Another year older

Cary and I spent this past weekend in Athens, GA celebrating my birthday.  We went to our favorite restaurants, Porterhouse and Last Resort, but the real treat was stopping at Marti's at Midday and going by Gigi's Cupcakes on the way out of town today.  

 

 Chicken salad sandwich at Marti's

 Yummy cupcakes...I'm just now trying the text feature of Photoshop.  Any tips?  Obviously I need some advice on making it look a little better. 

Thanks to my wonderful husband who made the trip so fun!  Also, thanks to my parents for taking care of the puppies while we were away.  I also enjoyed all the cards, gifts, texts and FB messages!  It has truly been a happy birthday!

Tobacco Baskets

I realized that I never posted the finished product of the Tobacco Baskets!  My mom was able to find 4 of these beauties (in this post I explained how she found 2 and we needed 2 more)!  I cleaned them up by giving them a good scrub and sprayed them down with water to get rid of a few decades of dirt and dust.  I then stained them with a polyurethane-stain combo from Minwax to make the wood look new again. Just FYI, they are approximately 4 feet by 4 feet and weigh about 15 pounds a piece.

Here's a before photo, with no stain:

 And here they are in place:

One is from Virginia and two are from North Carolina while the other one is not marked.  I think they turned out pretty good.  It was a much easier way to fill up that amount of wall space than with artwork or photos or something.  What do you think?

Happy New Year

Happy 2013 everyone!  We wish you many blessings in this coming year.  Cary and I are excited about what God has planned for us in this new year, too!

It is hard to believe this little blog, which started because of our wedding planning, now has over 9,300 page views.  No, it isn't a lot compared to some of those professional bloggers, but we still think it is fun.  We plan to continue blogging and sharing and hope to receive more feedback from ya'll along the way!

We played host to not only my family's Christmas, but Cary's immediate family as well.  Wanted to share some photos from Christmas celebrations:

 

The tree was placed in the dining room this year.  The table was lined with globes from Dad and the credenza featured a nativity from Cary's mom.  

  We decided to make salt dough ornaments and get the pups paw prints.  We got Morgan's ornament on the first try...Madison's required a little more work!  Imagine that!

 

 The West Family

We were blessed to spend the holidays with family!  Make 2013 great!