Girl's Weekend

So for Rich's birthday a couple of weeks ago Jolie and I got him a golf trip to Bay Hill in Orlando, it included over night and golf so this morning Rich and his friend Scott left for the golf trip leaving Jolie and I at home for our very own little girl's weekend.  I am actually really excited to get some one on one time with her as things have been so busy with work lately that I feel as though I never get to do fun stuff with her and with another one on her way in about 3 months I have to get in all the Jolie time I can find. So for our Girl's weekend we decided to make some fall decorations for the house and put them and others up and then we are going to paint our toes, Jolie is super excited about all aspects of the weekend except the part that has her Daddy away from her, she doesn't like that.

So for our decorations we got some dollar store fake pumpkins and made our own "glaze" to dress them up,  The glaze was made of some bronze paint from Micheal's (it was only $0.59 on sale) mixed with a little water to make it a little translucent so the orange of the pumpkin shows through, then for the little white pumpkins we got some glitter glue, also from Micheal's (6 colors for $1.99) and then again put some water with it to make it spreadable with a foam paint brush.  We then spent $3.00 at the dollar store on 3 items so that we could decorate the banister inside the house on the stair well, I absolutely love the way it turned out, it is just two pieces of the 5ft fall leave garland and one spool of fall colored ribbon to hold it on the banister, we twisted it along and tied bows and ta da!!  Once our pumpkins were dry we created a fall area on top of one of the shelves next to the TV.  Below are all the pictures from our decorating activities.

This is how the banister turned out, I think it is cute.  And yes I know that we haven't finished from our painting of the house because we haven't hung a single thing on the walls yet, although my Dad is coming tomorrow to help me so I can surprise Rich when he gets home and he will be so happy when he doesn't have to do it!!  I would like to have the living room done tomorrow so we can participate in Kelly's Korner Blog Hop of Home Tours, this week is Living Rooms and next week is Master Bedrooms and even though we just painted and got new furniture our rooms aren't picture and tour ready yet, I am hoping they will be soon!

Here is a picture of one of the plain white pumpkins before we added the glitter paint to it, I forgot to take a before picture of the orange pumpkin but just imagine a plain old regular looking pumpkin.

This is a picture of Jolie having a GREAT time painting the pumpkins, she really has a love of art, it so sweet to see her face light up with activities like this.

This is the finished orange pumpkin with our homemade "glaze" on it.

This is a picture of the space where we put the pumpkins, there is also a skeleton I painted several years ago at Halloween time so I put that with the pumpkins as well, Jolie really likes it.  Oh and underneath everything we used part of another dollar store item, a bag of fake fall leaves to set everything on and add more fall color.

After we paint our toes we will take pictures of those too to share.

But I want to show you how much Jolie is learning at school, she came home on Wednesday night between school and her Open House she was using her dry erase marker in her little number, animal, letter book that she often writes in but all of a sudden Rich looks down and she wrote her own name all by herself.  We are helping her write her e's better but we couldn't be prouder of her, here is a picture of what she wrote.