I resolve... to live.

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There are so many different changes I would like to make and goals I would like to accomplish that it leaves my head spinning to think about it. I have a long way to go to be the person that I want to be... that's for sure. But one thing that keep coming to mind is that I don't feel like I'm really living my life. I feel like I'm letting life live me (if that makes any sense). I'm not molding my life to be what I want, I'm letting other people and situations mold it all for me. I used to be really spontaneous and up for adventure. Not so much anymore. I've fallen into a rut over the past few years and I've somehow decided that it's easier and safer to just sit back and do... well, not much. I do far more going through the motions that actual "living" and that is something that I want to change.

 

So instead of setting resolutions I wanted to pick one word that I can focus on this year. And that word is LIVE.

 

Not just exist. Not just shuffle around my life, but live.

 

So what does this mean to me? This means that instead of being the last person to roll out of bed and wish for the next hour that I was still sleeping (it happens almost everyday), I want to welcome each day as a chance to really live my life! Wake up happy to greet my family. Make good, healthy food instead of directing them to pour their own cold cereal. Plan fun adventures for us, instead of just sitting on the couch and watching TV. Getting outside whenever we can and living life in nature. Opening my curtains and letting the light in instead of worrying about who might see in my windows. Having a good attitude about what we are doing and actually plan fun things to do.

 

Yesterday was the first of the year and I was already able to put my "live" mantra into action. Trent had the day off and wanted to go ice fishing. I have to admit that ice fishing isn't my favorite activity to do because I really hate being super cold. But I decided to try and make it a fun family outing and to not complain/sit in the car/wish I was somewhere else the whole time. So we all bundled up and made our way up to the frozen lake. We all climbed down the hill and sat around the poles waiting for the fish to bite. It was beautiful. Yes it was cold but not too bad at all. Sure it would have been easier to just stay home and send Trent and Blue up there, because really there are more comfortable places to breast feed a baby than sitting on a bucket on a frozen lake. Or it would have been easier to just sit in the car with the baby... but I reminded myself that I want to live, not just exist.

 

 

 

 In order to get onto the ice we all had to cross this... Oy!

 

It turned out to be such a beautiful day. Surrounded by the beautiful earth. Spending time with my loved ones and making memories with them. I'm so glad that I did it.

 

I plan on putting the word "live" somewhere that I will see it everyday to remind me of my goal, and what I would like my focus to be this year. Hopefully each day, and by the end of the year, I will have lots of great experiences and memories and feel more fulfilled in my life. I wont be able to look back at the year and think, "Man that went by fast. What did I do again this year?"

 

Like I said, there is a lot I would like to change and do this year, but it all boils down to really living my life with purpose and intent, and to not let life live me. 

Christmas decorations...

 Christmas has come and gone... and I can hardly believe it will be 2014 next week! Time has been flying by for us over here.

I didn't do anything to grand for decorations this year. I honestly wasn't sure we would even be able to fit a tree in this space since we have the baby living in the living room. It's been a little tight but we worked it out.

Last year when I pulled out all my decorations for the tree I realized that I really didn't like what I had. When we were first married I wanted to do all red and silver ornaments, so that is what I had. I've since changed my mind and style and when I went to pack up all the tree décor last year I got rid of all my red. All of it! No more red over here! I wasn't able to get done all the new stuff that I wanted too, but I was so much happier with my tree!

I wrapped the tree in burlap this year for the garland. We also picked up some green bulbs (to replace the red ones I got rid of). I had a bunch of "snow" covered pine cones from my wedding reception as well as silver ceramic snowflakes that I've held onto all these years.

I really wanted to make a new tree skirt similar to this one. But alas, I waited way too long to get it started and only had leaves on the front of the skirt. So I just used presents to cover the rest and decided to just put it on the back burner until Christmas was over. The plan is to finish it up before I put it away so that next year I can pull it out and it will be ready to go.

New ornaments that I added were our family picture ornaments, some little bird houses that I painted with a cracked paint affect...

Some twiggy snowflakes (tutorial found here)...

And my favorite are these itty bitty doilies that I found at this shop. I bought a pack of 50 and starched them. They look so great! Like tiny snowflakes all over the tree. I'm tempted to buy another set for next year, or maybe the next size up... so cute!

We still have random ornaments that get collected with time. I'm so much happier with the tree now though! Maybe a few more days until we take it all down...

Family picture ornaments...

 I like to have a family picture taken every year of my little family. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, most of the time we just have a friend snap a few pictures with my point and shoot camera. Just something, with all of us looking reasonably presentable, in the same picture... once a year. Not too bad right? We've been able to do it ever since Blue was 2 months old, and I love looking at how we have all changed a little over the years. I've been trying to find a way to display them around Christmas time since I haven't been the best at getting cute Christmas cards made every year. I thought it might be fun to make ornaments for our tree out of the pictures so that we can pull them out and look at them every year.

