Thrift Style Thursday - Fabulous Floral

It's Thrift Style Thursday - and this week our theme is Fabulous Floral.  I actually had a little trouble with this one.  I used to own a ton of floral things and I am finding I don't actually have all that many floral pieces anymore!  I am such a girly girl about a lot of things - but I've never been that drawn to floral.  Anyway, I have a skirt and a dress that could have worked, but it's another rare chilly day so I instead opted for pants and this fun floral top I bought off an Instagram shop.

I decided to attempt outdoor photos for the first time in ages as well today.  I had some extra time when I dropped off Oliver this morning and my parents have a fantastic backyard, so I decided to take advantage of it!  It's one of my favorite places in the world - they finished it right in time for my senior prom, so of course we did photos back here with all of our friends.  We had our engagement party back here and several other parties with friends before I moved out when we got married.  I just love their patio so much!

Sweater - Style & Co (thrifted), Floral shirt - Court's Crazy Closet (Instagram shop)

Pants - Denzien (thrifted), Shoes - from cousin

I hope to use their patio for other outfit of the day photos when I have the chance!  Might as well take advantage of the time I spend there dropping off and picking up Ollie!
For other floral fun, check out the other Thrift Style Thursday gals at the links below!

Spoolish//Sandpaper Kisses//Sincerely Miss J//Confessions of a Refashonista//

Alligator Toe//Buttons&Birdcage//Snippets With Alex//Eclecticity//Being Zhenya//

Erika's Style Diary//Sistas from Cali//Rachel's Lookbook//

The Two Cent Chick//Lipstick And Yarn//Nuttier Than Nutella

Favorite things

This dress is one of my very favorite things.  I know you're all going - ok Beth, every dress you wear you tell us is one of your favorites ever.  Fine, this dress is one of my favorites ever for FALL.  How's that?  It seriously has some of the best colors for fall.  It's also been in my wardrobe since close to the beginning of this entire blog!  I was looking at it and figured, the waistline is very high in this dress, might I squeeze in at least one wear of it while I'm pregnant?  The answer, happily, is yes!

I was pretty dang excited.  I'm guessing in another month or so it might not be the case, although there is a lot of room in the skirt of this dress.  At any rate, I'm going to enjoy it for today, that's for sure!!

Other favorite things in my outfit today?  Ruffles in the sweater, ruffles in my Jenna Lou bag, tweed on my shoes.  You just can't go wrong when you wear all your favorite types of things.

Dress - Axcess by Clairborne, thrifted

Sweater - Style&Co, consigned

Bag - Jenna Lou Designs

Shoes - DSW

Jewelry - Bead for Life

For fun, I searched my archives and found the many other ways I've worn this dress in the last two years. 

September 2011, October 2011, March 2012, August 2012, December 2012, January 2013, February 2013, March 2013.  There might be more too, but these are the ones I easily found.  It's been quite a versatile piece I guess!!

Inspiration Monday - Summer returns

Hello everyone!  I am back again!  We had a fantastic weekend away, we couldn't have asked for better weather.  But it is very nice to be home too.  I have never appreciated my own bed more now that I'm pregnant than I ever have before, I know that much!!

I could do without coming back to work, but hey, as always, taking the sting off of that is Inspiration Monday with two birds.  Today's inspiration comes from another famous person I've never heard of - Poppy Delevigne.  Nice laid back look from her though!

I meant to do an outfit for this while I was up north, but totally forgot to pack the right things.  I was going to skip this week, but then decided, I can make this work for work.  So here we have it!

It's going to be hot and muggy later today, so I'll likely lose the sweater, at least when I'm outside.  We have been so spoiled by nice weather, this humid and hot stuff is going to be hard to take.  Summer is definitely not over yet even if the stores and coffee shops serving pumpkin lattes starting today are trying to convince us otherwise!

Tank top - Michael Kors, consignment

Sweater - Style and Co, consignment

Capris - Simply Vera, Kohls

Bag - Lulus

Sunglasses - Fun Sisters Nisswa

Sandals - Mootsie Tootsie, from cousin

Necklace - Camy Couture

Bracelets - S&D

Speaking of summer starting to dwindle down, I can't believe how much morning light we've lost in just about a week's time.  I got up early enough to go for a walk this morning and it was so dark I said, nope, going to do a workout DVD instead!  It was also a little cloudy, so outdoor pictures weren't going to work out.  Indoor ones sure are a challenge, but I do my best!

