So What!

So What! if...
-I spent half of the day getting ready for a date with my husband (the first we've had since Henry was born) and his mom ended up in the hospital and we didn't get to go. Whatever, I was the hottest thing sitting in the ER last night.
-My weeks have been packed lately. Like...howintheworldamI'mgoingtofindtimetobreathe full.
-This is only the second blog post I've published in a couple of weeks. Like I said: busy.
-I am OVERLY excited for Christmas this year. I somehow convinced BOTH sides of my family that it was a great idea to have Christmas at my house this year and I literally cannot wait. I may already have my Christmas tree up...
-I am ready for snow. Call me crazy but I can't wait to take Henry out and play in it. Not to mention, it made for the cutest pictures last year.
Have some proof:

-I have turned down almost every photo session opportunity lately. I just don't have time right now and while I appreciate the business, I still have sessions sitting on my computer from a month ago that need edited that I did for a good friend so (luckily) I don't have to be in a big rush to get them done.

-Mentioning photo sessions, I told my husband after the last TWO weddings that I did that I didn't want to do weddings anymore, that they were too stressful and that I just didn't see me being able to do them myself.

-I've taken on three weddings already next year. Fail.

-I plan on dressing Henry in the same clothes he wore yesterday. Cause they're cute. And he didn't wear them for long.

-There are only 4 weeks left of Jeremy's schooling and we've hit that point where apparently teachers think that they haven't been giving you enough homework, lessons, tests, papers, etc... and I'm feeling overwhelmed. Last week I wrote a six page essay, a twelve page research paper (and did all the research), took two tests, one quiz and read over 500 pages of material in ADDITION to the normal work I had been doing. Shoot me, please.

-I feel like I could go on and on with this list, but I have another list (the dreaded to-do list) that is a mile long  and it's calling my name.

Happy hump day!

My 15 Month Old

I'm becoming a bit impatient for Henry to talk. In a few weeks he will be 16 months old and I feel like he should be talking more. The last week I've really been trying to work with him, sounding out words and pointing out just about everything during our day together. The most frustrating part is that I know he can talk, I just think he doesn't feel the need to.

We've heard him say mom and dad many times. He says 'I love you', 'get it' and 'thank you' on occasion but not very often. We've heard him say yeah, car, ball, dog, fish, and hello... but only every now and then. We taught him to roar for Halloween and make engine sounds when he's playing with his cars. His newest thing is 'gobble, gobble, gobble' which I think is the cutest thing ever. But again, he only says things when he wants to - he prefers just to point or drag you to what he wants.

I know that I'm probably overreacting and being impatient with him, but he's excelled so well up to this point and continues to excel in other areas that I feel like he should excel with this as well. He's such a good little boy, he cleans up after himself and understands and reacts to everything we say to him these days. When we come in from outside, he sits down, takes his shoes off and puts them into the bucket by the door. When he's done playing with his cars all I have to say is 'put your cars away' and he puts them, one by one, back into his box. He undresses himself and attempts to dress himself and if you mention a specific toy, he will go looking for it until he finds it. (We learned our lesson with that. If the toy is in the toy-box, he WILL dump the entire thing to attempt to find it.) He has learned to walk up and down steps if he is given a hand or a railing to hold on to. He doesn't fight his bedtime or nap time and he's really a very independent boy.

We are fighting with him about certain things though. He climbs everything and by everything, I mean EVERYTHING. He will pull himself up onto the counter-tops if you're not watching him - and same for the kitchen table. He can be up a flight of stairs in two-second flat and if you don't get up right as he wakes up in the morning, he can climb right out of his crib. He refuses to drink from a sippy cup and while he will still use cups with straws, he would really prefer a regular cup which usually results in a mess. But so do the cups with straws as his new favorite thing to do is to suck milk into his mouth and then spit it out. The dogs just love that. We've done all the child-proofing that is humanly possible and he still manages to get into stuff. Today he managed to bypass the safety-lock on one of my kitchen drawers and he dumped an entire bag of brown sugar all over the floor. That was fun.

