Hey everyone, happy Monday! Apologizes for no Tiny Talk today. I've been battling a really bad cough the last couple of weeks and if I talk for too long I tend to have bad coughing spells. I'll be back with some really great chats though in 2019, so look for those in the new year! We had a busy and productive weekend mixed with some fun and relaxation, ha! So a little bit of everything. On Friday and Saturday we spent some time with our family because my dear great uncle passed way last week. Please keep us all in your prayers. 2018 has been quite the year for our family. Your prayers have been such a blessing though and have really kept us going. We did have some fun on Friday night, though! We went to our friends' annual cookie party where we bake a bunch of cookies and they deliver them to the Kellogg Cancer Center for the patients and the staff. It's a wonderful tradition we've done for the last few years and this year was Kai's first one! On Saturday, we finished up our Christmas shopping and had a fun night of baking cookies and watching Elf with my mom. And Sunday was just spent relaxing and baking some gingerbread cookies!

Every year I always buy a little advent calendar from a store and Caleb and I try to keep up with it during the Christmas season but we aren't very good about it. With this being Kai's first Christmas season though, I wanted to start a few traditions that would stick with our family hopefully. I've always wanted to make our own advent calendar whether it was something crafty or some form of woodworking from Caleb. Caleb's busy with a few woodworking projects right now so I decided to go the crafty route. I have a lot of red and green decorations around our house so I wanted to do something a little more neutral and found this idea of little craft paper bags to make a DIY advent calendar! It was a simple craft project and after I got all 25 bags stuck on the wall, I added little chocolates to each of the bags that Caleb and I take turns eating each day as we approach Christmas! I plan on taking it a step further in future years and am going to slip a little piece of paper in each bag that either contains a Bible verse or an act of kindness for the person who opens the bag to read/do in addition to eating the chocolate. I always want the reason for the season to be the most prominent part of the Christmas season in our home and I feel that honoring the birth of Christ by reading about it from the Bible and spreading kindness in our world are two of the best ways. So here's how I made this super simple advent calendar that is now front and center when you walk in from our garage!

• Mini kraft paper bags - Michaels $8.99
• Small Clothespins - Michaels $4.19
• Command Strips - Michaels - $11.49
• Chocolate
• Black Sharpie
• Scissors

1. Write numbers 1-25 on 25 Kraft paper bags. I free handed them but you can also print out templates and trace them to make them look extra nice. To free hand them and make them look more like calligraphy, bolden any curves that are made. It adds definition to the numbers
2. Stick the front side of the command strips on to 25 clothespins. The command strips that I bought were wider than my clothespins, so I cut them vertically to match up with the edges of the clothespins so that the excess didn't stick out behind the clothespins.
3. Clip the Kraft bags on to the clothespins.
4. Remove the backside of the command strip and stick it to the wall. Evenly space the bags a part. I chose to do 5 rows of 5.
5. Place chocolates in each of the bags. I used Ghirardelli squares to keep them flat.
6. Take turns with everyone in your family every day from Dec 1st to Christmas in opening the bags and eating the chocolate to celebrate the Christmas season!

I hope you all have a happy and blessed holiday season! What are some of your favorite holiday traditions that you do with your family? Share with me in the comments below!

Happy Friday, friends! Once again, apologies for the late Halloween post but I still wanted to share our costumes with you guys! Better late than never, right? We can just file it away for future Halloweens, too! Caleb and I really like to DIY our Halloween costumes; we have so much fun putting them together ever year. He grew up with an amazing mom who literally made all of his costumes, which I think is so special. While I'm not that good, I do pride myself on searching for cheap items to bring a costume together well and crafting parts of them! This year we did Peter Pan as a family for Kai's first Halloween! I was Tinker Bell, Kai was Peter Pan, Caleb was Captain Hook, and Wrigley was Mr. Smee. I absolutely loved how they turned out and want to share with you how we made them!

