Friday Letters

Today, I'm doing my first link up to Adventures of Newlyweds to play along in:

Dear Life slow down a little bit. I can't believe how fast the days/weeks/months are flying by right now. I'm happy, but feeling a little lot overwhelmed as of late. 

Dear work elevator um...I'm really happy it wasn't me that got stuck in you tonight, but I really really feel so bad for my boss. See below message:

1.5 hours stuck in the elevator is never ok, but especially on a Friday night - poor thing!

Dear fellow MN Bloggers I had such a great time on Tuesday night when we all met up at the Paint Pub!! I'm sorry I haven't blogged about it yet. It's not you, it's me (see above comment about life being crazy lately)! Check out some recaps here. I can't wait for our next meet-up and chatting with you all more!!

Dear hubby thank you in advance for coming to the breastfeeding/newborn care classes tomorrow. I'm sure you will just have a fantastic time ;) We'll just call the iPhone 5 you got today your reward for being such a good sport about the whole thing!

Dear 3 hour glucose test next Tuesday that's right - I was supposed to take you last Friday (since I failed the 1 hour test). I showed up (starving) to my appointment at 8:15 and the receptionist hollers across the room that my appointment was actually on Thursday (the day before). What.the.eff! The lady that scheduled my appt verbally told me Friday, but wrote down and booked Thursday...awesome! I wasn't panicking about the test or anything. I left the doctor's office (after being super annoyed and probably rude to the receptionists re-booking my appt), called my husband, started crying on the phone to him out of frustration/stress/annoyance and then went to work where my boss saw me and gave me a hug after hearing my story. I also got a donut to help "ease the stress". I hope next Tuesday goes better, I don't think it can get much worse :(

Dear baby shower this weekend I'm so excited to see friends/family and open some gifts for baby Thydean. Thank you s-i-l for putting everything together for the party, means the world to me and baby!

Dear gazillion craft projects started and still thoughts in my head pins to my pinterest board I plan to really get some of you accomplished this weekend. I love pinterest (follow me here) and all of the great things I find on there, but man I just keeping finding more and more things I just have to do!

Hope you have a great weekend!

A Pinterest Filled Weekend

This past weekend, I decided to tackle some of the projects that I had pinned and have been wanting to get done. Some stuff I already had, some stuff I had the ideas in my head of what I wanted to do - just no time!

Here's what I got up to:

Homemade Laundry Detergent - recipe found here I was way more excited than one should be to make laundry detergent. I spent about $30 to get all of the supplies - including a cute glass jar to put the detergent in (that was $10). The jar pictured is not mine, I don't have my lettering on mine yet! It was pretty easy to do and should last us about 9 months or so!

Christmas Card Books - Instructions found here So apparently, I we have a problem called hoarding. I We do not like to throw away cards/announcements/thank yous...it's kind of ridiculous. If you have given or sent either of us a card in the last 6 years we seriously probably still have it - I'm not joking.

My completed Christmas 2011 book

While doing this project, I discovered how obsessed in love I was with Chris when we first met. I would write cute little notes and cards to him. Gave him cards every monthly anniversary and such. That slowly drifted into just the essential dates...annual anniversary, birthday, fur baby Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Christmas. It's fun to look back at the stuff I would say. I'm pretty shocked that he actually asked me to marry him after all of that :)

Pile of cards that I gave Chris over the years

Some of the other books I did. I decided that Chris's cards I gave him are better off in a box since there are soooo many!

Chalkboard Paint Wine Glasses - instructions found here The chalkboard paint part was done in April for my m-i-l's  birthday gift. I needed to decorate the upper glass part. I haven't technically given these to her yet - her birthday was in May, but I did tell her that she's getting another grandchild on her birthday so I thought the wait could be worth it :) I also told Chris that a steady stream of birthday gifts may not be such a bad thing either. It's a surprise that you don't know you're getting until it's here!

Finished glasses

With the erasable chalk writing

The glass says "It's my birthday and I'll wine if I want to"

Photo to Canvas - Instructions found here This project was super easy and low cost. I made 5 canvas prints for our bathroom for $30 and I still have 4 large canvases left over for future projects. I got the canvases at Michaels which happened to be on sale and I had a 25% off everything coupon. I printed my pics at Costco for an incredibly cheap price. I already had modge podge and paint for the edges. I love this project and will be doing some more for the baby's room!

