We are halfway through the work week, hooray! I can't wait for this weekend mostly because I am excited for everyone to open their gifts. We bought Anthony's dad this shirt for Father's Day and I plan on making him this card to go along with it, we are gifting Anthony's mom a necklace similar to this one and earrings like these for her birthday and I made Anthony a gift based off this pin I found but I am unable to find the original source (please leave the link below if you know so I can give proper credit). I decided to show a tutorial in how I achieved the look for our frame.

Welcome back guys! I am kinda getting caught back up on my blog post schedule and I am excited for the weekend as always! Did this week fly by or what? Probably helped that it was only a 4 day work week for Anthony to seem so. What do you guys have planned for the weekend?

Before we get ready for a birthday party this weekend, it's time for the next roundup of my everyday style. Remember for real time feed follow me on Instagram (@stormieariel) and my outfits are always captioned with #stormiearielstyle and if you can't get enough of my Little Love she has her own hashtag #sophiamanuela

I think this month, I was definitely coming into my own and getting more comfortable with my style again. As some of you may know I was struggling with my style as a nursing momma but just pull up that shirt girl! You don't need fancy nursing tops to feed your child. You can still rock your normal wardrobe, look fashionable and feed the kid. Win, win, win for everyone.

Olive and black and white stripes are a no brainer and are always a go-to match in my book.

Hey guys! How was your Memorial Day weekend? I hope yall didn't miss me too much (or maybe I do) with my odd blog post schedule last week and taking the three day weekend off to enjoy with my little family. We were a little busy enjoying dinner Friday night with our besties, clothing/gaming thrifting on Saturday (but had no luck), surprise visit to the in-laws on Sunday since they couldn't make it to us due to back road flooding (they're country folk and don't do freeways) and lastly taking Little Love to the Downtown Houston Aquarium on Memorial Day. Although it was mostly for our enjoyment, there were a few moments where she just stared and followed the little fishies swim around in their tanks. And lets not talk about how the white tiger jumped on the glass wall and growled right in front of someone's face.

Now about today's post, after doing a book review last week on The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, I decided to do a more thorough book review on The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth. If you been around you will remember me briefly discussing this book as one of my pregnancy must haves.

Hey guys! So I know I'm veering a little off schedule by posting on a Thursday and missing Wednesday but it's been crazy busy over here the last few weeks. Last week Sophia and I spent a few mornings attending my pre-k classes graduations and end of year parties. Our water heater broke (yay for cold baths, not), however it did get me out the house to go for a run. I was hoping I would sweat so much that the cold water would feel good, kinda worked, kinda not but thank God we have hot water again and I was finally able to shave my legs. And Anthony will be starting school again come this fall so things are gonna get more crazy around here while we try to figure out this parenting gig. But you know, life happens so quickly or at least it seems so now that we have Little Love. I mean come on how is my little baby already almost three months?!? I just can't deal right now so moving on.

I was initially planning to do a Memorial Day Inspiration outfit for today but the weather did not cooperate with me last Saturday so since I loved the outfit I wore to the Houston Blogger Union Meetup so much I decided to share the details in it's own post instead of waiting for my next edition of stormieariel style (check out my first roundup here). However, it rained Sunday as well and we were only able to quickly snap these photos on our porch.

About a week before the Houston Blogger Meetup, I started wondering what I should wear as I have seen on Instagram from other blogger events, bloggers typically dress to impress and since I typically stick to my mom uniforms, I will take any excuse to dress up when I can. But what is a girl to do when all her clothes are last season and she is still sporting a baby pouch and doesn't have the money to buy new clothes? Well, I went to my spring pinterest board to see what styles I have been loving and how I could recreate some of those looks by remixing my closet.  I knew I only had two options for pants unless I wore my maternity pants since most of my pants still don't button. It was either my white crop pants or my olive crop pants but knowing my white crops have a small stain I opted for the olive crops. Than came pinterest inspiration:

For as long as I could remember, I have always wanted a garden; filled with flowers, vegetables, fruit, you name it. I tried my first hand at gardening a few years ago when we were living in a tiny apartment. I bought lettuce seeds, jalapeno seeds and green bean seeds and I planted them in containers. My green bean plant was the only one to grow but I only harvested two green beans. TWO. That was it. To be fair, our porch of the apartment was very shaded with no sunlight at all so I gave up.

When we bought our first house, I was excited to carve out a place to garden and when my dog Olive died we made a remembrance garden with flowers but our other dog Bella decided to dig all that up so I gave up again.

Well now with this house, Bella hasn't been digging as much and Anthony decided he wanted to build something with some of the old fencing I have been hoarding. You can guess by the title of what he decided to build me, right?

So I'm gonna share the pictures and process he took to make me this little ol' box. There are no specific measurements involved as he made use of the pieces we had so you can customize this to whatever size you want.


Once he gathered all the pieces he planned to use for our box, Anthony cut down the pieces so they can be the same length, 7 long pieces (2 sides, 5 bottom supports) and 2 short pieces for the other sides.



Although Bella has already eaten the jalapeno plant and trampled over my basil but my cilantro is thriving!



Do your animals destroy your chance at having a successful garden?