After what has mysteriously managed to be both the longest and shortest year of my life, my baby boy turned one year old this week. I’m still not quite sure I can believe it! But we’ve been so busy with all the festivities, maybe it just hasn’t had a chance to sink in yet. Here’s how we celebrated…

First, we had a little photo shoot to commemorate his sweetness at this age:

He’s just too, too much! Then on the morning of his birthday, we surprised him with a crib full of balloons:

He loved it!

We had a quiet little celebration that evening with pizza and presents:

Even the rocking sheep got in on the fun:

Then we had to get ready for Quinn’s big “first birthday fiesta” on Saturday.

(Trying to get a good photo of Quinn in that sombrero for the invitation was no easy task, as these outtakes demonstrate. He could whip that hat off in less than a second!)

Anyway, the party was just a small one for our family, but I (predictably) went a bit overboard. Lots of crafting and lots of stockpiling Cinco de Mayo party supplies, but I was really happy with the way it turned out.

We had a fun taco bar. Ben made all the spectacular food, and I made the cake and cupcakes.

The party was primarily in the back yard, and it was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon.

And the margaritas were flowing!

The birthday dude had a pretty good time too.

His grandma, cousin, and aunt helped him open presents.

But Quinn wasn’t at all sure about the cake. What really sent him over the edge, though, was about a dozen people all standing around him and singing “Happy Birthday” at him:

He just couldn’t take it! Poor buddy. I did manage to get him to eat some cake a little later though and he liked it just fine.

Oh, my little man. I love him so much! I just can’t believe he’s a year old. But here he is, month by month:

Now I’m off to cuddle this little dude before he suddenly turns two!

In those six days, my dad absolutely transformed our back yard. He raked a bazillion leaves. He trimmed trees. He pruned bushes. He weeded and cut back overgrowth. He hung lights. He planted and potted. He fertilized and watered. He laid a flagstone patio entirely by himself, for Pete’s sake. And now it doesn’t even look like the same back yard. It’s amazing. I want to hang out back there all the time.

And while my dad was doing all that work, my mom was being the world’s best grandma. She entertained Quinn constantly, watched him so I could get stuff done, cleaned my house, took us shopping, helped me plan Q’s birthday party, and just generally took the best care of us.

I have the best parents in the world and I’m really going to miss them.

Here are a few shots of the back yard I took on my iPhone yesterday evening. There’s still an appalling lack of grass, but we’re working on that. Everything else back there makes me so, so happy.

Thanks for everything, Mom and Dad!

Happy Valentine’s Day, from my little love bug!

I had intended to write a post last week about some of the Valentine crafts I made this year, but I’ve been under the weather and couldn’t pull it together. So instead, I’ll just share some photos!

I hope you’re all feeling the love today from those you love the most!

Through that relatively unassuming front door is one of the most amazing living rooms I’ve ever set foot in:

Am I right?? Those windows are to die for! And here’s a better shot of that gorgeous pendant light:

This is the kitchen, which is open to the living room:

And the dining room, right off the kitchen:

The dining and living rooms are separated only by this beautiful see-through gas fireplace:

I want it all! Including the glass paneled staircase:

Here’s the money shot—the view of the living room from the second floor:

Those windows! I just can’t get over them. Too, too perfect.

Here are a couple bonus shots of my little dude enjoying the space:

And hanging out there with his grandparents (my parents):

We had a great trip to Iowa, and one of the highlights was definitely seeing Neal’s and Stacy’s beautiful home. Sleek, minimalist, modern style that’s still comfortable—that’s a tough combination to achieve. Good thing they have a well-equipped guest room so I can come visit often!

