wedding planning # 4

As the wedding reception celebration is approaching, I am having some fun with little details.  Food signs, details for the "sign in" table,  a welcome easel for displaying some of their wedding photos, centerpieces... It's all coming together! I am just praying that it all comes together smoothly and that they feel celebrated and special... 

Thanksgiving recap part 2

After we spent thanksgiving with Kits family, we headed south to spend saturday with my family.  We have a tradition that we always decorate the tree and start Christmas decorating the weekend after thanksgiving.  It's always so fun to pull out the ornaments made of picture frames.  We can never believe how fast time goes and how big all the kiddos are now...

The guys were there too, I just didn't seem to get them in front of the camera... It's usually because I have Kit behind the camera getting all the good shots...

I am not going to lie, trying to get photos of the kiddos is a little challenging so we always take what we can get...

We are so thankful for our families... Ryder is such lucky kid, he has 4 grandparents that LOVE him and he LOVES them.  He greeted his cousins with hugs and they are so sweet with him.  Even though he is so much smaller than they are, they let him do all the stuff that they do...  He loves his aunts and uncles and it just makes us so happy to see him love his family so much...

thanksgiving recap part one

Hi Guys!  We hope that you had a wonderful thanksgiving with your friends and family...

We spent thanksgiving up with Kit's family and we had such a great time!

We ate lots of tasty food...

My sister-in-law and I:

(We are both pregnant, She is due end of May, so the cousins will be almost exactly three months apart.  We are so excited about a new cousin and an addition to the Rae family!)

Some frisbee golf with the guys:

The whole group:

It was a really fun few days and we were really sad to leave...

We love you guys!

A thanksgiving prayer

Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope that you are having a wonderful time being with people that you love!

I came across this prayer and I just thought it was simple and beautiful and I wanted to share it with you.

A Thanksgiving Prayer

For each new morning with it's light,

For rest and shelter of the night,

For health and food,

For love and friends,

For everything Thy goodness sends.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

Have a wonderful day and we will see you next week!

Ryder has a current favorite...

Can you tell what it is?  We even have Dino Nuggets in the freezer...  While most kiddos are repeating sounds that cows and ducks make, Ryder knows what a dinosaur says.... "RAORRRRRR".  He is all boy...

Kit's vision for Eden's room

We are making progress on the rooms and I wanted to show you Eden's fabric. We have never been very conventional with our baby rooms in regards to color schemes.  Shortly after we found out that we were having a girl, I was looking at Ryder's nursery fabric and thinking about how we would pull our different colors and feminize it and Kit said, "Well, I was thinking about a different direction for her... what about gray, yellow, and pink?  I think that would be so fun and I really want to make the room her own."

So enter Amy Butler.  We found this pattern, we both loved it, and we can't wait to watch it all come together!  We have lots of projects that involve sanding and spray painting... I will keep you posted!

Kit's mom made a bed skirt and it is BEAUTIFUL! It has jumpstarted the whole room.

Thanks Diane!

Thanksgiving with our friends (a little weekend recap)

This last weekend we hosted an early Thanksgiving with our close friends from college.  10 adults and 9 kids (under the age of 5...)  Thanksgiving is such a great time to be with people that we love, eating great food, and sharing stories and life together.  

The girls:

The Boys:

The kiddos:

I am not going to lie, there were lots of little people and so the things that we did to make that a little easier was we ate outside, we used all paper and plastic dinner ware, and we outfitted the garage with toys so that the kids could play.

It was really fun to be together... 
We love you all and and are so thankful to share life with you!

big kid shoes

Ryder has been wearing closed toed, big kid shoes (though he still LOVES his Rainbows...)  I love the sounds the shoes make on the floor when he walks or runs.  When the shoes go on, he KNOWS that we are really going somewhere, even if it's just to his play area in the garage. 

He was sitting on my lap as we were getting ready for an outing and, call it hormones, I looked down and saw his little feet and melted.  He gives hugs and snuggles and loving pats on my shoulder.  He plays with my hair and pats my face... I love it! I want to savor every second of this little man's childhood.  

Ryder Rae~

You are so precious to us! We couldn't love you more!

thanksgiving party favors

This saturday we are hosting our close college friends for our annual thanksgiving celebration and I am really excited about it! It's been a really nice distraction from the not so fun stuff with Kit's accident.

So I decided to get Ryder in on the party favor action.

I have had this tree stamp and I thought all it needed was a few leaves.

Enter Ryder and his fingers:

Usually for party favors we go for something sweet and usually it involves chocolate,  but this year we wanted to try something different and went for pumpkin candles.

(No hyper kiddos here!)

We are so excited to be with our friends!  it will be a very special time and I look forward to each and every time we get to be together!

more fish in my life...

With this pregnancy, I have been really looking forward to creating a room for our baby girl.  We have ideas and fabric and a color scheme... 

We have decided that Ryder will move to the bigger room and his sister will stay in the current nursery.  The hard part about planning for Eden's room is that we want to get Ryder settled in his new room before we can get the nursery switched over, and we want to be really sensitive to Ryder in the process.

So I have been adding more kid details to Ryder's new space.  He loves the fish and fish was actually his first word, and he points them out in every book that we read so we thought this would be a fun direction to go.

In his room is a magnetic board and yesterday I switched it from this:

to this:

Each little step, I feel like we get him closer and closer to being a big brother!

We have picked out a couple of options for his big boy bed and plan to get that at the end of December or beginning of January.

Here they are:

or

We can't wait to share the process with you! 

wedding planning #3

As our friend's wedding celebration approaches I have continued to plug away at the planning for the decorations.  It seems to be coming together and I am really getting excited...

