Pretty box...

I needed to make a box to put recipes in for a wedding shower earlier this week so I hit up Pinterest.  As if I needed an excuse.  I didn't want to just cover a shoe box with wrapping paper.  Frankly, I stink at wrapping!  But in my search, I found this pretty box:

I though, "I can do that!"

So I did :)

Having a Bad day?

Are you having a rough day?  Feeling a bit down on yourself?  We all have days...sometimes weeks...like that.

But I have something to combat those yucky times with now.

Thank you, Gary Go!

One of those days...

It's been one of "those" days.

You know what I mean.

The days where you realize that somehow you have not washed you daughter's jeans and she now has no pants to wear to school.  How did that even happen??

So you are then running late getting your kids to school only to find that the road you usually take (so that you can avoid the blasted stupid-a-bouts and traffic) has a "road closed" sign sitting in the middle of the it.

You return home and thankfully the rest of the day is mostly uneventful.  Uneventful, because you are tired from staying up until 11:30 the night before to finish a really good book, and you have no energy to get anything done.  When did you get so old that you can't handle staying up until 11:30??

Then you get some possibly crummy news.  But you won't know for sure and it's not like you can do anything about it anyway.

AND THEN, while you are cooking dinner, you realize that you are low on milk.  So low, in fact, that you use the remainder in the recipe you are making and are still short thus leaving no milk for the kids to drink at dinner.  On the bright side, that doesn't happen very often and having juice at dinner this once won't hurt them.

So you soldier on with making the dinner and when it's time to add the final ingredient, you gracefully drop the canned chicken into the pot...can and all...thus splattering some of the contents of the pot all over the stove you just cleaned yesterday.

Did I mention that my hair looked like this today?

Forget me not

I cannot express how much I loved President Uchtdorf's talk yesterday during the General Relief Society Broadcast.  I know he hit home with a lot of sisters out there.  I've seen these "forget not" pics/quote popping up all over pinterest.  They are lovely!  As I was scrolling through pictures on pinterest, I saw this photo of some forget-me-nots that had grown into the shape of a heart.  It was such a sweet picture that I had to make up my own "forget not" pic with President Uchtdorf's kind reminders.

For Heidi...

It's not just Molly that uses her little legs as a blank canvas.

I still have yet to find the marker or figure out how Miss Seren got ahold of it in the first place.

Summer Break is HERE!!

Not even halfway into her first day of summer vacation and she's already snoozing the afternoon away :)

Bucket List

I'm turning 30 tomorrow...


HOLY CRAP!! I'M TURNING 30!!


T-h-i-r-t-y...THIRTY!!


ugh...


I know, I know...30 is not that old but I'm having a tough time wrapping my brain around this particular birthday.  So I decided to write out my bucket list because, at 30, I still have plenty of life left to be able to do all these things.


Here it goes:


1. Visit the British Isles and the Channel Islands...England, Ireland, Scotland, Guernsey
2. Get a bigger house...2 adults, 3 kids, 2 cats, 1 dog, 2 bedrooms...need I say more?
3. When I get a bigger house, have a RED room...I've always wanted to have a red room. Perhaps a library.
4. Serve a mission with my husband.
5. Visit Italy, France and Germany.
6. Paint again...I was never very good at it but I still enjoyed it.
7. Have a Steinway to call my own...words cannot express how it feels to play a Steinway.
8. Be completely debt free except for my home and perhaps a car AND STAY THAT WAY!
9. Visit all the Church historical sites...I've been to a few but I'd love to take the kids on a trip to see them all at once.
10. Finish all the genealogy I can.
11. Do all the temple work I can from those members of my family tree that I find.
12. Watch my children be sealed in the temple to their spouses.
13. Go to Disney...I've never been there but we're working on a five year plan to get there.
14. See a Broadway show and actually stay awake this time...I fell asleep during Titanic but I wasn't the only one.
15. Take a dip in the Great Salt Lake...I can't swim but I can float.
16. Try escargot...I might have to try it without actually knowing that's what it is.
17. Watch the wild horses of Shackleford Banks.
18. Get a pedicure.
19. Learn to swing dance.
20. See the Mona Lisa...I had the chance when I was in high school but my options were see what else the Met had to offer or wait in line for 2 hours to see the Mona Lisa.  I don't remember anything I saw at the Met but I bet I would have remembered seeing the Mona Lisa.
21. Go to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. and check out the Smithsonian while I'm there.
22. Take up photography again.
23. Read the complete works of Jane Austen...might have to watch the movies to understand exactly what is happening though.
24. Read the Bible from cover to cover.
25. Write a book...it will never be published but it would still be fun.
26. Watch the Indianapolis 500 and I don't mean on t.v.
27. Do 20 push ups...not the girl kind.
28. Visit a Renaissance fair.
29. Solve a Rubik's cube...without peeling the stickers off.