The weather has been unbelievably gorgeous here in North Texas over the past week or so—I’m talking sunny and eighty degrees. We wanted to get out and enjoy it last Saturday, so Ben took Quinn and me to Weatherford’s “First Monday” Trade Days. It’s a monthly outdoor flea market where you can buy used books, old glassware, broken electronics, beat-up furniture, random “antique” trinkets, farm tools, flags, homemade jewelry—your standard flea market fare. I was not in a mood to do the serious digging it would require to unearth a treasure at this particular market; I was happy just getting out for a walk, pushing Quinn in the stroller, enjoying the sunshine, chatting with Ben and sharing a raspberry lemonade. Until I spied the stall full of succulents—my little loves! This little guy looked just like one I had about a year ago, until one of our cats killed it—anyone know its name?

I tried to approach the vendor nonchalantly. “How much for these, ma’am?… Just three dollars?? I’ll take one!”

So I happily brought the little guy home and dug out an old pot from Ikea that was just sitting in a closet gathering dust. I thought the pot needed a little brightening up, so I decided to color-block it with some fluorescent pink spray paint I already had. Getting a straight paint line on a pot with sloped sides was a little tricky, so if you want to try this at home, here’s what I suggest:

1. Measure two inches up from the bottom of the pot and place little pencil marks every few inches or so around the pot.
2. Draw a light line in pencil connecting all the pencil marks. I used a cloth tape measure as a sort of “straight edge” to guide my lines.
3. Tear off short pieces of painter’s tape (each about an inch long) and place them above your pencil line, being careful to very precisely line up the bottom edge of the tape with the top of your pencil line. Repeat until you’ve taped around the entire pot.
4. Cover the remainder of the top of the pot, including the top edge, with painter’s tape.
5. Put down some old cardboard or newspaper on your garage floor, place the pot upside down on the paper, and spray paint away!

As an alternative to spray paint, you could pour some acrylic or latex paint into a bowl or bucket and then dip the bottom of the pot into the paint. Either way, after just about an hour’s drying time, you’ll have a fun, colorful, revitalized pot on your hands. Do with it what you will.

I put my pretty new succulent in mine, so for a grand total of three dollars, I now have this happy little addition to my dining room table, brightening my days:

Let’s just hope I can keep the plant alive this time!

“iPhoneography”—iPhone photography—is a real thing, people. Photographers are shooting weddings solely with iPhones. The Houston Center for Photography is offering an iPhoneography course. There are about a dozen published books on the subject. And while I hate the term itself, I am now firmly on board with the iPhoneography movement. Why? Because when I’m hanging out with Quinn and I see him doing something cute (which, to be honest, is pretty much all of the time), I don’t have time to run and get my DSLR—instead I grab my iPhone, which is almost always nearby. And the iPhone—because it is so small and close to hand—is the perfect tool for achieving my goal in those situations: capturing the moment and preserving that memory. As they say, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

And while an iPhone photo will probably never compete with a DSLR photo in terms of technical quality, I think the gap between the two is narrowing significantly. With the iPhone camera’s technical abilities improving with each new generation of the phone and the quality of post-processing apps likewise getting better, I now consider my iPhone to be a viable alternative to my DSLR in almost every situation. In fact, I took one of my favorite photos of Quinn and Ben on my iPhone and I had it blown up and printed at 16×20—and it looks great on the wall!

So in the interest of encouraging everyone to embrace iPhoneography (while shuddering at the term, of course), today I thought I’d share a few tips that will help you take better photos with your iPhone. I should preface them by saying that I always shoot with the iPhone’s standard “Camera” app—the one that comes pre-installed on the phone…

1. Turn off the flash. Never, ever shoot with the iPhone flash. Trust me, there is no shot that will be improved by a head-on, uncontrolled blast of light. The “auto” setting is even more pernicious than “on,” because then the iPhone surprises you with a blinding strobe whenever it feels like it, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. So the best thing to do is to turn that flash off. Forever. You do that by clicking on the lightning bolt button in the top left corner of your viewfinder and choosing “off.”

2. Clean your lens. Maybe it’s just because Quinn likes to chew on my iPhone, but for some reason there always seem to be fingerprints on my camera lens. So this probably seems obvious, but if you can remember to buff your camera lens (you know the one, on the back side of your phone) every once in awhile—I just use my shirt sleeve—your images will turn out sharper. And sharper = better!

