Pumpkins...

About five years ago I saw some cute fabric pumpkins that had real stems on the top, and sort of fell in love with them. So I asked my family members if they would pick pumpkins to decorate that had nice long stems and save the stems for me. They were troopers and saved their old stems... and then life happened and I tucked them away in a bag and haven't even used them all this time.

For craft night with my sister in law's we made this awesome faux mercury glass pumpkin (the silver one below) and I wanted to put together a little pumpkin trio. I had the wooden/ stick one already and decided that it was time to make the fabric pumpkins!

I used this super easy tutorial for them, and hot glued the stem on. Oh man... is it possible to fall in love with a pumpkin? I'm so happy with how it turned out!

I pulled out all the pumpkin-y fabric that I had in my stash and made a few more. I like them best lined up on the window seal from biggest to smallest...

I had some other close up pictures but blogger isn't letting me upload them, so maybe some other time. But they turned out so fun! I have six stems left, and all of these have some sort of polka dot on them (guess I really like polka dots?), so I'm going to get some velvet and other textures for the rest of them. I'm glad that I've held onto these all this time... they were worth the wait.

Thirty...

Cuddling my boys... my last day being 29.

 

I spent the last few days of my twenties in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Golden leaves, crisp air, dirt roads, and snow!!! It was pretty cold the first few days but then everything melted and the beautiful fall scenery came out.

I've come to terms with the fact that my birthday falls on the deer hunt every year. Instead of being mad that my husband is totally preoccupied with hunting that week, I try to go along so that Trent doesn't have to pick between me and the hunt. I get to enjoy being in a place that I love and relax while he goes and does his thing during the day. We weren't really able to go out and do too many walks/hikes like I had hoped because I didn't want the baby to get too cold. Instead we sat around the fire in the cabin and mostly cuddled Baby G while the kids played.

I found my thoughts centering around my life, this stage in my life, and the fact that I was turning the big 30 that weekend. Ahhhh.... thirty. I'm happy to be thirty. I guess I feel like I should really be an adult now... or something like that. I've been thinking about what I want my life to be like in my thirties as opposed to what they were like in my twenties.

Two things seem to hit home the most. The first is that I spent most of my twenties longing for babies. Longing to be a mother. One of my biggest challenges in my twenties was getting these boys here to our family. I've spent the last four years of my life hoping/longing/pleading to have another baby. And here he is... I have this beautiful boy in my arms. Such a weight has been lifted from my heart. I'm relieved that I wont be longing for a baby this year. That I will be taking care of a baby instead.

 

With that comes the second thing... I've been pretty sad and depressed while longing for this baby. I haven't taken care of my body the way that I should have. I justified a lot of poor choices (yes I mean food choices) because I was trying to fill a big void in my life. With just having a baby and turning 30 I'm finding myself really wanting to take better care of my body. I'm not the young 24 year old I was when I had Blue and I can already tell I'm going to have to work a lot harder to get this baby weight off. I guess I'm accepting that I'm getting a bit older and I need to make healthy eating a bigger priority.

Because I now have two boys who call me mom, and they deserve the very best of me...

 

So our weekend in a sentence... Husband got his deer, I turned 30, Blue built his first snowman of the season, and Baby G did his first 7 hour stretch of sleeping. Life is good! Life is full of beautiful things right now. Thirty is going to be great... I can feel it!



Yellow daffodils...

 In those many months that I was trying to get pregnant I thought a lot about how I would tell our boy the news when the time came. I wanted to make it really special, since he had been waiting for so long to have a little sibling. I saw the most adorable house bag and little doll family here that I was pretty set on making. Even though he is a boy... and boys don't really play with dolls, I was set on making our little doll family complete with a house bag to break the news to him about our new addition.

Well, the time came and I made a bag that looks like this little pioneer house we live in. But that's as far as I got. During the first 14 weeks of pregnancy I was taking progesterone pills to help reduce the risk of miscarriage and support the pregnancy and they made me super sick. It was awful. Every time I took them I would have to go lay down and they would make my head spin for hours. It was not good. The longer I took them, the worse it got... so I never got around to making our little family of dolls. But in the end being able to keep this baby cooking is way more important than feeling up to sewing dolls right?

