Christmas Book Advent Books 1-25

I am a PINTEREST addict! There I said it! Honestly a lot of great ideas are shared on Pinterest and I am always inspired when I visit the site :) So one of MANY pins I made was a Book Advent! Seriously how great of an idea! I sell Usborne Children's books and although not all 25 books are Usborne books we will be reading I am still very excited to start this tradition with my family! During the month of November I tracked down 25 Christmas books (or winter books) Some have excellent deep stories, some are just fun traditional stories and some are just fun!  My kids LOVE books! So I collected books from our own stash, some borrowed from my mom and the rest I purchased :)

So I used the NEW Usborne Christmas Sticky labels (and sharpies) to label all the books by number in order we will be reading them... I really like the Random idea of wrapping them up but I really would like to read Book #1 first and a nativity book last so I decided to number them :) My little Adalie helped! and then we put the books.  So here we are!  Book 1: The Sparkle Box

Can I just say... this is my new favorite book!  We are very excited to read this one with the kids!  It is a wonderful story!! I HIGHLY recommend this story!!   You can visit the website here
Book 2: Farmyard Tales Christmas

 Cute book with interactive flaps! Kids loved it!!

Book 3: Gingerbread Pirates

 Super cute little story! 

Book 4: Thomas Christmas Delivery

 This one was for my boys but our daughter loved it too

Book 4: Most Marvelous Gift

 I am a huge Max Lucado book fan! His children's books have wonderful stories for kids of all ages!

Book 6: The Snow Day

 This was a light fun book.

Book 7: The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey

 This book was a little heavy for our 1, 2 and 4 year old... but one day they will sit through the whole thing

Book 8: The Crippled Lamb

 Another Max Lucado book, a great little Nativity story :)

Book 9: The Polar Express

 One of my favorite things-listening to my hubby read to our kids, Cam read this book and they soaked in the whole story! Super cute!!

Book 10: God Gave Us Christmas

 I like this because it was a neat little story about how Christmas isnt about Santa

Book 11: The Legend of the Candy Cane

 Liked this one too! :) Great story!

Book 12: A Porcupine in a Pine Tree

 A Canadian twist to "12 Days of Christmas"

Book 13: The Shoe Box

 My mom gave me this book while I was in bible college. I love it! Great story for all ages!

Book 14: How the Grinch Stole Christmas

 A Classic!

Book 15: The Three Gifts of Christmas

 We chose this one for our little Princess!

Book 16: Mooseltoe

 Our local librarian suggested this one! Fun!

Book 17: A Chipmunk Christmas

 A favorite from my childhood

 Book 18: Jacob's Gift

 Another Max Lucado book!!

Book 19: A Christmas Carol

 Another Classic

Book 20: A Charlie Brown Christmas

 Another favorite story from my childhood!

Book 21: Finding Christmas

 I am a huge Robert Munsch fan!

Book 22: Ordinary Baby Extraordinary Gift

 A cute little story of why Jesus came :)

Book 23: We Believe in Christmas

 Really beautiful!

Book 24: God's Precious Gift in a Manger

 Another great nativity story with the story of why Jesus came

Book 25: The First Christmas

A cute Usborne book :) Loved this one!

Thats it! That was our 25 book Christmas advent! The kids loved it and even if we forgot to read, Adalie would remind us we could not go to bed without reading our Christmas book! :) Look forward to doing this every year!

Finally all settled in!

We had intended this to be a short term home until we were able to build out of town but we have fallen in love with our home and at this point I personally do not mind having this home as our forever home! I only wish we would have put a basement underneath! Then we would have room for all my crafting stuff and a family room ;) We still have plenty of room! This 20 foot by 76 foot home is 1520 square feet and perfect for the time being!

We finally were able to move into our new home in October! What an experience! We did not expect it to be such a run around and such hard work but we are happy it is all over and we now are living in our own place once again!! What a blessing it was to spend the first night together as a family :) I was thrilled to get everything unpacked and start to get the kids adjusted to their new rooms. I looked back on pictures that I took of the whole process and they stopped once we were able to go into the house. Haha, I took no pictures of the bedrooms or house before we moved in. And honestly it isn't in the best condition to show it off right now after a long weekend/week of birthday party, and babysitting kids.

BUT I do plan to paint, so maybe once that is done I can share! :) I also would love to share what the house looks like after some landscaping and everything is done!

We are thrilled to be in our home town and back into our routines! I look forward to focusing more on crafting and enjoying the things I love to do! :)

Thank you to all my followers who have been patiently waiting for something crafty to come from this blog! It has slacked immensely in the last year! I have some fun projects to share soon so stay tuned!

 I have a fun new tradition I will be sharing with you in the month of December! So please come visit for that! Thanks again for stopping by!

Saying Goodbye...

Well... Where do I start? Our beautiful 1913 Character Home goes to new ownership this week. On Friday,   August 24th I will be passing the keys over and saying my final goodbye. 

We will miss our beautiful old home but have a great adventure in store! 

A Possible Addiction?

I have been collecting furniture, it started ever since my first refinish.. I now have 2 finished projects (my end table and the one I am about to show you) as well as a French Provincial dresser with mirror, a bedroom set, a couple old doors, old window, some shutters... lol Basically I have an addiction and my poor husband just keeps collecting these projects for me...  I posted an ad on a facebook classifieds group "Wanted French Provincial Furniture" I had many people respond "ME TOO" but was thrilled when a lady told me she had two dressers in her garage, if I came and got them I could get them for free. I waited impatiently for my husband to get off work and get home to ask if he would run across the city to pick up these dressers for me :) and what a sweet man he is, he did! One was EXACTLY what I was looking for, great shape, missing a pull (Have a story that goes with that one) and the other was MDF, rough shape and basically "dump material"  Again, Pinterest inspired me! I saw this post 

How adorable is this? I thought, well if I wanted to experiment I could maybe try with this dresser, and if it did not end up turning out, well... then I could just dump it ;)  So I started salvaging... planning and after a vision I got to work

 Dresser when it arrived at my house...

 Salvaging the best two dresser pulls

 Alright! Got'em

 Now for some work.. I removed all the drawer guide boards on the sides except the bottom one, and removed the drawer wood beams except for the bottom one as well

 I then chose the best drawer.. the drawers were pretty much all in the same condition so this wasn't hard

 Then I started sanding

 And then painting, my little helper, Adalie, she loves helping mommy while her brothers nap ;)

 I spray painted the dresser pulls white, they look amazing! Then painted everything pink, for my girly girl

 See!! They look so different! Love the way they turned out! I used rustolium mat white. They are perfect!

 My husband then cut me a shelf for the bottom and nailed it in with his brad nailer, I added a closet rod. This was an amazingly cheap project!

 I wish I painted the drawer inside!

 Finished project, The dresses dont hang all the way down but they fit nicely

 LOVED the way it turned out!! 

I did this on a frugal budget...

Dresser: FREE!

Paint: I used red paint from my kitchen and white and mixed them for pink, then used some white spray paint I had on hand.. so basically used what I had!

Materials: Materials such as the rod, and board... surprisingly we had these things lying around, when we purchased the house we lived in the basement had some odds and ends, well the closet rod was one of them, so that was free, and the board for the shelf was salvage from another project my husband was working on. 

Total cost.. $0... only because I lucked out on having all the materials needed! Now... I think it turned out well! And definitely not dump material!

Thanks for stopping by!!