I'm ready to go back already...

Brian and I were fortunate enough (thanks to my sweet parents!) to go to Gatlinburg, TN the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was so nice to just get away from it all. We saw so many beautiful sights of the Rocky Mountains, but since I am anti-pictures with no people in them and it was just the 2 of us, we don't have very many pictures. Here are a few, though...

this was from our hike to Grotto Falls...

and this is Grotto Falls...

Clingman's Bluff...the highest point in the Smokey Mountain National Park (I think?)

Although you can barely see what this picture is, it is actually a black bear that we saw near the edge of the woods right beside the road! Of course, we just followed the crowd of people. It was dusk, so the pictures are all very dark. This was the best one because you can see his eyes as he was looking right at me! The park ranger told all of us to move away because "if he's looking at you, you're in the wrong place." Yeah, we moved away pretty quickly.

We had our picnic right here one day at Cade's Cove.

Leaves are fun!

Let me just say, we do love the tall trees in our yard...

but every fall we have many, many leaves to clean up from our driveway and yard.

Genna helping to rake the leaves....yes, that is the street behind her. We rake them in a pile to the street and every now and then the city picks them up.

Sweet boy

This baby is the sweetest boy! (except when he's fussy :-) He loves for people to talk to him, he is VERY ticklish and he is his Mama's baby. We have NO IDEA where his precious dimples came from, but we do love to see them!

He also LOVES his sister! Why else would he let her do this to him??? It didn't bother him one bit.

He also loves this jump-a-roo. He finally got too heavy for this one, so we had to switch.

He is fascinated with the toys and lights and music on it.

And even reaches for the ones over his head.

It makes us so happy to see him so happy.

My silly girl

I was trying to get a cute picture of Genna's shirt for my other blog, but she was acting so silly that I just kept taking pictures of her.

She's "hiding" under the pillow, but kept popping out...I have several pictures of the pillow when I wasn't fast enough to catch her.

I'm pretty sure she's pretending to take a picture with her hands.

Other favorites...

These are some of the other pictures that I liked.
Decisions, decisions!

I thought these were cute of Andrew, but I don't typically like to have a lot of props...

Since Genna turned 2 years old, having pictures taken of her has been "challenging" (to put it nicely). This time, I decided not to even try to get one of the 2 of them together. I didn't dress her to be in the pictures, but I did bring the Auburn cheerleader outfit just in case things were going really well. I tried to get her to help us make Andrew smile, but she REALLY wanted to be in the picture, so we did take a few with her in them.

6 months old!

I'm a couple of weeks late on this...he turned 6 months on October 13th. We took our quarterly trip to Portrait Innovations to have pictures made and I was very pleased this time.
These are the pictures that I bought prints of...

In case you didn't know...

***disclaimer - I don't normally do posts like this on this blog. This blog is primarily to update family and friends on the lives of my children, but I'm going to do something different just this once ***

Most of you do know this, but I do monogramming and more recently, appliques in my "free time." Anyway, if you are interested, check out my monogramming blog . I take pictures of everything I make and post it on this blog. I've been doing a lot of fall shirts for kids lately, so that's what my most recent posts are, but I also do baby gifts, towels, aprons, and anything else that you might like monogrammed.

Here is an example of a recent baby gift which included bib, burp cloth and paci clip.

Here is a regular white terry cloth bib with a Christmas applique.

Burp cloth with applique and name...

and a couple of cute Thanksgiving turkeys!