Goodbye, Blog World

This fall would be the 5 year anniversary of my blog. I love looking back and reading my old blog posts from the beginning. When my life as a newlywed revolved around work drama, where we were going for happy hour on Friday night, what time were heading to Tallahassee on Saturday to set up our tailgate for the FSU game, sleeping in on the weekends and tanning on my back porch with a beer and a trashy novel in hand. Oh how times have changed, and my times changed right here before your eyes on my blog. It's entertaining to read about what I once considered "fun", and to think about what I now consider "fun" these days.

I'm so grateful to have had my blog here to help me through the difficult times, when writing down what I was feeling was the only way for me to cope. This blog has seen me struggle through the experience of teaching in a Title I school, battling infertility, loosing my dad, leaving my job to put myself first and braving the IVF process. It has also seen my triumph through the amazing friends and family in our lives, our travels, our reconnection with church, a National Championship for my Seminoles, my pregnancy and the birth of our baby girl. In good times and bad, when all I needed was for someone to listen and not saying anything back, my blog filled that place for me. It's amazing what kind of emotional relief can come from simply typing on a keyboard.

However, 5 years and 744 posts later, I've decided that my blogging time has come to an end. The reason, I can't dedicate myself to my blog the way that I used to. If I'm going to take on a project, I want to do it full out 100% to the best of my ability, or not at all. These past few months, I've barely been able to keep up with doing a half-ass job with my blog. So I'm going to say goodbye to the blog world for now. I will continue to write privately on my own, in my own journal and in a scrapbook/baby book for Peyton. Maybe one day, when the time is right, I will return to blogging. But for now, I want to say thank you so much to everyone who has read my posts of these past 5 years. Thank you for allowing me to share my life, my stories and my obnoxiously large quantities of photos with you.

In true Wine Down fashion, I will leave you with some adorable photos of Peyton as I sign off from the blog world for good. Thank you.

Peyton's One Year Photos by Ariel Rose Photography

Valentines from Miss P

Peyton was hard at work spreading her Valentine's cheer last weekend! I wanted to send some special valentines to our family and out of town friends who don't get to see Peyton very often, and as usual Pinterest and the Walgreen's photo department got the best of me. I got a little ambitious this year, which resulted in some Pinterest worthy successes and some equally as worthy fails.

Pinterest success #1...Valentine's photo card. Pinterest success #2...DIY Heart Garland that I used for the backdrop (DIY blog post here!).

If I had unlimited funds, I would send out photo cards to every person I know for every holiday. After being so pleased with how my Valentine's photos of Peyton turned out, I just had to do something with them. Alas, these adorable photo cards which I managed to send out last minute to some of our out of town friends and family.

And now on to my Pinterest fail...footprint Valentine's craft. Red paint and a wiggly 8 month old, this was clearly a recipe for disaster.

I had some pretty grand ambitions for this craft. I was going to make one for myself, as well as all of Peyton's grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncle, and maybe even a few special friends too. However, twelve pieces of cardstock and a big ole' mess of red paint later, I managed to only get 3 of these which were fairly decent enough and didn't look like a slaughtered my child on craft paper. Goodbye grand plans for spreading the love this Valentine's Day. I was defeated, thanks a lot Pinterest. So I packed up my art supplies and my dignity, and sent one to my mom, one to Jared's mom, kept one for myself, and called it a day. While I'm ready to swear off art projects with 8 month olds for good, this craft still came out pretty cute and Peyton's grandmas really did love it.

At least Peyton, and her red feet, had fun attempting this endeavor. I feel like Pinterest is every mom's worst nightmare. It's full of adorable ideas that look so fun and easy, but are always a thousand times more expensive, messy, frustrating and involved than they let on, and nearly impossible to execute. Welcome to my love/hate relationship with Pinterest. 

Valentine's Day with Daddy...as you can see, it's February and football season never ends around here. Daddy in his Bobby Bowden shirt and Peyton practicing her best Heisman pose. 

We hope your family had a wonderful Valentine's Day!

DIY Heart Garland

I decided that I wanted to take some special photos of Peyton for Valentine's Day this year. Rather than just sitting her in her regular chair or outside, I wanted to get a little creative and make my own backdrop. I saw a lot of cute ideas on Pinterest, so I found one that I already had all of the materials for at home and just went for it. I am pleasantly surprised at how well this came out! Plus, it was fun and easy to make. Here is a little DIY on how to make your own heart garland...

Even Peyton enjoyed my little props for her photo shoot!

Step One: Cut out heart shapes using a craft punch and cardstock paper. 

