Today was exhausting. We spent most of the day outside taking care of tasks around the house that had been neglected for far too long. Pulling weeds that had taken up residence in our flower beds, cleaning out cobwebs and dirt from the garage, and trimming back trees and bushes that were so overgrown it was hard to see what the shape was supposed to be. Now that Mackenzie has gone to bed, Ben and I are just sitting here: achy + sore + tired.

Ben, Mackenzie, and I went to look at a house today that I had seen online. It was a four bedroom, two and a half bathroom house. We aren't ready to purchase a home now but we do hope to start building our dream home in 3-5 years. It was a builder's model; the home was gorgeous and made me that much more excited to start the building process.

I came across the list for Best Home Design Blog nominations on Apartment Therapy and saw The Lettered Cottage listed. It had quite a few votes so I decided to check it out - and I'm glad I did!

If you're anything like me, you get these grand ideas for craft projects and then spend the next 30 minutes trying to find that perfect sticker/cut-out/piece-of-paper/name-any-kind-of-craft-item-here that you know you have but can't find anywhere. You don't have that problem? Maybe it's just me.

After posting about Mackenzie's first birthday celebration, I started looking around for other great party ideas. You can never start planning too early for the next event! I came across these fantastic dessert tables created by Amy Atlas. They are stunning!

I know that there haven't been many posts uploaded in the past couple of weeks, but a lot of work has going on behind the scenes. My husband (AKA the computer guru) has been going back through everything and making hundreds of changes, even though many of them aren't evident to you. The blog is in much better working order at this point - you'll just have to trust me. Anyway, as he was going through everything, he realized that there were a couple of posts that were written but never published - this post is one of them.

I put together three Valentine's Day crafts over the past couple of weeks. Two were really quick + simple paper crafts and one was a more time consuming sewing project. The two paper crafts were made in less than five minutes and aren't meant to be saved for next year - I really just wanted something to put on the shelves in our living room. The third craft isn't quite finished yet, but I'll fill you in on that when we get to it.

This post was supposed to go up last week, but a bout of the flu had me out of commission for a few days. Better late than never, right?


Remember back to this post about our plans for the play room? I added this image from A Perfect Playroom as inspiration in that post:

I have a long blog entry about the play room and guest room written up and waiting for the last few photos to be taken and uploaded. I've already been working on it for the better part of a week, so I'm anxious to get it up and running soon. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I will have the opportunity to get those photos and can finally hit 'POST'.