Some of the pics and canvases (2 8x10 prints)

2 5x7 prints

Apply modge podge on top of pics

Finally a use for my old accounting books that I've been hoarding holding on to for future use

 pic from our last trip to Captiva

 pic from our honeymoon, lovely sunset on the beach

 Costco had pics that you can print from their website. This is in Death Valley - this pics may get changed in the future. The great thing about this project is that you can update photos by just applying new pics over old ones!

 Fish in the aquarium in Chicago from last summer. How hilarious looking are these guys?! They have a huge bump on their forehead and their profile is so human like

My favorite and biggest print - sunset from our honeymoon. The pic is beautiful and serene. Will be very relaxing while I'm laying in the tub dreaming of Captiva!

One piece of advice I can give from doing this project is to see what size canvases you can purchase before ordering your prints. I had a little issue with finding the correct size canvas after I ordered the prints and had to re-order the large print. It was only a $6 mistake but could've been avoided.

We also tended to our much over-grown garden and put up a fence to keep woodchucks out! One got in a couple weeks ago and ate up all my lettuce and half of my broccoli plants. Oscar didn't like the woodchuck either!

I'm excited to meet up with some of the MN Blogger girls tomorrow night! I hope to see you there!

Recap

Holy buckets time is flying by! Feeling a little stressed about the 5 birthdays (hubs, b-i-l, Oscar, s-i-l and dad) in December, our wedding anniversary (tomorrow - Happy 2 year anniversary sweetie) and Christmas! Not to mention a few holiday parties, get-togethers and a few added items to my workload at my job. So since I don't have a ton of time on my hands, I figured I'd share a few amazing recipes I have found on pinterest and have tried out.

double crunch honey garlic pork chops

We had these for dinner tonight and they were so delicious. I used chicken instead of pork chops (cuz that's what we had and we don't eat too much pork). The sauce alone is to die for. Chris told me to "dog ear" the recipe. LOL!

easy parmesan knots

I made these for Thanksgiving and got many compliments on them! I used crescent rolls instead of biscuits since I had bought them ahead of time (before pinning it). They turned out great! I did not roll them in knots, just made them look like crescent rolls.

nutella ice cream

I made these last night. So tasty! I am still in shock that it's just bananas and ice cream. Chris and I shared one tonight after dessert. He ate more than I did and he's not one for sweets! I halved the recipe since that's all I had on hand, but I could see myself making more of these. They are only 140 calories, pretty good in my book! 

Last Saturday was Chris's (age purposely deleted) birthday.

Enjoying his free mug (seriously, any drink you want in there - I've had a Long Island) at the Valley Bar in Eagan. Hole in the wall bar, but such a great deal for  your birthday! And they give you a mug to take with you ;)

We went out to lunch with his dad at Bonfire (so yummy) and then came back to the house to rest from our food coma. Then we went to Best Buy to get a tripod for our new camera (oh yeah, we bought a DSLR - so excited to figure it all out!!). We have met the most interesting people at our local store. We bought our Mac from the store in August and had a girl (mid 20's) helping us out. She was super nice and had just started out there. We've been in the store a few times since we bought our computer and never fail, she's always there and always comes up to us and remembers BOTH of our names. We both find it shocking/creepy she remembers our names. Of course on Saturday creeper nice saleslady sees us and comes over to check on us and remembers our names. Wasn't much help to us in the camera dept, but just had to stalk check in with us, I guess. After we got home, I made Chris get dressed up for our Christmas Card photo shoot. I thought it would go soooo much better than it did, haha! Either way, we got a picture for our card and I have them ordered. Can't wait to get them and send those suckers out! Saturday night, we met up with some friends at Ansari's in Eagan, Kind of a crazy night, but I think we left before the worst of it :)

Sunday, I don't think I could get enough sleep. It felt so nice to sleep in. The hubs ended up going in to work and I made may way to the neighboring cities for some Christmas shopping. Finally got some stuff checked off my list, still a LOT to go.

Tomorrow I'm looking forward to spending the evening with my love and celebrating our 2 year wedding anniversary. I'm also excited that we were able to book tickets to go to Florida and visit his amazing family in February. The next 2 months are going to go by sooo fast. I can't wait!

December 6, 2009 Captiva Island, Florida