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At The Picket Fence with Vanessa Hunt

Where Ideas for your Home Meet Inspiration for your Heart

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Fall Home Tour 2018
Community Doesn’t Just Happen in Front of a Barn
Simple Spring Tabletop Decorating
Hot Apple Cider Station

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My Crazy Christmas Shopping at Hobby Lobby

October 31 for me this year meant a quick trip to pick up discounted candy at Target (apparently our family has zero self-control if candy is purchased too far in advance of Halloween) and then a stop at Hobby Lobby to see what treasures I might find on the 1,578 shelves filled with Christmas decor. It had all been there since late July but, as much as I love the holidays, I staunchly refuse to ... continue reading...

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Devotionals

Being Mom and Friend

What I Learned From the Fumes

Dear Hallmark Channel

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Welcome to Autumn

My Most Simple Fall Home Tour Ever

Copper and Feathers Fall Mantel

Five Minute Fall Decorating

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Latest Recipes

Grandma’s Banana Bread

Homemade Apricot Bread and Apricot Ginger Freezer Jam

10 Delicious Brunch Recipes

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My Crazy Christmas Shopping at Hobby Lobby November 4, 2019
A New Light For the Kitchen October 15, 2019
My Most Simple Fall Home Tour Ever September 27, 2019
Copper and Feathers Fall Mantel September 18, 2019
Five Minute Fall Decorating September 6, 2019

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Happy weekend friends!! This has been one of my favorite kind of days today. The boys went and had some guy time and my daughter and I got some sweet girl time and now we’re all cozied in together at home enjoying just ‘being’. I’m doing some baking and dreaming about this year’s Christmas mantel. This photo is from a few years ago but it’s still one of my all-time favorites!

What’s been the best part of your day today? ❄️

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Matthew 7:13-14 says, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.”.
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When I was a little girl we took a trip to Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson, MO. One of the attractions there is the Marvel Cave. The whole theme park was actually built right around the cave! I will never forget the feeling of descending into the darkness. We had to walk down a steep, narrow path and I could feel the rocky walls beginning to close in on me. From time to time, our guide would even have to call out for us to duck our heads so as not to whack them on rocks that were jutting out. And just when it felt like we had been walking forever; just when it felt the most narrow and the most dark; just when we were starting to get really weary from navigating this path, we turned the corner and found ourselves awestruck as we gazed at this enormous room. Everywhere we looked there were stalactites and stalagmites. Lights had been installed and they reflected off of these formations creating the most beautiful colors on the walls. There were pools of water in a shade of aquamarine I had never seen before and waterfalls flowing from upper levels. That long, winding, damp trek had been so very worth it. The descent into darkness had revealed light…and life!

My prayer for you friends, is that you will look at that narrow path with the small gate as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to experience the kind of freedom that our souls are longing for. The wide and broad path of the world promises us a freedom that is fleeting and temporary. But at the end of the narrow path, there is hope and peace and life everlasting.

I’m choosing the narrow path. And in spite of the hardships, in spite of the challenges and the fears and the times that can feel as dark as the journey down into a cave, I wouldn’t trade a single minute of it.

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I was up half the night with a very sick kiddo so today I’m drinking ALL the coffee and my girl and I are going to hunker down and have a day at home to rest and recover. I absolutely hate it when my kids are sick but if there is a silver lining to it it’s that I get to do all of the fussing and caring and mama-ing that I don’t get to do as much lately now that they are tweens/teens. I’d prefer to not have a vomiting kid, but at least I get a whole day in the middle of the week to pour some extra love out on my favorite girl! And maybe we’ll both get a nap! 😴

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Happy Saturday friends!! We’re off to the pumpkin patch on this crisp Autumn day with the promise of food being the only thing that’s motivating my teenager to go! 🤣 One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from this stage of parenting tweens and teens is that you have to let your traditions change and grow as your kids change and grow. So the pumpkin patch we are going to today might not have a petting zoo and slides but it has food trucks and fire pits and we will all be together which is the whole point after all, right? 🍂. What are some of your favorite fall traditions?

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“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." (George Eliot)

Hope you have a deliciously beautiful Autumn day friends! 🍂

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It’s cold and windy and rainy outside so I’m just snuggled up on the couch after making our Saturday morning pancakes (I may or may not also have @hallmarkchannel Christmas movies on too!🎄) and planning out our hot cocoa station for this year. Here’s what I created a couple of years ago and I can’t tell you how much my family loves this annual tradition. It’s the very first area that is decorated in our home for the Christmas/winter season and it’s so fun to put a new spin on it each year!
What are you up to today friends?

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Welcome Friday!! I’m flinging open my door to you and I’m SO glad you’re here! 😅 Hope you all have a great day dear friends!

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Eleven years. It’s the longest I’ve lived in any house. We moved around quite a bit while I was growing up and I always wanted my kids to have the comfort and security that comes from spending most of their childhood in the same home. When we first walked through this house with our realtor, I remember spotting the window seat in an upstairs bedroom and I could so vividly picture my daughter, who was only 9 months old at the time, spending hours there reading and gazing out the window. Now, that same room with the window seat is bearing witness to the highs and lows of life as a tween girl and I love knowing that she will always have memories of the sanctuary that it has provided.

But, there has been one side effect to living in a home for so long that I wasn’t quite expecting. We’re starting to update what we have already updated once before!

Most recently, I decided that it was time to freshen up the light above our kitchen table and I was so thrilled to find this beauty!

I love the rusty tone and I think it looks pretty fantastic in this space. It’s softer than the black fixture that was here before which we hung when we first moved in and replaced the brass fixture that came with the house.
I’m so grateful to have lived here long enough to have this wonderful ‘problem’ of updating what we’ve already updated. Our home keeps evolving as our family keeps evolving and changing and I’m so grateful to finally have a place that truly feels like home. 🍂
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A few years ago, in a blog post about fall decor, I casually mentioned that every October I set out a pair of paper bag pumpkins (say that five times fast!) crafted by my children when they were each in kindergarten, respectively.

In one of the comments left for me, a reader told me that she would love to actually see those paper bag pumpkins.

I’ve wanted to share them with you ever since then. But, I always talked myself out of it. I mean, why would anyone but me care about them? And then I began to think about why I take those paper bag pumpkins out every year and what they mean to me.

In this season of motherhood, I’m experiencing that bittersweet sense of not only truly knowing that time is going by quickly but also this deep awareness of how little of it there is left. No longer do I see it stretching before me like some kind of yellow brick road meandering along until it meets the horizon.

So, I do things like putting out paper bag pumpkins every year.

Because sometimes the tangible items serve as the beginning of the intangible thread which connects us to the past, the present and the future.

We need to see a little bit more of this in blog posts and on social media, don’t you think? The things that reflect our real lives. Not the lives that we shove into a closet or hide in the laundry room in order to take the prettiest picture. But the ones that allow for the sweet, homemade crafts to peacefully coexists with the elegant home decor.

Because, in the end, it’s not the perfect lamp we found or the latest paint color we added to our walls which we will cherish the most. It’s those little reminders of the life we’ve lived. They remind us of the joys and the sorrows and all of the gloriously mundane days in between.

So hang up those popsicle stick ornaments on the Christmas tree, drink your coffee from the hand-painted mug you got for Mother’s Day that year, put your fanciest earrings in the little clay bowl crafted by tiny fingers and wrapped up in newspaper with all of the reverence of a sculptor and his masterpiece.

And I’ll be here putting out my paper bag pumpkins. 🍂

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