Yellow Jackets in December

I love Christmas. The hot chocolate, the lights, decorations, presents, cookies, gaining ten pounds, the tree! Oh wait we don't have a tree.
After we got married for our first Christmas together we decided to go to Home Depot and buy our first artificial christmas tree (since we had a gift card there) If was only like $70 it was a really pretty tree too! During the move I noticed that the box for the Christmas tree had gotten wet. I was hoping that the damage was not too bad, but when we opened it up, man it smelled. It had gotten moldy on some of the branches. We were deciding whether to just throw it out or try and clean it when we noticed a small yellow jacket. It looked dead but the longer it was in the warmth it started to move and clean itself. That was when we figured out that some lovely yellow jackets had built a nest in the box and were hibernating. Man we got that box outside so fast! STUPID yellow jackets! Now we don't have a tree for Christmas. All of the decent trees we looked at are so expensive! They ranged anywhere from $160-$300. That is a lot of money! So our plan is to go shopping the day after Christmas for one when hopefully they will be like 75% off. (I hope)

Moab

Over the Thanksgiving holiday Mike and I went with my family to Moab. We had a blast! For our Thanksgiving dinner we went out to eat. On Friday we went Hiking in Arches. Mike had never been there so it was fun to show him all of the neat sites. Saturday we biked on the slickrock trail. My mom looked up on the internet the difficulty, etc. They said it was for all skill levels and it wasn't that hard and you could take your kids. My butt is wasn't hard. That was the hardest bike ride I have ever been on in my life. There is no way I would take anyone under the age of 14. There were multiple times you would be a foot away from a cliff and the hills were way steep. Unfortunately I found out that I was the worst biker out of the group. I biffed it pretty hard at least 3 times. (the most out of anyone) Mike hurt his leg pretty bad. He was going down a steep hill and started going over the handlebars. I screamed, I though he was going to die. Luckily he stayed on but he has a pretty cool war wound on his thigh.

Gross huh!! Luckily we all made it out alive. It only took us 6 hours to go 11 miles. That shows how hard it was. Then on Sunday we went climbing in the Fiery Furnace in Arches. That was fun, you had to get a permit to even go in and watch an instructional video. You can go anywhere you want in there, except on the cryptobiotic soil. There were all of these small crevices you had to climb up or down to get where you wanted to go. I get a little claustrophobic so some of these places were hard.

All in all though we had a ton of fun. (even if we are incredible sore and bruised!)

Our new ward

I have decided that I am going to be involved!! I am not going to wait for other people to talk to me, I am going to talk to them. (I am not a shy person, but I usually just find it easier to sit back and wait for others to make the move.) In our new ward I have decided that I am going to sign up for everything I can and meet as many people as possible. This past Saturday they had a big Super Saturday, where you get to sign up to make cute projects. I decided this was the perfect opportunity. First there would be people there, second there would be crafts. I went and had a wonderful time. Everyone is so nice!! I am way excited to get to know everyone. Also I made some way cute holiday decorations. ( we all know how much I love to decorate!)

Soup, sweaters and gloom

I have decided that it is officially soup weather!! Everytime it gets rainy and gloomy it just feel like soup weather. It is also sweater time. I love the changing of seasons which brings on the wardrobe change. I love getting out my cold clothes, it is like getting a whole new wardrobe, which is just so fun!!! So here is to gloomy, sweater wearing, soup eating weather!

My new obsession

I have found that I go through phases throughout my life. These phases usually involve different forms of entertainment sometimes even food (which can be entertaining!) My latest one has moved from Twilight books (even though I am still completely obsessed) to the Gilmores Girls. I have decided that I absolutely love this show!! I am sure that Mike is getting sick of them because I always make him watch them with me. I seriously think I could sit down and watch them for hours. I just finished season 2 and am waiting for season 3 that I ordered on half.com to arrive. Yay for Gilmore girls!!

Snow :(

I am not particularly happy about the snow. I hate being cold (it is the worst thing in the world). I would rather be hot than cold. To be totally contradictory though, I love to go sledding. It is so fun! when I was growing up we would always go to Mountain Dell golf course up Parleys canyon. It is a huge hill. We would always get tired after only a few rides because of the long walk up the hill. So even though I hate snow I am excited for the events that come with snow.

Halloween

Yeah for Halloween! It is fun to dress up and go to parties. The only problem is I feel too old to dress up and Mike has reinforced this fact by making comments about my being too old and teasing me (he always teases me and I always fall for it). The problem is at work all of the front desk people dress up, therefore I feel the need to dress up. So today I am a cowgirl ( a darn cute on at that, I might add). I have decided that my favorite part of Halloween is all of the cute kids and there adorable costumes!! I love to see them all. At work today some kids came in as Buzz Lightyear, and some cute cheerleaders from HSM. It is so fun to see them get excited and raid our candy basket. Well I hope everyone has a great Halloween.

My Every Waking Moment

Lately as I am sure you all could guess, my every waking moment is spent planning my house. Where everything is going to go, what to do or how I can decorate. I want to have everything done enough so I can start putting things away but of course it is taking so much longer than expected! It is so much fun (and time consuming!) We have slept there the last couple of nights. It is fun to have a place of our own with no one upstairs! We don't have to worry about being too loud with the tv or waking anyone up. It is GREAT!

