Hello, 2013

Baby girl ringing in the New Year last year

Hello there!  A lot has happened since I last checked in.  A lot of good, bad, and in between moments that resulted in a stronger, more grateful me.  Instead of doing a giant recap post to cover all of the awesome and not-so-awesome events that have occurred since May, I decided to just start fresh.  Hey, isn't that what the New Year is all about?!

With the New Year comes reflection.  Usually I do not set resolutions, but this year I decided to make a list of goals that will {hopefully} result in a happier, more fulfilled me. 

My main goal for 2013 is simple: to be content. 

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So often, especially lately, my thoughts have been beginning with "I want..."  My wish lists range from materialistic things to larger, life-altering things.  It is a never-ending cycle that makes me lose track of the abundant blessings in my life.  Instead of spending any more time thinking of what I want, I plan to strive to focus on my blessings and be content with what I have and where I am.  

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I hope to take time daily to stop and really think about how awesome life is.  God has blessed me in so many ways, and although I don't have the trendiest closet or a perfectly decorated house and I am not where I hoped to be a year ago, my life is pretty darn awesome.  It is time that I let the beauty of the present shine through the wish lists that have been clouding up my life.

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With that, my friends, I wish you the happiest of years.  Let's make 2013 a great one!

Fancy seeing you here!

For the past several months, I have been completely consumed with grad school.  This has resulted in everything and everyone being put on the back burner for entirely too long.  I have a terrible habit of becoming overly stressed which makes juggling a social life with work and school seem impossible.  I feel like I have been a bad wife, daughter, sister, friend, employee... the list goes on.  Good news though!  I am on break until June!  I am so excited to get some relaxation in, catch up on DVR, clean my house, work on house projects, and, most importantly, spend time with the people I love the most.  Since I am ALL about lists, I thought it would be fun to write a Summer Break To Do List.  So, here goes...

Summer Break To Do List

• Apply to Checkpoint 1 - Teacher Education
• Clean the house
• Set up lunch or dinner dates with friends
• Get lots of family time in
• De-popcorn upstairs ceilings (so far, I've done 2 of the 4 rooms upstairs)
• Paint upstairs rooms (waiting on the hubs to finish smoothing out the de-popcorned ceilings)
• Write my observation teacher a thank you note
• Go to a concert (Done!  With a few more on the books.)
• Read for pleasure (Loving this!!!)
• Go to the pool
• Take a nap (I am usually not a nap girl, but I took one today and it was AMAZING!)
• Catch up on DVR
• Go for a hike with the hubs
• Go to the beach for a long weekend
• Get a head start on some assignments or reading for next semester (yes, I am a nerd)
• Study for the GACE (I take the Middle Grades Social Studies Gace on June 16th)

I know I am leaving lots off, but this is a good start.  As you can see, it's a mix of work and fun, with emphasis on the fun.  I haven't had a summer break where I wasn't working full time since 9th grade, so I couldn't be more excited to get my first real summer. :)

HAPPY SUMMER!!!

Anniversary Creativity

My husband and I are coming up on our 2nd anniversary in October.  This year, I have been inspired by so many sentimental DIY art projects on Pinterest and I wanted to try my hand at one to give my special hubby on October 10th.  Well, that didn't work out.  I hid it under my side of the bed because I didn't have time to wrap it before he got home.  Of course, that was the first day he has ever looked under the bed.  I wasn't quick enough to distract him, so he found it, lifted it up, and asked "What is this?"  Can't surprise that boy for nothin', I swear.  BUT it did have the effect I wanted, so it all worked out. :)  Now I just need to figure out something else to do so that he can have a special surprise to open on our anniversary.

Anyways, here was my inspiration:

Source: Pinterest

Source: Pinterest

And this is my end result:

I love how it turned out.  I used a reading from our wedding called "Blessing of the Hands."  I absolutely love everything about that passage and thought it would be the perfect thing to use for this sentimental piece.

