Merry {late} Christmas! And a couple gifts…

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!!  Ours was so good.  Apart from still feeling really sick these days, it has been so nice to not have to be running around a million places with the kids, making sure homework gets done, etc.… and just enjoy some very relaxing and lazy days at home. My Dad came and stayed with us for a couple days from Dallas, which is always nice to stretch out the Season a bit longer.

And I’ll get to find out if we’re having a girl or boy in the next couple of weeks!  Yahoo!  I’ll be 17 weeks on Monday and we’re all excited to find out.

I’ll be sharing a couple more posts next week of some gifts I gave.  Since they were so last minute I didn’t have time to blog about them before Christmas.  To my mom and Dillon’s Grandma, I made some hot pads. I decided I don’t love making hotpads, but they did turn out pretty cute.  I tested them out and they seem to work great, even though I was worried about the thinness of them.  I used just two layers of insul bright with the silver side facing out towards the cotton layers.  (blah, the lighting has been so difficult to work with for me this winter!)

I was worried about the thickness with the bias tape, and honestly, I wouldn’t have been able to sew these without my new Christmas present (gifted early so I could use it for presents).  Yay!!!  I’ve been sewing with a very basic mechanical Singer 3820 I got for my high school graduation gift.  I have been very thankful for that machine.  I am thrilled with the machine my hubby got me.  He was proud of the fact that #1: It has pink on it (which was for Poppy’s sake I think, not mine, ha ha!), and #2: It’s a Project Runway edition, and he knows Sabra and I love the show.  He went into a sewing machine dealer and talked with them extensively, and I think he ended up with a great machine.

Many of the presents I gave this year was straight from eighteen25.  When I saw THIS post on their blog with printables, and found THIS frame from Ikea, I knew it would be a fun gift.  I sent the prints off to Costco ($0.13 each) and gifted nearly 30 of these.  Thank you ladies at eighteen25!

I just have to share a couple fun things our Elf on the Shelf did—we got ours at a Real Deals and I think they are much less creepy than the real ones! We didn’t go all out most nights—he did a couple other fun things, but mostly they were very simple.  These were my kids’ favorites I think.

We watched the movie Elf and I thought they’d like this one:

And this idea I saw on pinterest:

I think that’s all I have for today.  Have a great and safe rest of your holiday season and weekend, everyone!