I also wanted to share a close up of my fun new sunglasses I bought up north to replace my favorite pair that I lost quite awhile ago.  And I haven't shown off a Stella and Dot arm party for awhile, so you get one of those today too.

And now I'll be making the rounds and trying to catch up with all of you!  I feel like it's been forever!  What's new in your worlds???

Be sure to head over to two birds over here for more Inspiration Monday looks!

Power color

 I think pink is my power color.  I'm not talking baby pink, I mean this hot, bright magenta colored pink that my pencil skirt is here.  And maybe it's the pencil skirt itself - but I always feel very powerful, professional and put together whenever I wear it.  It gives me an air of confidence.  Or something.  I am so glad I have still been able to wear it while pregnant.  Again, let's give it up for elastic waistbands!

I tell you, I needed a powerful, confidence boosting type outfit for work yesterday!  It was my "Friday" and it was crazy hectic.  It helped make the time go faster though!  And my reward at the end of the day was my favorite burger and fries and root beer.

 Shirt - Style and Co, consignment

Sweater - Old Navy

Skirt - two birds vintage via b (resale)

Sandals - Mootsie Tootsie, from cousin

Necklace - Maurices

Bracelet - Bead for Life

As of this posting, I'm likely in a car headed north for another short getaway.  It's our annual cabin weekend with our music group.  We often go in September and end up with lousy weather, so we moved it up a month and the weather sounds fantastic now.  I cannot wait to be out on a boat on the lake.  A beer in hand would be nice too, but I'll settle for a cold root beer, which has been my favorite lately!

And I had to do my weekly bump shot a couple of days early. Friday marks 23 weeks.  We're plugging along.  Still lots to be done, but getting closer every passing week!

Have a great weekend!

All the color

Good day all!  Welcome back to Monday.  Sadly, I'm not doing Inspiration Monday today.  I had the perfect outfit on yesterday, no joke, but never got time to photograph it because we had a very busy and hectic Father's Day.  The best laid plans I guess!  Instead, I have this fun and colorful ensemble today and at least I'm not at Jury Duty, so that's something right?

I've been running late in the mornings as of late, so I've been sneakily taking pictures at the office as soon as I get in.  I regret it today, it was very nice out this morning, would have been a good outdoor picture day!  Perhaps tomorrow will work out better!

Shirt - Style and Co, consignment

Capris - Simply Vera, Kohls

Sandals - Issac Mizrahi for Target, thrifted

Necklace and bracelet - Bead for Life

Did a little jewelry close up on these two items, because while I think I have before, it's been awhile and some folks were asking when I wore this necklace last week.  I love these pieces because not only did I support a good cause to get them, they go with just about everything given the multiple colors in them.  I'm just in a big color mood today!  More color!  All the color!

And finally, if you missed it yesterday, it was my 2nd blogiversary and I did a huge blog love post highlighting the reasons I love many of you - so head on over here to check it out - and again, thanks for all the nice words!  You are all the reason I love to do this!

Inspiration Monday - Good times

Hello everyone!  Happy Monday!  Thank you all for the sweet comments on my last post!  As I had said, I don't always recognize our dating anniversary anymore, but 15 years was too big of a milestone to pass up!  We had a great day and I'll get to more of that in a minute, but first up, we have Inspiration Monday!  Today the birds picked Nikki Reed and my age is showing again in that I don't quite know who she is.  Oh well, she's got a pretty chic outfit on at any rate!

Once again, I decided to make the outfit work for work - so here we go.  I chose dressy black pants and two of the shirts my cousin gave me.  Wonder if she ever wore these together?  I also got a haircut over the weekend.  It had only been about three weeks since my last one, but I just felt like it was a shaggy, hot mess honestly.  This time I told the person I wanted a spiky pixie and I think she got the idea!  I'm happy anyway.