To do it, I typed out the whole passage in Microsoft Word line by line and copied and pasted it until it filled the whole page.  You don't want to have any line breaks that are common in most poems and readings.  Instead, you'll want to type everything out consecutively so it looks like run-on sentences.  I printed it out on some white cardstock I had lying around.  Then I used my heart craft punch to punch across the page in rows.  I lucked out because a lot of my favorite words ended up being in the center of the hearts, but you could always target your favorite words.  Then I took it away with Cozy.Cottage.Cute's tutorial, minus the grid she mentioned.  I just eyed the hearts and they ended up lining up nicely.  You could also use a ruler to keep it level and spaced perfectly if you don't have the grid. 

This was a fun and easy project that brings so much meaning to our home.  We haven't decided where we're going to hang it yet, but we know we want to showcase it in our bedroom.  It's the perfect reminder of one of the most important days of our lives and one of our favorite passages.

Your butt crack is showing

Please don't take offense to the title of today's post (and please don't look behind you to double check).  It has nothing to do with you.  It has to do with pillows.  No sew pillows, to be exact.  Today I decided to finally take on a no sew project.  A few things led to this:  First, Centsational Girl inspired me with her tutorial.  Second, I fell in love with the cloth napkins at Target.  Third, Pinterest reminded me of the tutorial.  Fourth, I needed a break from reading and writing papers for grad school. :)

Let's go back for a second.  My husband and I bought all dark brown furniture for our living room.  We thought it was a good idea at the time... You know, the dark color would hide stains (we have 3 nephews and 3 honorary nieces, so the baby stain potential is pretty large) and hide Bailey's fur (black fur does NOT work on light colored furniture).  When the brown furniture combined with our beige walls, I immediately got overwhelmed by a feeling of "blah."  We won't be painting our walls any time soon because they connect to our foyer (we have a catwalk type upstairs thing going on) and that would be a ridiculous project.  So the beige and brown combo are here to stay.  In order to bring some color to the room, we bought some fancy blue and brown pillows from Ross before we even moved in.  I like them, but don't LOVE them and sometimes I feel like they are too fancy for our style.  They have an elegant floral design on them and are made out of a shiny material.  This no sew tutorial gave me an opportunity to bring in some fun color on the cheap.

I'm not going to go through the tutorial because Centsational Girl does an excellent job, but I will show you my results.  Here's my final product (and yes, our couches look green at night.  It's the weirdest thing.  I promise they are chocolate brown.):

I absolutely love the patterns and the colors.  It's a similar blue to what we had, but on a cotton-based fabric instead of that shiny stuff.  And I like the addition of a playful yellow.

The one thing I'm not so sure about is the giant butt crack showing in the back:

Nobody likes a showing butt crack.

Centsational Girl warned everyone in her tutorial that the insert may pop out a bit in the back, depending on how big the insert is.  She recommended using a safety pin or two to secure it.  I'm not a big fan of that idea, simply because we are huge pillow users.  They're not just for show in this house.  We're always squishing them in some way or another, so I wouldn't want the cold hard safety pins to be up against anyone's face or skin.  My husband loves the pillows, which I am super excited about, so I need to find a way to make them work.  My crafty friend suggested using Velcro.  I may give that option a try to take care of the pesky problem or I may just put the crack against the couch and try my best to pretend it's not there. :) We will see!

