tackling the list + 6 month photos

the list is getting attention folks! i am checking things off! but then again, i am also adding things to the list ... eek! is it okay to add things to the list just to check them off? i think adding somethings - like take 6 month photos and post or FINALLY post before and after photos of your sofa - are okay to put on the list just to check them off ... but go to the grocery store or do the laundry ... your just trying to make yourself feel better. so here is the progress:

- make baby gift for a friend (must be done before July 9th!)
- finish christmas craft (i know its early but i wanted to do it before the baby comes!)
- paint dresser (need hubby's help and a sunny Saturday)
- hang two frames downstairs 7/1/11




i hung those two little dark gray frames finally ... just to finish that wall off. nate asks me all the time, "are we going to leave those frames blank?" i tell him maybe some of them but i want to but pictures of baby in a few of them.

i like how it flows from nate's korean frame that says "home is a heaven on earth," to the frame cluster with a wedding photo (and baby one day), and ends with our beautiful Minerva Tichert picture of Christ (which i don't think i ever posted since i mentioned that it was being framed ... that is how lame i am people. this is why i need a list.)

i long for the days i can paint my walls. this whole setup would really pop!

- buy 3 wall-hangers for coat rack
- hang said coat rack
- photograph paper flowers i made for baby girl's room ... to show the blogosphere 7/1/11




i made these babies - copying a friend i made while living in DC who is now a brilliant designer in Copenhagen. she made paper flowers for her wedding and all sorts of other events (including the royal wedding.) I will be putting these up in baby girls room over the crib with some paper lanterns ... a few of these flowers are pretty big and oh so fun!

- re-pot some of our wedding 'babies' (succulents) that are starting to die one by one
- put away party supplies (from the end of may - i am terrible)
- organize my dresser drawers and sort my clothes into stages (this is to give me more space and to help me get motivated to get back to my wedding size after the birth ... this is a reasonable goal)
- hang our beautiful wedding clock
- organize the under bed storage in both baby's room and our room
- start looking for 8 x 10 frames at Goodwill
- modify my downstairs curtains
- post photos of before and after sofa 7/1/11

BEFORE

AFTER

now i remember why i haven't posted pictures of the sofa yet - even though it was almost 9 month ago that we worked on this project - because i haven't taken any good photos! have i mentioned how bad the light is in our house? yeah its bad. but you get the idea with how bad the sofa was before and how much better it is now. my mom is amazing. she basically re-covered the whole thing with me as her apprentice. she also made me these pillows during her last visit at the end of may. i love this fabric - i found it as a remnant at joanne's. it works perfectly with the gray and black and yellow we have going on.






- take 6 month pregnant photos and post 7/1/11




me and baby girl at 25 weeks (just over six months) i am a large human being. whew. can you believe i will be getting bigger? hopefully just in the belly area but yikes. i can't blame it all on baby girl but i try. can you believe i live with that chest either? the crazy part is that upon getting pregnant i immediately gained extra in the boob area ... right away. its shocking that there are non-pregnant ladies with this bra size and even more shocking that there are women who get fake ones this size and larger. i am all for some cleavage but this is just too much.

on other pregnancy related notes ... my skin is still the worst it has ever been and my stretch marks have migrated from the hip and thigh area to the base of my belly - fortunately or unfortunately (who knows which when it comes to stretch marks) they are in the underside that is getting harder and harder for me to see. i am also experiencing those sudden urges to pee and that phenomenon that women also describe as the baby pushing or dancing on their bladder. all of a sudden i will feel baby girl move and i suddenly have an urgent sense of needing to urinate. crazy. also ... baby likes black licorice.

... she could make lists for days ...

its amazing to me how much stuff i get done at work. i make a list of things and i go at it. granted it make take a few days to cross some of those things off the list - i get interrupted and derailed a lot at work - but they get done. by the time i come home from work i am tired and lazy and have lost the motivation to work on my list of things to do at home. i feel triumphant when i actually make a nice dinner! tonight was one of those nights.

i need to make a list of the things i want to get done at home ... i am hoping that will help me kick it into gear and stop being so lazy.

