Home on a Holiday...before the Holidays

Today is Veteran's Day, so first off, I'd like to say thank you to all the brave men and women who have served and are serving in our armed forces.
Veteran's Day means a holiday from work for me. It also happens not to be a school holiday for the kids. That equals a real "me" day, right? Well, it would, except that two of the four people in this household are sick in one way or another, that being me and my six year old. So he is home with me today. He took the couch, I've got the recliner. We aren't up for much of anything.
Except that I do have my laptop and a little time to think about the upcoming holidays…cards, food, decor. (I already talked a little about Christmas shopping here.)
(Oh, and by the way, today I'm linking up with Molly and Carly for Funday Monday. Click on the button above to hop on over and check it out. You might even want to link up yourself!)
Today, I'm focusing mainly on our Christmas cards, since those need to get done first!
Once again, I have procrastinated on putting together a Christmas card. I usually design mine from scratch and upload the complete card to a site for printing. Last year, we actually had proper family photos taken just in time to use for cards.

Front

Back

This year, I think I'm going to do something different. In September, we took the kids to New Orleans for a fun weekend. We met up with my college roommate who lives all the way across the country, too, so it was doubly special. I took some great photos of the kids that weekend, and I'm thinking of using a collage of those for a card this year. Here are a few of them:


I'm still deciding what kind of finish I want on the photos. They look great in black and white, but I also love them in this one:

Decisions, decisions.
We stayed at Le Pavillon.

It is fantastic, especially if you have children with you. At 10 p.m. every night, they have a "peanut butter and jelly hour" in the lobby - several varieties of bread, peanut butter and jellies, plus cold milk and hot chocolate, with plenty of whipped cream and marshmallows to top it all off.
I really love this one of the kids looking out the window at the hotel...

...and this one of them lounging in the robes...

I'm thinking of using some of these photos along with a chalkboard background and sketchy chalkboard fonts. What do you think?
Stay tuned for a post about the entire process from start to finish in the coming weeks!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin