Thanksgiving overload

It was such a wonderful break! I am not even sure I can quite summarize it, but for now I will leave you with one of my favorite pictures from this weekend.

I love my family!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy your time with family and friends today. Ben and I will be chowing down with his side of the family this year. Luckily my sister and her roommate came along for the ride. 

This is the first year that I won't be celebrating Thanksgiving with my immediate family and it's a little bit sad. I'm glad that my sister was homeless for Thanksgiving and decided to come to North Carolina with us. It will be a whole new experience celebrating and experiencing another family's traditions but I think I'm ready for it! I am a Spivey now, so bring it on!

Life lately

Life lately in pictures...

Such a morning person! He loves when I take pictures of him before 8 a.m.

More burp cloths... I am in such a crafting mood!

Dunkin holiday cups! I love having a Dunking Donuts in Lynchburg, it just may not be the best thing for my waste line.

The cutest mini cup I have ever seen.

A little baby onesie I made for our campus pastor's brand new son. 

Over the weekend

This weekend was filled with lots of food, family, and crafts!

Ben and I started out the weekend with dinner at WaterStone Pizza in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia. While no pizza in Virginia is as good as New York style pizza, WaterStone is a close second.  It was delicious as always, and the bonus was seeing my long lost sister working hard at the front desk. (Kari, I need more of you in my life!)

Saturday started off early in the morning at 6:30 a.m. since Ben and I couldn't sleep any longer. We had some coffee, went over to my parents, and enjoyed the morning. The rest of the day was filled with movies in bed, Chinese food, and crafting!

 Sunday morning we attended church and worked in the nursery. I am positive that our nursery is filled with the cutest kinds on this planet.

I spent the rest of the afternoon picking out paint colors at my parent's new house that is currently under renovation and...more crafting. 

What a great weekend! Lots of rest and relaxation before the upcoming holiday. 

Friendsgiving

On Friday, my office celebrated Thanksgiving with a big bang and hosted a Friendsgiving. Everyone brought in one dish and we all sat down in the middle of our work day to celebrate.

I decided to make mini apple pies. While delicious, I will probably never make them again as they were a hassle to prepare and the sugar stuck to the pan making the pies incredible hard to remove in one piece. 

They were cute though. I created some with a crumble topping and others had a cut out leaf as the top crust on the pie. 

What a spread!

I love Thanksgiving and can't wait to celebrate again on Thursday!

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for friendship. I am thankful for the friends I have in my life who know me, know my faults, and love me as I am. I am thankful for friends who pick up right where we left off and laugh until our stomachs hurt.

 I have been blessed to know and love some incredible women in my life and I am so grateful for their faithfulness over the years. I may not call as much as I like, or write as often as I should, but our friendship still remains. 

My wedding day was one of the best days of my life for several reasons, but one of them was that I finally had all of my friends together again. The night before my wedding was like one big reunion and I wish I could relive that night over and over again. 

True friendships are hard to find, and I am thankful for the ones I have. 

DIY bench

I've finally done it! I've learned how to use a drill and I have officially upholstered my first piece of furniture that now sits at the end of my bed. 

It wasn't actually that difficult of a project, but lets just pretend it was. I struggled a little getting the drill bit stuck in batting and breaking some bits on a few of my first tries, but here it is. I'm pretty proud.

It was a pretty easy process. We went to the hardware store and had our wood cut into the dimensions we would need for a bench. I used 3/4 inch plywood for this project. I ended up making a pretty sturdy bench that was 19" x 48". 

At the beginning, I may have thrown a fit a couple of times because I kept breaking bits. My wonderful husband politely told me that I was drilling them in at an angle. Who knew you had to drill straight into the wood?

We assembled the box, and I used 3" foam and batting to cover it. I then made a slipcover for the box with 3 yds of fabric and finished it off by stapling it around the bottom.

The final step was attaching wooden legs that I had stained a deep walnut color to the bottom of the bench. 

I'd like to add some nail head at the bottom of the bench, but for now I'm just enjoying my new piece of furniture!

Etsy sale!

I am so happy to announce my first Etsy sale! I haven't had a lot of time to put into my page, but with this first sale, I am hoping to get more items up in the shop soon!

You can see all of my current listings at the themspiveys shop! 

