Pinterest Project - completed!

okay so OOPS.

I promised to come back the next day with a completed pinterest project and, well, i didn't. That will teach me to make promises that I know are super far-fetched.

In any event i DID complete a pinterest project and I am SO excited about it. It didn't happen by the 15th but hey, it DID happen in the month of November and beggars can't be choosers.

I made these little awesome dudes:

(note, those are not mine and have been snagged from a blog that you can get to by clicking the photo)

This was all thanks to my friend Jule Ann who has a really great blog called The Crappy Housewife which you should check out. Jule Ann hosted a Make-Cute-Turkeys playdate at her house today when my "Let's Decorate Thanksgiving Shirts for our Kids" playdate fell through due to horrible disorganization on my part. 

I had a lot of fun and these little guys aren't nearly as complicated to make as they look. They're fun and fabulous. And I completed another Pinterest Project!! I'm up to 3 now! Go me!

So yea, that's my exciting news for tonight. 

How are the rest of you doing? Have any fun crafts or Pinterest things you want to make? Link me! I need inspiration!

doctors and presents and turkeys oh my!

So today was Henry's 12 month well baby checkup!

He is a big and beautiful boy who is meeting all of his milestones and is advanced with his speaking :) hooray! 

Henry weighs - 27.7 pounds

Height: 31 inches 

Head measurement: 19 inches (he's got his daddy's genes on that one - giant head (for giant brains?))

Poor guy also had to get four shots so that was kinda sad. He liked the nurse just fine until that happened. But he ended up getting a sticker with a cat on it so he was happy (he kept holding it up at me and saying "Caaaaaaat!!!!" and laughing lol)

After his appointment I managed to meet up with a lady selling a cool baby basketball hoop! This facebook garage sale group has been awesome both for selling and buying so far! I am scoring all kinds of cool gifts for Henry for Christmas and am spending hardly any money (my cheap frugal husband is so proud). 

 This is the one i got! for only $7!! (retails $36!) 

You seriously should look and see if there are local garage sale groups in your area on facebook. For reals.

After the pedi we went to Whole Foods where we stocked up on all kinds of goodies. Now that Henry is eating tons more solids, I am basically obsessed with feeding him the best quality foods that I can. For lunch he had Three Squash Soup which he was absolutely in love with (despite the fact that i thought it tasted like eating liquified onion. gross!). He topped that off with some whole grain apple muffin for dessert. He was an absolute MESS once the meal was over due to trying to wear his muffin on his head like a hat but LOL he had a good time in the process. I love that kid. 

Okay, i know this is a basically pointless post BUT i wanted to post something so here it is. 

Oh and for my pinterest project, I am going to be making Henry a Thanksgiving shirt...wanna help me decide which one?  Here are the two i'm debating between:

OR

(only not so girlie obviously)

So what do you think? #1 or #2?

okay off to wrestle the little one to bed (and to join him there myself)

Project Month

November is officially (well, unofficially until just now) my Project Month.

There are so many things I want to accomplish and I am feeling like now is just as good of a time as any to get them all (well, some of them anyway) started at least.

So far this month I have done a lot already: I made two crafts from pinterest (both for Henry's birthday), I have begun a "painting" I'm doing for him for his room with a Nancy Tillman quote from the book The Night You were Born, I have rejoined and have been actually following (for the most part) the new Points+ Program on Weight Watchers and today I started Project Organize which is what I came here to write about.

Ryan and I moved into our house last March. You'd think that in the subsequent 8 months that we've lived here that we would have gotten organized and everything would be nicely in it's place.

Well, you'd think wrong.

We've been living together for five years and over the course of those five years we've I've acquired a lot of....well...crap.

I guess you can say that one of the only down sides to being a sentimental person is that i have a tendency to like to keep things that mean something to me. Unfortunately since I am known to get emotional over basically everything this shows up in the form of me hanging onto many objects over the years.

However I've recently realized that my need for an organized and functional home is starting to outweigh my sentimental need to obsessively stuff random treasured objects into drawers. It's just not worth it.

So today I started on the Mud Room - our infamous crap pile. I sorted and tossed and threw out and donated and at the end of the day SO MANY THINGS WERE ORGANIZED! It's amazing how cleaning out one room affects the whole house! I freed up an entire closet and moved all of my scentsy stuff into it and that enabled me to clear off a book case and a table and it just went on and on and on.

So hooray. Project Month is a roaring success so far and I am happy about that!

Now, to get started on my pinterest project!

hello, old friend (again)

I think I'm going to give this blogging thing the good old college try again. Although in my case, I should just say give it a try since we all know how long it took me to get through college.

