2011 Highlights and Pictures

January

Highlights: a visit to Amish country, snow days and chubby legs in polka dot leggings

February

Highlights: color on gray winter days, bundling up for a walk in the sun, a Valentines' party and cut out cookies (let's be honest. the real highlight was when the month came to and end!)

March

Highlights: Signs of spring, Jared's birthday, a day that required sunglasses and Caroline sitting up

April

Highlights: Marietta in bloom, warm days spent at the park and Uncle Austin's farm, Easter Sunday and egg hunts

May

Highlights: Mother's Day, a pet turtle named Sparky and a lost tooth

June

Hightlights: Pool days, Jared and I's whirlwind trip to North Carolina, a canoe trip to Hocking Hills, a SafetyTown graduate and Caroline's first birthday

July

Highlights: fireworks, Jared's graduation, family visiting from out of town and celebrating 8 years of marital bliss

August

Highlights: A trip to Columbus including a stop at COSI, a day at Idlewild amusement park and Mitchell starting kindergarten at home.
Low lights: A babe with a broken arm

September

Highlights: A Labor Day trip to Lakeside, Mitchell's birthday, my birthday, homemade applesauce and a trip to visit Grandpa B. at the T-county fair

October

Highlights: Spencer's birthday, fall foilage, family portriats, tricks and treats

Lowlights: A weekend spent at Children's hospital with Caroline

November
Highlights: moving to North Carolina, visiting the beach

December
Highlights: warm weather, gingerbread houses, a ride on a firetruck and Christmas in striped jammies

Christmas Eve Firetrucks

On Christmas Eve we partook in a fun tradition in a little town just up the road. Every year they get out the city fire trucks and let all the kids (and adults) ride. The trucks go up and down main street with the lights flashing and sirens blaring. Santa rides on a vintage fire truck at the end of the line. This first photo was taken toward the end of the ride, just as we were about to get off but I'd say a good time was had by all.

The Beach

After we left Ohio, we had about a week to get settled before Jared started work and the weather was sunny and pleasant so naturally, one of our first stops was the beach! On our

way, we made a quick stop at the home of "Grave Digger" for a photo-op and then we went on to Jockey's Ridge State Park. Jared and I both agree, it is the best place to let kids run free. It is a huge sand dune so they can't get lost, they can't drown (or get hurt really) and there is nothing

for them to break. After Jockey's Ridge we went to Nags head to see the ocean and our last stop was an Aquarium on Roanoke Island. It has since cooled off but I'm excited to make some more day trips to the beach when the weather warms up again!

We Have a New Backyard

We moved...to North Carolina! The day after Thanksgiving Jared and I said good-bye to the good old Buckeye State and drove south. We landed in North Carolina, sort of in the middle of nowhere but just for reference, about an hour south of Norfolk, Virginia and an hour and half inland from the Outer Banks. The past month has been hectic with our move, the holidays and Jared's new job happening all at once but we are slowly getting settled and feeling more at home every day. Here's to a fresh start and a sunny, mild winter (insert hallelujah chorus here) in 2012!

Long Time, No See

I have been MIA since the end of July! Yikes. As it turns out, three kiddos are keeping me pretty busy and I am having a hard time making time for blogging. Although I hate catch up posts, they are, unfortunately, a necessary evil. Here are a few things I've been up to since my last missive:

- Caroline broke her arm at the beginning of August. (not badly, but still sort of traumatic none-the-less.)
- We tried to savor every last bit of summer we could, even though Caroline's arm splint put a damper on our outdoor water activities. :(

- Mitchell turned six!

- I turned 31! As a naive child/teenager, there were a few things I thought would be different about my thirties. First, I thought i would be heavier. I really am pleasantly surprised I've been able to stay fit. Second, I thought I would have a lot more money. I am realizing now that becoming a millionaire is a lot harder than I originally thought. :) Also, I thought for sure I would be done getting zits. (What's up with that?)

- I am home schooling Mitchell. So far so good. It was a little rough at the beginning but we've gotten into a routine and things are going well. I started thinking about it because I'm sort of anti all-day kindergarten. I don't think it's horrible, just a waste of time. Also, I read, Well Trained Mind: A guide to classical education at home and watched Waiting for Superman, a documentary on public education in America in the same week. (Bad combo if you feel like you want to home school and are trying to talk yourself out of it!) However, if you are thinking about it, I'm definitely no expert but, I would recommend the Well Trained Mind. I put together a simple curriculum based on their recommendations.

