Pictures & Pawprints: Wrapping Up 2014

2014 has been my busiest and most life-changing year ever. Becoming a mom for the first time has been exciting, happy, scary, stressful, and wonderful all at the same time. Fortunately, Brendan is a great baby. He's healthy, happy, sleeps well and eats well. He's growing like a weed, and already starting to fit into 9 month clothes! He definitely inherited his daddy's genes.

I've had to put a few things on hold as I adapt to motherhood and get Brendan on a decent schedule. One of those things has been working on this blog. I love coming on here and sharing pictures, stories, projects, and recipes. I'm still thrilled at the amount of hits it gets, mostly from past projects that get repinned on Pinterest. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to make an effort to get back on here - even if it's once a week. It's a good outlet for me and I need to keep it up!

That being said, here are some pics from the last few months, and we get ready to wrap up 2014. I love the monthly pics I've been doing of Brendan since I'm able to record his stats and remember things that he was really into at each age. Plus, it's fun to see how much he changes month to month!

This was Brendan's Halloween costume - a 1930s circus strong man. How cute is that?! The mustache was part o a 6 pack of stick on fuzzy staches I found at Target in the Halloween aisle. The onesie was one he already had with an anchor on the front that I cut the sleeves off of and turned inside out. For the dumbbell, I bought a wooden rod at the craft store and had Mike saw it down to size. I glued on two styrofoam balls and painted the whole thing black. I cut out the "100" numbers and glued them on. As for the belt, I printed out that letter "G" and then traced it on to glittery foam paper. I glued that on to a thick piece of black ribbon, added a piece of velcro to fasten the belt together, and that's it!

Shameless plug...his pic also made it on to the Today Show's website last month to promote "Movember." It was awesome :)

These are Brendan's Christmas pictures and I am simply SMITTEN with them! I did these in my living room, and I wish I had taken a pic of what the setup looked like. I took a white tri-fold board (like the kind we used to use for science fair porjects. Though I guess they still use them for that since they still sell them...), and draped white Christmas lights over it. I took the shaggy area rug from Brendan's room and draped a nice white blanket over it, so it would be nice and cushiony for him. I set him up a few feet in front of the board, instead of directly in front, so I could get that nice blurred light background. I put a few more lights in front of him and scattered some candy canes around for fun. I love the way these came out, and love that Penny was included too :)