I can hardly believe our first baby is five years old today! Where has the time gone??

It’s so easy to celebrate this boy because he is just the sweetest. He loves to celebrate and has the most fun whether he’s allowed to eat donuts for breakfast (a birthday tradition!) or gets to go on a week long vacation. His excitement is the same and it’s just so fun!

Shaney is the best big brother and has so much pride in his title of big brother. He truly sees it as his responsibility to look out for and protect his younger siblings. It’s the sweetest thing to see. He absolutely loves playing with his younger brother and absolutely adores his younger sister. If it were up to him he would have ten younger brothers and sisters to love and play with. He just loves his siblings so much.

He also has the most helpful spirit and finds so much joy in being a helping hand. He’s always there to let you know that he would love to help, whether that’s folding the laundry, doing the dishes, or just grabbing something for you. He genuinely just really wants to help.

Shane is wise beyond his years and is so thoughtful and responsible. He is quick and witty and has us laughing all the time.

Being this boy’s mama is one of the greatest joys of my life. It’s such a bittersweet thing watching him grow. Some days I wish he were back to being a sweet baby again but he makes it so much fun to watch him learn and grow. I just love the little boy he is becoming and can’t wait to watch his abilities and interests grow over the years!

He loves to learn and loves animals and it’s been such a delight to get to teach him this year so far in homeschool. I’m so glad I’m the one who gets to be with him day in and day out and watch his abilities continue to grow.

Happy birthday to our sweet boy! We love you so much!!

Best adventure, travel, or trip: By far our trip to Ocean City, New Jersey was the best trip we took last year. We had the most relaxing, enjoyable time. We had rented a house that was a few blocks to the beach. I was about 24ish weeks pregnant and we took everything very slow because of that and it just made the time very enjoyable because we weren’t trying to push ourselves to do anything just because it would have been “fun”, if that makes any sense.

Best book: My favorite non-fiction book was definitely M is for Mama. This book was such a breath of fresh air and helped me realize how much I was doing because the internet said so. It was full of practical words of wisdom and I honestly may read it again soon. My favorite fiction book was probably The Younger Wife. Sally Hepworth can do no wrong honestly.

Best TV show: Probably A Million Little Things would have to be my favorite this year. Or This Is Us. Or Ted Lasso.

Best movie: Honestly, much to my husband’s despair, I don’t really like movies. We rarely ever watch new movies. The only ones that I can sit through are ones that I already know I like, haha! We watched The Grinch quite a few times and Tommy and I rewatched The Princess Diaries and that was really fun.

Best album, song, or artist: I also don’t really listen to much new music, but my favorite artist is King’s Kaleidoscope. They make the best Christian music. Their new song All The Emotions is my new favorite.

Best new podcast listen, newsletter subscribe, or blog follow: I really enjoy Ashlee Gadd’s newsletter. I honestly love all of her writing and really look forward to reading her newsletter’s each month.

Best kiddo milestone: Watching Riley become a big brother! He surprised us all and handled it so well. He’s absolutely in love with his baby sister and it’s been really fun to watch them together.

Best faith grower: We switched churches last year and it was such a great decision for our family. I think I’ve talked about it a little bit on my Youtube channel but this church is so much smaller than our last church. This switch has really grown my faith and showed me practically how the church is really meant to function as a family and not as a list of rules to “get right”.

Best beauty purchase: I would have to say this serum. It’s been so moisturizing and I’ve really enjoyed it a lot. Ever since Melly was born and I’m breastfeeding again, my skin is so dry and it helps it feel so much better.

Best new tradition: I wouldn’t say you would call this a tradition but starting homeschool this past year has been such a gift. I’ve had a lot of fun spending lots of one on one time with Shane and am really thankful that I get to be the one who teaches him (so far anyway).

Best habit you created: I’m not sure if this is exactly a habit but I would say choosing to read more this year is something that I want to grow even more in in 2023. It has been really great to choose to read more and spend less time watching videos or on social media. My goal in January since I’m taking a month off of Instagram is to read a book a week. I’m already a quarter of the way through my first one and it’s been really refreshing to read a book on my phone instead of scrolling social media.

