To God be the Glory

"He said in a loud voice, 'Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.'”  

--Revelations 14:7 NIV

The political issues, recent tragedies, and life in general are all a little bit overwhelming right now.  Then, after coming across this verse, I am reminded that there is no need to get caught up in politics and other things of this world.  We need to stop and remember that God is the ONE who matters most.  We need to be focusing on giving Him the glory he deserves.

This verse made me think of a song:  “To GOD be the glory, GREAT things He has done!”  Thinking of this song then made me think of a version of the song at VBS one year….

What's in a Name

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

~William Shakespeare

Avery Fisher

Avery’s name was easy to pick out.  My husband’s favorite name for a boy was Avery, and I loved the name when he suggested it.  According to babycenter, Avery means “leader of the elves”.  It has a unique (pretty silly) meaning, so that made the name even better! 

His middle name, Fisher, was not originally going to be his middle name.  Up until I was 26 weeks pregnant with him, he was Avery James.  We were going to save the name Fisher for our second child, should it have been a boy.  But we decided to go ahead and use it just in case we didn’t have a second boy (good decision!).  That is how he became Avery Fisher!

Selah Lynn

So many people have asked where we came up with the name Selah.  When I was in high school, one of my best friend’s sisters named her baby Selah, which was also the name of my favorite Christian band at the time.  I absolutely fell in love with the name!  The band, Selah, pronounces their name “Say-la” and there is an explanation for why on their website. 

Selah is Hebrew and is actually pronounced “See-la”(but in my opinion, that is not as pretty).  It is a word found in the book of Psalms.  One of my favorite verses using Selah:

“You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. Selah”

 –Psalm 32:7 NIV

Popular meanings for it that I have found are “pause and reflect on what was just sung”, “amen”, and “to lift the voices in praise”, all of which I like!

When we found out Selah was a girl, we were beginning to second guess our girl name decision.  We knew people would always be mispronouncing and misspelling it.  So we agreed to go with another favorite, Chloe.  I tried so hard to call her Chloe.  I even went so far as to paint decorative letters and hang them on her wall.

But, I kept accidentally calling her Selah.  I kept this to myself, because Sam seemed really excited about the name Chloe.  Then one day, out of nowhere, he tells me he doesn’t want to name her Chloe anymore.  I was really relieved, because it never sat right with me.  It is a beautiful name, just wasn’t right for our baby girl.  So, at 35 weeks pregnant, we switched her name back to Selah, though we weren’t positive we wanted to spell it that way.  We spent the next 4 weeks deciding between “Selah” and “Sayla”.   I asked others for their opinions, I spelled the name out on paper, I searched the internet, and still kept flipping back and forth between the two.  I really wanted the original spelling; however, “Sayla” is phonetically correct.  People would say it right and most likely spell it correctly.  But in the end, I just could not bring myself to spell it any other way than Selah.  I have had that name picked out for about 10 years.  We actually didn’t make it “official” until she was born.  There was absolutely no doubt once she was born, that she was our little Selah Lynn. 

As for her middle name, Lynn, it is my mother’s middle name!  I have my maternal grandmother’s middle name, and now Selah has her maternal grandmother’s middle name!

Oh, and funny little side note:  one of our other favorite names was Olivia.  According to www.babynames.com that name means “elf army”.  That would have gone well with “leader of the elves” (Avery), don’t you think?  =)

Bow Holder

This project was inspired by this pin from Pinterest.

I went through a box of picture frames in the garage and picked out the frame I wanted to use.  I spray painted it black from the left over paint I had from the dresser (see last blog post).  Once the frame was dry, I pulled out some ribbon I had in my craft box and hot glued it to the back of the frame.   I hung it on the wall and clipped bows to it. Easy Peasy!

It will eventually need to be bigger, but this will work for now!

Selah's $25 Dresser

This has been my favorite project to date.  I had been looking for a dresser for a few months.  Garage sales, resale shops, Goodwill; I could not find what I wanted anywhere!  Finally, in July, I found this treasure at Goodwill:

Sure, it is a little beat up and looks rough around the edges, but all of the drawers work, and it is exactly the type of dresser I had been searching for.

I bought this dresser for $20

As you can see from the picture, some of the drawers looked a little crooked, so before I painted, I took time to figure out which drawer went in which spot the best.  Once I figured that out, I labeled them so that I would remember when putting them back in.  I bought a few cans of black and pink spray paint from Wal-Mart (roughly $5, I bought the cheap stuff).  I removed the hardware from the dresser and began the transformation.  I painted the dresser itself black.  The drawers I alternated pink and black (3 pink, 2 black).

It was incredibly humid outside as a storm was coming in, which made spray painting a chore.  Every time I sprayed, it was as if the paint just sat in the air.  Needless to say, even with a sheet down on the garage floor, the paint floated around so much; it put a nice pink coat on part of the garage floor!  I did the first 2 coats the day after I bought the dresser, and then finished with the last 2 coats the next afternoon.  I did not sand the dresser; I only wiped it down with a clean rag before painting.  Once the paint was dry the second day, I put all the hardware back on (I didn’t have to buy new hardware because I like what it already had on it!  Bonus!) and then moved the dresser into Selah’s room. The dresser was missing a panel under the bottom drawer, so I stapled black fabric that I already had (for a future Pinterest project) to replace it.

