These Days...

Here are some photos from around my house.

I felt like my dining area needed a bit more Spring-ness. These bottles are mostly from my grandmother's collection. This was a very low cost decoration. I had the bottles already, all I needed were some flowers from Michael's (on sale, of course) And the jars with candles idea I got from Pottery Barn. I just bought the jars and candles from DI and the moss and rocks from the dollar store. Totally cheap and looks great.

The yellow chairs were a DI find. They were ugly white and natural oak and we made them yellow with red showing through the distressed effect we did. Everyone who sees them says something about how when you spend time and work on refurbishing furniture, you want it to look nice and new, not weathered. But I really love how they turned out. So much better than our scary 1970's vinyl ones.

Wood.

Our yard is a menace. So we had a ton of dead branches cut off of our trees (we have over 50 trees in our yard. I tried to count them once and I lost track) and some trees and stumps removed. And so, we were left with lots and lots of wood! Sadly, for Cody, they only cut the trees into very short pieces, so he can't make furniture out of them or anything, but we do have a TON of firewood now. And our yard now smells like fresh wood. It is heavenly. Sort of like Christmas mixed with camping. Cody has been fulfilling his destiny to become a lumberjack and chopping the wood just for fun.

I wasn't actually doing any real lumberjacking. Just wearing this cool hat and looking like a tough wood cutting person. Also, from this I got a lot of sap on the seat of my pants. Cody is doing his "Hey, I'm a lumberjack" face.

Messing with the Macro

This weekend a lot of our roses bloomed. We have the greatest roses in our yard. I noticed that we have a lot of aphids though, so we bought a container of lady bugs to take care of the problem. I didn't want to buy poison because A.) It kills the bad bugs and the good bugs and B.) It was a lot more expensive. Also, ladybugs are simply cuter. The container supposedly had 1500 bugs in it.
We followed the instructions, releasing them after dark and after watering the area. They all just kind of... fell to the ground. This was back on Friday. Those dang bugs are still sitting on the ground, crawling around in the dirt and leaves. It's like the were born in their little container and are just used to crawling around under their little wood shavings. We even spent a lot of time putting some of them onto the leaves and rose buds, and they would either just sit their like they were stuck, or they would crawl around and fall off. Stupid bugs.

Last week I noticed a very big ugly spider on our back porch. He wasn't hurting anything, but then I took this picture and tried to research what he was. The closest thing I could find was a Hobo Spider, and those are really poisonous, so we decided to kill him. I always feel really bad when we have to kill stuff (see mole and scorpion), even if they are pests. We sprayed him and I felt so bad for making him suffer! He was dang ugly and had HUGE black fangs, but he can still feel pain. Haha, anyway, here he is.

Babies Babies Babies

I am usually trying to get the Husband to agree to having children immediately. I'm always looking out for cute little curiosities that I cannot pass up because they will look just so magnificent in my future child's room. But there are moments in between those times when I am thinking about something non-infant related.

But lately my brain has been inundated by baby fever. (Gosh dang it. Now I have that Hanukkah Fever song from The Soup permanently stuck in my head!) My sister just had a little boy, and I recently found out that my freaking awesome sister-in-law is preggers. She and my brother have been attempting the stressful and not fun process of in vitro for quite a while and we have been praying like mad for them to have a baby, so this is very happy blessing. I am SO excited for them!

So because of all of this baby mania, Mr. Black and I have been discussing it pretty seriously. I am obviously good to go on the whole thing. He however, being the careful and responsible and dang cute individual that he is, wants to plan out all the details. It seems he would like for us to go to some kind of family planner who can tell us "how to get all of our ducks in a row" before attempting parenthood. As in spiritually, financially, health-wise, insurance-wise. Does anyone know how we can do this? Someone we can talk to or a book we can read or your own personal advice? Anything would be helpful as we are clueless in the ways of baby.

For now I am trying to figure out what to get Brother and Sister-in-Law for their tiny baby. I know it may seem early to some, but I started planning next Christmas's gifts in January. I am a gift giver. I LOVE planning out, shopping for, making, and wrapping presents for people. As soon as someone gets engaged, or knocked up, or put on my family Christmas rotation list, or pretty much ANYTHING else, I am thinking about what to get them. I just love it. So what to get them? I really really want to make them something.

Here is a onesie that I made my cute friend Randi for her baby whom she named Jude. (They are Beatles fans and also, awesome.)

So what shall I make them? (Hint, hint, Elisa, I know you're months and months away from giving birth, but I'm going to need you to come up with baby nursery decorating ideas so I know what to do!)