3. Get creative with composition. Taking a moment to think about composition—how you are composing the shot—is one of the best ways to improve all of your photography, not just your iPhone photos. If you’re taking a portrait, does your subject fill the frame nicely, or are you cutting her off at the waist while simultaneously leaving a bunch of uninteresting dead space above her head? Or worse, does a tree appear to be growing out of her skull? Then get closer to your subject and recompose your shot. If you’re taking a photo of someone across the table at a restaurant, are there a bunch of water or wine glasses cluttering up the bottom of the frame? Then move your camera in closer or take a moment to move the glasses. There are treatises out there on photography composition (the “rule of thirds” and all that), but two basic principles that will improve your photography immediately are (1) get in closer to your subject, and (2) cut out visual clutter.

Once you have these basic principles down, the iPhone really allows you to get creative with composition. Why? Because it’s so small and light! It can squeeze into places and shoot at angles that would never be possible with a bulky DSLR. Hold it up as high as you can and shoot straight down on your subject for a bird’s eye view. Hold the iPhone down near the ground and shoot a portrait at an upward angle to make the subject look seriously imposing. Hold your iPhone out a car window or stick it through a fence for some really daring shots—just be sure to hold on tight! Notice how dramatically the composition of a photo can be changed just by tilting the top of your iPhone towards or away from your subject, or by moving the phone from eye-level down to waist-level. If you are thoughtful about composition and willing to experiment with your iPhone, you’ll get some really great results.

4. Expose purposefully. Exposure is another technical term that refers to the amount of light your camera allows in, which controls how light or dark your photo appears. Again, there are countless resources out there dealing with the nuances of exposure, but here’s what you need to know when shooting with your iPhone: Your iPhone camera (like any camera not set on “manual” mode) will automatically decide how to expose your photo based on the amount of light in the frame. If you’re taking a photo outdoors on a bright, sunny day, for example, your iPhone will automatically adjust the camera settings so that your subject is properly exposed and not “blown out.” At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re taking a photo in a dimly lit room, your iPhone camera will adjust its settings so that your subject is properly exposed and not just a black blob.

Most of the time you’ll probably be shooting where the light in your frame is pretty evenly distributed and your iPhone will make these exposure determinations without you ever having to think about them. But in a difficult exposure situation, when there are both very light and very dark areas in your frame—your subject is in front of a window, for example—then you may have to help your iPhone camera decide whether it needs to let in more light or less light. If you want the subject of your photo to appear brighter than what you see in your viewfinder, just tap the screen on an area that’s dark. Conversely, if you want the subject of your photo to be darker, then tap on a bright area of the screen. What you’re doing is telling the iPhone which part of the photo you’d like the camera to expose for. So now you have some exposure control over your images!

5. Stop camera-shake. We all know that to take a photo with your iPhone, you press the button that looks like a camera—the shutter button. But when you tap that button, you inevitably cause the phone to move a bit—maybe just a little, maybe a lot. In a good lighting situation, you might never notice the effects of that movement. But in a low light situation, or when your subject is already moving, any “camera-shake” at all can cause your photo to turn out blurry. But here’s a fun little fact about your iPhone camera that you can use to reduce camera-shake and get tack-sharp images: your iPhone camera snaps the photo not at the moment that you press the shutter button, but rather when you release it. So press and hold the shutter button for a second or two, compose your shot, and then when you’re ready to take the photo, just lift your finger! There’ll be a whole lot less shaking going on, I promise.

6. Take multiple shots. This is another tip that applies not just to iPhone photography, but all photography, and I’d say it’s probably the number one tip for getting great shots of kids. Don’t just snap one photo and call it quits—take several! And shoot them in quick succession. Facial expressions, especially children’s, change extraordinarily quickly and you don’t want to miss that heart-melting smile if it only appears for a moment. So always take a burst of photos. It doesn’t cost anything (that’s the beauty of digital photography) and you can always delete the duplicate or “bad” shots later. But when you have multiple shots to choose from, you’re more likely to have captured the truly great moment, and that’s what matters most—even more so than all the technical stuff. So shoot a bunch and pretty soon people will be wondering how you always manage to capture the perfect moment!

