Author Archives: vanessawyler

Emerald – 8 Months

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Happy 8 Months Baby Girl!

These months are going by too fast!

Emerald hasn’t been to the doctor since her 6 month check up, so our best guess is she weighs about 16 lbs. She’s just growing out of her 6 month clothes and starting to wear her 9 month ones. She loves to eat solid food now, her favorites are bananas, squash, crackers, yogurt drops, puffs and loves when mom and dad share food with her like french fries and green beans.

She loves to clap and jump and is starting to scoot around – good thing we got one baby gate up! She’s still a great sleeper and we are all thankful for that! Her favorite word is still “dada” but is starting to learn a few sounds such as “shh”.

She ended her 7 month by getting the stomach flu and passing it on to her mama – thank goodness daddy takes such good care of us!

“Ok mom, enough photos”

Project 365 // Day 25 – 31

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Day 25 // Hold my Hand

Day 26 // Rolls

Day 27 // iPhone

Day 28 // Vintage. (She went thru so many outfits one day, Grammy had to put her in some vintage pjs because she used up all of her other outfits we had brought for her that day)

Day 29 // Best Day.

Day 30 // Exersaucer.

Day 31 // Discovering.

 

Out from Behind the Camera

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One of my goals for 2015 was to improve on my photography and document life, every 365 days. To help accomplish my goal I joined a photography group called Shoot2015, which is a combination of an online forum in which we all help critique and inspire each other + we get monthly and weekly emails that educate us on different techniques, whether it be composition, lighting, and so on.

So far I’ve learned a lot and can’t wait to see how much more I learn throughout this year! One of the most recent weekly emails encouraged us to get out from behind the camera and into our images – and that our kids will want to see us with them in photos when they look back at these years from now.

So today we did that – set up my camera with the self-timer and tried to get some “candid” looking shots. Ha, but Emerald likes to look at the flashing light on the timer, so they don’t quite look as candid – but I do love them and I’m going to make it a goal to get behind the camera at least a few times more each month.

She loves playing with throw pillows – my kind of girl!

Rolls & Teething

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Thankful for all the days I get to spend at home with her – even when she is teething and wants to be held all.day.long. – my work schedule changed a little bit and I’ll have a little more time to focus on her during my days at home. I know being a working mom is hard, but also a stay at home mom is another kind of hard. Hoping to find balance between the two. Just all around thankful for this girl.

And even though she is itty bitty, she’s still got a few rolls on her.

Living Room Fireplace – Painted

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So there’s this one time where I used to share our home renovation projects on this blog – which has now become the blog of Emerald. Sorry everyone… but hey I’ve got a new home project post.

It started back in the summer where I threw out the idea of painting our fireplace on social media. I’ve thought about painting it from day one when we moved in, but was having a hard time committing since you can’t really un-paint brick. So thankfully – the social media agreed and said to go ahead and paint it, and so we did. Then a few months later, it looked like this and this. Then I raked in Drew’s help via strong muscles and no fear of heights and we finished off the painting part. Then it came time to stain the wood a darker tone which also took longer than we thought since the color wasn’t getting dark enough. Then we decorated it for Christmas – so then I had to wait to take down all the decorations before I took these photos. So what you have all been waiting for… our finished fireplace (well and maybe it’s not 100% finished because I’d like to get rid of the brass, but for now we are calling it done).

Sidenote – no our house is never that clean, it lasted about five minutes I’d say. And yes, Emerald is allowed to have toys, we keep them in the corner so they are kind of hidden, but I limit the color schemes, well I try too!  Seriously, why do all baby toys have to be ugly primary colors?!

So overall, having a baby slows down your home renovation projects. One project per year is all we might get in now – luckily we worked like crazy before she was born! Next up is making some baby gates and then installing our faux wood tiles we won like 2 years ago.

Project Details: Behr Ultra Paint + Primer in Ultra White Semi-Gloss finish was used on the fireplace, and no I didn’t prime it separately, who has time for that? The stain was Minwax Polyshades in Royal Walnut with a Satin finish.