presents!

as i mentioned in yesterday's post, austin and i brought some goodies back to tennessee with us. and as promised, i'm back today to share those goodies with you. cause i wouldn't want to break any promises.

first, we brought home a ton of plants to plant in our gardens. we also got a bunch of pink daffodil bulbs and some blackberry lily seeds.

i don't know what's in the water back home, but i need to get some of it because apparently it makes hostas grow to be the size of houses. thanks to tucker for modeling as a size reference here. and also for letting you see how ridiculously hot it was outside.

so as baby hostas have popped up here and there, mom and tim dug them up for transport back to our house in tennessee. they're just little guys right now, but hopefully they'll like their new home around our back patio and grow up to be huge.

not so sure if this guy is going to make it or not, since tucker didn't do his job and keep the deer out of the yard... but we'll give him a shot.

we also brought home quite a few purple coneflower plants.

and although it doesn't look like much right now, they'll eventually have purple flowers and hopefully they'll attract more butterflies than bees...

and for the final item from the plant category, we brought home some sedum.

i believe that these little guys will grow up to look like this:

{image from here}

i can't wait to get all my plants in the ground, but we're actually going to get some more hostas and some cannas from some other friends/family first. anyone else have plants they want to donate to our house? i want my gardens to look like pretty jungles!

the other presents we brought home are for prettying up the inside of the house. in case you didn't know, my momma is a genius scientist smarty-pants and a really crafty artistic person. she makes stained glass art of all kinds and she donated some pieces to our house!

we got this pretty blue flower piece for our living room window. {turns out i'm not so great with the camera and i couldn't quite get a good picture of the whole window without it either being way to dark, way too light, or this kind of blah shade of blah.}

but up close to the glass, you can see how pretty the color is and the details. i literally smile every time i walk into the room and see it hanging over our couch.

and as if that wasn't enough, momma gave us two more pieces! we've got this victorian style flower piece hanging in our kitchen:

and this little green flower hanging in our bathroom.

unfortunately, our stupid windows have stupid little bars dividing them into little sections which are really screwing up the glass. for the one in the kitchen i was at least able to hide them a bit with the edges of the piece, but the one in our bathroom didn't work out that way. eventually, though, and hopefully sooner rather than later, we'll be getting all new windows installed without those dumb little bars.

anyway, so those are the goodies we brought home from virginia. a big thank you to momma and timmy for being willing to share these things with us. i feel like it makes it a little easier to be six hours away from home when i can bring little pieces of home back with me and i get a little reminder of home by just looking around.