Emily McCall Photography

All of the recent excitement surrounding the presidential inauguration started to make me feel a little ashamed of the fact that I had never been to our nation’s capital, so Ben and I decided to go!  But unfortunately, we didn’t make the trip until two days after the inauguration!  Story of my life: always a few days too late!    But we still had a great time seeing the sights and soaking up the incredible atmosphere.  The first stop on our whirlwind D.C. tour was the Washington Monument.

Gorgeous, right?  We went all the way up to the top.

Here’s the view of the White House from the top of the Monument:

And the Lincoln Memorial:

Our shadow:

This sign made us chuckle . . .

There was a neat exhibit in the top of the Monument:

I love these next three shots, all taken at the base . . .

These were taken from the Lincoln Memorial:

Ahhh, and here’s my lovely husband, desecrating a treasured national symbol . . .

Just a couple more shots, this time from sunset:

And finally, we may have missed the inauguration, but we did get to see the cleanup!

More coming soon!

I can’t believe Christmas is almost here!  For those of you out there like me who wait until the very last minute to wrap gifts . . .

. . . I wanted to pass along these fabulous FREE gift tags, from Inside a Black Apple:

They’re adorable!  Download them here, then just print ‘em out and stick ‘em on your packages for an extra special touch!

Happy wrapping!

This is my favorite ornament: my husband’s childhood handiwork . . .

Hope you all are enjoying the holiday season!

A couple weeks ago I showed you the pretty respectable job we did sprucing up one corner of our back yard.  Well, the success went to our heads, and Ben and I thought we should just push on through and get to work on Phase 2 of our landscaping plans.  So the last two weekends we worked our little heinies off in the back yard, and I’ve been too sore even to blog about till now!  You may remember that last time I alluded to a flagstone patio being in the works:

Well, we had a go at it, but you’ll notice there was a bit of a problem:

The patio was about two or three inches below ground level!  Oops…  So, to our utter dismay, we had to tear everything out, add a bunch more sand, and then lay the flagstones all over again.  After a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day of hard work, we managed to fix it.  And after another day of back-breaking labor, we even managed to get some green stuff planted around it!  So here’s what it looks like now:

Much better, right?!  You can see we’re not quite finished filling in all the cracks with sand, but this time it’s at least level with the ground!  And I think the plants around it add a lot.  Here’s a wider shot:

We tore out the overgrown bush along the fence in the back, dug a new bed, and planted a magnolia tree:

We also planted some fast-growing jasmine vines along the fence there, so hopefully we’ll get our privacy back soon!

Ben and I are really quite proud of ourselves for doing all this work — physical labor is not my strong suit, nor is patience, waiting for all these things to grow!  But we are rewarding ourselves for our hard work by hiring someone to take care of Phase 3 in the back yard: putting in a deck!  The contractors started today, so by Thanksgiving, we should have a gorgeous cedar deck where this not-so-impressive view used to be…

I can’t wait to show it to you!   (Oh, and don’t worry — sod is in the plans for the spring!)