Favorite blog post written: Definitely my birth story of sweet Melanie. I love that I have each of my kid’s birth stories written out on here.

Best life or mom hack: Finding the app, Tumblebooks and letting Shane “watch” books on my phone when he wakes up earlier than I want him to be, haha. He’s just listening to someone read him books so it’s not really screen time and he loves it.

Best mama moment: Definitely meeting our sweet Melly girl! She brings so much joy to our family!

Best home improvement: We technically started this project at the end of 2021 but have (sort of) finished it in 2022, we renovated our bathroom and it has made the house feel a lot more cohesive which has been really fun.

Best little luxury you’ve enjoyed: Getting my hair done for sure I’ve been getting my hair dyed at a salon ever since August of last year and I’ve enjoyed it so much more than I would have thought. It definitely feels like a luxury every time I go.

Merry Christmas from our family to yours! I hope that you guys had an enjoyable and fun Christmas this year.

We had a relaxing and really fun Christmas Eve at my brother’s house and then hosted Christmas with just my mom yesterday. It ended up being so nice and relaxing. We made prime rib for the first time which turned out to be really fun and so delicious! Then we made homemade cinnamon rolls for dessert and they were amazing! We used the Pioneer Woman’s recipe and I highly recommend!

I was able to work with Basic Invites to make the cutest holiday cards this year. I was super impressed with how easy they were to design. For the past seven years I’ve used Shutterfly to make my Christmas cards and while I do love the cards, it was so much easier to customize them on Basic Invite’s website. Once you choose a card you can change the color of each element on the card and they have over 180 colors to pick from. So cool.

Another really cool feature they have is an address capturing feature where you can post a link on social media and your friends and family can fill out the form with their addresses. It’s a much easier way of getting all of the addresses you need from your friends and family. They will even print them on each envelope for free!

Each year Tommy and I have had to text many of our friends and family who have moved throughout the year to get their new addresses. This would be a particularly cool feature for the first year that you are sending out cards so that you wouldn’t need to text each of your friends. It can be really time consuming to wait for each of their responses and then copy each address onto the website. You can also have Basic Invite send out your Christmas cards and I’m definitely going to be doing that next year. I always wait way too long to send out my cards because I hate going to the post office, ha! Not to mention it’s faster because they can send them right away and you don’t have to wait to receive them.

Another one of the things I love about Basic Invite is that they have faith based cards too. Even after seven years on Shutterfly, I have yet to notice many faith based cards, but it was one of the first things I noticed on Basic Invite’s website. I love the glory to God in the highest card below. It’s so cute!

I was even able to put together a birth announcement for sweet Melly girl too which was really special because I wasn’t able to do that with either of the boys. I love that I have that this time around.

Basic Invites is such an awesome site to order cards from and I thought you guys might love them too. If you are still interested in sending out cards this year (they have designer Christmas cards, business holiday cards, and even new years cards!) you can use code 15FF51 for 15% off your order.

I really hope you guys had a great Christmas! I’m really looking forward to this week to reset the house and to sit down and think about the new year and things I want to focus on. I’m still unsure about if I’m going to set goals for this year but if I do I will be back to share them soon!

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I wanted to start by sharing what I got Melly for Christmas. For those who don’t know, Melly is 3 months old so I didn’t buy her much for Christmas seeing as she doesn’t need much! 🤣 I got her three small toys, this little teether toy being the first one. I thought it was super cute and great for when she’s able to start grabbing toys and munching on them, which will be very soon!

The second thing I got was this ball. I’ve heard lots of good things about toys like this for babies who are under six months old or so. I’ve heard that they just love grabbing onto them so I’m excited to give this to her.

And lastly, I got her this cute water mat for tummy time. She doesn’t mind tummy time – she actually seems to enjoy it but I thought this would make it extra fun!

