Kenna turns 3! part 2

After a fantastic birthday party in Raleigh, Kenna got the special honor of flying on an airplane ON her actual birthday- to Florida for our Thanksgiving trip to Grannie and Pop Pop's house! Once we arrived, we discovered that Jana and Grannie had organized a surprise princess party for Kenna complete with a strawberry cake, princess dress up clothes, and a cupcake pinata! Thanks Jana and Grannie!

 Kenna's special strawberry princess cake! 

 Kenna opening a special present all the way from Nairobi from Jana!

 Finn decided that the party was for the birds and headed up into the nearest tree...with a little help!

 Dad had a bit of technical difficulties with getting the candles to light- must be all that breeze off the Gulf! 

 Finn decided that a princess party could be tolerable if he got to be a prince- Kenna kept calling it the "king hat."

 Everybody got in on the cupcake pinata action and that thing was tough to crack. Each kiddo took turns, but it was truly not trying to budge! After 20 minutes of whacking and chopping, we ended up having to grab a corner and *get it started* for the kids in a pretty large way and Evan took it out. The big giant cupcake itself, even once emptied, proved fun for the girls to play with for days afterward!

It was a special time down at Grannie's celebrating our little blessing from God who happens to be getting very big! Happy Birthday Kenna! 

Kenna turns 3! part 1

For our special girl's birthday we decided to combine Kenna's love for parks and our love for not being cramped and head to a new park that we had recently discovered with our Sunday School class. Kenna asked for a polka dot party and Linds made it happen! Honeycutt Park had everything we were looking for in a park: slides and swings for all ages, tons of room to run around, picnic tables, convenient bathrooms, and a shelter to let Finn sleep in the shade. As it turns out, the morning of the party was a bit chilly, but Kenna didn't mind at all. Due to a tight budget, we weren't able to reserve the shelter at the park for the day, but in God's sweet providence the shelter had not been reserved and the park remained mostly empty all morning. It was all ours for the majority of the time and the kids had   a blast. Linds went all out and made a huge amount of cupcakes for Kenna to share with her friends, as well as skewers of grapes, gumballs, fruit, berry Kix, juice boxes, and cheese and crackers. For the grown ups, Lindsey was kind enough to think of coffee and donut holes. 

   

 Kenna grabbed her Momma's scarf to wear while she played hard!

The kids were amazed and excited at the great food Linds made. I love their faces when looking at it all! 

The swingset was great there and Kenna had fun swinging and playing with her friends and family all morning.

 Kenna and her Granddaddy and Nana

 Sweet friends and family celebrating our baby girl! 

 Even Finn ate crackers i honor of his sister! Happy Birthday big girl!

Happy birthday to our sweet blessing! Kenna is a precocious gift from God. She loves to sing and her sweet spirit comes out in a myriad of ways each day. She sings songs to the Lord and we are thankful for all the joy that she brings to our lives each day. Happy birthday Kenna McKay! We love you!

All "New" Nursery!

When we found out we'd be having a boy with Finn, since we'd have one of each, we'd make the kids' rooms a little more specific (this mostly coming from the fact that both of us wanted our boy to have a very masculine little room!). I remember sitting on the bed in the guest bedroom while Matt painted it green to make it Kenna's new "big girl" room, just barely pregnant with Finn.

The very first thing we did for a boy nursery was to paint a chocolate brown focal wall- I was SO excited that Matt was up for this idea! He helped me pick out the perfect brown, chocolate truffle by Martha Stewart's paint line at Home Depot. It seriously looked like we were painting the wall with chocolate, so much so that I started craving chocolate milk when we were rinsing the brushes! Painting in progress:
It ever-so slightly darkens the room, but I love how it looks behind the white crib. Then we started adding in some other fun more masculine details. I took down all the girly stuff and started hanging up some manly things. I made a giant monogram and loved how it turned out.

I absolutely love redecorating, and really love the challenge of trying to make things fun on as small a budget as possible. It's so fun to have one of each gender to decorate for!

Big Girl Room!

I didn't really decorate as much as I wanted to with Kenna's nursery- we moved when she was only about 4 months old and after that I just never really took the time to get it super-coordinated... I tend to not be a very matchy-matchy person anyways. Part of it was that we tried to be extra practical when it came to all the things we registered for that we'd be receiving brand new, we tried to make those as neutral as possible in hopes that they'd last for multiple kiddos, but looking back that kind of backfired since neutral seems to feel to masculine for a girl and too girly for a boy.

For Kenna's big girl room I wanted it to be a little more girly. We had a lot of fun transforming our guest bedroom into her own space... I never got great "before" pictures, but here are a few of what the room looked like as a guest bedroom:

And, after we moved the bed into the corner... it's nearly impossible to get a picture of the whole room because of the angle of the doorway:Rather than buy a twin or toddler bed (which Kenna is so tall she's already mostly grown out of anyways) we took the queen bed off the frame to just use what we had. We also painted the room our favorite kiddo-green, Christopher Robin's Swing by Disney (and by "we" I mean Matt painted the whole thing while I sat on the bed "supervising" because I was only a few weeks pregnant at the time!). Believe it or not, we have painted Kenna's room this color in 3 different houses now-first in Wake Forest which we moved away from when we were 6 months pregnant, second in Asheboro which we moved away from when she was 4 months old, and now here. We must really love this color!

A work in progress after painting & moving the bed into the opposite corner:

Luckily, it was easy to re-use most of the decor things I'd made for her nursery, like her "K" letter collection and the pink, green, and white paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and it didn't look too babyish. We added a bench under the window for toy storage, and here's what her "big girl room" looks like now!

I absolutely love redecorating, and really love the challenge of trying to make things fun on as small a budget as possible. Check out my craft blog if you want to know more details about the things I made/painted/crafted for the kids' rooms!