BONUS TIP: Look at good iPhone photography daily. This tip won’t turn you into an artiste overnight, but if you’re serious about wanting to take better iPhone photos, you should spend just a little bit of time every day looking at iPhone photography that you like—whose subjects or composition or lighting or post-processing or whatever appeals to you. You’ll then begin to emulate those qualities in your own photos—consciously or subconsciously—and your work will slowly improve. When I was just starting out with my DSLR, for example, I spent hours every day on Flickr, looking at others’ work. It not only gave me ideas for subjects to shoot, lighting situations to try, and post-processing techniques to apply, but it also helped me gravitate toward a particular style of photography that I eventually made my own. Flickr is still a great photo-sharing website, but the hands-down number one place to see today’s best iPhoneography (and share your own iPhone photos online) is Instagram. It’s a free app, so there’s nothing to stop you from joining, if you haven’t already. And to get you started down the wormhole of stellar iPhoneography out there, you may want to follow @theartofbasic, @cannellevanille, @arielealasko, @designmomblog, @nikyboomsnap, @stephmodo, @fawnandforest, @tarawhitney, and @sfgirlbybay—a few people whose Instagram feeds I find to be a constant source of inspiration. You can also follow me, @emilymccall, if you like!

I hope these tips inspire you to stop relegating your iPhone camera to second-class status and start treating it like a real, honest-to-goodness camera that is capable of taking great photographs. In a future post I’ll cover some of my favorite iPhone photo post-processing apps and settings, plus some cool things you can do with your pretty-fied iPhone photos to get them off of your phone and into your hot little hands. So if you have a specific question about post-processing iPhone photos that you’d like me to answer, let me know in the comments. Now get out there and shoot!

I’ll spare you the long, tortured story of how we wound up in our “new” house—mostly because I can’t bear to relive it myself. (I say “new” because we’ve been living here for almost six months already—seriously, where does the time go??) Suffice it to say that, after looking at dozens and dozens of homes, this was the third house we made an offer on and even this sale almost fell through at the very last minute. Add to that some pretty unreasonable sellers, a very hormonal new mom (me!), and a colicky not-yet-three-month-old and you can perhaps imagine the many, many stress-induced tears that I shed.

But all’s well that ends well, as they say, and we’re really quite happy in our new home. It’s a one-story ranch with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a couple hundred more square feet than our last home. It was built in the mid-1990s and looks pretty much like the rest of the houses in our subdivision, which is exactly the kind of place that I swore I never wanted to live in, but it definitely has its perks—namely, larger closets! And moving when we did gave us the perfect opportunity to purge some of the unnecessary things we’d accumulated over the past five years and redesign our home with Quinn foremost in our minds. Gone are the porcelain knick-knacks, the sharp-cornered wood coffee table, and the neutral color scheme. Instead we’ve embraced bright colors, used toys as decorations, and left lots of open space to play. It’s certainly a different aesthetic, but it’s been a fun challenge to decorate in a whole new way. And I have to admit, the new modern look is really growing on me!

Today I’d like to give you a quick tour of the new home, showing you what it looked like before we moved in (with the prior owners’ stuff in it) and what it looks like today. Let me preface this by saying that our house is very much still a work in progress. Time and money are in short supply these days with a baby at home and me not working, so we’re moving at a snail’s pace through our lengthy to-do list. I typically hate showing photos of rooms that aren’t completely finished, but I’d like to document our home’s transformation process here on this blog—and to do that I have to show you were we started from, so here goes nothing!

First, the exterior. As you can see, we’ve already done a bit of landscaping, pruned the tree and overgrown bushes that were blocking the view of the house, painted the front door, and added some fun house numbers (which deserve their own post in the future):

This is the living room, right inside the front door:

The first order of business when we moved in was to paint all the walls white and replace the über-traditional light fixtures and window treatments with something more modern.