Well we finally spent the night in our new house!! Even if we did sleep on the floor due to a lovely incident involoving water and our blow up mattress resulting in mold. YUCK! it was so gross. The floor wasn't too bad because we were so tired from moving and painting and sanding and cleaning and 'whew' I get tired even thinking about it. I also used our oven for the first time. It is a gas oven, I have never used one before. I found out that it doesn't cook very hot and I had to reset the timer like 5 times, but eventually my cake turned out. I am excited to get far enough along in the painting process that we can clean the carpets and start moving our big items in. Right now we only have our boxes and small items moved over (hence we don't have a bed)
I am also excited to report that our color turned out great!! Even better than I expected, it is perfect.

My House

He He it is so crazy to say that I have a house. I am very excited to decorate! It is almost to late to put out fall decorations and those are my favorite type of decorations for the year. So I will just have to put them out anyway. I have decided that I hate this deciding on paint stuff. It is hard. Everytime I pick a color and get a sample to paint on the wall, I hate it. It is either too pink, too yellow, too green. All I want is tan/brown. Is that too hard to ask for? I don't think so! It is fun though because it is mine, well I guess it is Mike's too but he is no help with the paint. He will only tell me if he hates it, and if you know me then you know I hate to make decisions. We finally picked a color though. Hopefully it doesn't look terrible.

This picture was actually taken before we got the house so the furniture is not ours. We are ripping out the hole above the fireplace and painting.

Here is the kitchen. Again nothing in it is ours. We had a fun fight over the fridge and we won!!

This is the master bathroom. It has a full walk in closet that I am so excited for.

I will post more pictures after we are done.

So I decided to start a blog. I don't really know why or what is interesting in my life to promote this but oh well. Here we go!

Guilt Free Housework

I don't know about you but I am terrible at housework!! I am always behind.  I have tried a million different schedules to keep on top of it, including cleaning a room a day, and just cleaning whatever I see first.  Needless to say nothing has worked.  I always have a million projects that I want to get done but I feel guilty working on them if my house is dirty.

One of my friends has an awesome blog, The Modern Hive, she is so inspiring!  If you get a chance peruse her site, you will love it.  I am always checking it to find out what great ideas she has come up with lately.  She posted about this awesome book published in the early 80's.

 

Source

Just a quick outline, it uses the creation of the world to help you outline your schedule for the week.  For example Thursday was the day of vegetation and beautification, therefore Thursday is the day to work in the yard.  I love the organization of this plan.  There are certain things that you need to do everyday, then there are things that are assigned to Mondays, Tuesdays, etc.  The chores that don't have to be done as frequently are assigned to the first week, second week, etc.  It really stresses how necessary it is to have time with your family.  It also sets aside time for you to work on your projects.  I like how it focuses on being a 'guilt free' approach to housework.  

Here is how I wrote my schedule up.  For now I wrote it on a white board so I can change days around and find out what works for me.  I also added a spot at the bottom of the board for 'ideas' and 'projects'.  That way I can keep track of everything.  

I really like this schedule.  I have had to modify a few things, for example Tuesdays are super busy for me, it is hard to get laundry done on that day.  It is easy to just switch days.

There are also some great ideas for how to get your kids involved.  One of the ideas to get small children involved, is to play games with them.  Let them pretend they have a farm.  They can feed 'hay' (paper) to the horse (trashcan) or cans to the billy goat.  

If you would like a list of what chores are on which day I compiled a list for you here.  Also Heather has a free printable that you can use to set up your chore chart.

Do you have an approach to housework that helps you have some 'me' time?  I would love to hear about it!

Decorative Food



Source

I recently heard about this awesome food stylist, Amy Atlas.  I have seen some of her work before but never had a name to put with the designs.  If you haven't seen her arrangements yet go check them out.  She is amazing.  I love the simplicity and beautiful colors that make up her designs.

For the past nine weeks our Young Women's group has been attending finishing school classes.  It was so fun!  We had guest speakers talk to the girls about topics ranging from communication to hair care.  We even had a four course dinner prepared for them, so the girls could learn proper etiquette

I think the Young Women really liked it.  For week ten we had a graduation night.  We had the girls get into groups and do a skit about what they learned during finishing school.  I think they really learned a lot.  Then we gave them a diploma for completing the course.

Throughout the weeks we used a fifties theme to pull it all together.  At the end of our graduation night we had a dessert buffet.  We thought it would be fun to use Amy Atlas' style to make the dessert table super cute.  It was really easy to come up with the design.  We just decided on the colors we wanted to use and came up with desserts that coordinated.  We decided to use red, blue, green, and yellow.  Then to kind of pull it all together we made a fruit pizza. Do you remember the post I did with my favorite lemon recipes?  Well I volunteered for yellow. 

I am definitely going to use this method in the future when I am planning an event.  I love how the colors of the food stand out on the white plates.  Ours didn't turn out as cute as Amy Atlas' but they still turned out pretty good in my opinion.