Category: Vacation

Life, Vacation

The Windy City

Jessica Smith

Chicago

Last weekend, mom, Emily and I hopped a plane to visit my older sister in Chicago.

SelfieJA

She and her business partner were having the grand opening of their new BYOB painting studio, the Surreal Rabbit.

SurrealRabbit

The whole store is themed after Alice in Wonderland. They painted murals all over the studio, from a cheshire cat, to Alice and the Mad Hatter enjoying tea together, to the white rabbit and his watch. There was even a card painting the roses red! It looked incredible.

Ribbon-Cutting

My sister is so incredibly artsy, she never ceases to amaze me.

When we weren’t admiring her store and beautiful creations, we were out exploring the city. We went to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was a lot of fun as usual. I mean, you get to make your own tornado. That’s my kind of museum. And there are things to touch and buttons to push EVERYWHERE. Did I mention they have an exhibit where you can watch baby chicks hatch from their eggs!?! Yeah, my kind of place indeed.

MoSaI.jpg

We also went to the Adler Planetarium. I’d never been to a planetarium before — it was so cool! We got to see two shows in their domed theater, which was really cool.

allieonmoon

Look, we landed on the moon!

emonmoon

We had an amazing trip visiting my sister.

Windycity

When we got back, Brian and I finished PUTTING OUR HOUSE BACK TOGETHER! You know what that means — reveal post, coming up!

Holiday, Vacation

Thanksgiving 2014

Jessica Smith

Hi folks! I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. I traveled to Ohio to see my dad’s extended family. We have some great family traditions with our Cincinnati family, like drinking UDF milkshakes, walking the Thanksgiving Day Race (… we actually bailed this year… oops), and black friday shopping with the girls. We also have the best food ever! My aunts make mean dishes for Thanksgiving, including cheesy jalapeno rice, strawberry pretzel salad and the yummiest sweet potatoes.

Here are a few pictures from our fun trip!

Stay tuned for a post on how I decorated my home this holiday season. I love all of the decorations I’ve accumulated through the years and am excited to share them with you!

Life, Vacation

Happy October

Jessica Smith

It’s the most wonderful time of the year — fall time! After spending a hot week in Florida, I am so excited for cool weather.

My mom, sisters and I just went to Disney World last week, hence me being M.I.A. from the blog world.

We hit up all four parks and then did the Universal Parks, too. My favorite by far was the Harry Potter portions of the parks. And then Animal Kingdom. That was an awesome park.

My poor mom got the shaft in my pictures. I swear she was there and that we have a ton of photos with her! In fact, we got the memory maker package so the Disney professionals took a ton of photos of all four of us. I will share those later.

I’ll also have to share some old school pictures of the family and the new versions that we recreated. We spent a ton of time at the parks finding old places that we’d take pictures more than a decade ago. I can’t wait to see the side-by-side comparisons!

Anyway, the vacation was awesome. The weather… too hot for my liking. It is time to break out the fall decor, like my fabric pumpkins from a few years back, and the fall clothing. Finallyyyyy!

Hope you all are enjoying the fall weather where you are.