Step Two: Attach heart shapes to some type of string that matches your backdrop. I wanted to create the illusion that the hearts were floating in the background. I used white thread since I was using a white table cloth as my backdrop. You could also use fishing line. I used scrapbook mounting squares to stick the hearts to the string, but you could just use regular tape as well. I used two hearts on top of each other and ran the thread in between them because I didn't want the thread to be visible and since the hearts would be hanging, I knew they would spin around so hiding the thread on the back of the hearts wasn't an option. 

Figure out how many strands you need and how long you want your garland to be. It depends on what you are using it for. I made 6 strands with 7 hearts on each strand. Measure out the string in your desired location ahead of time so that you know how many hearts you will need. You can use all one color of paper or different colors. I used all red, but I wanted a little subtle variety so I used 7 different shades of red paper.

Step Three: Hang the strands in your desired location and then enjoy your adorable garland!

Here is the set for Peyton's little photo shoot! I didn't want my strands to lay flat again my backdrop, so I tied a string between two chairs to suspend them in the air and then tied my strands onto that so that that they appeared to be floating behind her. 

This garland was the perfect accent to some adorable photos for Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day

Peyton wants to wish everyone a very Happy Valentine's Day today! I wanted to take some cute photos of Peyton for the holiday, and of course I got a little carried away. The mamarazzi strikes again. I created my own backdrop using a while table cloth and heart paper garland (DIY blog post here!) that I made myself. I am so excited about how these photos came out. I think Valentine's Day is finally starting to grow on me after all!

I ordered a few prints of these photos to send to our families, and when I went to pick up my prints they informed me that I needed to sign a copyright release form. I was obviously confused by this. They informed me that the photos appeared to be professional so they would need a copyright release in order to give me my prints. I was shocked. I told them that these definitely were not professional photos, that I took them myself on my own camera. So they complimented me on my pictures and said that I had to sign the release as the photographer. I felt pretty special and very flattered. Well, that sure made my day. Can I please make a living off of taking pictures of my own child? 

So please enjoy this overwhelming, unnecessary number of photos of my child to celebrate Valentine's Day this year...

 Peyton's 1st Valentine's Day!

I used to be a Valentine's Day hater, but now that I have this little munchkin, I think I can get on board with this holiday if she is going to make it this adorable.

 I love how you can see her two little teeth in this photo!

I can hardly believe that I actually let her play with (and destroy) my decorations that I worked so hard to create. I pretty surprised with myself. I guess I'm officially a mom now.

Happy Valentine's Day from Peyton!

Christmas Cards

Holiday cards are by far my absolute favorite tradition of the season. Obviously, any tradition that revolves around taking pictures is number one in my book. Unfortunately, my husband does not share this same love for taking holiday photos, but he tolerates my photo shoots and puts on a good face just for me because he knows how important this is to me.

This year was no exception. I tried to talk Jared into letting me have professional photos done, but the financial adviser in him quickly vetoed that idea. Granted, we've already done two professional photo shoots this year (maternity and newborn) so I can't blame him for not being on board to pay our photographer for a third time. Don't worry, I've already made it clear that we will be doing professional 1 year photos of Peyton in June so that's a done deal.

Anyways, I decided to not make a huge deal about these Christmas card photos and just had my brother snap a quick family photo in my mom's backyard when we were at her house for Thanksgiving. Jared was obviously thrilled. If he thought that taking a holiday photo was a pain in the ass before, now we have a baby...which means extra stress for me (getting Peyton dressed, in a good mood and willing to cooperate) and an extra long photo shoot because you have to take twice as many photos (since babies never want to look at the camera or smile when you really need them too). Apparently, I was just double lucky on this particular day because Peyton simply did not want to look at the camera or smile the entire time. Every other day of her life I can get her to make the cutest faces, but not today of course. Oh well, she's adorable no matter what so I just had to let it go.

We got a couple of cute shots for our Christmas card and called it a day. I take so many photos of Peyton on my own every day that I'm not worried about lacking in that department :)

Peyton says, "Mommy this is what you get for taking so many darn pictures of me all the time. I will not smile for your Christmas card photo. Ha". Touche Peyton, touche.

I wanted to come up with a creative way to display the holiday cards we received in our new house. I didn't want to have to take something down or hang up something extra on the wall, altering our normal home decor. Therefore, I decided that I would use one of the doors in the house as my canvas. In the entry way of our house, at the bottom of the stairs, is a door that goes out to the extra single-car garage. It is centrally located and you see it right when you walk in the front door. Plus, it's an 8 foot door so that leaves plenty of space for me to work with. I bought some red twine and mini clothes-pins from Hobby Lobby. I made the "Happy Holidays" banner myself out of scrapbook paper and I spray painted the clothes-pins gold. Then I wrapped the door in twine and hung all the cards with the clothes-pins. Voila!

Here is our fun holiday card display! It came out just the way I pictured it in my mind and people enjoy looking at it when they come over to visit. I love walking by it everyday and looking at our pretty friends :)

Happy Holidays from The Roche Family!