Hello!  My name is Ashley and this blog is an extension of my Etsy store and Instagram account.  I’m a mom and wife with a little monogramming side business, EmeryBodie.  I love sharing my creations via social media, but often a cool story accompanies the particular item I’m working on and a single Insta post or Etsy thumbnail doesn’t fully capture the essence.  In addition to my little monogram business, I’ll be sharing snippets of our family life, vacations, parties and celebrations, books (my book club, SC Book B*tches, rocks), plus random brain dumps.  Please follow along!

My husband and I live in South Carolina with our daughter, Emery, and son, Bodie.  Emery is eight and Bodie is five.  Both kids are in school full time this year, so I have more time to devote to EmeryBodie……and our house.  We’ve been in our house since 2010.  It was built in 1993 and I love its traditional bones.  However, a house is NEVER done.  In the time we’ve lived here we’ve survived a kitchen reno, a master bathroom reno, LOTS of cosmetic changes and major landscaping adjustments.  We recently painted the exterior white and added shutters.  Of course we’re still tweaking it….looking to add some Chippendale railing and a mahogany front door at some point in the near future.  But, I am thrilled to call this place home.  In case anyone is wondering, the brick and trim are SW Pure White and the shutters are BM Deep Creek.  The front door (although it’s hard to see in these pictures) is BM Covington Blue.

If you look closely at the house pictures you may notice our big mutt, Gipper, hanging out in the driveway.  He is 70+ pounds of pure love.  Gipper is about eighteen months old and we adopted him as a baby from the Humane Society.  Despite all of the damage he’s inflicted on our house, shoes, yard, etc., he’s the love of my life.  Seriously.  Watch out, hubby!  I kid.  Sort of.  Good thing I’m so enamored with this dog because he created one of the most embarrassing moments of my life while dropping the kids off at school the other day.  Of course I drive them every morning clad in my pajamas, looking like a hot mess.  Gipper usually joins us and we’ve yet to have an incident.  Until Monday.  The moose dog decided to jump over the backseat of my SUV and bolt into the school’s breezeway when he saw some kids he recognized.  I had to abandon my car in the car line and chase after him in all my early morning (no bra, no shoes, no makeup) glory.  This was a fun game for Gipper and he refused to get back in my car, instead opting to hop into my neighbor’s car who had stopped to help me corral the big oaf.  All I can say is I bet quite a few people got a good laugh at my expense.  I can only hope we brightened  some families’ Monday. 

My family loves to travel and we’ve taken quite a few wonderful trips with our extended family and other dear friends and their families.  I plan to feature a trip every few weeks on this blog as part of my “Travel Tuesday” segment.  I hope I can be a resource to any readers (all two of you! Ha!) who may be interested in planning trips, both near and far, for your own families and friends.  I feel like many of my children’s best memories stem from our vacations (or even staycations).

The big “header” photo at the top of my blog was taken through an airplane window shortly after takeoff from Exuma (Bahamas) this past July.  A recap of this trip will be the very first Travel Tuesday installment on EmeryBodie next week.  Spoiler:  it was incredible.  I’ll provide flight information as well as links to the resort and various operators we used during our stay.  This is definitely the perfect trip for families.

That’s probably enough for day one, huh?  I look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.  Please feel free to contact me with any questions you may have about any of the content on the blog.  I’m still figuring out WordPress and will certainly have some goofs as I learn the ropes.  I’ll probably look back at these early posts one day and cringe, but I’m giving myself a grace period and accepting the fact that this contains errors.  Just hopefully not for long.