I am absolutely in love with the way this turned out.  It is not perfect but it serves its purpose.  And the best part about it is:  $20 dresser + $5 spray-paint = $25 awesome dresser.  I’d say $25 well spent!

Avery's Sports Room

My husband and I bought our house on May 3, 2010.  It was 3 years old at the time and looks like all the other houses in our neighborhood.  The inside of our house was never changed by the previous owner (paint color and such).  All of the walls were the same tan color and the cabinets were honey oak all throughout the house.  From May 2010 to May 2012 every time I would get the urge to paint or “decorate”, I would talk myself out of it.  I didn’t want to personalize the house too much, because I didn’t want it to be hard to sell.  I finally have come to the realization that we will be living in southeast Texas (blah!) for a while, so I might as well be happy in my house.  I am hoping that decorating and making the house “ours” will make me happier living down here.  I am trying to turn our “house” into a “home”.

The first room I decided to change was my son, Avery’s, room.  When he was born, we decorated it with jungle things (but did not paint the walls).  When he turned a year old, I started collecting sports things for around the room.  I took his jungle themed bedding and decor to a local consignment shop in June and began the transition to his sports themed room. 

Of course, my first inspiration came from Pinterest.  We decided to turn one wall in his room into a baseball.  You can find the original pin here.  We did not follow the blog exactly.  We figured out how far out we wanted the stitches on the wall and cut a string that would reach.  I held one end of the string in the corner as my husband took the other (with a pencil tied to the end) and drew the curve on the wall.  We went from the bottom left corner and the upper right corner for our baseball.  I tried to free hand the stitches on the wall, as the people did in the original blog, but that wasn't working out great.  So, my husband grabbed some card stock paper and cut out a stencil of a stitch.  We took a small roller, red paint, and the homemade stencil and painted the stitches along the penciled line.  We made each stitch roughly 2 inches apart.  Then we used a sharpie marker to draw the line that represents where the stitches bring the fabric together

 The wall before

 Avery helping daddy put marks on the wall

The finished product

We were really pleased with the way it turned out.  While my husband was out getting the paint for the baseball wall, I decided to work on a different project.  I bought some sports fabric and batting to turn an existing shelf into a bench.  It was inspired by this this pin, but I put my own twist on it so that I could use a shelf that we already had.

First, I spray painted it red.  It was brown before.  To save on spray paint, I only painted the parts that would be showing after it was covered in fabric.

This is the finished product. 

I wrapped the bottom part in fabric only, using a staple gun to hold the fabric in place.  I then covered the “seat” in batting, stapled, then fabric, and stapled.  I was originally going to cut off the fabric that hangs down (shown in the next picture); however, we discovered that it hides the toys underneath!

Avery loves it!

And so does Peanut!

That night I spent 2 ½ hours wrapping Avery’s name letters in the leftover fabric from the bench.  This was a very tedious task.  It took about 30 minutes per letter.  The hardest part was getting the fabric to pull tightly around each corner of the letters.

 The letters were jungle themed

Now they are sports themed!

The next day, I finished adding pictures and curtains.  Also, I hung the letters on the wall

Before

After

Avery!

We later added super cute curtain rod ends my mom found at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  I will try to add a picture of those used in his room later.

After a few days of admiring our baseball wall, my husband suggested painting the wall on the other side of the room as a football.  I searched the internet for ideas for doing a football wall, but couldn’t find what I wanted (even on Pinterest!).  So, we just decided to get inspiration from a real football and go for it.  We made a trip to Wal-Mart to get our supplies.  We got a football from the sports department and compared paint strips to find the colors we wanted to use.  We bought rollers, painters tape, a sponge (from the craft section, the paint section didn’t have the size we wanted), paint, and the football. We started by drawing a line from the bottom left corner of the wall to the top right corner of the wall to make sure we could line the stitches up straight. (We used some string we had in the garage for that).  We then taped off the stitches.  This took a couple of tries to figure out what size we thought they should be.  And then the painting started.

First, we painted the base color.  It didn’t take long using a roller, and we only did one coat of paint.  Then, we took the darker brown color to do the dots and used a Sharpie marker to draw the black stitches that go around the white stitches.

Finished product!

Inspiration

I am not going to lie, my husband did the majority of the work on the football wall, as I tended to a very hungry and cranky 4 week old. 

We are so pleased with the way his room turned out.  Hopefully this will be a room that will grow with him. 

Moments of Sanity in my Madhouse

So many days I have wished I would have written down the days events, or how I did a DIY project.  Well, here I am.  I have FINALLY created my own blog.  

I am a stay-at-home mom of 2 beautiful babies, Avery (17.5 months) and Selah (2.5 months).  I will blog about each of their pregnancies and births later.  I have an amazing husband, Sam, and two dogs, Peanut and Mia.  

My amazing family

 Our dog Peanut

I have found a new love this year, Pinterest.  I have tried recipes and Do-It-Yourself projects from that website and I will show off what I have done (so far) on here as well.  You can follow me on Pinterest by clicking here.

I hope I can find time each day to make a new post.  Seeing as my days are incredibly hectic balancing my time between a toddler, an infant, two dogs, and a husband, I might not get to write as much as I would like.  But here's to trying!

Wish me luck! =)