Now I’m working on art for that big white wall!

Here is the family room, which is part of one big space shared with the kitchen and dining room. It’s where we spend most of our time (as you could probably guess from all the toys):

The dining room, also in need of some art:

This is the kitchen (which I am dying to renovate):

And here is our master bedroom, which we haven’t gotten around to painting yet. It will be white like the rest of the house—very soon, I hope!

The master bathroom—again, in need of painting (and a great deal of other work!):

Quinn’s room:

The guest room, which also needs the white paint treatment:

Our office:

And finally, the kids’/guest bathroom:

So that’s it! We’ve already finished a few projects that I’ll be sharing the details of here in the future, and we’ve got many, many more up our sleeves. I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

I was going through some of last year’s photos and just had to share a couple shots of Quinn’s first Halloween costume. With that bald head, Charlie Brown wasn’t much of a stretch! I just threw some fabric paint on a yellow onesie, got him a little Snoopy sidekick, and voilà! Cutest little Charlie Brown ever.

Ben and I bought our first home in March of 2008. We were in a bad rental situation at the time—our landlord had stopped paying the mortgage on the house we were renting and foreclosure notices were being delivered every week. It was incredibly stressful and I wanted out. I was determined never to rely on someone else to pay our mortgage again, so we decided we’d start looking at houses to buy and, if we could find one, break our lease.

On a Sunday, I drove Ben to the neighborhood I had set my sights on: Kessler Park in North Oak Cliff. It’s a beautiful neighborhood full of historic homes, old trees, and just about the only hills you’ll find in the area, all just minutes from downtown Dallas. We walked through two or three open houses—our first ever—to get an idea of what these older homes were like. Neither Ben nor I grew up in an old house, and we were renting a new build at the time, so at first we were a little underwhelmed by the tiny closets, the creaky wood floors, the compact floor plans. But we quickly realized that these were just standard old-house quirks that came with the territory when you were shopping for eighty-year-old homes. But one of the open houses we walked through—a small brick Tudor with only one bathroom—didn’t display its age so obviously. It was clean and bright and on a very nice street, and for some reason the fresh pink tulips on the island in the kitchen made an impression on me.

On Monday, I called a realtor who a couple of my co-workers recommended: Dori Warner (who is awesome and who you should definitely hire). She said she had three homes to show us that afternoon, if we were available. We were. She took us first to an adorable old home with amazing period detail, but that really had only one bedroom and one bathroom, which was just too small for us. She then took us to a three bedroom/two bathroom home that had more space, but that felt older and more run down. Finally, she took us back to that one-bathroom brick Tudor that we had walked through the day before. By then we had seen a grand total of something like a half dozen homes(!), but I was beginning to sense that this house was more special than the rest. It just felt good. After walking through it again, Dori and Ben and I sat down on the couch in the living room and I said that the house was growing on me—that, in fact, I really liked it. Dori was glad, but said she had to warn us that someone else was making an offer on the house that evening. So no pressure, but if we were serious about the house, we would need to make an offer right away.

Ben and I drove home and talked about it long into the night. I was becoming more and more sure that this was the house for us, but what would people say? Heavens, what would my parents say? In typical impetuous-Emily fashion, was I going to buy a house after looking for just one day? And almost the first one we saw?? It sounded crazy. It probably was crazy. But we wanted out of our rental situation and we really liked that house. And I believe the old adage that you regret only those things you don’t do…so we decided to go for it.

On Tuesday morning, I called Dori and told her we wanted to make an offer on the house. We were so determined to get what we were convinced was the perfect house for us that we offered $10,000 more than the asking price—I didn’t want to have any regrets. Later that evening, as Ben and I were driving to dinner, Dori called. I can still remember the feeling of butterflies in my stomach as I answered the phone and she told us that the homeowners had accepted our offer. We were officially under contract.