They were pretty simple to make! This is by no means a tutorial, but here are the supplies that I used:

 

I found some wooden rectangles at Hobby Lobby (4 in the pack for $1.49) and printed out wallet sized pictures (I had to get two of each... so now I have lots of extras!). I stained the wood because I love the whole darker wood look, and just mod podged the pictures onto the wooden tags. I then drilled a small hole in the top and laced some bakers twine to hang them from.

I wanted to use my wood burning tool to put the year of the photo on the back but it wasn't working so well. I ended up using a white paint pen and just writing the year on each one.

I have to say I LOVE how they turned out!!!

 

Here is our shot from this year. Can you believe this gorgeous "forest" is just two blocks away from our house? 

 

Easy project that didn't take very much time that I will treasure. I'm still working on getting my tree all decorated, but it makes me so happy to see these when I walk past the tree.

Las Vegas...

 I've been aching to go on a road trip back down to Las Vegas for a long time now. A couple of things have happened this last month that sort of spurred a sudden road trip! One was we have a new niece along the way we wanted to meet. Also, we left our adopted 85 year old Jewish grandma Malka there when we left and we told her we would come down for a visit sometime. Trent has lost two of his grandparents in the last four months and I felt like we needed to jump on the opportunity to see her while she is still around! We also wanted to introduce our new baby to the friends that were so amazingly supportive to us while we struggled so much down there. So we decided on a Tuesday to head down on Friday! It was such a great trip! I only wish we would have had more time to see more people down there.

I've missed driving this long drive down the center of Utah. Utah really is such a beautiful place.

First stop were to play with cousins! These three followed Blue everywhere he went and loved playing with him.

Our new little niece/cousin. Blue said, "Mom I hope we get a sweet little baby like this someday..." Ummm... we did, like two months ago ;). He just loves babies!

We found out that Baby G really hates road trips and wanted to be out of his seat!!! He was super cute when we would get him out, and screamed the rest of the way there ;).

 

We only had about 24 hours in Las Vegas, so it was a really quick trip! We meet up with Malka and took her out to dinner at our favorite buffet (The Seasons at The Silverton). As we drove through our old condo complex we told Blue that this was where we lived. He didn't remember it at all! We've only been gone for two years and he was four when we moved so I thought for sure he would remember it. Nope, there was very little he actually remembered. I'm glad that he remembered the people, it's okay that he couldn't remember our old condo.

If anyone would like to adopt a wonderful grandma in Las Vegas I have one for you. She is so sweet, and we miss her a lot.

This lady moved in behind us right before I started chemo. She would bring me fruit and veggies from Trader Joe's every single week while I was sick so that I could stay "as healthy as possible". We spent all of the holiday's that we stayed in Vegas for with her. She is not an orthodox Jew (hence going to an un-kosher buffet on a Saturday night), but she is from Israel and speaks Hebrew. She is one of the kindest people I have ever met.

We didn't do what normal people who go to Vegas do ;). Our first stop was to the place my husband missed the most... Cardenas Grocery Store. He walked the aisles and was sad that we don't have this Mexican grocery store in Utah.

We went to our favorite pizza place, Manhattan Pizza, where you get a huge slice of cheese pizza for $2.79! Sadly... the pizza was not nearly as good as we remembered it being.

We reunited with some of Blue's old playmates. He really misses these boys... and I don't blame him! He hasn't yet found great friends like this up in Utah, so it was fun to play with them for a while.

 One of my favorite parts of the trip was to see some of my best friends hold my little baby and giving them huge, long overdue hugs. There are a few women who were such a huge part of my life when things were so hard. They were there for the whole thing... and they are who stood by me through the thick and the thin of it. They have seen me at my worst and pulled me up to higher ground, and I owe a lot to these ladies. There are others I could have had this moment with, but the two that I did were Crystal and Heidi. By far one of the best moments of my life was seeing them hold my little miracle boy. Thank you ladies, for being my friends and taking care of us! This was a full circle moment in my life... love you both!

 And it is no secret that I love to look at old pictures from when I was sick/bald and recreate them. I don't know why I like to do it, other than it reminds me that life goes on, and things get better. My friend Crystal had this little girl the same week that I finished chemo. When I went to meet her she had a head full of hair and I was so jealous!! Crystal requested that we take another one now... which was super fun! We now both have long hair... but I'm the only one with a natural bump-it (come on... it's totally obvious that my head is mis-shaped. Thankfully it just gives me volume now).

 

I'm so glad we were able to get away for a few days to go and do this. I miss Las Vegas a lot... mostly the good people that we met there. It really lifted my spirits to see so many wonderful people in my life. Thank you everyone for having a fun weekend with us!

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.

Three months...

This little boy has changed so much in the last three months! He was so tiny when he was born, but now he is just a regular rollie pollie baby!

He is finally starting to get to be a happier baby! He is smiling and cooing every chance he gets. Middle of the night feedings are actually pretty fun because he starting smiling at me as soon as he sees me. It's actually hard to put him back down to bed because he is just soooo sweet and cute (I never thought I would say that!).

