Harts in Durham

Happy Thanksgiving and happy Black Friday!! I’m linking some of my favorites from the last two weeks, as well as some things I’m shopping for this Christmas. Can you all believe we’re coming up on another Christmas? I really can’t–this year just flew by, but I’m so excited that the most wonderful time of the year is upon us again!

Our adoption

This post from earlier last week. I am thrilled to start sharing our journey with you all! In the next couple of weeks, Corey and I are going to make some YouTube videos talking about our adoptions and answering questions. Feel free to leave a comment below with any questions you have about adoption in general or our story in particular. We’ll do our best to answer them!

Christmas gifts

I know some of you are super on the ball and probably finished your shopping for the year already, but I love shopping this time of year for my friends and family. I love the atmosphere of the stores, I love walking around with a salted caramel mocha in hand and browsing stores while Christmas music plays, and I love being out and about in the chilly air and coming home to a warm fire (and more coffee ;)).

We try to keep Christmas relatively simple in our house, and this year is no different. We’re focusing on experiences rather than things this year, so the girls are going to get year-long passes to some museums and things they love in the RDU area. In addition, we’re getting them just a couple things we’ve been eyeing for awhile, including some books. The Jesus Storybook Bible is a staple in just about every Christian household, and ours is no different. We read it nightly to our girls and we all love it. in our hourand read it almost every night but….we read it almost every night. We need something to mix it up a bit and this one has a story with three questions for more discussion at the end, which I’m super excited about! Both girls are getting to the place where they really understand and want to talk about the things we’re reading in the Bible and I think this format will be really helpful.

I’ve heard over and over again how amazing this book by Trillia Newbell is, and I can’t tell you how thankful I am to have a story of God’s redemption with all His people prominently featured. It is so important to us to show our girls that the Gospel is not just for one particular type of person. Jesus was sent to earth to redeem people from every tribe, tongue and nation. I just cannot wait to dig into this book with my kids!

And our big secret that we haven’t even hinted at with the girls–we’re getting them a Kindle this year! I love that these kid Kindles have access to apps for games AND the capability to read books. And the parental controls that allows parents to set a timer that causes the device to shut down when time is up. This is a HUGE bonus for us and really what swayed us in the direction of getting this particular model for the girls. We have lots of arguments over screen time and a lot of attempted negotiations when it’s time to transition to something else. I think the timer feature will eliminate a lot of that for us, which really just makes everyone’s life easier and more pleasant ;).

Christmas outfits

The other thing I’ve been on the hunt for this week is a Christmas outfit for each of the girls. Corey’s sister is getting married at the beginning of December, so their dresses this year will do double duty for the rehearsal dinner and Christmas Eve. I really love clothes for little girls and picking out Christmas outfits is so FUN! Right now I’ve got my eye on these with these overtop. I think they’re casual enough for the rehearsal, but festive enough for a Christmas Eve service. Old Navy is having some great sales, so check out their website for some really cute clothes at good prices.

I’m planning to wear this dress in navy. It’s super soft and the elastic waist just makes it extra comfortable. I actually had it altered (if you follow me on Instagram, I had a whole saga in my stories on this. Ha!) to make it closer to knee length instead of mid-calf. Now I just need a great pair of shoes to wear with it ;).

Beach time!

We headed to the beach for Thanksgiving this week and it has been such a relaxing holiday. Instead of cooking this year, we headed out to enjoy a seafood dinner. No pressure, no fuss–just lots of quality family time. I really cannot think of anything better! And of course later on we enjoyed one of our favorite Thanksgiving traditions: watching America’s team play! I loved spending Thanksgiving this way…maybe we’ll make it a tradition??

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and that you get to sped the weekend surrounded by people you love.