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Melly has started using this awesome sit-me-up seat this week and we all just love it. It’s so fun to see her sitting up now and she loves to be able to see everything a lot better. She’s even starting to reach for the toys a little bit, which is really fun. I also love how there’s a tray behind her, and we can spin the toys to swap it for the tray and when she gets older and is eating finger foods, we can have her sit in here and eat.

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We’ve been making homemade pizza for about a year or two now and Tommy has gotten quite good with it! We use this recipe for the dough and then season it, add some sauce, and cheese and it’s so so good!

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I also ordered this number board this week for homeschool. Shane has loved it and it’s definitely helping him with letter recognition and learning how to count past thirty. I highly recommend it if you have a 4 or 5 year old who is learning larger numbers. It is a lot smaller than it looks though, just a heads up!

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Another yummy dinner we ate this week was actually a weight watchers recipe. Tommy has been doing weight watchers for about six weeks now. We had the Weight Watchers cookbook sent to us and I found this recipe in it and it was so yummy. I did add just ground turkey rather than the turkey meatloaves that they say to add and we also added parmesan cheese on top. So yummy and healthy!

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Today I’m linking up with Andrea and Erika for Friday Favorites! The links are affiliate, thanks for supporting my little blog!

I just wanted to first say that I had to take down the reader survey from yesterday because it somehow got spammed?? I didn’t even know that this was possible so that was disappointing. I’m going to do some more research and see if I can post another one soon because I genuinely want to know more about what you guys like reading here.

But today I wanted to share a quick post on what I got Riley for Christmas. As you can see and as we did with Shane, we did something he wants, something he needs, something to wear, and something to read.

So something to know about my boys is that they are joined at the hip. At this age, everything Shane does, Riley wants to do too so because of that I bought him the same “something he wants” gift as Shane. He also needed rain boots just like Shane so they are getting very similar gifts this year.

Dino Smashers – The perfect toy for any 2-6 year old boy. Somehow they are on sale for less than $17?? They are also huge, like over 12 inches and have a ton of toys inside. The boys are going to have so much fun with these.

The Cutest Slippers – I was going back and forth between buying him cute slippers like these and ones that he would prefer like Spiderman ones and I couldn’t resist these. Riley loves wearing shoes so I’m hoping he will love wearing these around the house. Shane had a pair of slippers around this age and wore them all the time so fingers crossed Riley loves these.

Yellow Rain Boots – I really liked these ones because they are shorter than regular rain boots at this size which I thought was really helpful for Riley at this age. I had originally purchased these shark ones but thought Riley would have a hard time walking in them so I got these cute yellow ones instead. They come in so many color options too and are just really adorable.

The Story of God Books – Like I mentioned in Shane’s post, I’m excited to give these to the boys and excited for the conversations they will open up with them over the years about who God is and why they need him.

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The gift I am most excited about giving them though is from the show Wild Kratts. The boys have been obsessed with this show lately and pretend they have “creature powers” all the time. I got them the creature power suits and creature power disk sets to match. They are going to completely lose it when they open these gifts because they’ve been trying to find makeshift creature power suits since they started watching the show. I can’t wait to give them these.

I also wasn’t planning on getting them anything else but decided on a whim to get them each a Kiwi Co crate. I used to do these with Shane when he was around Riley’s age and Kiwi Co was having a Black Friday sale and I got each of the crates for $5 so I couldn’t resist. 🤣 I thought it was worth it for $10 total because it be quality time I get to spend with them and they will be learning too so win, win!

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If you need any other ideas for a two year old boy, I shared this post a few years ago when Shane was younger. I think I might also share what I got for Melly, although it was only a few small gifts since she’s only 3 months old, haha! Maybe I’ll just include them in my Friday Favorites post tomorrow. Thanks for being here friends!

Today I’m sharing Vlogmas Day 1. I decided I’m going to try to share one video or vlog on each Monday of this month. In this video, I talk about the new devotional I bought and how it’s helping me adjust my expectations for this Christmas season. I also share a story about how I had to apologize to my four year old and had to remind myself what the true reason for this season really is. Also throw in some cleaning and you’ve got my week last week. Hope you enjoy!