Cost breakdown:
4 cloth napkins from Target (yellow) $9.99
4 cloth napkins from Target (blue) $9.99
Heat n Bond Hem Regular Strength from Hobby Lobby $1.99

All in all, I spent under $25.00 for 4 "new" pillows!  This is huge, considering one pillow is usually $10.00 minimum if you find a stinkin' great deal at Ross.  Most decorative pillows are much more.  So I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Holy Stripes

Earlier this week, I mentioned my dreams of transforming my half bath into this:

Young House Love

During my hookie day, I painted the poopy brown walls a beautiful ivory.  Sherry and John at Young House Love said that it took them under 4 hours to transform their ivory bathroom into the striped heaven displayed above.  I foolishly thought I could do the same, so I planned to conquer the stripes one night after work.  Boy, was I wrong!  It took me an hour and a half to do one stripe.... Yes, I said ONE.  Don't judge.  Needless to say, I got completely discouraged and, after a much needed hug, the hubs encouraged me to call it quits for the night and offered to help me try again on a weekend when we don't have any time constraints.  Who knows when we'll get to the stripey fun, but right now I am fully enjoying the brightness of the ivory on the walls.  It is SUCH a big difference and makes me smile every time I walk by.  It's also a good reminder that it's okay to take my time with things and just let it be.

Hookie

According to the Urban Dictionary, the term "hookie" is defined as "A day in which liberty is taken upon oneself to exclude themself from school or work obligations while, most likely, pretending to be sick or having a death in the family. Usually this time is spent with a significant other (i.e. hookie for nookie), a sports activity (i.e. golf or playstation), or just plain sitting on ones ass all day editing & writing definintions for modern slang words over the internet. Commonly referred to as "playing hookie"."  For some reason, this definition does not include "working one's boot-ay off doing home improvement projects with a significant other."  Weird.

 

Why the vocab lesson?

 

Yesterday, I played hookie.  Before you shake your finger at me with an ever-dissapproving look in your eye, hear me out.  My husband is a firefighter.  This means that he works 48 hours on (yes, 48 hours away from me) and then has 72 hours off.  Because of his schedule, we rarely have days off together where he isn't just coming off an exhausting shift or about to start a new one.  This has left our huge home improvement wish list / to do list just lying there all sad and lonely.

 

Last week, my husband helped his co-worker out by switching shifts with him.  This gave him a Sunday off (YAY!).  And the best part of this particular Sunday???  NO PLANS WHATSOEVER!  Usually when we have weekends together, it's already stocked full of plans with friends and family, which is amazing, but that also means we never get to have our carefree days or our Lazy Sundays filled with movies and Chinese take-out that filled our early dating years.  We definitely made the most of this plan-free Sunday.  The hubs surprised me with a shopping spree for some summer clothes followed by an afternoon movie and then some quality "us" time.  Me being spoiled by a full day of hubs + me of course resulted in me wanting an extra day together so we could actually tackle some of our projects.  TOGETHER.  Isn't it amazing how raking dead stuck-together leaves [I swear those leaves must have been there since the beginning of the fall season... Disgusting] from all our "beds" could be fun knowing that your hubby is also working on the yard?  Weird, I know.  We woke up bright and early to get as much done in the yard as possible before it got blazin' hot.  I got a major arm and ab workout with those packed down leaves, while Hubs mowed and edged.  After that we ran a few errands to prepare for our afternoon projects.  While he worked on staining the deck, I painted our poop-brown (how appropriate) bathroom an ivory color.  It was not fun, especially considering I did not prime... Novice error (or just plain laziness that I ended up paying for).  After 5 or 6 coats (I can't remember at this point), the ivory finally covered the poop-brown nastiness.  Next step is taping off stripes and painting just a shade off.  I am so excited to see what this does for our tiny bathroom.  It already feels bigger and brighter after the first ivory coat.  My inspiration for this project came from a "little" blog called Young House Love, which I am obsessed over!  I am following every single step down to the paint colors because I fell in love with their pictures and because I am incapable of deciding on a paint color in under 2 months (Sad, I know).

 

Isn't it beautiful?
Young House Love

 

 

I am severely paying for all our hardwork today.  Every inch of my body is sore.  No exaggeration.  But I couldn't be happier.  The feeling of working on even the smallest project on our forever home with my forever mister was amazing.  I can't wait till our next To Do Day... Maybe it won't involve me playing hookie next time.