Beautifully Poor

AdoramaPix  is an amazing company that lets you create beautiful, extremely high quality Christmas cards. The prices are fabulous and the quality! I cannot say enough about the beauty of these cards. This is our second year getting them and I couldn't be happier. Photo cards can look cheap and quite frankly, can be pricey for the quality you get. These will not disappoint! I have never been disappointed with anything I have purchased from  AdoramaPix , so I can put these on mythe "I highly recommend this" list! I was more than thrilled to open my cute little  AdoramaPix  box this afternoon when the mail came. I LOVE sending out Christmas Cards, and it is the only time of year we do family pictures. It has become a tradition for us, so I was definitely looking forward to it. The experience to create the card was a good one. It is so easy to create your own personalized cards, whether using a template they already have on the site or making your own from scratch.

I am always looking for fun things to do around the city, whether it be cultural, educational or just plain fun. One of the most recent Fun and Educational things I have found is  Kidcreate Studio   - not just any art studio, but somewhere that children can express themselves through their own creations. My son and I participated in a Thanksgiving Craft Party class and had so much fun! The kids made their own clay turkey - just in time for Thanksgiving - as well as some Goo Gunk, which was a fun science lesson. The class was led by Kendra, along with her helper Linnea. Upon walking in, the atmosphere was bright and happy. Kendra was extremely welcoming to the parents and their kids, which is a great way to set any environment for learning. She started us off by having the kids sit on a mat while she went over the simple and easy to follow rules of the class and introduced us to Ferdinand, her clay turkey (who was just adorable!). As an ode to Thanksgiving, she also as

Bedtime Read and Rhyme Bible Stories is a beautifully illustrated book and is the perfect addition to the family night time routine. I keep this on my son's dresser and we read a few stories every night before bed. They are short and written in poem form so are easy to read and fun for kids to listen to.  As you would imagine, the stories aren't thoroughly detailed but are great to get your child started on a variety of Bible stories , or supplement one's already known to the child. Stories include the Creation, The Ark, Daniel and the Lion's Den and Queen Esther for the Old Testament stories among many others. The New Testament stories go beyond the life of Jesus and into the gift of the Holy Spirit, Saul's change of heart and even touches a little bit on Heaven in the book of Revelations. Each story/poem (over 90 altogether!) ends with a short prayer, so this can be a complete, short devotional for kids before bed.  The illustrator, Robert Dunn,

You know how you have to write down people's birthdays on the calendar so you don't forget about it? Or even sometimes special days in your life, like your own birthday, or God forbid, your Anniversary! It happens all the time to me with a lot of things. But there are two dates I don't need to write down. Two dates that are burned into my memory so much so, that the days leading up to these dates are full of the memories they hold. Those two dates are 7-17-13 and 11-9-15; the days we lost Adora Ruby and Theodore Andrew. As Theodore's "birthday" is approaching, I can't help but remember those horrible days. I started spotting on Halloween; right before we went out for trick-or-treating I saw it. Nine days later I was in the hospital being told I wouldn't be going home, that in fact I had an ectopic and they would be doing emergency surgery that night. The numbness I felt can't ever be matched. I vividly remember asking for pain medicine, not b