So just to recap: we began looking at houses on Sunday. On Tuesday, we were under contract. It was definitely crazy, but Ben and I never regretted it. Not for a minute. We loved that house. I mean, loved it. Everything about it. Even the outdated kitchen and one tiny bathroom, because we were going to make them better. And when we outgrew the existing space one day, we were going to expand into the attic and turn it into a dream master suite. Because we were never going to leave that house. We said over and over again that we were never going to move.

Four years passed. We became more and more attached to the house as we invested time, money, and our own sweat into dozens of different projects. Painting. Landscaping. Decorating. I became obsessed with interior design. My favorite thing to do on the weekends was to rearrange furniture and knick-knacks. The house just made me happy. It was my favorite “thing.” So when I got pregnant, we decided that would be the perfect time to finally undertake that big kitchen remodel we had been dreaming about. We wanted to turn it into a special place to make memories with our kids. So we lived through a grueling eight-week renovation and wound up with our perfect kitchen. And I put together the perfect nursery for our baby boy. The house had never looked better and we had never been happier there. We were definitely going to stay there forever.

But then I had our baby. And Ben says that my tune changed dramatically about four hours after Quinn was born. Shouldn’t we live closer to his grandparents and aunts and uncles? Wouldn’t he be happier growing up with his cousins? And how would I ever leave that sweet little baby to go back to work? But how would we be able to afford the mortgage if I didn’t? We began to think that moving sixty miles west to Weatherford, the small town where Ben grew up and most of his family still lives, might actually be the best thing for our little family. It was going to be tremendously difficult to say goodbye to our home, but a house is just a house after all, right??

In June of 2012, when Quinn was about a month old, we were still ambivalent about a potential move, but decided to call Dori again and explore the possibility of selling our beloved little home. Dori met with us on a Tuesday afternoon and told us that if we thought we wanted to sell, the time was now. She went home, did her homework, and came back Friday afternoon with comps and a recommended listing price and marketing strategy. She thought that there was a perfect opening in the market right then because the other comparable homes at our price point had all been sitting on the market for awhile without selling, so we would be fresh and well-positioned. Dori wanted to take advantage of the situation and put our house on the market the following week, as soon as we could manage to get the house cleaned and staged for showing, and she planned to hold open houses over the next two weekends. We were a bit dazed by the speed at which things were moving, but we agreed and promised to work all weekend to get the house into shape by the middle of the following week. But just a few hours later, Dori called us back and said there was someone who’d like to take a look at our house on Monday, if that was okay. Sure. Somehow we’d get the house ready by Monday. And just like that, all of a sudden, it was happening. We were really going to put our house on the market.

We spent that entire weekend—dawn till dusk and late into the night—scrubbing baseboards, mopping floors, detailing grout, touching up paint, clearing clutter, rearranging furniture, washing windows, tidying the landscaping…all the things you’re supposed to do when you get ready to sell your home, but I took them to the extreme. I felt like this was my big chance to show the world how wonderful this little house was, that this was when all the love we had poured into it over the past four years was going to pay off. I wanted it to look better than it ever had before. So stopping only to nurse Quinn, I worked my fingers to the bone to get the house ready to be seen by potential buyers on Monday. But on Saturday, Dori called again to say that someone else wanted to take a look at the house on Sunday, if we were okay with that. “But the house won’t be ready!” I told Dori. “I know,” she said, “they understand that but they still want to see it.” Well, I sure wasn’t going to let anyone see the house before it looked perfect, so we called in help and by some miracle, managed to get the house looking pretty close to perfect by mid-afternoon on Sunday. It was Father’s Day, Ben’s first. We were dirty and sweaty and exhausted, and were just putting a six-week-old Quinn in his car seat when the potential buyers knocked on the door. They were a young, nice-looking couple, maybe a few years older than us. We shook their hands, got in the car, and drove to a nearby park to wait.