- We made a bunch of homemade applesauce-delicious!

- I am playing tennis again! I played tennis growing up, including on my high school tennis team. It is something I love but for one reason or another, (being pregnant, having no money, having no one to play with, being pregnant again...) I haven't done in a long time. Lucky for me, Marietta has a really well organized community tennis association so I've been playing on their women's league and have met some fun new people to play with. My game is still sort of rusty but it's slowly coming back and it feels great to whack some yellow felt around even if it is just for a few hours each week.

- We spent a relaxing weekend watching our church's semi-annual general conference. A weekend full of spiritual enlightenment and encouragement. What? You missed it? No worries. It's all archived, here. Seriously, even if you are not LDS, you should watch some of it. It is so good! Try this talk and this talk.

-Spencer turned four! (In case you are wondering, his cake is supposed to be a rocket ship. Unfortunately, it had a few mechanical/structural malfunctions and toppled over several times before we sang happy birthday. It was pretty sad looking by the time the picture was snapped!)

- A few of my old thrift store revival projects have been buzzing around Pinterest. If you are here from Pinterest and have read this far, welcome! Unfortunately, I didn't do tutorials for most of those projects so you won't find them on the site. Sorry! :)

That's all the major happenings around our house. It seems like it suddenly turned into fall this week; the leaves are beautiful and Halloween is just a few short weeks away. Hopefully I can get back to blogging on a more regular basis soon! :)


P.S. I changed the template on my blog and I don't like it. However, I don't know how to change it back. Boooo!

Shrimp Tomato and Basil Pasta

A delicious Every Day Food recipe I found via my culinary genius friend Vanessa. I made this last week when it was a million degrees outside and it made a nice, light ending to a very hot and hazy day. All the better if you grow tomatoes and/or basil in your backyard! Recipe here.


My notes: The recipe says to add two cups of water along with the diced tomatoes to make the sauce. I made it that way in the past but found the sauce was too watery. This time I made it using one cup of water and that was plenty. (I actually added a couple tablespoons of cornstarch to thicken it up a bit. So really, you could probably omit the water altogether and just use the juice from the tomatoes. You live and you learn.) I also used 1 pound of bow tie pasta instead of angel hair.

Mr & Mrs

Celebrating eight years as Mr & Mrs today.

Happy Anniversary Jared!

(photo taken in Michigan City, Indiana shortly after our first anniversary.)

Time Out Book

Mitchell and Spencer play together really well the majority of the time. Really. They are like two peas in a pod. However, certain days they have a little more trouble getting along. Just recently, I remembered an idea I got from my sister-in-law way back before I had any kids. She said when her girls would argue, she would have them sit in time out where she had pictures them being nice to one another displayed on the wall. I thought that was a great idea so I decided to do something similar for Mitchell and Spencer. I just used a cheap-o photo album from the dollar store and filled it with lots of pictures of them sharing, playing and laughing. Now when they are arguing, they go to time out and look through the book together. When they are ready to say sorry and act like the pictures in the book, they get to come out. This is really the first day I've tried the book and so far so good. They love looking at pictures of themselves so they forget whatever dumb toy they were fighting over to begin with. Don't worry. I'm sure the bloom will where off by tomorrow and I'll have to think of something new but if it works for one day, I'll consider it a success!

Sweet Peach

Photo by Elizabeth Messina

Caroline is as soft and sweet as a little peach so it only makes sense that I make this cake for her belated birthday celebration this weekend. (It also helps that her birthday falls smack dab in the middle of peach season.) My mouth is watering thinking about it. I just hope I can make it taste as good as it looks in this picture! (Recipe here.)

Update: This turned out to be a very yummy cake with a mild peach flavor. Spooning the cooked fresh peaches over the cake is a definite must. (I did this over each individual slice after the cake was cut.) It was maybe not as delicious as it looks in the picture but also, the peaches I used were just so-so. If you make this, half the frosting recipe. It makes a TON!

Stripes!

I just couldn't pass up this striped t-shirt dress (with pockets!) on a recent trip to Goodwill. It is originally from Land's End so the knit was substantial and high quality. I had originally planned to transform it into a little boat neck shift dress but my sewing skills weren't quite up to par so I settled on a skirt. Working with stripes was a minor hassle as well as reattaching the pockets but all in all, it wasn't too bad and I'm pleased with the results. Hooray for stripes and hooray for $4 skirts!

