Some of my favorites...

I thought I'd join in today with Kelly's Korner Show Us Your Life, about my favorite blogs.

One that has been my most favorite recently is NieNie Dialogues.

Nie (aka Stephanie) has an amazing story. She has four beautiful children (and a fifth on the way!), a sweet husband and an experience that has changed their lives forever. But it turns out their life has been changed for the better. Her and her husband were in a plane crash three years ago. They both survived but Nie ended up with burns over 80% of her body. Her determination to make every day the best day and give glory to God for allowing her to continue to live, is inspiration at it's finest. I also love her blog because she has the best, eclectic taste, she's so quirky and I love the way she's so in love with her hubby!

Another blog I love to read is Katie's blog at It's in the Details.

Each week she will post about some of her favorite ideas she's seen in the blog world. Some of the things she finds are so cute and creative! Katie's become a great bloggy friend over the past year and she doesn't take herself too seriously and she cracks. me. up!

I randomly came across k's blog, Two Adults, One Brown Baby about a year ago.

She's also become a great bloggy friend and I look forward to her posts every day! She's hilarious, has adorable brown babies, and I feel like every mom (and non-mom) could relate to her everyday musings. I know that whenever we have a baby, I'll be hitting k up for some mommy advice because she just seems like the best mom to her two cuties.

Of course, the well-known Pioneer Woman (aka Ree - I like to pretend we're on a first-name basis) is a favorite of many, and a favorite of mine as well!

And I cannot leave out BooMama. If you need a good, hearty laugh, head on over there. You will not be disappointed!

And here are some of my other top favorites:
In This Wonderful Life
Tales of the Trees
Our Best Bites
Kaite's Keepers
These are the Days
Kelly's Korner
A Turtle's Life For Me

I love the connections you can make in this bloggy world, and the support you can get from other ladies out there. When I first started blogging I didn't even know that it could lead to these great things. And I'm pretty glad it has!

I hope you all have a safe and fun holiday weekend!

xoxo,

Show Us Your Life: Bathrooms

I thought I'd participate in Kelly's Show us Your Life home tour this week. This Friday they're touring bathrooms.

We have three bathrooms in our house, but none of them are all that exciting. I mean, how exciting can a bathroom really be? Ha!

This is the main bathroom (sorry the picture quality is horrible!). The theme in here is kind of beach-y/nautical with light brown and sea green towels. I really like these colors together!

I'm quite proud of this chalkboard sign I made. I describe how I made it in this post.

The sink.

Shower.

Here is the ceiling of this bathroom. The prior owners did some interesting painting designs in here. Kind of cool though.

Here is our master bath. It's not very big, and somehow we share this every morning. We kind of have a routine so it works out. I didn't do much in here except add the grey and black towels. There's kind of a lot going on with the tiles and crown molding, so I just let it be. I should probably find a picture or two to hang in here now that I'm really looking at it...

I will say that I feel very lucky that we have a nice house with granite counter tops in our master bathroom. However, this black granite is impossible to keep clean. With the makeup and hairspray I use every day, there is never a day that there's not a film covering this counter. Drives me nuts!

And this is our guest bathroom. Very boring. I ended up using the decor I had in the bathroom from our old place because I didn't feel like buying everything new. It works for now. With those bright blue tiles on the floor, I'm not sure which direction I'd go if I were to re-decorate this all over again.

And those are our bathrooms. Link up on Kelly's page if you'd like to share yours this week!

Show Us Your Life: China Pattern

I’m participating in Kelly’s Show Us Your Life blog hop this week. It’s about china patterns, or your favorite dishes. I’m not married yet, so I haven’t experienced the joy of registering for wedding gifts (which I think will be Kevin’s favorite part of the whole wedding experience), but I do already have a beautiful set of china, so that’s one less thing I’ll need to register for once we get married (darn! ;)).

My Grandma Ruth has had a set of antique china for a very long time, and she passed it on to me a couple years ago. I felt so honored that she thought to pass such a special thing on to me. I don’t know much about china, so as I’m describing my set, forgive me if I don’t use the correct terminology. Ha!

For now, I keep my set all wrapped, nice and safe in these protective dish containers.

We rent our house right now, and we also don’t have a dining room, but once we get our own house and a dining room to display my set, they will definitely be out in all their glory!

My china set includes a set of eight: dinner plates, saucers, dinner bowls, smaller bowls, teacups and a little container for cream (sorry, I can’t think of what the name of it is!). Luckily, I have a full set of everything; but if anything broke my mom already looked online and said there are replacements available out there, so that’s always good to know. She also told me that these dishes are “soft.” I don’t know too much about “soft” dishes, but to me that just means I should be extra careful with them!

I absolutely love this china set because it has one of my favorite colors in it (red) and it also has a bunch of additional colors like blue, green, pink and yellow, which will make it easy to pair up with a certain color theme for a dinner party, and the dishes won’t clash too much.

A close up

This is the floral design in the middle of one of the bowls. Each dish has a different, little floral design in the middle.

A little history about this china: as I mentioned, it is antique and comes from the year 1795. Pretty amazing! Each piece is also hand-painted (is all china hand-painted?? I told you I don’t know much about china!) and comes from England. How my Grandma Ruth was able to keep a full set of antique china, with five boys and my mom in her house, and moving multiple times across the country, is beyond me! But I’m glad she did because now I can enjoy it!

I don’t think I’ll miss out too much by not picking out my china when we get married because I feel like the set I have is much more special and meaningful than anything I’d find in a store. :)