Brand New Names on Tiny Clothes

Here are the twins' names!

Parker Allen Morris & Brooks Patrick Morris

We've been debating over these names since we found out we were pregnant again. And the epic war dispute has finally been settled! We really liked both of these names all along, but there was another one in the mix there for a while that was making us question our decision. I would decide on two of the three names, then Marsh would like the other one, then vice-a-versa....you get the idea. Once the first names were settled, though, the middle names were pretty easy to pick. We were set on using Allen because it is Marshall's middle name and also his great-grandfather's middle name. We then thought it would be random if we didn't give Brooks a family name as well, so we chose Patrick. It's my Granddad's name and it also just sounds really good with Brooks.

I was so excited to have the names picked out that I went ahead and made them some little name onesies! They were really easy to make, so I want to show you how I did them. I used the same freezer paper technique that I did last year when I made Marshall's Father's Day t-shirt. I'm definitely not the first to use this method (I'm always copying projects), so you can probably search for other examples online, too. Here are the steps:

1. I started out with some white, cotton onesies. Are these not the smallest things you've ever seen?! And they aren't even "preemie-sized." After my 8-plus-pound Laney, these boys are sure to seem so tiny to me! Anyways, I washed and dried them (in Dreft) before I started.

2. Gather all the other materials you need. They include freezer paper, scissors, fabric paint, paintbrush, cardboard, an iron, and a craft razor & cutting mat. On these onesies, I actually used screen printing ink ($4 / bottle) but the first time I did this I just used fabric paint and it worked fine.

3. Trace your chosen letters or image onto the non-shiny side of the freezer paper. Use the razor and mat to carefully cut out the images. Make sure to keep the centers of the letters to iron on as well. If you don't do this, you won't have holes in your letters like P, A and E. (This step is where I used my Silhouette machine instead of tracing and cutting. It was so nice because it cuts so fast and perfectly!)

4. Place the freezer paper shiny-side-down on your clothing and iron it on! Don't forget to iron on the centers of the letters, too. My centers were so tiny that I used some tweezers to help place them.

5. Cut a piece of cardboard that you can place between the layers of the shirt/onesie so that when you paint it doesn't bleed through to the back.

6. Finally, paint several coats of fabric paint over the freezer paper and onto the shirt. Let it dry completely before pulling off the freezer paper. Then you're finished!

Boy oh Boy

We went to the doctor today and had the BIG gender-finding-out ultrasound. So I'm posting to announce that the twins are...drumroll, please...

TWO BABY BOYS!

We are so happy! At the beginning of this pregnancy, Marshall and I both said we didn't have a preference on if they were boys or girls because there would be wonderful things about either. But now that we're sure, here are some of the reasons why we can get really excited about boys:

-Laney will always be "baby girl."

-Marshall will continue to be sane and not be outnumbered 4 to 1.

-We won't be putting on THREE weddings in the future.

-We can finally take a break from some of that pink stuff.

-Boats, fish, cars, trucks, & dinosaurs.

AND we've almost nailed down the names. I'll post them as soon as we're sure! :) Have a wonderful night!

Happy Heart Day

Happy Valentine's Day.

I know a lot of people boycott Valentine's Day because it's a "Hallmark" holiday, but if it's an excuse to dedicate a whole day to saying "I love you" to those people in my life that just don't hear it from me enough and to teach Laney about the importance of love, I'll take it. Little kid Valentine's days are the absolute sweetest thing ever. It's breathtaking to experience the innocent and honest love that only a child can portray. I look forward to the next ten to twelve years full of precious, child-like V-days! (Then we'll arm and prepare ourselves for the junior high / high school V-days that may carry a few more tears with them. Ha.)

We started off the day getting Miss Bug ready for her party at school. I got a little carried away with the planning and outfit picking. Honestly, I kind of went into guilty mom mode because I don't even remember if Laney had a Christmas party at school, which means I definitely didn't make anything to take to it or dress her up cute for it. At that time, I was doing good to scrape my morning-sick bottom off the bathroom floor and make it to work on time. So, I guess I tried to make Valentine's day extra special to make up for my lack-luster holiday season. Here was the first outfit we put on this morning:

....but it ended up being too big, so we changed into this:

I had made some Valentine bags this past weekend for Laney to give her friends as school. It was my first project using my new Silhouette cutting machine! I cut all the paper using the machine, then I glued all the pieces on the fronts of the bags. I ended up filling the bags with random stuff like heart-shaped bubbles and stickers since there's not much candy this crowd of one-year-olds is allowed to have. I also made all the girls in the class little flower ribbon clips for spring using some of the massive amounts of felt I have left over from making the felt playhouse and clipped them onto their gift bags:

And lastly I'll leave you with some random pictures of Laney. I feel like I haven't done a great job of taking pictures of her lately with everything going on (again with the bad mom guilt!). I assure you, though, that she is quite the center of our world just as she has always been. I just can't believe she's getting so old already. She's just growing up. It's really happening. She looks like a little girl in these pictures!