And speaking of happy, let's get back to my anniversary day with the Pants Monkey.  We went to a vineyard about an hour north and east of us in Wisconsin and enjoyed a lazy afternoon of tasting wine.  It was really quite good.  We brought several bottles home with us!  In the evening we headed down to a newer restaurant in Minneapolis - it's been there a year already actually, but we hadn't had a chance to until now, called the Butcher and the Boar.  It's definitely a "meat" kind of place, but I was surprised at the large number of seafood dishes they had as well.  We're carnivores though, so of course we had ourselves some meat.  It was delish.  I would love to go back there sometime, we were definitely treating ourselves so it was spendy, but I bet we could go back and maybe not spend quite as much!  After dinner we were pretty much in a food coma and headed home to watch our all time shared favorite movie, Punch Drunk Love.  It was a nice day!

White shirt - White House, Black Market (from cousin)

Sweater - Jones New York (from cousin)

Pants - Style and Co, Macy's

Necklace and bracelets - S&D

Sunglasses - Xhilaration, Target 

The rest of my weekend involved breaking my shopping ban a little early (more to come on this, I'm so excited about my goodies, even if a Facebook friend did comment "um what happened to abstaining?) seeing my blogging besties Lori, Cambria and Amanda, doing a beer tasting and enjoying pizza with some other good friends, and eating my favorite Mexican meal at home to close out the weekend.  All in all, it was a good one!  And it's another short week for this girl, so no complaints there either!

Don't forget to head over to two birds to see the other Inspiration Monday outfits!  And have a fantastic day!

Inspiration Monday - Let's rewind

Aww, Monday again?  How did it get here so quickly?  I'm going to be running the weekend through my head on replay over and over because it was spectacular.  Taking the sting off of Monday as usual is Inspiration Monday and today we have Ashley Madekwe - once again I have no idea who she is.  But she's got a cute outfit!

I decided to make it work appropriate, so no jeans, but I kind of went after her peplum look and a little bit of sparkle in my jewelry.  And yep, pictures at the office again.  I think this may be my new fall/winter spot for awhile.  We'll see how it goes.

So I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seats wondering where secret date night ended up taking us.  I realized I didn't share about that in my post from yesterday.  Well it may not seem like a big deal to some of you, especially anyone reading who lives in a coastal town that can have fresh, good quality seafood whenever they want, but we went to Red Lobster for dinner.  I had commented to the Pants Monkey a few weeks ago that we hadn't been there in awhile, so he treated us to that for dinner on Friday.  And then after dinner we went on a wild goose chase looking for a specific kind of dark chocolate, because we decided for dessert that dark chocolate and scotch would be lovely.  But everywhere we went the specific one we wanted was sold out because apparently there was a run on Lindt dark chocolate bars or something.  We finally found some at a drugstore of all places.  It was kind of fun running around from store to store though, we were being silly and carefree and I loved it.  Then we went home and watched Red State, written and directed by Kevin Smith whom we are big fans of and he said it would be a horror movie - it's not really horror.  It's definitely creepy and maybe more of a psychological thriller, but horror?  Not as much.  Anyway, overall it was a good date night!

So after we had two days in a row of crazy fun times, we opted to be pretty lazy on our Sunday.  I worked on laundry and blog stuff.  Still, I'd love to just hit repeat and do the weekend all over again.  But alas, we press on!

As with every Monday, make sure you head over to two birds for more Inspiration Monday looks!

Jacket - unknown, via Clothes Mentor

Shirt - St. John's Bay, JCPenney

Pants - Style and Co, Macy's

Shoes - Sonoma, Kohls (old)

Necklace - S&D

Earrings - Butterfly Boutique

Inspiration Monday - Shopping win/fail

Hi friends!  I hope you all had good weekends.  We sure did.  Yesterday we did an Oktoberfest boat ride through Living Social on the Mississippi River and we ended up with fantastic weather.  I could not believe how we lucked out on that.  It's probably our last boat ride of the year, so I'm glad we made the most of it.

Now we're into the week and it's Inspiration Monday!  We have Leslie Bibb (no idea) here in a jacket I just want to steal off her body.  It's funky and cute and fun.  

Since I don't have a jacket like that I did my best with a funky button shirt instead.  And I had to wear my fun new shoes.  Yes, I am technically on a shopping ban but I made an exception for shoes.  I had gone to Target on Saturday with the intention of going in for some new tights and a few toiletries, etc.  I decided to wing past the shoe department just to see if anything good was on sale. 

