vaguely remember talking to my cousins a week ago about eating at 2:00 p.m., but somehow it became 5:00 p.m. in my mind. We made it about an hour late and without the dishes I’d been assigned to cook, but all was well and they had PLENTY of food even without my latkes. 

It’s sad, but we’ve already taken down and packed up our Christmas decorations. We usually leave them up until after New Year’s but we are getting ready to put our house on the market, and seeing as we close on our new home in mid January we don’t have much time to lose. We will get new carpet in the back room on the 6th, and hope to have it on the market that next Monday. If you know of anyone looking for a super cute two bedroom, one bath house in the midtown area, let me know!

Anyway, so all the packing and cleaning has got me in an organizational mood. I’ve always had a separated and compartmentalized personality, so I just LOVE this kind of stuff. Here’s some places I’ve gone for ideas and just a bit of drooling.

HGTV has some easy and quick tips for organizing your entire house, and tons of other ideas. 

I *heart* The Container Store. Nuff said.

The cover story for the Better Homes and Gardens’ January issue is 50 tips to cut clutter and organize that I found very helpful, and there are tons more tips on their website.

Simplify 101 is a website I’ve recently found, and love her organizing tips page. The fact that she is a fellow scrapper is helpful. Be sure to check out the blog too.

Okay, I have to stop. The urge to put things is boxes is overwhelming, and I must sleep now. Let me know what organizing tips you have, I’m all ears!

Christmas Eve 2006

An Irish toast-

The light of the Christmas star to you; The warmth of home and hearth to you; The cheer and good will of friends to you; The hope of a childlike heart to you; The joy of a thousand angels to you; The love of the Son and God’s peace to you.

May your house be warm with the love of family and friends. Merry Chistmas!

I so forgot to do Wordless Wednesday until right now, oh well! Here’s my entry…from our Austin family gingerbread-house-making session this past Saturday night.

The husband and kid working on our first gingerbread house.

"Dude, don't eat all the candy!"

Our "finished" project

One proud gingerbread house builder!

For more on-time Wordless Wednesdays, go to Arkie Mama.

Here’s a quick, little happy for you and your kids to make for Christmas Eve…some reindeer food for the kids to sprinkle on the lawn before slipping off to bed.

It's all sparkly!

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Here’s a few of my tried-and-true recipes, and a new one I just saw today on TV.

Photo from Allrecipes.com

I made these for a scrapbooking get together in October, when the fall chill was first in the air. They are called Big Soft Ginger cookies, and I found the recipe on Allrecipes.com, a wonderful site that has great recipes for everything. They smell DIVINE and taste wonderful.

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I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to hold on to stuff. I particularly like greeting cards, and collect the ones we get all through the year.

I saw some gift tags cut in the shape of initials from cards earlier this year on line or something like that, and thought that would be a great use for my collection. I grabbed up some Christmas cards from my stash for the project, and set out to make some gift tags instead of buying new ones.

Step one

I added a few photos to my Flickr set, hope you like them!

Have you heard of Etsy? It’s an online marketplace, started in 2005, for hand-made items and vintage goods. I could spend hours perusing the beautiful knit hats and sweaters, iPod cases, fabric-covered notebooks, vintage aprons.

When I saw this article on the New York Times website, I was intrigued to see that there are people making six figure salaries on Etsy. But I was not surprised to hear that those folks makin’ the big bucks are working like crazy to make it all happen. As one of the crafters in the article put it, “What’s the point of doing something you love,” she asked, “if you are too exhausted to do what you love?” 

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