Clean that room!

We have a room in our house that is absolutely disastrous! Don't believe me? Well that's because if you were to come to our house that room's door would be shut! :) We refer to it as the office but in reality it has been a catch all. Yes, there's a desk with office supplies and printers on it, so I guess it's an office, but it's also a library, a craft room, a game room, and about any other room you can think of.

Anyways, today Mister and I began working on the pigpen room. We're no where near complete--don't you hate how it has to get messier before it's better :S--but if you happen to have a room like this in your home--not that you would--I highly suggest begin going through it!

Why?

You never know what you'll find.

Exhibit A: A 3-Prong Frog Spear

Seriously?!
At least this one's Chris'!

Exhibit B: Teeth Molds from when I busted a tooth on a kernal of popcorn

Why they gave these to me is beyond me!

Exhibit C: My Hair... that I cut to donate... over 2 years ago.

It'll be in the mail this week!

Like I said, you just never know. :)

Fall into Wreath Obsession

With extra yet unpredictable time on my hands, I spend way too much time browsing the internet. These leads to swooning over crafty blogs. [I know. I know. There's dishes to be done, laundry to fold and a house to pick up, but that can't be done 1-handed while holding a demanding beautiful babe like surfing the internet can!] Note: all but one of my posts in the past 32 days, including this one, has been typed one handed! :)

The One-Handed Cause
I don't mind too much! :)

Back on track: Something I stumbled upon is Pinterest. I really have no idea how it works or how to use it but I knew a couple friends have talked about it, so I headed over there and searched their names. Stalker-ish, eh? Anyways, I came across adorable Fall wreaths and then hundreds a lot of blogs/crafty sites with tutorials of gorgeous wreaths. Hence the trip to the craft stores upon Mister's arrival home from work!

I remembered that we had a couple yards of burlap from my grandparents' garage sale--gotta love those "I'll find something to do with this some day" pick-ups--so as Ains snuggled with Chris on the couch I sprawled out with my supplies on the floor.

Fall Decoring Supplies
Fabric Remnants, Ribbon, Leaves, Wreath

At first I thought I was going to make a Fall wreath like the one on this site and then some flowers like the ones on this site. [I like the overall consistency and look of the burlap flowers on the burlap wreath, but didn’t find any other color burlap in the remnant section at the fabric stores.] So that's what I set out to do. Well as with so many of my projects, I found something different I liked better, on accident! I read about how to best cut burlap straight and I followed that tutorial. I realized though that as I went to pull the burlap strand out to create my guide, I liked the effect that it had on the burlap and made a ruffled look. Nevertheless I pulled it all the way out and cut the strip. Then I got to thinking that it'd be prettier if I had the ruffle since my wreath was pretty small. So that's what I set out to do, and here's the jist of how I did it.

Supplies:
Wreath [Mine was a skinny little thing from the Dollar Store]
Burlap
Scrap Fabric for Flowers
Hot Glue Gun [I don't know how I've gone this long without owning one!]

Using the method for cutting a straight strip of burlap, I cut a strip of burlap 2.5" and then wrapped it around my wreath. [I read that if you purchase a straw wreath, to leave the plastic on it so it makes it easier to wrap. This is especially important if you wrap the wreath with yarn!] I needed two strips to wrap all the way around my 13" wreath, securing it with dots of hot glue.

Burlap wrapped Dollar Store Wreath

Then I cut two 5" strips of the burlap. These are the ones that I made the ruffle with. At the 2.5" mark I pulled the string of burlap, careful not to break the string so that I would be able to tie it and "hold" the ruffle. I then secured the ruffle onto the burlap covered wreath using my glue gun.

The next step was to make some flowers. Using a couple Fall-colored fabrics, I set out to make a couple different styles. The first one I made was what's called a button flower by some sites. Basically you cut 8 circles of the same size. [I used the top of an oversized coffee mug as a template.] Then with each circle, you fold it in half and then in half again. [You now have a quarter-circle. Use glue as needed to hold the fabric together.] I used a little scrap of felt to glue 4 of the quarters onto. Then with the remaining 4 quarters, stagger the top layer. The flower can be topped with a button for its center, hence the name. [You can check out The Ribbon Retreat for a full, better tutorial.]

Basic explanation of button & poufy flowers

I made this type of flower in 2 different sizes, but instead of using a button for the center, I ended up putting the one flower on the other and then "finishing" the top flower using the Poufy Flower method. I couldn't get the 9th circle to look as nicely as The Ribbon Retreat ladies could, so I gave it a little help by gluing it where necessary to give it the look I desired.

Poufy Flower Layered on Button Flower

Finally I made two other flowers [brown & yellow] using the rosette method describe by this site. Basically you made a knot at the end of a piece of 2-3" folded fabric and then wrap the fabric around the knot creating the rosette. One thing that I didn't notice when following the tutorials was the suggest to glue as you wrap as needed. I didn't do this, and so I just had to hold tight as I wrapped. next time I'll definitely use the glue every so often method!

Rosette Flowers

The last thing to do is to position the flowers how ever I liked!