He loves the swing, and I usually nap him in there during the day because he will actually sleep... I'm hoping that I'm not creating too bad of a habit with that. But in our tiny house that is always loud, I feel like I just have to do what is working for me at the time. He also loves laying on his back and that is when he is the most talkative.

We are all falling so in love with him. I find myself smiling so much, which is sadly a little surprising to all of us. Blue keeps saying, "Mom, why are you smiling?", like it is so out of the ordinary. Maybe it is... this baby is healing my heart in a big way and I'm so grateful for him.

Not that this is a real surprise, but we have another big, blue eyed boy around here!!

He's doing pretty good with sleeping. He's started to go 7-9 hours at night with one feeding around 5 AM. That is until daylight savings... and now we are all messed up! I don't know if it's daylight savings really or something else, but he's suddenly back to waking up 3 times at night for the past few nights. I hope that it's just a fluke and my good sleeper will come back!

Halloween...

Yes, I know it was already a week ago! But I wanted to share my cute boys in their Halloween costumes on here.

I may have made a bit of a mistake last year... that is that I bought Blue a costume out of a bag. Now there is nothing wrong with buying a costume out of a bag, other than I don't want him to think that every year he can just pick whatever costume he wants and I will buy it for him. That kind of takes the fun out of Halloween for me. So this year he found some cheaply made Ninja costume that he wanted for $20 and I said, "nope... sorry". I tried to explain that part of the fun of Halloween is to make our costumes and go on a search to find the things that we need for them! I showed him this blog post about the costumes she has made for her kids and when he laid eyes on Luke Skywalker it was all over! He HAD to be Luke... even though we have never watched the Star Wars movies. So Luke it was...

I followed Miss Sheena's tutorial on using a women's white sweatshirt for the tunic. Brilliant! I made the white pants out of an old bed sheet that we had laying around and the pouch out of some old tan chords that Blue wore to church forever and are too small now. We thrifted the belt for $1 at DI and borrowed the light saber from his cousin. The cowboy boots... well, that was his little touch ;).

I paid less than $7 to put this costume together. I love that!

And our little pumpkin boy had this hat put on his head enough that he finally got used to it and didn't care anymore. I had a long sleeved white onsie under his other onsie on Halloween because it was pretty chilly. I'm suddenly super bad at taking pictures of my kids or getting out my camera on days like this. So I re-dressed him up a few days later and took this picture. Someday I will get it all figured out!

It all started with a pumpkin hat...

Five years ago when Blue was one year old, I got this crazy idea that my boy needed a pumpkin hat to wear for Halloween. Not just any pumpkin hat, but one knit lovingly by his mama. I had no clue how to knit, but this desire for a pumpkin hat is what got me started. I bought a "teach yourself to knit" book, and spent lots of time on you tube, and managed to make a pumpkin hat for Blue to wear to our church party.

Not too bad for my first knitting project! He of course hated it and would barely leave it on long enough for me to snap these pictures.

Little did I know then while making this pumpkin hat what a huge blessing knitting would be in my life. Knitting is a very dear friend of mine... I can't even count the number of doctor's appointments I have sat and waited for that have allowed me a little knitting time. I've been able to make gifts for friends, booties, baby leg warmers, hats, cowls, scarfs... the list goes on. I was able to make some of the hats I wore while I had cancer to keep my poor head covered and warm, as well as hats for my friends who have also had cancer. The most sacred knitting project I have done was the little soft white blanket I knit for Clayton that I wrapped him in before we buried him. Something that kept my hands and mind busy for the days between his birth and burial. The only temporal thing I ever made for my son I was able to make with my two hands, running every fiber of that yarn through my fingers. Yes, knitting is a very dear friend to me.

As the wind has grown a bit colder and the leaves have been falling from the trees, I've found myself once again with a burning desire to knit my new baby a pumpkin hat to wear for Halloween. This is the first project I've encountered since having him, and I was able to finish it up just before the big day!

It's fun for me to look back on the first pumpkin hat I made and see how much my knitting has improved over these last five years. This hat was a bit trickier than the first (I used this pattern), but I love the way it turned out. I wanted to take some pictures of it with Baby G modeling his new hat, so I waited until he was in a super happy mood. He was all smiles and coo's one afternoon so I grabbed the hat and had my husband hold him outside to take a few pictures.

And this is what I got...

In case you are wondering... yes, he's totally glaring at me in this picture for making him wear a stupid pumpkin hat.

Seriously!! Ugh... he really does not like the hat! I'm not sure if it's too tight or he just doesn't like hats, but he was not happy with us. We took a little break and let him say hi to the ladies before we tried for more pictures.

No such luck (and he couldn't have cared less for the chickens)...

Back inside with the hat off, he's as happy as can be again.

Oh well! He's still wearing it for Halloween. Or at least until we get tired of him complaining about it. We tried again to have him wear the hat later that night and he did a little better. No smiles but at least he wasn't fussy about it.

Even if my sons don't fully appreciate the Halloween pumpkin hat, I'm sure grateful that I can make such things for them. And that this silly desire of mine has sparked such a fun and relaxing hobby for me.