In any event, here I am sitting at my computer on the evening of Henry's First Birthday Party. It was a huge success and everyone had a phenomenal time.

I want to thank the vendors I worked with to pull this party off - specifically:

Cake Arts Consulting who is local to me and who made an amazing cake for Henry's party:

(sorry for the photo quality there, it's a cell phone pic)

and

Alli App Boutique on etsy who made Henry's first birthday shirt for us:

Both were awesome vendors and they come highly recommended (and no, i am not getting anything for saying that!)

It was such a great party and don't worry, I have more photos coming but for now I will leave you with this teaser photos and one of my accomplishments in this whole endeavor because it is something i made and was inspired by from pinterest (and yes, that links you to my pinterest, feel free to follow my boards! i like to follow you back on pinterest so it will be fun):

Henry's party was a Rainbow themed party (i really wanted to just have Birthday Party be the theme and when trying to come up for a color-scheme for that for a 1 year old - rainbows seemed the most celebratory and awesome). I found this idea on pinterest done with tulle and i knew i had to try to execute it for his party! I think it came out awesome :) I made it myself using a lampshade - a pillow case and streamers! Such a cool rainbow-coming-from-a-cloud affect!

I have some fun ideas for blog posts coming up. Included in this will be a monthly Pinterest post where I make a craft from pinterest and post it here. I am going to be posting it on the 15th of every month (so i better get cracking on my November pinterest item!). Please feel free to join in on this with me and we can do a linky-type-event where we all praise one another for our pinterest successes :)

I am also going to document my Project Body journey which is basically just my endeavor to return to my pre-pregnancy figure. I'm not too far out from it now but I still could use some work. It's my goal to get myself back in shape before we bring on Baby #2! (more on that to come)

So I just want to thank anyone who is still here and still reading and who is still hanging in there. Please keep on keeping on and check back for more to come. I am excited to share with you all!

Books: the dystopian novel strikes again. in a good way.

so i just finshed reading Divergent by Veronica Roth

Divergent is a dystopian YA novel that is the first in a trilogy; the second and third have yet to be released.

For those who don't know, a dystopian YA novel is a book written for the Young Adult crowd where the characters live in a culture that is touted to be a utopia-like society. HOWEVER as it turns out what they are actually living in is in fact a dystopian society (dystopia meaning dysfunctional utopia). After some digging, the reader comes to realize that the formerly-perceived utopia is actually oppressive, controlling and fundamentally corrupt even though the objective it was to eradicate corruption. Dystopian novels are basically always a commentary on the nature of humanity, government, and our abilities and inabilities to live harmoniously and without corruption (and our constant desire to create an incorruptible society). Think 1984 and The Giver for other more well-known dystopian novels.

These books are typically set sometime in the super future after the collapse of our current society as we know it now...they never typically outright say what happened to cause the collapse of society but in general our current culture is heavily alluded to as the villain who caused massive destruction and the ruination of (hu)mankind as we know it. Probably rightfully so. We did create Pajama Jeans, afterall.

Anyway, I read this book because I am in the process of writing my own dystopian YA trilogy so i want to research what else is out there and currently selling. And, okay I also read itbecause dystopian YA trilogies are super fun and addictive and awesome.

As predicted this book was definitely all three. It kept me up reading all night which is something i love (until the next morning when i have to wake up at 6:45 with my 10 month old).

Because it's a YA book, it's definitely not difficult to read nor is it fine literature (it's okay, i can say that because the one I'm going to write will probably share these qualities at least to a certain degree). I think that's kind of half the fun of it.

That in mind, i do have to say that the book is pretty terribly written and is SUPER obvious with it's plot-lines. Like, really bad. It's so poorly written that when I was reading the "About the Author" part i was legitimately shocked to see she had graduated with her degree in Creative Writing.

But hey, it can't be THAT bad i guess because i did read the whole thing. It's just that there's so much more that she could have done, and so much that could have been done better.

Let's just say it's nowhere near as good as Hunger Games which, despite it's abysmal ending, was really legitimately a GOOD series. No, a GREAT series. It really was. Really good. Re-readable good.

I don't really want to give too much away about the plot of this book but if you're looking for a fun, easy, totally addictive book, this is the one to go to next. Unless you haven't read Hunger Games because really, you should. Those books rule. Okay, except for the last one. But it's still worth it.

Anyway, the point is, go out there and read these kinds of books. dystopian trilogies are super fun and all the rage and if i can get you guys hooked on them, you'll buy mine when it comes out hahaha it's gonna be just as formulaic and fabulous as the rest of these. i hope.

Oh and if you've read this and need another one to read, I suggest Matched by Ally Condie (the second one comes out in November).

that's all. off to bed with my child who sleep-crawls.