White T-Shirt - Gap | Green Leggings - Amazon | Green Pom Flats - Amazon | Tutu - DIY 
Green Jacket (old, similar) - Dicks Sporting Goods | Fairy Wings - Amazon | Red lipstick - Chanel

Tutu Materials:

• White glitter tulle
• Green tulle
• Elastic band
• Safety pins
• Scissors

Tutu DIY Instructions:

1. Take elastic band and measure around waist. Make sure it's tight so that it will stay up on your waist.
2. Cut the elastic at correct length and safety pin the ends together
3. Cut 12 inch strips (longer for a longer skirt, shorter for a shorter skirt) of white and green tulle
4. Tie the tulle pieces on to the elastic band. I did two green pieces then one white piece.
5. Tie pieces all the way around the elastic band and voila! You're done!

Green Onesie - Amazon | Green Pants - Amazon | Hat - DIY | Beige Moccasins - Freshly Picked | Leather Belt - DIY

Coat - HalloweenCostumes.com | Hook - HalloweenCostumes.com | Hat - Spirit of Halloween/DIY

Hat Materials:

• White feather
• Hot glue gun

Hat DIY Instructions:

1. Glue white feathers on to purchased hat.

Red Hat - Amazon | Blue + White Bandana - Amazon

We knew when we started designing Kai's nursery that we wanted to have a little spot for Wrigley to curl up in in his room. Wrigley loves to be wherever we are and since we knew that we would pretty much be holding Kai 24/7, we wanted Wrigley to have a spot that he could go to and feel comforted since he wouldn't have much space with us in our laps or in the rocking chair. We came up with the idea of putting a small dog bed in the nursery for him but then decided to go further thanks to our Up Adventure theme and made him a teepee for it, too! It was the simplest DIY, and I want to share it with you all today! Here's what you will need to make a teepee dog bed for your fur baby:

Target 
Wrigley weighs about 17 lbs so we got him the small bed. He likes the comfort of curling up nice and snug. If you're pup prefers more space or is bigger than Wrigley then the medium would be the better option. However, this is just the bed we picked out...any dog bed works!

Hobby Lobby
We went to Hobby Lobby and picked up some of this white canvas fabric for the main part of the teepee. You'll want about 2 yards of fabric.

Home Depot
You'll need four 1/2 in x 48 in wooden dowels to make the stand part of the teepee. If you want a bigger teepee for a bigger dog then make sure you get longer and thicker dowels.

Home Depot
You'll need some twine to hold the dowels together.

Hobby Lobby
You'll need a couple push pins to hold the fabric to the wooden dowels.

 Step 1: Position the 4 wooden dowels over the dog bed to figure out the how much space you'll need around it. To make the teepee part at the top, criss cross the dowels. At the bottom you'll want the dowels to be positioned evenly around the backside of the bed. Ideally you'll want a dowel on each side of the bed and a dowel at each back corner of the bed.

Step 2: Wrap the twine around the dowels about a foot from the top. Use a long piece and wrap it as tight as possible.

Step 3: Take your canvas and drape it around the dowels. Start it about an inch below the twine and leave about a foot of material in front of the front dowels to wrap inside the teepee to hide the dowels on the inside. If you feel like you have too much material you can cut it with some fabric scissors. Use a push pin to hold the material to the front two dowels.

Step 4: Place the bed on top of the extra canvas. That's it! You're done!

For some added fun, you can add some twinkle lights, do some free hand painted symbols/your pup's name, or put a pin on it like we did! Now your fur baby has a fun place to snuggle up all day long and it's a nice, whimsical addition to your home.

Be sure to follow me on Instagram for some daily life fun! Have a happy hump day!

Hello friends! I would like to start out by thanking you for following me over to Tiny Dapper Fox. I know you might be wondering why change from This Boundless Journey? And I will definitely be addressing that as well as all the exciting things you can read about and find here on Tiny Dapper Fox. But let's start with why we're changing first...

So like I said before, this site will be a look into bits of our whole life, starting with motherhood. I want to share with all of you this magical experience I'm currently going through and offer any words of wisdom for mamas who might need it. I know at the start of this journey I was like a deer in headlights. I was so nervous and didn't know where to start. While I am NO expert and I will NEVER claim to be, I've found it's nice to hear that other mamas to be are going through the same thing I'm going through. I won't ever be offering medical advice here, for that I will always suggest you call your doctor but I do plan on writing about my pregnancy experiences/safe products I've loved using and after Nugget arrives (that's our temporary name for our baby boy) my postpartum experiences/awesome baby products I've found.