So our colors are coming from my oil cloth banners:

So I have been collecting images that I like for the centerpieces.  This is the feel that I am going for:

I think I might try to incorporate some milk glass in there too!
I am excited for making it all come together.   I hope that I can make it all flow together.  I will keep you posted on all my planning.  Thank you for all of you that have helped me!

Angelina, you are amazing!

Very happy news...

We had an appointment with the orthopedic surgeon today and Kit does not need surgery!  His Achilles is completely intact which was a huge relief.  He has a severe sprain/mild tear in his calf. I was dreading his surgical recovery, being pregnant and chasing Ryder while entering our third trimester.  Our instructions are to have Kit elevate throughout the day, to take Motrin, and to do gradual stretching to increase his leg's mobility.  Overall it was a great day with some great news for our family!

urgent care visits...

Kit hurt his achilles tendon last night while practicing for our church's annual turkey bowl football game.  His X-rays showed no break,  but we won't know the extent of the damage until we have an MRI, which is hopefully going to happen on Monday.  Please pray that the tendon is not ruptured and that surgery is not needed.  As of now, we are laying low, and I am just taking care of my guys and hoping for a quick recovery for Kit. Thank you all for your phone calls and messages of support!  We feel very loved... 

Hello, this is Ryder Rae speaking...

Ryder has taken it upon himself to help us screen our phone from solicitors...

When my mom calls, she always leaves a message and when she does, he gets so excited to hear her voice.  So now he thinks that anytime the phone rings, it's HIS Mia.   So if you have been hung up on in the last few weeks when calling our house, just know this is what's happening on our end of the phone.

Thanksgiving in a backpack

This year, our church is partnering with Giving Children Hope through the "We've Got Your Back" program.  Our goal is to fill 1,000 backpacks with food items for a Thanksgiving meal.  Our church will then give them to a participating school so a teacher can deliver them to their students and provide their families with a Thanksgiving experience. 

To find out more, click here.

We are really excited to be part of this and we decided last night to make a family night of filling the backpack.  One of our prayers for Ryder is that he would develop a heart that loves Jesus as well as those around him.  That he would see needs and have a heart of giving and service.  That he would be a blessing to those around him.

So off we headed to the grocery store, Ryder was in charge of holding the grocery list. We grabbed some dinner first because it is a MUST to keep a pregnant person well fed... 


These are the items that the program has asked for:

Canned Soup, Instant Mashed Potatoes, Canned Vegetables, Canned Gravy, Box of Instant Rice, 100% Fruit Juice, Canned Beans, Cereal, Canned meat, Evaporated Milk, Macaroni and Cheese, and Canned Fruit.

It was a really fun evening and Ryder was really into it.

(He really didn't understand what the food was for but was really excited to put the items in the basket.  We only had one casualty of a jar of gravy, but other wise he did pretty good.  We just kept saying "Oh, the family is going to love that cereal." or "Thank you for helping us fill the back pack for the family at the school."  Again, he really didn't get it but we figure that it's a good place to start.)

Each time we have been part of something like this, it is incredibly humbling.  I realize how MUCH we have, so much EXCESS! We hope that by being part of something like this on a regular basis year round, Ryder will grow with a sensitivity to needs around him, and in turn, we will be changed as individuals, as well as a family unit.

E is for...

We have decided to name our baby girl Eden Marie.  Eden means "delight" and Kit and I are so excited to meet her in a few months.  Marie is the name of my grandma, my mom, and the middle name of myself and my sister.  She will be the 4th generation to carry it.   She has already brought so much "delight" into our lives in her only 6 months of existence. The name just seems like a perfect fit!

Thank you Mom for taking these amazing pictures of our baby.

I think Marie is a perfect middle name.  

A little weekend recap...

We had a WONDERFUL weekend as a family.  We went garage saleing on saturday and spent 2 dollars on a magna doodle, books and small plastic dinosaurs for Ryder,  all of which he is ECSTATIC about.  We (mostly Kit) organized the garage to make an outdoor play area for Ryder and to purge things that we really didn't need anymore.  That always feels so good.  

Then on Saturday night we went with our neighbors to our local high school's annual fund raiser where all types of food trucks come to the campus and there is live music and families and LOTS of raging hormones.   (And not just my pregnant ones...man, high ) But seriously, what these people can create in a tiny truck completely blows my mind!

Then on Sunday we went to church and Ryder stayed in his class the ENTIRE time.  Let me think of the last time that happened... I got nothing... So Kit and I were able to go to an ENTIRE service together.  It was so special for us.  We have really been having a hard time with separation anxiety with our little man. We leave him with our family and close friends but I really don't have to leave him very often so, if I was being honest, it's as hard for me as it is for Ryder.  We are both doing better though.  This was a huge step for us!

Then we headed with some of our close friends for a progressive dinner that took us from Balboa Island, to Irvine, to Laguna Beach.  It was a wonderful time sharing good food with some of our close friends...
I have to say that Ryder did not get the memo about how great time change is.  I also think that he is growth spurting and that has been super fun.  Clothes all of the sudden don't fit and he is eating a TON, plus he has been running into walls or falling a little easier than before.
All things that our pediatrician thinks points to a growing boy!

Have a very happy Monday!

banana topping!

In the Food Network Magazine, they take an ingredient and give you inventive ways to use it each day of the month. In the November issue, the ingredient was cinnamon... Very holiday!!!

The recipe that I tried this week was a really quick "dessert."

I used cut up bananas, sautéed with a little bit of butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon and we topped it on honey flavored greek yogurt. It was a really light and tasty dessert and it was SO easy!

It's the kind of topping that would be great on vanilla ice-cream, pancakes or waffles... I am going to have some fun experimenting with this recipe.

Did I mention that Kit and Ryder loved it?! That always makes food so much more fun!