Finished Product
inside our house!

I hung the wreath on the inside of our front door. I figured it'd get more appreciation because we have an ugly screen door with flowered gating aka completely blocking the wreath.

After this project, I'm pretty such that I'll be making a wreath for every season! :)

Last but not least, yesterday was Ainsley Jo's 1 month birthday, so we had to take a couple pics! I'm hoping to take a pic every month in a white onesie on the chair to document her growth. Hopefully I stick to it! :)

She wasn't the [most] cooperative!

Weekend Review: Quality Time with Chris & 3 Goals Accomplished

After spending 6 hours learning all about having a baby, I sent Mister the following text message on our 5-minute ride home:

"Your adventure, should you choose to accept it, is to pack your bags and get ready to head back out on the road. You will need to pack a bag including the following: change of clothes [nothing fancy!], swimsuit, toothbrush, flip-flops, older tennis shoes, and your pillow. Hopefully that's everything! Will you join me?!"

*I later realized that I put nothing in there about needing shorts to sleep in. Oops. Good thing our tent was secluded!*

He turned to me, smiled, and said I'll join ya!

Had this statement not be made, this weekend would've went to the toilet real quick!

Chris and I packed our bags and we were off in my preloaded car. I told him our ETA was about 40 minutes, but I didn’t really know because I’d been there maybe once and he didn’t ask many questions. [He’s much easy—better—to surprise than me! I’d been playing 20 questions the whole way!

Ten minutes into the trip: “Oh crap!"

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot to pack something!” What’s that important “something” that I forgot… butter of course! J

As I thought a little more, I realized that I may have needed to pack a rubber mallet to drive in the tent stakes but didn’t want to ask because it would’ve given it away. [We ended up not needed a mallet.]

A quick $2.61 for butter and a bag of ice and we were back on the road.

It wasn’t until we pulled into Van Buren’s KOA that Chris knew what we were doing for the weekend! I patted myself on the back for this secret planning accomplishment! After parking, registering, realizing that everyone there hated their jobs and their kids, we were off to set up our campsite.

Later we would have to return to said hatey workers to buy wood from their empty wood storage which reiterated their passion for the job!

Campsite

 A quick tent set-up and change into our bathing suits, we were off to the swimming area. This pond likely had more chemicals and we were surprised our suits didn’t turn teal so we decided not to go under, but wading chest deep was refreshing and relaxing! They also had a big inflatable slide as well as a "spinning log", but you had to rent their life jackets to use them and it was pretty kid-infested attraction anyways. After relaxing in the water and on the "beach" we journeyed back to our campsite.

Snackin' on a pretzel after wading in the teal water.

For supper we made pizza pudgy pies. All carbon aside they were good! I think I should have taken some PAM along to help out the sticking to the iron and burning factor, but I thought butter is all we'd need. That's a downfall of trying to replicate what you did when you were 12. You don't always remember the details!

I had packed apple pie filling to make dessert pudgy pies, but because of the trickiness of preventing burning that we couldn't quite master, we stuck we the good ol' camping standard, s'mores. Toasted to perfection, they were delish! As we sat around our lil fire, Chris enjoyed a pipe or two and I decided to working on crossing another thing off my list. Borrowing his knife I went to carve my initials in a tree. It was difficult to find a tree in our little area with smooth enough bark to do this, and it ended up not being the prettiest of carvings, but I'm am amateur when it comes to vandalism so it sufficed!

Lighting his pipe, which was much more
successful than the last time he attempted.

Not beautiful, but it counts. :)

 We decided to call it a night and retreated to our tent for the evening. Isn't it amazing how the sun dictates your sleeping and waking when you don't have electricity?! I had borrowed a friend's air mattress [ours took electricity to pump and they had a battery powered one] so sleeping was quite enjoyable. [One question that Chris did ask on the way up was if we'd be sleeping on a mattress that night. I told him I was, but I didn't know about him! This confused him a bit which was perfect! Later he realized why I answered that way.] We rested well and I dreamt about being on a WWF tag-team with Hulk Hogan against his evil twin and another guy. Quite a night. :)

The next morning we rose with the sun, trekked to the mosquito infested hole in the ground toilets, and then enjoyed delicious banana nut muffins cooked over the fire from Meijers. I still have a scar on my finger from the one time I remember making breakfast while camping, so I decided to go with a safer option! After devouring these muffins, we took a little walk around the campgrounds. We were drawn to a jumping pillow [never heard of it prior to this weekend] and saw a handful of kids jumping on it. We walked over intrigued, but I assumed it was a kids only kind of thing. As the kids got off and we got closer, a lady said that she had just turned it off, but asked if we wanted to jump because she could easily turn it back on. After some debating back and forth, the next thing we knew we were kangaroos hopping all over that thing!

I didn't have my camera and don't have Chris' near
to get the pic off his, but this is pretty much
the same thing!