- make baby gift for a friend (must be done before July 9th!)
- finish christmas craft (i know its early but i wanted to do it before the baby comes!)
- paint dresser (need hubby's help and a sunny Saturday)
- hang two frames downstairs
- buy 3 wall-hangers for coat rack
- hang said coat rack
- photograph paper flowers i made for baby girl's room ... to show the blogosphere
- re-pot some of our wedding 'babies' (succulents) that are starting to die one by one
- put away party supplies (from the end of may - i am terrible)
- organize my dresser drawers and sort my clothes into stages (this is to give me more space and to help me get motivated to get back to my wedding size after the birth ... this is a reasonable goal)
- hang our beautiful wedding clock
- organize the under bed storage in both baby's room and our room
- start looking for 8 x 10 frames at Goodwill
- modify my downstairs curtains

just as we suspected

fortune cookie is a ...

girl

i have pretty much known this from the beginning ... which is so funny because since i was 16 years old i have felt that i will have 5 crazy male children that i will have no idea what to do with. but once this little girl started really cooking in my oven i could just tell she was the girl variety. we are beyond excited and feel very very lucky to be anticipating this great blessing ... i mean of course its a blessing already ... but whoa we are overwhelmed by the majesty and miracle of it all and pinch ourselves all the time ... we made a baby! and its still in there! and i think i actually felt it for the first time last night! it felt like a wave inside me! and then we saw her for an hour today and measured her every little tiny body part! she appears healthy and happy and was even playing with the umbilical cord in my womb! it was adorable (strange, i know)! sigh. we are in love ...

the next thing on my mind is how to make a pastel blue, green, and mustard yellow nursery girlie but not cheesy girlie (when i say "nursery" think multi-purpose baby room ... i won't be able to do a full out nursery like i have in my head ... but i will do what i can!) the queen bed is staying in the extra room (at least for the first six months of fortune cookie's life while we have family and friends visiting) and i love love love the Paisley pottery barn duvet i have in there in those exact colors. it was my first (and maybe my last ... you never know) "high end" linen purchase in my life. when i was living/working in DC i splurged and ordered it online. i have no regrets.

i like the idea of going with those colors for fortune cookie's room ... i think they are pretty and fairly gender neutral and then i can throw in pops and punches of girlie things .... like these:

pom poms and paper lanterns above the crib ... love this idea
i am thinking blues and greens with a punch of pink

more pom poms ... but these are made of t-shirt material ...
i like the texture and warmth
(again think pastel blues/greens/yellows and a punch of pink)

But I was also thinking of some oversized flowers in the appropriate colors ...
that would be soo soo soo fun.

eek! i can't wait! my mom and dad fly in tomorrow and we are going to get going on planning and prepping and sewing and crafting and just spending some good days together! yippee!

primed and ready to go

so her she is ... all primed up with some oil base primer that is such an awful thing to clean up ... i have oil based because that is what the paint guys at Home Depot kept stressing. even with water based paint to go over the top of it ... they said its the best. ugh ... i think i will go oil based once i run out of this quart just to see. (i like to learn the hard way)

here you can see my patchwork of painters tape around the hardware that WOULD NOT COME OFF ... i am still annoyed by this aspect of the buffet/sideboard.


all nine drawers waiting for a few coats of caribbean splash (don't be fooled by soon to come pictures ... the painters tape and caribbean splash are not the same color) ...


her body all empty and primed (kilz brand is what i used).


.... next up painting!

and while i was painting i stole a picture of my cute husband after a long day of work ... he lets me sleep in the wee hours of the morning and i let him nap when he gets home from work (sometimes.) is he listening to his student's oral homework assignments? or watching an episode of the Simpsons ... my money is on the later.

our first apartment!