I also plan on incorporating a lot about our cozy home that we're slowly making our own. I'll be doing room tours and honestly you'll probably get multiple of one room because we're always transforming them! We have big plans for a lot of rooms throughout our house and as for the ones that are "done" we're always coming up with new ideas to make them more us and I love to decorate them differently for every season. On top of decor, I also want to bring you all some DIY posts! One of the biggest reasons I wanted to create Tiny Dapper Fox is to get my creative juices flowing again. I miss using my hands and the right side of my brain. I really love my day job but it is very structured and I really miss flexing those creative muscles on a regular basis, so I think this blog and some fun crafty projects might just be the answer to cure that! It's also no secret that Caleb and I love hosting get togethers and to be honest it really is an art to pull off some of the bigger ones like Thanksgiving or our gender reveal. I want to share with you all our tips and tricks of how we make all this happen as well as all of Caleb's yummy recipes you all ask me for all the time. I'm going to try to get over my shyness as well and share some of my baked goods recipes, too!

In the travel section all of our tips/trip stories will be available as well as our original City Guides from This Boundless Journey. We will no longer be offering trip itineraries but I will be putting together quick guides for places that we don't have city guides for but have visited and have some recommendations for. The way we establish a city guide is we need to feel that we have thoroughly explored that city and be able to give multiple recommendations. For places like Niagara Falls or the Cinque Terre that we only visited for a day or two do not warrant that, but we do have some great info to share on those places so those quick guides can be found in the general Travel section and the Stories/Tips category. On top of all that, I will be putting together our long awaited Disney series. It's no secret that we really really love Disney and having been to Walt Disney World two years in a row we have some really great tips and recommendations to share with all of you. I will be putting together multiple posts about Disney and those can all be found in their own special Disney category.

The last section will cover any fashion or beauty tips I have. I'm no fashionista or beauty expert but I do love putting together fun outfits and trying out new beauty products. Being pregnant as also presented its challenges with these two bits of life and I want to share some wisdom with all of you mamas to be that might need it!

And last but not least the last section of the site and honestly the one I'm really really excited for is our Shop page! So at the very top I mentioned Tiny Dapper Fox has been a long awaited of dream of mine but also of Caleb's. We came up with this name a really long time ago when we first started dappling in to a couple of our hobbies. Mine being stationary and Caleb's being woodworking. We've thought long and hard about how we'd like to execute these hobbies into making them a bit of a side hustle, I suppose. We've thought about Etsy and Offer Up but have always felt kind of shy about putting ourselves out there and also don't really have the time or resources to market products to the max since we have day jobs. Well when I mentioned to Caleb that I wanted to start up a little lifestyle blog for our growing family it sparked the idea of maybe putting up some of his designs on the site so that you all can see them in real life through our home tour posts. If you don't know, a lot of the furniture in our home is made by Caleb! We often get questions about where we got pieces and I always say with so much pride that my hubby made it! He has really refined his skills and is finally confident that he can create pieces that everyone would love to have in their homes, too. So as we get our stock up and put up home tours you'll be able to shop those pieces from our Shop page! As for my little creative piece in stationary, I just love all things papers. I pick up journals and cards even when I don't need them and I love snail mail. I always have an idea for cards or invitations that I'd like to send to people but a lot of times I run in to that road block of I can't find what I'm looking for or I have such a good idea for something that I should just create it myself! Well I'd like to share those ideas with all of you, too! So keep an eye on that little corner of the site as we build it up with all of our favorite little things.

And that's it for now! I don't want to confine myself to just these topics but I believe this is a good basis and what I've been itching to write about for a long time now. I hope you enjoy Tiny Dapper Fox and find some fun inspiration from it! Please leave me a comment and let me know if there are any topics that YOU would like for me to cover, too. Hope you have the happiest of days!