Joan Ellen Cornell

This kid and this dog. SWOON.
I put him to bed and was on my computer for a while (we share a room, so I am like, 10 feet away from him when i'm at my desk and he's in our bed). He woke up from a dead sleep, sat up, saw Lola laying there, said "Lola" and then cuddled up next to her and fell right back asleep. I pretty much died. Then came back to life and took this picture. I love these two, and especially together.
 Boy boy boy. Loves tools. Even if it's my flower printed hammer. Haha.
 Friends. I hope Nora is in P's life forever :)
No words...

In no particular order...

1. My iPhone. Pretty self explanatory. But really, I think i'm addicted to my phone. It's kind of a problem, and i'm gonna work on that...tomorrow ;)

If you're friends with me on Facebook or Instagram, you've probably seen these pictures recently. About a month and a half ago Porter and I started going to church. Flatirons Community Church to be exact. The place is huge, like, 15,000 members huge. Huge, and AMAZING. They're actually building a second location about 45 mins closer to my house than the main building is, so that'll be sweet for when the weather is bad and I can't (or don't want to) drive an hour away.
I've been wanting to go to this particular church for years, and i'm so happy that I finally got around to it. You see, i've never been a big "church person". I was raised Catholic (kind of). I got baptized and my first communion before I can really remember. My Grandmother was a Catholic school teacher, and my mom and her siblings were raised Catholic. Growing up, my mom didn't really force church on us...we only went for holidays and stuff. Then in high school, my friend Val and I found a church (in Illinois, but similar to the one i'm going to now) and would go every Saturday night for a service that was aimed at 20-somethings. It was fun, there was live music, we really enjoyed it. Then I went away to college and church became a thing of the past. I think it was around the time I had Porter that I started to miss it. I felt like something was missing and craved church again. But I let my lack of motivation take over and kept putting it off.
It's kind of like a lot of things for me...it's hard to start, but once I do I get hooked easily. So now we go every Sunday and I look forward to it all week. It's an amazing place to be for that hour once a week, and I feel like it's doing good things for me, especially while i'm in this particular place in my life. I have cried, I have laughed, I have really felt at home here, and i'm looking forward to keeping this a part of mine and Porter's life :)

I went shopping yesterday on Black Friday for the first time ever. I wasn't planning on it at all, but it started with this coat that I saw at Puma a couple days ago that I couldn't stop thinking about. So friday morning Porter woke up at 5:30am wanting milk, and I couldn't fall back asleep and he was kinda half awake for a while too...and I was thinking about that damn coat again. So I said "bye bye, let's go bye bye!" and he kept saying "noooo mom, sleeeep" I then had to bribe him. With the choochoo train at the mall, and more milk, and I even may have slipped ice cream in there too...at 5:30am I was promising my child ice cream. Ha. Buuut it worked and we were outta the house by 6:30, him with a banana in hand and milk (he forgot about the ice cream, phew), and me with an extra large thermos of coffee.
Even though I think it was ridiculous that Black Friday technically started on Thursday this year, i'm so very happy for that, because I got to the mall at about 7:15ish and parked right in the front. And there were barely any people in there. Awesome! So I got my new coat, along with several other clothing items for myself, and a couple things for Porter as well. I think i'm sold on Black Friday shopping now :)

I know i've been MIA for a while. Lots going on at the moment. I've also been toying with the idea of starting a completely new blog. I'm not sure yet if i'm going to do that, so I guess we'll see. I've also purchased my own domain (www.joanellen.com) and plan on changing my blog name to Joan Ellen. I am having trouble getting blogger to forward this address to my new domain name, that's why my blog has been offline or whatever for the past few days. I'm giving up for now and may end up starting a completely new blog using Wordpress and using my domain for that one. Or if anyone wants to help me figure this stupid Blogger/godaddy.com process out, I would be so appreciative!

I think I am also going to stop doing my InstaFriday posts. I feel like that's the only thing i've been posting for the last few months and it's boring me so i'm sure it's gotta be boring everyone else! I still want to post iPhone pics sporadically but I think i'll just pick a handful whenever I feel like it and instead of filling a post with Instagram pictures, use a few and write more about each one and what's going on around here.
Sooo. Happy Thanksgiving a day late! We had a great day, we spent it with a few friends and had an amazing dinner and an amazing time. Porter didn't really eat much, but that's not a big surprise. I made Butternut Squash Soup and it turned out delicious, i'm in love with it :)
I had his "house" (as he calls it) set up for a while, strung some lights on it, and he played in there a ton. We have fun reading books in there, and he also will lay in there and play on his Kindle too. It's put back away for the time being because we don't have much space around here for it, but hopefully someday when we have our own place it'll get to stay up permanently. I loved having forts when I was a kid and would like for him to be able to play in his all the time!
The weather here has been exceptionally amazing lately, considering the time of year. It's snowed a little bit a few times, but the sun comes back out and melts it all and we're back to dry parks and warm(ish) temps. That's one of my favorite parts of living in Colorado...even when it's cold outside, the sun is out 90% of days (no joke) and makes it feel much warmer than it is (and since we're pretty high in altitude where we live, we're also closer to the sun and it makes such a big difference!).
We went and picked out a Christmas tree today! Porter got to sit on Santa's lap and wasn't terrified this year like he was last year :) Santa asked him if he has been a good boy, and Porter said no. Freakin' hilarious. He says no to everything so I realize that he didn't really mean he'd been bad, but I was cracking up and so was Santa. I love our tree, and i'm really really excited to listen to some music and decorate it and the house tonight.

This week started out pretty shitty, and I plan on writing a post about that in the next day or two, but it's getting better and i'm trying to keep my head up.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.
I will figure out the whole blog thing soon, and i'll either be back here shortly with more posts, or I will come back and direct you to the new blog. We'll see what happens!

I better get this post up before Halloween gets too much farther behind us! I was kinda lazy this year on the costume front- I kept thinking that I needed to figure something out but never could actually do so.  Then about 3 days before Halloween I was picking P up from his dad's house and found this cow costume that must have been handed down to us. So cow it was. It ended up being pretty dang cute, and warm!
I didn't end up taking too many pictures, it was super windy and chilly so we kinda just hurried through all of the trick or treating (we went to a business area in town that hosted trick or treating in all of the stores).

Another awesome product, complimentary from Influenster!