May 27, 2016

Blessing Our Home…

Mark and I with our Pastor Brian Krawczyz (Grace Monroe)

Blessing Our Home

I think I quite possibly may be a little too excited about today’s post. Like maybe even more than Addie on her “last day of school eve” today. You see… I love traditions, I love making unique memories, I love our new home and I love our church family. Take all of those ideas, mush them together and what do you get?!?… One super memorable Monday evening. I have to admit that I SO wish I could take credit for this idea. But I will have to hand that over to Mark and our pastor Brian. I simply brought a bolt of fabric, several bottles of wine, some candles and three dozen Sharpies. They took care of the rest.

Several weeks ago we were at Our Historic Wonderland and Mark randomly asked the girls if they wanted to write their names on the studs of their new bedrooms. You may remember this image I posted on my social media pages back in March…

Well apparently that got his memory juices flowing and that evening he told me about something he’d seen several years ago where someone had written bible verses on the walls of their new home before Sheetrock was installed. I thought it was so incredibly sweet and knew it was something I’d wanted to do. Then we got to talking and decided to take it a step further. Since moving to Monroe two years ago, we have felt this incredible sense of community. Everyone has opened their arms so much to our family and we have absolutely fallen in love with so many families at our church, in our community and at Addison’s school. And in moving into this home, my goal is to be an open door to our community as they have been to us. A place for everyone to feel welcome and at home. And what better way to welcome our friends and family than to have them involved in our construction from the beginning.

And the story continues… So we had honestly kind of forgotten about the idea with all of the craziness we’ve had going on and the stall in construction. And then Sunday before church I saw Mark texting about our Sheetrock delivery scheduled for Monday and I hit rocket planning mode. We spoke with our preacher Brian after church and we decided on the following day, Monday evening, for the house blessing. He also mentioned a tradition that our church has of planting a Bible into the walls of all of their new church builds open to the book of Psalms. So with all of these ideas in mind, we sent out fancy text message invites 😉 and made a trip to Wal-Mart for candles, Sharpies, wine and flowers. We hired four sitters, ordered 6 pizzas and sent about 30 kiddos to the backyard to play (the house is a little bit of a construction danger zone). We were so beyond blessed to have around 40 of our friends and family (plus little ones) spend the evening with us this past Monday to bless Our Historic Wonderland…

Oh and remember my blog post last month about our baptisms and the “surprise” photography? Well, David Cannon Photography‘s (@davidcannonphoto) wife Stephanie, AKA our new neighbors, photographed the entire event and blessed us once again with these gorgeous images. They are incredibly talented and he even specializes in Architecture/Interiors photography. Sounds like a neighbor match made in heaven to me! 😉

I spoke…

And then Brian prayed…

Meet the only baby on Earth that gives me baby fever. He is a little heartbreaker!

My bestie Brooke (remember her from Shark Tank?!?) Mark’s Grandmother

My Sister and Brother-in-Law…My Mom…

 XOXO, Brittany Hayes