Playing with neighbor, Noah:

"Helping" unload groceries:

We're also so excited because our big appointment with the maternal medicine specialist is TOMORROW!! I'll be posting tomorrow to let you all know for sure if Laney is expecting little sisters or brothers. :)

Felt Card Table PLAYHOUSE!

I know I already posted once tonight, but I am just so excited to finally have this project finished so that I can post pictures of it on here! I literally finished it just 30 minutes ago. It has taken me so so long. I can prove it. The first time I posted about this project was almost a year ago. I heard about these felt playhouses from my friend Natalie and started looking them up online. It's a card table cover that's made entirely of felt sewn together. The nice thing about it is that you can take it off and fold up the cover and card table to be stored when it's not being used. I found these on Etsy and fell in love with them. So before you're too impressed, click on that link and notice that I basically ripped off their idea! Here's mine:

This was a very very time-consuming and difficult project, especially for this amateur seamstress. When I started it I thought, "What a great gift this would be! I'll make some for my friends that have kids when I'm done with mine." But let me be clear that I will NEVER make another one of these again unless someone offered to pay me a million dollars. Ha! And if someone did offer me that, I'd feel obligated to tell them that they could buy one on Etsy (with prettier stitching, I'm sure) for about $200. I'm so glad I made this one, though, because I learned so much about sewing through the process. I got really comfortable with my sewing machine and now feel that I could take on any sewing project (not that I plan on taking on any more projects of this size any time soon).

When I began working on it (last year, haha), I was adamant that I do it all by myself and not let anyone help me. I wouldn't even use any patterns. I just wanted to look at them online and try to copy them and add my own personal touches. This made it a lot harder, but made me think out of the box and problem solve as far as sewing goes. Then I got really bored with it and put it up in a closet for, oh, 5 months. I finally pulled it out again a few days ago when we had FOUR snow days in a row (woohoo!) and was determined to finish it. I knew that once the twins were born, I'd never have time to finish it, so I decided to knock it all out before I got too big and pregnant to be crawling around on the floor cutting, pinning, and sewing. And I did get all the sides done by myself! Here are some pictures of the work in progress:

After I got the sides and all the embellishments done, I kind of freaked out. I swallowed my pride and had my wonderful momma (who is a much more experienced seamstress than I am) come help me figure out how to sew all the sides together and attach the white "roof" with scalloped shingles. After a little pinning, sewing, seam ripping, re-pinning, and re-sewing, we finally got it finished! Here are all the detailed pictures of the final product. I hope Laney loves it! It features our two cats, Jack & Penny, a fruit tree with removable velcro fruit, and a little mailbox with 3 pieces of mail. Also, the number on the house is our actual address number, so hopefully it will help her memorize it. :) Sorry for all the pictures that are probably taking forever to load. I'm just pretty stinking excited to have this done and want you to see all angles of it!

Yes, our cat really did walk in there and look out the window on her own hahaha.

Week 20

I'm finally 20 weeks along! Half way there! Well, actually, I better be more than half way there considering that I shouldn't go the full 40 weeks. My doc promises he won't let me go past week 37 (if I make it that long). So this is more like the "20 weeks down, 17 weeks to go" point of my pregnancy. Still exciting. :)

And can you say "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THAT TUMMY!?" I'm feeling SO pregnant. I wasn't feeling this pregnant with Laney until about month 6. Wow. I just can't even believe my eyes when I look at this picture. Since I don't get this wonderful side view of myself many times during the day, it's even a shock to me. The good news is that everything is looking great, the blood clot is getting smaller, and I didn't even have to go in to see my doctor this week. Our next appointment is with the maternal medicine specialist next Tuesday. And that's when we get to find out the gender of the twins for sure! FINALLY!! Soooo excited. We have a sneaking suspicion that they are two little identical boys. We shall see!