After jumping to our hearts calves' content, we headed back to our site. [Sidenote: As we were leaving and she turned it off again, there was a 3-year old and a 13-year old that came over to jump. "Oh, I'm sorry you can't jump. I've already turned it off!" I felt bad that she turned it back on for us but denied the ones it was likely designed for!] We played several games of Crazy 8 Countdown and then decided weren't really hungry enough to build a fire to cook lunch and both of us were more than ready not to sit in a pool of our own sweat so we would go ahead and pack everything up.

Chris won all but one game of Crazy 8 Countdown.
I let him win since this was kind of like
his birthday celebration. ;)

 After a quick tear down of our campsite and packing of the car, we were homeward bound. In the air conditioning! It felt ah-mazing! Since we returned to Lima early enough in the afternoon [church was actually just getting out as we drove by] we decided to head to the mall to check a couple things out.

On Friday, my momma-cita had asked me to pick up her eyeglasses from JCPenney's and in doing so I saw a "gazebo" [canopy] discounted up on the second floor. Chris and I had talked about wanting to make our back yard a little more livable and have plans in the works for what we want to do to it next summer, but this gazebo seemed like a good option for now! So I looked at it a bit and did some online review research when I got home. Then when our mail came Friday we received a coupon for JCPenney's for 20% off if you used your JCP Credit Card and 15% anything else. Every have a feeling that a sale was made just for you! Yeah, I was feeling that way. So this is what we were going to check out and see if Chris thought it was as much of a good deal as I did!

He agreed.

At checkout they asked if I had a JCP Credit Card, which I did from when I purchased all our bridal parties' attire there over 2 years ago, but I was pretty confident that it had since been cancelled. I am glad that it had because my re-opening it, we were able to save another 10%. We left we our new gazebo canopy saving $398 overall! Cha-ching!

It only took about an hour to set it all up and now we have our own little backyard oasis. Okay not really but we have a back patio that we will actually use! It doesn't fit perfectly this year, but after our planned renovations next year, it'll fit much better!

Back Patio Before

Back Patio After
It has a mosquito netting that can be pulled around it.

Now I have a bit more motivation to pull all the weeds back there so we'll see how that goes!

So in additional to learning quite a bit about the birthing process, having a great getaway time with Mister, and bettering our home a bit I was also able to cross 3 things off my 101 in 1001 list.

40. Plan a surprise get-away with/for Chris.

57. Carve my name initials on a tree.

60. Go camping--somewhere other than our backyard. 

The bad news is I had to start over for Goal #21 even though I was on day 11 of 14. Drats!!

Urge

I feel a great urge to blog, but I am not sure what about...

So here are some thoughts...

...I'm ready to be in our house. Stopping by once a day to get the mail, and usually use the potty just isn't cutting it. Only a couple more days though.

...I want to learn how to cook. Like real well. I get urges to buy lots of cook books and search recipes online to try, but I'm a pretty big chicken when it comes to adventures with cooking. Chris will help with pushing this I am sure.

...It's weird that everyone is packing up and moving out and there is all the hustle and bustle on campus. I am so out of the loop, even though I feel as if my job requires me to 'be' the loop.

...In 3ish days I will be moving off of Bluffton campus forever. After being here for 5 years--that's nearly 22% of my life-- I will both miss and be so thankful to no longer live in a dorm. I'll miss some aspects of Res Life aka the staff as well, but definitely will not miss being woken in the middle of the night or having a [mostly self imposed] curfew.

...I still have quite a bit to pack up into our adult diaper boxes--thanks mom for working at a nursing home-- but it seems like now there isn't theme to anything left to back. When we get to the house and open these boxes we'll find books with yarn with sweatshirts with spoons. I guess it'll make for more of a game as we look for things as we settle.

...My aunts and uncles had some serious loot to share with us as we take a hodge-podge and make it mesh. It was/is greatly appreciated! And quite fun Saturday!

...I already want/have invited others over. Then I remember that our furniture is on layaway. We make do. :)

...I really enjoy subbing. Not only do I get to learn more about different classrooms/teachers/schools, but in some cases I am left with lots of "free time" as students work independently. This free time equates to reading time. "Freakonomics" was absolutely fascinating! And I enjoyed reading the entire modern version of "Romeo and Juliet" Friday. There were details I didn't recall that makes the story make more sense now. Fancy how those details make a difference.

...I had a mini-final hoo-rah with my BASIC group and was told a joke. The joke teller warned that it was a bit inappropriate--1 bad word-- but "since we're graduating" she told us anyways. So here's the joke for you and you MUST read it in a Southern accent even if you are only reading it in your head! Here's the joke:

There were these 2 Southern women--hence the accent-- and the one Southern woman said, "Wh-ell for my first anniversary, my husband bought me a ruby red ring!

Second woman a bit disgusted, "Mmhmm."

"Wh-ell for my 2nd anniversary, my husband bought my a brand new car!"

Second woman disgusted, "Mmhmm."

"Wh-ell for my 3rd anniversary, my husband bought me a brand new house."

Second woman, "Mmhmm." "Well, what did your husband get you!?!"

"Speech lessons."

"Speech lessons?!"

"Yep, I used to say f-you, but now I just say 'mmhmm'."

: )

I'll just leave you with that.