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.

 

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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



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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.