These bad boys were sitting off on one of the benches, either abandoned or perhaps someone was planning on coming back for them.  I picked them up and noticed 1. they were my size and 2. they were only $4.99.  Well, if someone was coming back to grab them, too bad, they're mine now!  Then I found some bootie/shooties on sale as well in a color I've been wanting, so I grabbed those as well.  And I may have also bought one clothing item even though I said I wasn't buying clothes.  But everything was very cheap so I got some great deals, which means total shopping win!

Except I forgot the tights I originally went in for.  Oops.  Shopping fail.  Oh well!

Head on over to two birds to check out other Inspiration Monday looks!

Patterned shirt - Christopher and Banks (from cousin)

Black t-shirt - Mossimo, Target

Pants - Style and Co, Macy's

Shoes - Xhiliaration, Target

Necklace - Stella and Dot

Appreciation

Happy Wednesday friends!  In case I don't say it enough - I just want to say thank you to all of you who stop by, leave comments and show me a little love.  It makes my day and warms my heart more than you can know.  Yesterday I said I felt my outfit was boring and I had so many wonderful comments stating that it couldn't be further from boring. 

I'll let you in on a little secret too - I've been mildly cranky this week.  Works is a little frustrating and then there are those lovely monthly surge in hormones that I can't control - so again, your comments have really helped perk me up and cheer me up.  You guys are just the best.  I love this community so much!  Thank you all!

Today's outfit I'm pretty sure is a repeat of an outfit I wore back in the spring sometime.  I don't mind though, it's comfy and it's a bit classic feeling with the black and white.

And that's about all I got today. My mind is just a bit mush this morning! I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Outfit rundown:

Shirt - Alfani (handed down from cousin)

Pants - Style & Co, Macy's

Shoes - Rampage, DSW

Necklace - S&D

Bracelet - Charming Charlie

On we go

Isn't it a nice feeling when you wake up thinking it's only Wednesday but in fact find out it's already Thursday?  I love short work weeks!

Still coolish outside today so I went the pants route again.  I figure at least I won't get sick of my skirts and dresses too early this summer at this rate!  Warmer weather is coming this weekend I hear.  This second picture isn't the greatest here, but I wanted to show off my pretty flower pots in the background.  I haven't planted flowers in a couple of years so I'm kind of excited to have some this year.  I chose petunias, simply because they seem to be the lowest maintenance kind of flower I know, we used to plant them at my parents house and they'd take a beating and still be alive, sometimes even after the first snowfall, I'm not kidding.  And I don't have much of a green thumb, so I figured these bad boys were a good choice!

Beyond that I have nothing terribly witty or exciting to share.  Much less tired than I was yesterday, but apparently I'm just a bit boring today!  As Willy Wonka would say, "Good, then, on we go!"

Outfit rundown:

Shirt - Arizona Jeans, JCPenney

Pants - Style and Co, Macy's

Bracelet and watch - Charming Charlie

Necklace - thrifted

Shoes - Duck Head (from mom)

Plain Jane

There isn't anything terribly special about today's outfit, it is the last shirt I received from the divine Miss K, and it is fun and funky like the others, but it is also fairly simple.  Overall it's just a simple old black and white type outfit today.  I do like it, but it feels a smidge boring.  Sometimes boring is good though right?

I was also lucky enough to receive a few pairs of shoes from her as well, as you saw on Easter, so I pulled out a pair to wear today and tried to show them off in this second photo.  They are pretty basic black pumps, but you know what?  I didn't have a pair.  *GASP* what kind of woman am I?  Doesn't every girl have one pair of basic black heels?  Anyway, I love these because they are actually comfortable!!  That is always my problem with heels.  They are a brand called Lifestride - I think I've seen them at DSW before.

I stuck a pair of sandals in the car though because right after work today I'm finally getting myself a pedicure!  Fortunately it is going to get a bit warmer today compared to how it has been, so I shouldn't freeze my toes off!  I hope some warmer weather comes back to stay so I can make sandals a part of my wardrobe again!

Outfit rundown:

Shirt - Alfani, Macy's (From cousin)

Pants - Style and Co, Macy's (old)

Shoes - Lifestride (from cousin)

Necklace - thrifted