Five on Friday:)

Hello and Happy Friday! I’m linking up with Darci and friends for Five on Friday:)

{1} This year, we decided to put together two boxes for Operation Christmas Child.  My original plan was to have Harper fill a box for a girl around her age and for Will to create a box for a boy his age.  However, after reading more about Operation Christmas Child, I realized that the most needed boxes were for boys ages 10-14.  As a result, we compiled two identical boxes for boys in this age range.  This was such a fun project for the kiddos!  Will and Harper loved sorting the items and filling the boxes.  At first, Will said, “Mommy, this ball won’t fit in the box, so we will just keep it.”  Ha!  We plan on making this a yearly tradition.

{2} I decided to go through my closet and get rid of some old clothes that I haven’t worn in years.  My friend recently sent some of her clothes to thredUP and received a decent amount of money.  I bought some nice children’s clothing from thredUP but did not have a good experience when I sent them a huge bag of kids’ clothes.  However, I was planning on donating my old clothes and thought it would be worth it to see if any of them would sell.  We’ll see how much I get!

{3} My first Stitch Fix came this week!   Here’s my little helper digging into my box:)  I loved the experience of Stitch Fix and plan on getting another “fix” in the future, even though I ended up keeping only one of the five items.  More about my experience with Stitch Fix will be in an upcoming post, hopefully sometime next week if I can get my blogging act together.  Work has been so busy lately, and after the kiddos are in bed in the evenings, all I want to do is read blogs and relax, not write blog posts:(

{4}  My parents came last weekend and spent the night.  Will loves it when they visit (and Harper, too), especially since he gets to camp out in our bonus/play room.  Will’s bedroom serves as the guest bedroom, so he gets booted out of his room when company visits.  Here are my parents playing with the kiddos:)  While they were visiting, we went to downtown to an event called Sparkles and Sweets.  It’s a holiday kick-off open house where many stores are open until 9pm, including our favorite toy store.  We did a little Christmas shopping and walked around in the freezing cold!  But not too cold to stop at our favorite gelato shop and share some ice cream (I actually had some yummy hot chocolate instead, since I was really COLD!)!

{5}  Christmas cards, check!  I’m trying to do some holiday prep in advance so it doesn’t become so overwhelming. We had our fall pics taken several weeks ago, and I had been waiting for a good deal on Christmas cards. I typically use Shutterfly for our cards, but the quality isn’t the greatest.  I happened to find a great deal on cards at Minted from The Mom Creative.  I’ve heard great things about the quality of cards from Minted, so I was excited when I purchased 25 Christmas postcards for $8 (including shipping and tax!).  What a great deal! Plus, it will save on postage!  Here’s the front of the Christmas postcards; the back has our address (already printed!) and a pic of Will and Harper.  The cards are made of nice quality, thick paper.  Now all I need to do is narrow down our Christmas list to 25 people!  Ha! I plan on buying a few additional Christmas cards to send to some family members (since I will include copies of our fall pics for them).