We moved in a little over a month ago and unfortunately we are still a little unsure about what exactly to unpack. With our immediate future plans sooooo up in the air, we don't want to accumulate anymore furniture than we have. In fact, we sold some of our furniture right when we moved (it was the start of the term at the UO so it was the best time to sell.)

So basically I am trying to justify our little apartment's state of affairs. So yeah ... its not much, but it is ours and I have done my best to make it home.

BEFORE
(aka - moving in)

(remember that face from this post? yup, told you i saw it almost everyday)

Stuff everywhere! This is our living room and the doorway
into the eat-in kitchen.

This is the opposite view - from the eat-in kitchen looking into the living room.

The eat-in kitchen was our "staging area" and still sort of is at this point.
We can conveniently store our packing boxes and bins behind the wall
separating the living room from the kitchen.

Here is our itty-bitty kitchen which of course does not have enough counter space.

The disaster that was our bedroom!

AFTER:
(aka: a little decorating to make it home)

Living Room

More living Room

This is on the wall behind the sofa - my thrift-store found framed mirror
(I found it at a Eugene Goodwill when looking for milk glass for our wedding)
and my dear friend Ally's two screen prints of a photo I took back in my DC days
of a light post outside the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.
I love these prints and I love Ally - she is soo very talented


Living Room Corner ... trying to hide our storage bins :) underneath a scrap
piece of curtains, a lamp, a watercolor of the temple frames - under our
framed marriage certificate.

The entryway between living room and eat-in-kitchen. Thanks to my
old roommate Tiffany, we have a kitchen table and chairs to eat at!
And of course to help Nate feel at home,
we hung his Henry Weinhard's Root Beer sign -
the kitchen area seamed the most appropriate for it.




Eat-in-kitchen! Thanks Tiffany!


Itty-bitty kitchen ... not much change there ...
but I did hang a LARGE frame I already had and it fits perfectly above the sink.


Have I mentioned that I LOVE owls ...
I also found these two little guys at the Eugene Goodwill -
they were unfinished white ceramics which I snatched up while hunting for wedding milk glass. I hung these on the hallway wall across from our bedroom on the way to the bathroom -
not the best picture, but you get the idea.

My refurbished window frame turned bulletin board
hangs on our bathroom door.


Our blue and brown bathroom.

No photos of our bedroom because its not much to look at. We don't have any bedroom furniture besides a bed and box spring on the floor and two mismatched side tables.
We don't even have a dresser to put our stuff in ... we are that sad :( but we don't
want to buy one for fear we may be moving in a few short months.

So, that is our humble first apartment! YAY for new roommates!

bat(s), owl, and spider - hanging on a tree ...

We are trying to get to know our ward better and so we try to participate in the activities. Our first major ward event was the Trunk-or-Treat at the ward building the day before Halloween. Nate and I decided to decorate our trunk - nothing fancy or expensive, we just used paper.

While buying trick-or-treat candy at Target I was admiring their cute Halloween decorations ... not overly scary and lame ... but not toooo cutesy either. Basically I fell in love with Skelanimals. Come to find out they are their own thing ... like website and all.

Needless to say I am hook-line-and-sinker in love with these cute little guys. I heart them like a 13 year old ... like the pre-teens they are targeted at. Sigh. Too bad I found out about them the day before ALL-HALLOWS-EVE!


So I decided this would be the theme of our trunk for the ward event. So I did some "grabbing" on my trusty MAC and printed me an Oliver, Timmy, and two Diegos.

Oliver the Owl

Timmy the Spider

Diego(s) the Bat(s)

So yeah. Next year (or some year in the future) I am totally gonna have a Skelanimal Halloween decoration extravaganza ... you know ... when all the hype has died down and they aren't at Target.

Muah-ah-ah-ah (enter creepy and lame laugh.)

All in all it gave me some good ideas ... but really, the trunk-or-treat was sort of a bust. No one else decorated their cars and in general it was a little anti-climatic. Here's to next year!