Still, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love his kisses which have went from open-mouthed to puckered lips. And when you pick him up, he has taken to squeezing you around the neck for a gentle hug. It's just about the sweetest thing ever. Sadly, he doesn't like sitting on our laps anymore though. He would rather sit next to you, but he still leans close against you so that you can cuddle him close. In the car we have long conversations of jibber jabbers that I just don't understand at all, but it makes me smile.

Overall, I think I have a perfect little thing and I hope that he will just continue to grow and learn and play just like he is now.

Crazy

I think I could sum up the last couple weeks of my life in one word.

Crazy.

Plain crazy, every bit of it.

There's a Mouse in the House!

Sunday morning was quite an eventful one.

I live in Ohio, out in the boondocks, where harvest time equals mice. Luckily for us we live a bit of a ways from a field and don't get the hoards of mice that someone living right next to a field might, but that doesn't change the fact that our entire town is surrounded by fields. So when I saw those little black turds on my counter, I knew we had a mouse, and I knew we had to kill him.

So I did what any person would do; I bought some traps Saturday, baited them with some peanut butter and waited. As long as I didn't see this said mouse, I was in no real hurry but knowing it was out there, somewhere, gave me the heebee-jeebees.

I was the first up on Sunday morning. I walked into the kitchen all sleepy-eyed, stretching and trying to get over how light it was outside for 7:00 a.m. and appreciating that extra hour of sleep when I noticed that one of my traps was gone. I was dumb-founded for a minute, because if it had moved, it meant that something big enough to move it was on my counter over night and THAT is a freaky thought.

So I looked around a bit and noticed that it had somehow gotten back behind my coffee pot that sits at an angle in the corner of the counter. So I moved it out a bit and immediately jumped, screamed and started acting like a two year old, something I never expected from myself.

"Jeremy! Jeremy! Mouse! There's a mouse!"

I'm standing in the kitchen yelling and alternating between jumping up and down and what I'm now calling the 'disgusted jig'. For future reference: I cannot dance, no matter what the circumstance.  I run into the bedroom where my husband has gotten out of bed and is standing right inside of the door. I swing it open, almost hitting him, but I don't care there's something more important to be taken care of right now.

"Jeremy! Mouse! There's a mouse! There's a mouse and, and, IT'S ALIVE!"

And it was. When I moved the coffee pot, what did I see? A cute little mouse, perched on top of my trap, just twitching it's little nose and whiskers at me. Now what was I going to do? I didn't want to touch the thing and I didn't want to kill it - that was the traps job. But I couldn't just let it go so that it could wander my counters late at night, leaving nothing but little trails of poop to remind me that he was still around.

So I did what any crazy, desperate person would do. I got the vacuum cleaner and made my husband attempt to suck him up, where he would have a nice, safe home until we could dump him into the garbage can outside, preferably dead over alive.

But it didn't work because, ah-ha!, we had caught that mouse, it just wasn't caught very well. His little hand had been caught by the trap and he was stuck. I kinda felt bad at that point for trying to suck him up into the vacuum cleaner (and a little stupid for not realizing why he hadn't run off during all this commotion) but we were still stuck with a live mouse, on our counter and I still had no idea what to do about it.

My husband, who I'm fairly certain was beyond me jumping up and down and screaming in his ear at this point, reached over, picked him up by the tail, released the trap and put him in a plastic, zip-lock bag and then attempted to hand it to me, saying 'Here'. I, of course, refused the bag and made my husband get rid of it. I told him I didn't want to know what he did, or how he did it, just that as long as it was out of sight and I didn't have to deal with it, anything was fine.

Of course, my husband being the softy that he is was all like, "Well I'm not going to be the one that kills him!". I think the poor guy literally just got put into the garbage can in his little plastic bag and if he didn't suffocate, he will probably be back. Hopefully the trap will get him this time so that we don't have to.