And finally...


30. Have some amazing kids.


I think I can check that last one off my list.

Down the drain...

I already posted this on good ol' Facebook but I felt the need to put it on here too because a couple of years ago I dropped something down the drain.

It was one of those birthstone baby charms.  The one I had for Teagan fell down the drain when the chain it was on broke right over the sink.  I was devastated.  I think Brad was a work so he wasn't able to take the sink apart to get the charm out.  Being the impatient control freak that I am, I decided I could do it myself.  I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what happened next.

Needless to say, this little trick would have save us about $30 in sink repairs, a lot of water under the sink and an argument :)

Something Down the Drain?

Feelin' crafty...

I was sweeping my dining room for this morning.  It's one tedious household chore that I actually kind of like to do.  Brushing Cheerios and random crumbs into a neat little pile makes me feel like I've accomplished something...might be a little bit of O.C.D. too.

Anyway...I was sweeping and trying to think of a way to get my almost 4 year old little boy to sit still long enough to learn the alphabet.  I didn't get to spend the one on one time with him that I did with our oldest and I feel very guilty about that.  So before he starts 4K next year, I want to try to do some catching up.

He loves rockets, jets, space, astronauts...and he flies around the house at lightning speed most of the day.  So I thought I'd make him rocket themed alphabet tracing pages.

I found a rocket graphic courtesy of NASA (thank you very much) and a free tracing font.  I couldn't be more pleased with how they came out and it took me less than an hour to do.  Best part--Logan actually sat down and did a few with some help from me.  I'm going to print some permanent ones on card stock and laminate them so we can reuse them.  But dang it was fun to make them!

Switch-a-roo

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a larger bedroom.  The bedrooms I had growing up were a normal size but what kid doesn't dream of having a huge room.  So when we bought our first house, I was excited to have a master bedroom to call my own.  I couldn't have predicted, however, that in the five short years we've lived in our two bedroom house, we would add two more children to our brood.  A family of five in a two bedroom house makes for an itty, bitty living space.  Our oldest kids share the smaller room at this point and the hubby and I share our room with our youngest.  But the youngest is almost two and as much as I adore her...well, she needs to get out of my space.  A set of bunk beds and a crib or toddler bed will fit in the smaller bedroom but it's extremely tight.  So I measured my bed, dresser and two nightstands.  I measured the kids bedroom.  The bed and two nightstands measure 114 inches...the small bedroom measures 115 inches...and the dresser will fit perfectly on the opposite wall.  Yes, it's a tight fit but it will work.  I'm going to start cleaning out my closet (I think I'll miss that the most) and get rid of stuff that I've been hanging onto but no longer need.  Then during spring break I think I'm going to paint our room (we never did that when we moved in) and I'll start making the switch.  I'm excited for my kids to have a bigger space but I still have to work on convincing the hubby that it's a good idea.

An Excellent Reminder...

Sometimes it becomes too easy to be blinded by the world that surrounds us.  We get tired of fighting against it and become complacent.  I am frequently guilty of this.  And then, when I'm not looking, Heavenly Father gives me a loving smack on the back of the head to knock the sense back into me.


In this case, it was this quote from Margaret D. Nadauld.  It was at the very bottom of a website that I was looking at for lesson helps for my primary class.

"Women of God can never be like women of the world. The world has enough women who are tough; we need women who are tender. There are enough women who are coarse; we need women who are kind. There are enough women who are rude; we need women who are refined. We have enough women of fame and fortune; we need more women of faith. We have enough greed; we need more goodness. We have enough vanity; we need more virtue. We have enough popularity; we need more purity."

-Margaret D. Nadauld