Dori called us a a short time later to say that we could go back home and to casually drop the bombshell that the couple wanted to make an offer on the house. I felt a lot of things in that moment: happy, proud, and maybe a little smug— “of course they want to buy my beautiful home,” I thought, “who wouldn’t?”—but also sad that this sale was becoming real and—once again—shocked at how fast it was happening. The couple sent over their offer later that evening for the full expected list price. The next day, Monday, we honored the other showing that Dori had already scheduled, but the young couple then increased their initial offer a bit and we accepted it that evening.

So just to recap: we met with Dori on Tuesday to talk about the mere possibility of selling our home, and by the following Tuesday—just one week later—our house was under contract. It sold before it even went to market. (I told you, seriously, hire Dori.)

Thus begins and ends the story of my crazy love affair with our first home. I was a bit disappointed that we never got to have an open house, that no listing photos were ever published—in short, that I never got to show off our home at its best. But with it looking that good, you better believe I took my own photos—just a little something to remember it by. So had our sweet house ever made it to market, here is what you might have seen:

Random tip from Dori: when you take listing photos and when you show your home, every single light and lamp in your house should be on. It makes it look more lived-in and inviting. (And it also saves potential buyers from fumbling around trying to find light switches.)

Aaah, sweet house, I do miss you. This photo was taken right before Quinn and I left for good:

It was hard to let go—and I will admit to driving past the house a few times since then to see what the new owners have done to the place—but I think I can now finally let it rest. Onward and upward, right? Because there is plenty of work to be done at the new house. More on that to come…

Better late than never, right?? Despite all my good blogging intentions, the holiday season got the better of me. Quinn’s first Christmas seemed to fly by faster than any other I can remember, but maybe that was just me struggling to fit in all of the usual gift buying, tree decorating, cookie baking, holiday movie watching, carol singing, and gift wrapping while taking care of a seven-month old. It seems like it takes me eons longer than normal to accomplish anything since Quinn was born, but boy, was Christmas morning with my baby special! I can’t wait to do it all again next year. And just to prove that I truly didn’t fall off the face of the earth, here are some of the highlights of our holiday season.

First, some outtakes from the holiday card photo shoot. Too much cuteness!

Quinn picked out his first Christmas tree while sporting an adorable Santa on his butt:

We decorated the tree and the house, which was a bit of a challenge because I had to find places for all our existing decorations—plus that awesome new reindeer head!—in our new home.

Quinn got to sit on Santa’s lap, and he loved it! We were expecting lots of tears, but as usual, he surprised us.

I wrapped many, many gifts. I picked out pretty matching wrapping paper and painstakingly decorated all the packages with baker’s twine, washi tape, and even handmade yarn pom-poms—only to discover that Quinn would probably have been happier with cheaper paper that would have torn more easily and those regular old stick-on bows that he loved ripping off the packages so much. Oh well, lesson learned!

On Christmas morning, Quinn was overjoyed to see that Santa had not passed him by! The moustache pacifier was in his stocking; we still can’t stop laughing at it.

He had a blast playing with his new toys:

But Christmas Day still had one surprise in store for all of us: SNOW! Big ol’ wet snowflakes that stuck to everything immediately. It was Quinn’s first snow and he thought it was awesome, until we rubbed his hand in a pile of it. He wasn’t so sure about the cold…

We had a pretty low-key New Year (I mean, I spent New Year’s Eve organizing our pantry and spices—wild times!), but Quinn managed to say goodbye to 2012 and welcome 2013 with a bit of fanfare:

And then he promptly took to his bed for a long winter’s nap. I think he’s finally recovering from his first holiday season!

Last year, 2012, was an incredible one for me. Here were some of the highlights:

A kitchen renovation, pregnancy, Quinn’s arrival, the move to a new town, a trip to Cozumel, a first Christmas and first snow on the very same day, and lots more good times with my two favorite dudes. It was a magical year—and I can’t believe the year my baby was born is already over! But I hope 2013 will be just as good to us, and that it has great things in store for you and yours as well. Happy (belated) holidays!