And now I have a bag that looks like this house that I have NO CLUE what to do with it!!!

Sorry, it's a bit wrinkled because it's been sitting in my sewing cabinet, and there it is likely to sit. When I made it I sewed a little flower bed of yellow flowers in the front. Now... I had never seen yellow flowers in front of this house before. When we moved here there were red tulips in the bed and when they were done that was it. But I LOVE yellow flowers! They are so bright and beautiful! So I put yellow flowers in there just because I like them. This doesn't look exactly like the house, but it's pretty close, with some of my favorite features.

The back has a garden with the walnut tree that I love so much. I even put our little squirrel friend that lives in the tree on it.

This squirrel doesn't like us very much. Things got a little heated in the fall when Trent was harvesting the walnuts that had fallen on the ground and the squirrel did not like us touching his walnuts! But I guess he was still able to gather enough because he's still back there, and made it through the long hard winter that we had... and he doesn't yell at us so much anymore.

Anyway, the point of this whole story is that I was a little shocked and so happy to see a bed full of yellow daffodils pop up last month!!! They were so beautiful! We even had some red and yellow tulips come up in the last few days! So my little sewn flower garden turned out to be right on!

I'm a little sad to say that in the last day we've had a really bad wind storm up here, and all the flowers are gone now. They didn't make it through the 70+ mph winds. But they were gorgeous while they lasted! Till next spring little yellow flowers...

Snow!!!

 Sorry if you've already seen these pictures on Facebook/Instagram, I know I'm being repetitive... but I just can't even believe all of this snow!!!

On Thursday it was a beautiful WARM (44 degrees) day with a blue sky! But the news kept saying that a big winter storm would hit by 3 PM. Sure enough, 3 PM came and the flakes started to fall. All night it snowed and when we woke up the next morning it was a winter wonderland out there!

 I measured the snow that had collected on top of our garbage cans... 21 inches! That's nuts! I don't remember ever getting that much snow in one day before! When I was little I remember it snowing a lot and we were out of school, but that was a long long time ago.

I braved it to get a shot of the root cellar, buried in snow! Up to my knees...

But it didn't stop there! It kept on coming down and by the next morning we had 9 more inches!!!

So yes, we are currently hibernating in this snowy cold place. We live right up by the mountain so I think we get more snow than other parts of Utah does. It's been so long since I've been around snow like this. Part of me is missing Hawaii/Vegas right now and that warm winters that I had gotten used to. But another part of me is like a giddy little kid, sitting by the window for hours watching the snow! It's been fun to see our little boy and the snow. I had forgotten that he has not lived around snow his whole life, so this is a different kind of winter for him. We were here last year but it was a really mild winter and we didn't get much snow at all.

Winter...

Winter is here!!! We had a big snow storm a few nights ago. It was fun to watch the huge snowflakes fall. Not so fun to drive home on I-15 in the middle of a huge blizzard. So grateful that we made it home safe on Saturday night.

This place never ceases to amaze me. The pioneer house looks so good in whatever season is upon her (can a house be a gender?)...

My garden covered in snow...

I'm not sure how many inches fell, but it was a lot!

Poor apple tree with it's weighed down branches.

I love this walnut tree. I'm glad that we were able to get the leaves all raked up before the snow fell. The day before the storm we spent the day outside raking, putting things away, covering up my husband's duck hunting boat. So glad that we did all that!

And last but not least, the first snowman of the season!

Now all I want to do is curl up under a warm quilt and knit...

Twenty nine...

I'm glad that my husband married me. Even though my birthday is during the muzzle loader deer hunt every single year. It's his favorite hunt you know, always has been. Thankfully we've avoided this predicament for the past 7 years that we've lived out of Utah. This year though... it was back.

