playskirt

I love playskirts...simple and breezy, perfect for a day of toddler play. My mom is always sending me beautiful pieces of fabric from the quilt shop she works at...this particular piece was destined to be sewn into a playskirt from the moment I saw it. Monkeys, pink elephants, toucans and tigers...oh yes!


There is just something incredibly gratifying about making an article of clothing for your babe.

Oops!

I can't believe I let an entire blogless week pass me by!

Thank you so much to everyone who had so many helpful suggestions for blog layouts! I cannot WAIT to show off my new duds...a very dear and sweet bloggy buddy of mine generously offered to use me as her "guinea pig" and is giving me a full make-over! I have followed SarahsBlueCastle for a while now and I am always amazed at her thriftiness and her creativity...This lady is talented ya'll! I am so excited for you to see her amazing handiwork. Definitely give her blog a visit if you're in need of cool decorating ideas or even just a little inspiration.

Over the weekend I was invited to a birthday party for a little girl in Isabella's nursery class at church...I had one short evening to think of a gift idea...so I zoomed up to the Target and quickly put together this gift basket full of three-year-old bliss. I whip-stitched this little drawstring pouch and filled it with "magic rocks" Isabella just loves to play with these.

This morning I tried my hand at braiding Isabella's hair...this was my first attempt ever at braiding her hair...so cut me some slack haha! I just LOVE the look of little girls with french braids (especially when there is ribbon tied to the ends-to die for!) so now that Isabella's hair is long enough I am going to practice every day until I can make them look sleek and perfect. That might take a while. It doesn't help that braiding her hair is like trying to wrestle a greased pig...I used cookies and Max and Ruby to get her to sit still for these...

Ok well, be sure and pop by later this week to check out my new look...I'm SO excited!!

o,l <--- Isabella's contribution to the blog...whilst I was fethcing myself a diet coke I found her fiddling with my keyboard....future blogger on my hands!!!

blog augmentation

My blog needs a little lift, ya'll!

I want a new background, new template...new everything! Trouble is, I don't know the first thing about doing any of that myself and I don't want to risk losing my archive, or my list of blogs I like to view, well...anything off of my page, really. I see lots of beautiful bloggies out there...so I'm wondering, who do I go to? What's the going rate? Anybody got any info I could use? Pretty please? With a peach on top?

I'm envisioning something pink, sassy and definitely frou-frou...

i've been working....

...on Isabella's room! If I wasn't such an amature, I would have taken before pics... I still have many, many things I plan to accomplish in here. Like curtains, (do I attempt making them, or just make it easy on myself and buy them?) a fancy mirror for her vanity, a pink, fluffy rug from Target to cover the hideous, brownish, office carpet ($80 rug-yowza! Will definitely have to wait) and a yard sale book shelf I just acquired that is currently undergoing a major face lift.

I have the hard part done though...and that is painting the entire room. The stripes were a pain in my rear-end...but definitely worth it because I LOVE 'em. The little canopy thingy over her crib is just an embroidery hoop that I covered with fake peonies, I saw one similar to this in a magazine and wanted it so badly, but it was $60!!! I racked my brain and came up with my own-cheaper-version, well it's probably not my own version, I'm sure someone has done this before, but it was new to me...Anywho...I cranked up my hot glue gun and I lined the entire hoop with pink ribbon first so that none of the hoop shows, then I glued on my strips of tule, then I added my peonies...it took about three artificial bouquets and six yards of tule. Super easy and fun to make! Maybe I could use this as my first tutorial....that would be so fun! But then I would have to host a giveaway I suppose...seeing as I would have this extra thing laying around...ho-hum...what to do...

Have a happy Monday, all!

One day

Today was a gift to me.

These are the days God sends me when He knows I'm in danger of losing my groove. Before deployments I never knew the power that one day could hold. One day can get you through the mire of hundreds of days. It can wipe away the frustrations and dread from the past weeks and completely refresh your outlook for the ones to come.

I took Isabella for countless rides in her new wagon (her prize after being so sick for so long) We scoped out the yard sales in the neighborhood, we mailed daddy a 24 lb. care package (yep, 24 lbs. I don't cut corners, they already go without so much out there) We went for ice cream cones at McDonalds, we rode the escalators at the Navy Exchange (she loves to do that) and after all of this, we sat in my bed and read some of her favorite books, then took a three hour nap together.