The worst part of it all is that I literally acted like I was two, woke everyone up in the house, got the dogs running and barking, and every time I would scream or get too excited, I would scare Henry and he would start to scream too.

If only the neighbors could have seen. They'd boot us into the crazy part of the neighborhood for sure.

Old & New

Horrible Paint art, I know.

My little peach tree lost all of it's leaves in the winds from Hurricane Sandy earlier this week and it kind of made me sad. I enjoyed looking out my front window and seeing all those leaves. Then I thought about this verse and how we are transformed from the 'old' to the 'new' and it made me realize that my tree is just symbolic of th

at nature. And then I thought, how could anyone ignore God's existence when everything around them screams with His Word, His Promises and His Presence? My little tree just HAD to shed it's leaves and when I think of it that way, it's hard to be sad!

I love when I hear whispers like this from the Father. It makes my soul rest in a way that's hard to describe. Like - even the little things are important to Him and He won't forget anything, no matter how small the details.

Bargain Buys with a side of Crafty Goodness

I really need to start learning to just take a photo and write a quick blog when I buy something that is a real 'bargain' instead of waiting for weeks on end. I rarely buy anything unless it's cheap. This includes clothes. I really can't get over the price of clothes. I mean - as a girl, I want a fairly large mixture of clothing and paying $100.00 for a pair of jeans just seems ridiculous to me. It'd cost a fortune to stay fashionable!

So I buy things on clearance and with coupons and I ask for lower prices and I haggle and do anything I have to to get that price down.

I've bought 2 pieces of clothing in the last few weeks.

This cute little sleeveless dress that I had planned on wearing to our pumpkin patch wedding (it was canceled due to weather).

Original Price - $54.99

What I Paid - $8.00

It will make a cute summer dress next year. I still need to do a few alterations though. It was on clearance (as in, here-take-it-we'll-pretty-much-give-it-to-you clearance).

Then I bought a pair of jeans from Maurices. I love that store, it makes us heavier girls feel like we're normal but the prices reflect the effort, I assure you.

So I went in expecting to walk out empty handed because even their clearance stuff is usually too expensive for me. These had a price tag, (already marked down a couple of times, mind you) of $89.99 . Yeah, um...no thank you.

But upon looking a bit closer, they were on the 75% off CLEARANCE PRICE rack. Now that I can do!

Original Price - $120.00

What I Paid - $22.50

The catch here was that they were literally six inches too long. Plus they were hugely bell-bottom, which worried me, but I took them anyway because HELLO! Did you see that savings?

So this morning I attempted the 'hem your jeans while keeping the original hem' thing. Guess what? It worked! I LOVE my jeans that are finally JUST THE RIGHT length!

This is my half, I pinned it and then sewed right along the outside of the hem.

The best thing? It's really simple to do.

1. - You pin your jeans where you want them hemmed just like you would for any other type of hemming.

2. - Measure how much you need to take off and divide that in half, but don't include the hem. Then pin the half in place instead of the full amount.

The finished product! It's not completely straight (I'm still a beginner here!) but you'd never be able to tell unless you were really looking at them. And look at that wonderful frayed hem that was part of the jeans all along!

3. - Sew right along the outside of the hem on the inside of the pant. If you have crazy bell-bottoms or flared jeans like I did, make sure your side seams line up!

4. - You can either cut off the excess or just iron it in place (good idea for the kiddos) from there. I cut mine off. Then iron the front side of your jeans so that the jean lays right again.

My directions are never the best, so go check out this tutorial for a more detailed look into the process. Pretty awesome, right!

Jenn's Jams - Brandon Heath - Love Will Be Enough For Us

Brandon Heath - Love Will Be Enough For Us

I'm totally crushing on this song right now, like... can't get enough of it. After listening to the new Blue Mountain album, it's probably my favorite. Of course, I'm a total sucker for cute love songs like this.

Listen. Enjoy.

(P.S. - Dave Barnes has done this song too, and it's AWESOME. I can't pick a favorite, I love them both.)