I honestly don't care if he hunts on my birthday anymore. We can always celebrate later right? I would rather him go and have a good time with his friends then worry about hunting on my birthday. Well, I guess there was this situation a while ago... on my 21st birthday... where I was left by myself at a cabin for the whole entire day without any phone service or sight of another human being until late into the evening. Yep, I really did spend my 21st birthday all by my lonesome, and was a little sad about that. I'm over it... really I am! But my husband has taken a personal vow to never have that happen again, and to no longer hunt on my birthday.

My boy and I decided to drive out to where he was hunting this year and camp over on Friday night. Such a good decision! I didn't want to spend the whole week with a bunch of smelly hunters {no offense}, but one night was not bad at all.

This was my view when I woke up Saturday morning...

And I just knew it was going to be a beautiful day.

 

Twenty nine this year... my golden birthday. I don't know why but I've been looking forward to 29 for a long time. Still in my twenties, but hopefully a little wiser than I was in my early twenties.

 

The boy needed to use the potty, which was a few miles away. We normally would not drive to the potty while out camping in the woods but I felt like going on an early morning drive to see this beautiful place we were in.

 

Best decision of the day.

 

You see, mother nature had a {few} wonderful birthday presents for me on this drive. I left camp, turned a few corners, and found myself in the most beautiful golden aspen forest. 

For miles, and miles, and MILES all you could see were golden aspen trees! I drove slowly along the dirt road trying to soak in as much of the sun reflecting off these golden beauties as I could... it was magical to me.

It was one of the most amazing drives of my life. I know that it's the time of year for leaves to change, and I was up in the mountains, but it almost felt like someone had painted all the trees gold the night before just for me on my golden birthday. I shed a few tears at the beauty I was beholding and considered it a gift.

The next gift that was on my drive... sheep. Lots of sheep. I love seeing wildlife outside and Utah has a lot of it. But seeing hundreds of sheep brings me back to my college days when I went to Snow College. There were many mornings I would be walking to school and the roads in Ephraim would be covered in sheep. This city girl {who wishes she was a country girl} loved it when the farmers would do that.

So we slowed down even more and watched the sheep.

I took the most awesome movie of the hundreds of sheep surrounding our car... but I can't for the life of me get it to load. So sorry, that you have to miss out on that one ;). It was pretty amazing to see all these sheep out there.

Even with all my tree gazing and sheep watching going on, we still made it to the loo in time. I love that my birthday started out with something so simple yet special. It's the small and simple things that sometimes bring us the most joy. When we got back to camp we packed everything up and headed home. My cute husband was true to his word and did not hunt on my birthday. He made me feel very special. Mother nature made me feel special. My wonderful friends and family members made me feel special. It was a great day. I'm lucky to be so loved and have such great people in my life.

Antelope Island...

I've been wanting to take my boy to Antelope Island for a while now. It's a magical place... once you get past the smell of brine shrimp and salt water. Where else can you go and see buffalo roam around on an island in the middle of a lake? I've only been there a few times in my life but I really love this type of thing and knew he would too.

So we went for family night this week and took a picnic dinner to eat with the buffalo. We lucked out and found the perfect secluded spot where there were two buffalo feeding and roaming around pretty darn close to us.

We parked our blanket in the middle of the trail because I didn't want to get any closer to the buffalo ;). Turns out these two were pretty docile creatures. Just getting a little dinner themselves.

 And rolling around to get bugs off their backs. It's quite the ordeal, to roll around in the dirt when you're a buffalo. And loud...

Then this little dude decided that he was a baby buffalo...

We watched the sun set and turn the sky the most beautiful orange color...

Goodbye buffalo... til next time.

You know what else we saw on Antelope Island? Antelope! I don't know if I've ever seen an antelope out there before, but we drove along side this one. He was beautiful!

In a three day span we saw two tarantulas, coyotes, buffalo, antelope, owls, deer, rabbits, all wild... all outside in this beautiful state. Utah, you are so diverse and beautiful! That is why I love you...