We have a winner(s)!

We have a winner of these earrings from Piedra Studios -- commenter #1, a.k.a. Maya from Completely Coastal! Congratulations, Maya. The earrings have found a good home with a fellow beach babe.


The other winners are everyone who left a comment on my 100th blog post, helping raise money for Hudson Cradle Home for Infants. From those who left a comment for the first time, to the amazing employees and friends of “the Cradle” who came by to comment, to those who came by many, many times (like Marybeth and The Quintessential Magpie :-), to those who helped drive traffic to my post (like Renovation Therapy), to my friend at Empire Coffee who tucked money in my hand Christmas Eve to give to the babies…I can not thank you enough.

There were 109 comments, which means the final winners of the day are the seven babies currently residing at Hudson Cradle. As I mentioned in my original post, the company I work for will match what I raised dollar-for-dollar. And, I got some incredibly good news from the executive director of Hudson Cradle: The William E. Simon Foundation is in the midst of a grant challenge, so they’ll match every dollar donated by me and my company. PLUS, there’s a Hudson County, NJ, based organization that read my blog post and may be able to match what I raised.

Wow. WOW. A million thank yous to everyone who helped.

In other news on the “home front” (literally), it was a year ago this week that we closed on the shore house! We took a “walk through” of our home this weekend and are pretty excited by the progress we’ve made. To mark the occasion, I got the man of the shore house a portrait of the home for Christmas. “Wait,” the observant readers among you might be saying. “Didn’t your mom give you a house portrait?” What can I say; great minds think alike. The one I had done is a smaller oil on board work that can rest on the mister’s bookshelf at work to remind him “there’s no place like home.” Plus it was pretty interesting to see two very different artists' takes on the house. Here’s the one I had done by the talented Hudson, NY, artist Gretchen Kelley. I first learned of Gretchen’s work this summer on the blog Newlywedisms and almost immediately commissioned a painting of Casa Shore House. Here’s how it came out:

And here’s the one that my mom had done. If you didn’t see my original post about this painting, click here to see some of the amazing detail in this watercolor by local artist Theresa Troise Heidel:

And here she is on the one night it snowed so far this year, all decked out for the holidays with her window candles (always wanted a house to do the candle thing with. :-)

It’s been quite a year here at the shore house, and we’re both looking forward to many, many more. Thanks for being a part of it…I’ve loved “meeting” so many people as a result of the house.

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Finally I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that today would have been my dad’s 67th birthday. I miss him every day, some days more than others. Today is one of those days.