Moran Family Fun

Madison is seventeen! I know it shouldn't be surprising and it's probably a little silly to say, but really, wasn't she just three years old? Somehow she grew up and instead of playing with toys she's studying for the SAT and our mailbox is filled with letters from different colleges every day.  It's special but also a little sad to watch your kids grow up. We were in Pennsylvania visiting the Kennedys on Madison's birthday so we were lucky enough to be able to have them join in the birthday fun.  It was nice to have their amazing musical abilities singing along on the birthday song!  Her list of birthday wishes was pretty simple:  cheesecake for dessert, a new belt, a silver necklace, mechanical pencils, and pocket sized editions of the Lord of the Rings books.  One thing we love about Madison is her practicality - she would never ask for something off the wall like a pet monkey!  We're so lucky to have Madison in our family; she's i...

Can you believe it's been six years since I started this little blog? The time really has flown by for our family. Initially I started this as a way to keep our family and friends in the States up to date on our life in Germany.  We had a couple of family members and friends with blogs and I really liked the idea of having a place to have a family journal of sorts online so I decided to give it a try. I don't know how much everyone out there cares about our blog or the mundane things our family is up to, but it's been so great for me to have a place to write, share, and remember.  I love going back and reading about the everyday things that sometimes get lost along the way. Everyone remembers the big events - vacations, birthdays, holidays - but it's those little day to day adventures that get lost in time.  I thought I'd just share some statistics today as a way to look back over the last six years. 17,788 pageviews - mostly from IP addresses in the US, but Germ...

Something about this time of year makes me feel like sewing. I think it's a combination of the extra time I have because the kids have gone back to school from their Christmas break and the cold weather that makes me want to live like a hermit in our house. Whatever the reason, my sewing machine and I have been BFFs lately and the result has been a bunch of handmade items ready to be enjoyed. First up was a baby blessing outfit for our new nephew/cousin Ethan Brandley. I made the pants using the Big Butt Baby Pants pattern from made-by-rae.com It's a pattern I've made before, I think for another Brandley baby, and it's a fairly quick sew with really great results. I used a cotton fabric from Joann that looked like silk dupioni with a really nice silkiness to the wrong side of the fabric and a more matte feeling to the right side. I used a soft white flannel for the panel on the bum of the pants. The vest was made using this pattern I found on etsy. The only real...