Now here are all the previous tummy pics for comparison's sake:

This next one is a very special picture. I'm pretty positive that it is the first one taken of just Marshall and me since Laney was born. Ha. BC (before children), you take pics of just you and your hubby all the time! Once those babies start coming along, though, it just doesn't happen. We had a little surprise date night this past Saturday and went to Perini's Steakhouse. I really need to wear this shirt more. It's way more flattering than the red one that I wore the next day to take the "week 20" picture in. :)

Shoes

"Shoes....oh my gosh, shoes. Let's get some shoes!" If you are now not thinking of this video, then you are either way more mature than I am or weren't in college during the Liam Kyle Sullivan YouTube craze. Does it make me old that I don't think it's as funny now-a-days?

Well, back on track, this post is titled "Shoes" because Laney absolutely loves her shoe collection. And since we've had lots of time at home together due to these wonderful snow days, we've had the opportunity to see just how much she loves them. Laney has been doing this thing where she finds all her shoes in random places (they're never actually in her closet), brings them to us, and has us put them on her. Again and again and again. We do this probably a good 15 times a day. She hates not wearing shoes. She doesn't even like it when I take MY shoes off. Silly silly girl.

In this particular shoe-changing instance, Laney was still wearing her footy pajamas and Daddy wasn't able to put the shoes on her that she had brought him. So they got a little creative. (Notice how red and swollen her eyes are. Poor sick baby girl!)

There's a smile!

Laney has a lot of shoes to choose from. Here are all of her Uggs. It's a good thing we have a very wonderful Mama C who believes in shoes, as well. And I even think there is a missing pair of Uggs somewhere that didn't make this photo shoot (can you believe that?).

I'm sure people think that Laney doesn't own any shoes other than Uggs because she wears them literally everyday. My question is, what shoes will I put on her when winter is over? Is there life after Uggs? I'm a little scared. Uggs are just so easy.

We do have some other shoes that make many in-home appearances. Some that squeak, some that sparkle, some that are missing parts, and some that have a very wonderful college logo on them (whoop).

I guess you can say Laney gets her shoe-craziness honestly. I love shoes, too. I'm not as good at evenly distributing the love to all my shoes, though. I buy these high heels, wear them once or twice, then they never leave the closet again. Because given the choice, I'll wear my tried and true flats 10 times out of 10, regardless of if the heels would have been cuter. So go ahead, convince me that I don't need these:

Because I've already been looking online and want them. Can you imagine me walking around in these shoes pregnant! No. Please don't imagine that. At least for the next 4 months, I'll hold off on buying more heels that will go unused.

The Playroom

The playroom is finally finished! I'm so excited. Laney has loved playing in there already. When we moved into this house almost a year and a half ago, we made this fourth bedroom into an office/sewing room. It ended up be a junk room more than anything, though, because it was just too easy to put anything we didn't know what to do with at the time in there and just shut the door. We were silly not to make it a playroom from the beginning. The other bedrooms are pretty small, so the kids won't be able to do much "playing" in them. Hopefully this will be the perfect solution!

I knew I had to get this room decorated quickly since I still have TWO more rooms to do -- another nursery and a "big girl" room for Laney. I couldn't decide for the longest time how I wanted to decorate the playroom, so my mom and sister helped me dream up a plan over Christmas break. Marshall was just thrilled to see us come home from Lowe's with buckets of paint and hear that we were, in fact, set on repainting all the walls (ha). He put on his trooper pants, though, and led the way. He stayed up all night one night after I went to bed and started and finished all the solid walls. The next day, he helped me tape and paint the striped wall. {I also want to give a shout out to my sister Lauren. She was the one who taped off all the edges, ceilings, and baseboards. And that's the most important but least fun job.}

After that I just painted all the animals on the walls ordered some animals and tree wall decals from Pottery Barn Kids and stuck them on the walls. I DID paint the canvases that say "PLAY." Then we just shoved all Laney's toys in her new toy box, hung the new TV on the wall, and finished the room off by bringing in her pink chair and bean bag.

Here are some pictures! It will probably never look this perfect or picked up again. I hope it doesn't. I mean, it is a playroom. Laney is not feeling too hot right now, but as soon as we get that precious snotty nose cleared up, I'll get some "real life" pictures of her playing away. :)