I found a baby mobile at the thrift store months ago that had little bears on it. I bought it to see if I could baby (oh my heck, I mean MAYBE. See what I mean? Wow. I am THAT bad!) make something cute out of it and sell it on Moxie Owl. I have been trying to come up with a creative idea of what to make it into. I was thinking of hanging felt owls or woodland creatures, or rain clouds on it. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. Today I thought of just the thing though! I will be working on it this week and hopefully it will turn out to be the cutest mobile ever, and then I will just have to keep it. Or it could be a disaster. I will share the results soon.

P.S. I am no longer "obese" according to the BMI calculator. Just over weight! Woohoo!

Right Now and a Little of Back Then

Hello! I hope you all had a good weekend/first half of your week! Last weekend was so nice for me. On Friday I dyed my red tips purple! (Lust Lavender, actually.) It's pretty hot.

We went to a kinda weird movie. Sucker Punch. I REALLY did not want to see this movie when I first saw the previews. I was thinking "Wow... stripper teenagers fighting giant samurais and nazi's with swords? What?" but Cody expressed his slight interest and I thought Ok, it can't be too terrible, the action-y parts look interesting. And yeah, it was just ok and kind of confusing. If you do see it though, the pimped out mayor is my fav part.

I also played a lot of hackie sack. I'm getting pretty good at it and it gives Mr. Black and I an activity to do outside together.

ANYWAY! Gosh. I have been trying to lose weight. I am "obese" according to the BMI calculator, and have "lost my face" among various other things according to my dear mother. So hopefully I can stick to my plan of eating nutrisystem food and exercise (EW) everyday. My family is having a competition to see who can lose the most weight before June. I am losing pretty bad right now, but it's only the first week. It is good motivation and cool to have a bunch of my family all trying to be healthy as well.

Nutrisystem is really nice. The food I've had so far is really good, just tiny portions. WAY better than HCG. I'm hoping to lose a pretty sizable amount of my body. I want to be AT LEAST what I weighed in 10th grade. Even back then though, actually, pretty much since 6th grade-ish, I have not been at all happy with my size. Haha, not saying I'm going for my 5th grade weight or anything, I just want to feel better about myself, which means losing at least 40 lbs and getting a bit toned. And then staying that way. That's the part that really scares me. All I know is eating what I want, which includes a ridiculous amount of pizza, like, all the time. So after nutrisystem isn't there telling me what to eat, what do I do? I don't really know.

Here is a size that I would be happy being again. This is prom with Cody. Oh there's my face! I found it.

Photo Shoot

I got to take some family photos of our friends, The Hernandez's. They have such a cute and good baby! We were taking photos for quite a while and she barely even fussed. Cody was quite tired from jumping up and down and making silly sounds behind me, trying to get her to smile. He is a trooper. The pictures turned out pretty good in my opinion but I definitely have a lot more learning to do.

12:04 AM

Last week I visited my sister Aimee in California. She is about to pop out a baby boy (so excited!) She has two tiny precious busy little girls, and her hubby was out of town for the week So I went down to help her out. She just moved to Riverside. I had never been there. They live on a pretty cool property with cute little places to walk, and orange groves, and a lemon tree. California is my very favorite. I would never abandon my Utah but every time I go to California I realize how deprived of vegetation we are. I want a lemon tree!
This is the first time I have every driven anywhere like that by myself. 6 hours in a car alone with myself is a long time and I am terrified of driving in unfamiliar places. I left home at 2:30 in the morning so as to miss all traffic and it was nice, just me and a few other cars out there in the desert. I was seriously thinking it was a very probable possibility that I would somehow end up dead on my way there. The scenarios that went through my mind include getting run over by a semi, death by decapitation. Needing to pee so bad that I'm forced to stop at a seemingly empty rest-stop, killer is waiting in stall next to mine, death by decapitation. Etc, most ending with losing my head for some reason. Needless to say I am a bit of a worrier. I've accepted this, I'm okay with it, and I just have to remind myself that things always turn out fine. And they did. I made it there with my head and only had a couple of terrifying moments. I did really really need to pee so I got off on some exit south of Vegas and totally got lost, ended up giving up and trying to get back to the freeway, and accidentally turning sooner than my GPS was telling me and driving onto a road with "WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER" signs all over it. Thankfully it was empty and I found my way to the right road. Phew! Pretty much almost a decapitation!

Before, I pretty much would not drive anywhere but Saint George. Now that I have done this, I feel like a bit more of a woman and I don't have to be afraid anymore. Maybe.

Here are some pictures I took when we went on a walk by Aimee's house.

Aivree.


Aria.








Pretty Pregnant Aimee.




Under the pepper tree. Did you know black pepper comes from trees? I didn't. They looked like little pink berries. But they smelled like pepper! Amazing.

I had so much fun just hanging out with my sister. I haven't done that in a long time since we both got married. We spent most of the time playing with the kids, making owls for Moxie Owl and reading Do Not Reply emails. And trying to induce labor which totally didn't work. Does spicy food ever work for anyone? I think it's a myth. Now I am back and I miss them so much!