Show Us you Life: Things that make you happy :)

This friday's SUYL on KellysKorner is things that make you happy. There are many things that make me happy...too many to name them all so I condensed my list down to my top favs.

Of course the obvious ones-                        my hubby(what a hunk!)

and baby boy

Then there is my family

and friends

~chocolate makes me pretty happy(especially if it is paired with peanut butter!!)

~I love all things that relate to fall-leaves changing, crisp cool air, etc

who doesn't love fresh strawberries?

~And what about the smell of the beach and breathing in fresh mountain air

~Most recently, my favorites have been sleeping in, snuggling with my two men, Mr Baby's laughter and breakfast in bed!

~I love laughing so hard I almost pee in my pants(I wouldn't be so happy if I actually did pee)

and being goofy

~Taking pictures makes me really happy

~Holidays and traditions give me the warm and fuzzy happy

Toes in the grass

~Cant forget Target!!!!

~Hot chili on a cold day,

cold lemonade on a hot day...its the simple things in life that make me my happiest!  :)

Extreme Makeover: Blog Edition

As you can tell, my blog has had a bit of a face lift. For a long time, I have come across so many cute blogs with the cute little headers and cute little post dividers and thought...hmm maybe I will just pay someone to make me a cute little blog. I found some designers who do it for 60-70 dollars and some who do it for 20-30. Then I came upon the websites where all the cute little blogging graphics are sold. Digital scrapbooking is the new fad these days and there are TONS of websites to find cute little graphics. I thought to myself  "maybe I can spend too much time figuring out how to make a cute little header and such, and buy the graphics myself." Well, that is pretty much what I did over the weekend after the cute little baby went to bed. I stayed up way too late figuring out how to layer, resize, crop, merge, import, flip, flop, stretch, etc. I learned about pixels, transparency, guides, grids, blah blah blah. It took me forever since I would start something and then not know how to start over if I messed up. I found those cute little buttons, ribbon, paper and frames from GottaPixel. They have "packages" of scrapbook graphics you can purchase for anywhere between a dollar(whoop whoop!) to 20 dollars(um no thanks). I found a package with just the right about of graphics and the colors I wanted for only a dollar! If you are not familiar with how digital scrapbooking works, you purchase a package of graphic images and download the zip file. Once you upzip your file, the next step is figuring out how to layer them with pictures to create a collage, or header in my case. A lot of people use Photoshop but I downloaded a free program called Gimp. It is awesome and works a lot like Photoshop. If you are willing to give it a try(it is a lot of fun!) there are plenty of websites where you can find free graphics or tutorials on how to add a post divider or change your margins. HTML scared the begeezes out of me when I first started messing with it, but now, I have learned a little about what all that nonsense means. A great website I found for blogger tutorials is BlogBulk.  Let me know if you have any blog makeover questions, I will be glad to help as much as I can now that I "sorta kinda" know what I'm doing! Haha!

Show Us Your Life: Your Hometown

This week on KellysKorner SUYL is all about your hometown. I am proud to be a southern girl born and raised in NC, Greenville to be exact. Went to school in Greensboro and then moved to Raleigh for my first job. I haven't lived anywhere else so I sure know my way around this beautiful state and love to brag about how it's a great place to visit! Friendly people, the best food, great shopping and gorgeous weather. One of the best things about living in the middle of the state is-moutains are 3-4 hours west and the beach is 2 hours east. What more could you want?  We love our hometown of Durham and here is our mini tour around the town~~~

Home of the Blue Devils, go Duke! We love all things Duke, especially basketball. Such a great hospital and school. Mr Baby and I love to take walks around the lovely campus and we visit Duke Gardens quite often too!

Another favorite about this part of the state-gorgeous leaves in the fall, my favorite time of the year!  :)

(These are trees in our front yard)

Eno River State Park is a beautiful river practically in our backyard. We walk down there quite often from our house but there are many different access points of the River and tons of great trails.

Museum of Life and Science and butterfly house-I can't wait to take Dillon here in a few more months! I haven't been since I was a kid

/

Durham Performing Arts Center-broadway tours, comedians, singers. And such a pretty building!

American Tobacco District recreated into restaurants, shops, exhibits, baseball stadium, offices, etc. Lots of history here and a fun place for weekends! Also home of our Farmer's Market.

Brightleaf Square-great historic area of downtown. Old warehouse buildings turned into restaurants and shops

Durham Bulls Baseball Stadium(the original stadium was the location of the movie Bull Durham!) This is also where we watch the awesome fireworks display on Forth of July!