Birthday Girl

I can hardly believe my sweet, little Caroline is one year old today! Jared is out of town so we will be celebrating when he returns next week. However, I always intended to blog about her birth story and never got around to it so I figured now would be a good time to reminisce. First off, what made Caroline's birth different from the boys, is that I decided to have her naturally. (Aka: no epidural.) The initial reason behind my decision was financial. Jared and I have no maternity coverage and epidurals are expensive- like $3,000 expensive. Since I had a very quick labor with Spencer, I figured the $3,000 could be better spent (or saved) on something else. I will say, that although my initial decision was financial, the more I read about natural child birth and the more women I talked to who had had a natural child birth, the more convinced I was that it could be a very positive experience.  And, now having done it myself, I can confidently say they were right! It was a great experience and I'm glad I didn't waste $3,000 for pain medication in what ended up being a very short and very manageable labor.  It was definitely painful but really cool and in a weird sort of way. With that said,  I don't regret having an epidural with the boys nor do I think births accompanied by an epidural are inferior in any way. However, for me personally, I think natural childbirth is my preference for the sole reason that it lessened the amount of time I spent pushing. Also, I enjoyed knowing exactly what was going on and being able to feel the different stages of labor.  (Just for reference, my recovery was the same as when I had an epidural and my babies have all been equally as healthy.) The birth story itself is a little anti climatic.  I was two days past my due date and woke around 2:00 A.M. in labor. I laid in bed trying to relax, while my contractions progressed until about 4:00 A.M. BY this time, my contractions were getting more painful and were about five minutes apart so I got out of bed and got a few things together for the hospital. In the meantime, Jared called our sister-in-law to come over and stay with the boys.

With hospital bag, ready to go!(in between contractions)

My sister-in-law arrived around 5 or 5:30 so we left for the hospital, walked up to the maternity floor (pausing in the hallway during contractions) and I was all checked in by 6:00 A.M. The nurse said I was dialated to an 8 which made me very happy-I knew everything was going to go quickly! I got nauseous a couple of times (no fun) and continued to labor in the room with Jared and a young nurse that kept trying to ask me questions and type stuff into the computer. (I really just wanted it to be quiet and wished the questions could have waited until later!) The doctor took his time arriving and broke my water around 6:45. For 15 or so minutes, I just laid on the bed with my eyes closed in an almost zen-like state. I was very relaxed but ready to be done!  The nurse shift changed at 7:00 AM (right after the doctor broke my water) and my new nurse was awesome. She was older and it seemed that she had more experience with natural deliveries. From the time they had broken my water, I had been laboring in a reclined postition on the bed but she encouraged me to stand up, hold on to Jared's shoulders and sway back and forth (like slow dancing.) She was very soothing and just told me to tell her when I felt ready to push. It was during this standing and swaying, that I felt the uncontrollable urge to push and could also feel Caroline moving down. (This last 30 minutes was the most intense part, my contractions were not as painful but it's a little scary to feel something that large moving down the birth canal uncontrollably!) After 15-20 minutes, I told them I was feeling a lot of pressure. The nurse checked me right then and that was followed by a mad rush. The doctor came in out of nowhere, a table suddenly appeared and they hurriedly helped me back onto the bed. Caroline was ready to be born! (At this point, I sort of wish I could have remained standing instead of being put back on the bed, because gravity seemed to be working well in my favor but oh well.) Once I was on the bed, I pushed a couple of times (It was painful and the only time I made any noise during labor- I screamed!)  But of course it was all very worth it because at 7:30, Jared delivered Caroline (under the supervision of my doctor) and she was perfect.

A few minutes after she was born.

A couple of hours later, feeling good after her first bath.

I can't believe how quickly this year has passed! Caroline has been such a happy, predictable and delightful baby. She truly lights up the room wherever she goes and lights up our home every day. Happy Birthday Caroline!

Married

I had the pleasure of photographing a lovely bride and groom at the Columbus Ohio Temple on Saturday and fell in love all over again with this sign template from Martha Stewart. It is so easy to make and it always turns out so cute! Find an excuse to make one and then click here for the template.

(Busting my tail editing pictures from the day so hopefully I'll have them all up early next week!)