I'm taking an odd sort of comfort in the fact that my house is insanely messy because I know it's because spent the entire day playing with my daughter and putting miles on her new Radio Flyer, only stopping to rest when she did. My O.C.D. self really wants to jump up and start scrubbing and tidying and on a normal day, I wouldn't be able to sleep until I did...but no, today is not a normal day, not at all, for we were restful and pefectly content. There wasn't a single tantrum or meltdown...not a single tear was shed today, no backs were arched, no food was thrown, no accidents, no fresh boo-boos...however there was, hot sunshine, much laughter, running amuck, red cheeks, stickey kisses and many a times, a sweet toddler pausing to put her clammy little hands on either side of my face and say; "Mama, I wuv you."

Be still my heart!

I just want to relish this calm, I want to remember the serenity of this perfect day during deployment. I'm going to pack up all of the sweetness from today, tuck it away somewhere and bring it out when I'm feeling so overwhelmed that I don't know if I can go on another day...week...month.

Yes, today is a gift to me :)

we're weaning.

Uhm....yeah....so the weaning thing...not going so well for me. She's like a junkie with her crack...I'm not even sure where she finds them all...since when do I own a GREEN pacifier? I swear, she's been hitting kids up at playgroup, she's probably got some gangster toddler name like..."Izzie-P" I can just see it now. She's walking up to some toddler, shuffling her feet, there's probably some nervous twitching, eyes darting from side to side, makes sure i'm not looking, and then she asks "So you got the stuff? You got it? Huh? HUH?!?" Paci dealer/toddler thug then whips a paci out of his/her diaper in one fell swoop and passes it to her in a fake, (but adorable) toddler hug...all of the parents are so busy grabbing their cameras and oohing and awwing over how cute it is that we never notcie the exchange.

Anybody have any helpful suggestions for this wean-green mother of one?

(boo-boo on the nose: A flash-before-my-eyes disaster involving a 4 1/2' couch, a sick toddler who very uncharacteristically threw herself backwards in anger when she didn't want to go to bed, a mommy with her hands full of laundry and one panicked phone call to the doctor at 9:00 at night on his Emergency line...all of this, on Easter Sunday... Sigh)

A giveaway and some ramblings

I'm shamelessly leaving my mug all over the place over at Bee and Rose these days. I've been following her for a while now, she makes me giggle and she homeschools too!

So yeah...about me and my mug...she's having this monster giveaway you see...Unless you live in a blogland cave then you probably have heard all about it because it's all over the place...I mean this is a crazy fantasic giveaway we're talking about here...I'm salivating over the cup-cake apron (because you all know about me and my pink cupcake kitchen) not to mention she has her own Halloween boutique called Black Crow Boutique that features these dolls called Ugly Dolls...I LOVE those ugly, ole dolls...they fall into the category of "so ugly it's cute" heh heh heh....ok so if you hurry you still have a chance to enter for yourself! She's taking entries until 11:59 pm MST April 17'th...so hurry hurry hurry!

Anywho...a while back one of my sister gifted me with this fabulous pink, vintage tablecloth...it was positively dreamy. It had a lot of holes (because it really was vintage) so I was unable to use it on my table...I was contemplating pillows but I decided to try it out as a window valance first...what do ya'll think? As I'm typing this I kinda think I may have written about this before...I can't even recall, oh jeez. Well, if I did I hope you don't mind a re-run!

I gotta tell ya, I'm really digging decorating with old plates lately...they are addictive. I found all of my old antique plates at the Goodwill...some of them are chipped in places, but hey, they only cost me fifty cents a plate so I can't complain! Plus, who can tell when they're hung way up over a window? not me!


Now Isabella's art desk I know I have blogged about before...but I just took this other picture yesterday because I moved the desk to a different wall (and completely gutted my clutter self and gussied it up a bit with some pom-poms)...I can't help it though, seeing her messy, little desk just makes me smile, what's even better is the way she pronounces the word draw....she asks me if she can go "dwaw" Love it!!!!

another yard sale makeover

I found this little shelf at a yard sale a while back...I think I only paid a few bucks for it. I liked it because it was solid wood-and heavy! It had potential and I couldn't bear to pass it up. It sat unpainted in my hallway for over a month...my brain just pooped out, I had no idea what to use it for or where to put it.