Skyline of downtown

And of course, I can't forget to mention that Durham was voted the 5th best place to live by US News and World Report in 2009!  Whoop Whoop! We love this town!

Strawberries and Such

This weekend went by too fast, but it was a nice one! Friday Mr Baby told me get my butt out of bed and go to Zumba(which is a crazy booty shakin workout class if you are not aware). I am usually not one to exert that much energy in the morning but I am determined to get back into shape, so I did it. I sweat more in that class then I did while pregnant in August, ha!  Saturday we woke up early to beat the heat(yeah right!) and go strawberry picking at Waller Farms.

I forgot my camera so I didn't get any of Mr Baby's first strawberry picking....not like he could pick or eat any!  He was strapped to Evan in the Bjorn while I picked in record speed in order to avoid heat stroke. We got enough to freeze and snack on, but not enough for me...I will probably go back by myself to get some for cooking!
Lunch on Sunday, we went to Doc Greens with some friends from Raleigh, who we don't see enough! It was fun to catch up and for Laura to hold Dillon now that his head isn't "floppy" anymore, haha!
And finally, here are some pictures of the Mr B just cause he's the cutest little thing I ever saw!!

Favorite Children's Books

This week on Kelly'sKorner Show us your Life is favorite books. I decided to think back to my childhood when I REALLY enjoyed reading books and remember the ones that stood out the most( I had a lot of favorites). Right now, I don't really have time to read so I don't have any current favorite books. Thinking back to my favorite books as a child brings back the warm and fuzzy feelings of innocence and care free times when there were no worries, just fun books to read and being read to by mom and dad. I want to make sure Dillon knows what his mommy's favorite books were and hope he will enjoy them as much as I did!
Here are just a few of my favorites-

Mother's Day

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being.  I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune.  ~Graycie Harmon

Mother's Day was special this year with my sweet boy. Last year, I was 2 months pregnant and could only imagine was it would be like to become a mommy. Now that I know what it's all about, it is way better than I ever imagined! It is such a wonderful feeling to have a child who loves you unconditionally. The giggles, smiles, hugs, and snuggles make any day better and I could just hold him and kiss him all day long!

We had a mommy/baby photo shoot at Duke Gardens, which was a lot of fun. Mr Baby had a great time and enjoyed posing with mommy. He is such a happy baby lately(if you saw us a week ago, it was a totally different story!) and I just love his smile and cuddles! We decided a mommy/baby photo shoot on Mother's Day, then a daddy/baby photo shoot on Father's Day will be a tradition every year.   
Here is a slide show from our photo shoot~

A free slideshow design by Smilebox

Snoozin'

Mr Baby enjoyed his nice long walk yesterday! He was napping so nicely, I just parked him in the shade and let him sleep for another 30 minutes!

Show Us Your Life: Kid's names

Time for another Show us your Life from Kelly's Korner blog, names of our children or future children. It took us a while to choose our son's name. For some reason, girls name are so much easier to come up with and Evan wanted to make sure his son's name was macho enough, haha. He shot down about every name I threw out there for about 5 months. Some of his ideas were Nathan and Robert. Some of my ideas were Patrick, Preston and Max. None of those stood out with flashing lights and sirens so we moved on.  Evan's family is Norwegian so we had a thought of naming our son a Norwegian name. Well....most of the names we either couldn't pronounce, his teachers/friends wouldn't be able to pronounce them or he would just be made fun of. We thought about family names, looked at thousands of names online, bought a couple baby books and had some input from my co worker who loved coming up with cool baby names.
Finally, our precious boy's name:

Dillon Thomas

Dillon: Like a lion, loyal  Thomas: Twin

When we found Dylan in a baby book, we both liked the name, which was a big ding ding ding! Evan doesn't like y's in names so we changed the spelling to Dillon. That is pretty much why we chose the name Dillon. Thomas is Evan's brother's middle name and his Uncle's middle name. We want to include a family name in all our children's middle names. After we decided on his name, we found out Dylan Thomas was a famous poet and writer in the 1930's. It was quite fitting since we both have a lot of writers in our family-published and non published. 

Our girl's name was easy to decide on: Carly Anne We both liked Carly because it not very common and sounds like sweet little girl who would never yell at her mommy and daddy, haha. Anne is my mother's middle name.   Lets hope we have a girl next, considering how hard it was to come up with a boys name! Or we will just name him Carly! haha!