Corning Museum of Glass

When Ben and I were up for the Wineglass Marathon, we stopped by the Corning Museum of Glass to do one of my favorite things: glass blowing. Having grown up in Corning, glass blowing is not new to me. Our Christmas tree can be found adorned in glass ornaments and icicles that our family has blown over the years. We even have a few glass flowers strewn about the house from class field trips.

One of my family's favorite ornaments is a little purple egg shaped piece of glass my sister blew at a very young age. She was so young when she blew it that she could barely get any air into the pipe leaving us with one of the heaviest ornaments on the tree. 

This is the second year Ben and I blew pumpkins together, and the second year was better than the first!

Last year, Ben's pumpkin ended up getting broken in a rowdy house full of boys. Here's hoping we can  get these pumpkins safely through the holidays!

Run baby run

Now that daylight savings time has taken place, it is so hard to motivate yourself to step out in the cold, dark weather to run. Ben and I decided last week to head on out for some fresh air after work. (Ben also insist on me burning off energy running. I go a little crazy in confined spaces if I don't and Ben usually gets the brunt of that crazy.) You would never know it by these pictures, but I was the one complaining the whole way and Ben had to put up with it.

I promise, Ben really loves running. He also loves me taking pictures of EVERYTHING.

You can thank me for taking these pictures before my fingers were numb from the cold and snot was dripping down my face. I must keep coming back for the endorphins.

Things that make me happy

Seeing our headboard every day reminds me of how blessed I am to have Ben in my life. I love being reminded of that every day.

Funny pictures reminding me to not take life too seriously.

Books. When Ben and I first got married, we had to keep buying bookshelves because of our large combined collection. You can find them in almost every room of our apartment.

Every time I walk up the stairs, I am reminded my favorite season is upon us. 

It's the little things in life that can make you smile the most. 

Thankful Thursday

Credit: Southern Disposition

Tis the season for thankfulness. As I reflect over the last year, I have so much to be thankful for. Of course, marriage, a great job, family and friends are all a part of what I'm thankful for, true thankfulness stems much further than that.

While I am thankful for all of the material things I have been blessed with and the relationships I have formed the last two years in Virginia, I am so much more thankful for the Lord's continued faithfulness. I so often get caught up in who I am, and I forget who Jesus is. I look inward to solve problems rather than looking to Jesus. I seek comfort and value in the opinion of others, rather than being assured by the knowledge that I am a child of God. 

Today I am thankful for the Lord's continued grace. While I admit to seeking satisfaction and approval in others, He supplies Jesus, the one who has already approved of me and made me one of His own. While I continue to become aware of my selfish motivations, He provides the grace to forgive and the solution, Jesus. 

Cheer up. You are worse than you know. But you are far more loved than you could ever imagine.

The 2012 Wineglass Marathon

Ben and I traveled to my home town of Corning, NY for the annual Wineglass Marathon. The marathon has been taking place over 30 years and was a big part of my childhood. I remember when my dad ran the marathon and we (the kids) were able to skip church to cheer him on. Skipping church was not allowed in my family except for this one weekend a year. The whole family would be together, volunteering, running, and cheering others on as they crossed the finish line.

I have always aspired to run the entire marathon myself, but have never been dedicated enough to complete the training required. I participated in the relay during high school but never ventured to the full marathon distance. I was so excited when the Wineglass half-marathon was introduced in 2011! It was the perfect reason to return to my hometown and participate in a race that held so many memories for me. When I took Ben in 2011, it was the first time I had brought him home to meet the family and show him where I grew up. After that experience, we knew we wanted to come back again, and this time Ben wanted in on the fun.

We arrived  late Friday night and had Saturday to enjoy the town and pick up our race packets. 

The race came early on Sunday morning, but we stopped and picked up Dunkin so I had something to survive on. The picture below with my brother and dad was taken about 10 minutes before the start of the race. It's usually at this point that I regret my decision to run and classify myself as insane. 

We finished! Ben finished his first half marathon in 1:36, what a speedy guy! I on the other hand did very little training in preparation for this race and barely crossed the finish line alive. Okay, that is an exaggeration  but I definitely learned my lesson. Train a little before you decide to run 13.1 miles!

Already looking forward to next year!