In a sudden gust of inspiration the other day, I removed the door, replaced the drawer pull with a vintage glass knob, I painted her up and sanded her corners...made her look worn out :) I think it looks great sitting by my front door loaded up with Isabella's sweet, little, Keds. She loves to to take her shoes off at the door and put them in the shelf after coming home.








Just a little side story about that old window frame hanging on my wall there...The first time I saw this window frame it was hanging on my then boyfriend's wall in his little bachelor pad. I immediately fell in love with it and when he began telling me how he had a passion for antiques and loved to peruse the flea markets, I knew that he was definitely the man for me. Oh, I married him alright! You better believe it! Now, some of our favorite things to do together on the weekend is going to yard sales, thrift shops and antique malls. Some of my favorite things in our house are pieces that he collected all on his own-so adorable!

i love a good hunt...and old books!

Get a load of these! A friend from my ward called me on Saturday to tell me that her husband was in charge of a used library book sale and would I like to go? .....Would I?!

An hour later I was sweating, stinky and definitely grimy but grinning like a polecat as I carried a crate full of books out to my car. The book sale was held in a musty old warehouse (cool!) over on the air force base...every nook and cranny of the space was stuffed with books of every genre. Said space was not air conditioned and people were crammed into this place like sardines, happy sardines though, lugging crates upon crates of loot around as they pilfered. It was so humid and muggy that I was sweating astronomical proportions out of every pore and follicle I had (I'm a lily-white you see, not meant for this wilting, tropical heat)...even still I was excitedly wedging my stroller into impossible crannies and shamelessly on my hands and knees rummaging for dear life because...well, because it was fun. All of the proceeds went to the base library, of course and none of the books were over $1.00. Not even the hardbacks!! While plundering the shelves I stumbled across a little crate/shelf full of books that had an ink pen on duct tape label that read "old books" (Yes!) I gathered up all of the ones that looked the most interesting to me and here is a picture of my four favorites.




I just love how old books smell (and new ones too)...you can't see in these pictures because I'm a horrible photographer, but the edges of the pages are browned and crumbling and oh, my but I love that too! The spines are worn from multiple reads and as I was flipping through them I noticed that a couple of the books have been written in. It's just magical, I tell ya. Something about old books just makes my imagination start to spinning...I think, if I could have anything in the world, it would be a time machine. Yes, most definitely a time machine.

I plan on reading these books eventually...but in the meantime I am enjoying decorating with them. Tucking them in corners and enjoying the site of them in my home.

Easter Re-cap

Whew! I'm back...no excuses...just plain ole bloggers block, it hit me like a bag of bricks this week, ya'll!

We were both feeling a bit puny on Saturday, but I assumed it was just something that would pass. We went about our Easter business...I gritted my teeth and stood back to let her dye her eggs all by herself....she did a great job, choosing different colors, plopping them in the dye and mixing and matching, she didn't quite "grasp" the concept of the fragility of eggs though...and we ended up with about four crushed ones.

Easter morning arrived bringing excessively sore throats and icky sinuses...poor Bella won't eat a thing. We had to forgo church and stay home since I was afraid we were contagious, not to mention she is a serious cranky crankenstien.







Friday afternoon we received a pleasant surprise from daddy! He sent his girls Godiva chocolates for Easter. For Isabella, a giant chocolate bunny, and for mommy a sizeable box of my favorite truffles! He does spoils us :) This will mark the third Easter in a row that we have not been able to be together...I have my fingers crossed for next year though!

Isabella was very excited to dig into her "bassit" and was immediately clawing at the cellophane :)







She was all about the giant bunny...until I took it out of the box, then apparently it transformed from a cheerful springtime treat to a dark and menacing creature from the wild...for when I placed it front of her, my toddler was instantly overcome with terror. I managed to catch this picture as she was fleeing for safety. Leave it to my child to go down as the first toddler in history to be absolutely terrified of a chocolate bunny.






I hope everyone had a blessed Easter!