When my children were small I had the insane idea of making Christmas stockings. I thought it would be so much fun and they would look so cute. I went to my favorite catalogs, Herrschners and Mary Maxim and started looking at what my options were. I settled on the felt stockings, so cute, so many options, they could be personalized…….I ordered 5 of them and began to work.

What I hadn’t planned on is how much work they were! The pictures look so simple and I have done my fair share of

So one more article about Emma’s wedding and I think we’re done!

Photos are so important! I’ve told you about our family photographer, Kim, we love her! She always gets the best out of our family when it comes to pictures and I think she has a great eye. When it comes to things like a wedding you really want to have some beautiful pictures, but you also want to have some fun. It’s a day of memories, and we may all get to that point when we’re so old we can’t remember yesterday let alone the day

Weddings are a lot of work, I believe the previous bazillion articles on Emma’s wedding have shown that! But the thing that may often get lost in all the planning and parties and fun and stress is that a wedding is not only the start of a new family, but the combining  of families and the bringing together of our families.

It starts with 2 people who have decided that their lives will be made better by being together.

Then you add one side of the family and then the other.

Then you add

For almost all of us, when planning anything as huge as a wedding, budget is a big honkin deal! The bulk of our budget was to be food and of course the candy bar, so decorations needed to be very cost effective. Now my daughter in law Christie said something that I thought made perfect sense, “If you don’t want your reception to look like it’s in a church, don’t have it in a church!” Well we were having the reception in a church and with a tiny budget. I wanted to spread color around, have it

One of Emma’s biggest requests for her wedding reception was to have a candy bar. I don’t know where she had seen one, but she thought it was fabulous! As her wedding got closer and she attended some friends receptions she saw a few candy bars, but they were more or less just a few bowls with candy in them on the ends of the food tables. What Emma wanted was a table full of her favorite candies with the ability for her guests to take a bunch home with them.

My sister found some great jars at

Emma doesn’t like cake. Emma was getting married. Wedding usually have a wedding cake. Emma doesn’t like cake. Well I didn’t have a huge problem with not having or serving cake, Emma said she wanted pie, so I thought we could make mini pies and serve them. However I thought we still needed a cake stand in or representative. Emma did want a cake topper, had a cute one picked out, but if you don’t have a cake what do you do with a cake topper? I couldn’t figure out how to put one on a pie.