a promise is a promise.

I told you I would show you more of adorable luke and his adorable cousin…

and here’s your warning:

I could not narrow down her cake smash pictures.

try as I might, there are far too many that I love.

cake smashes are my new favorite!!  and I am a lucky girl because my last two have been with such sweet little girls.

     

besides having some of the cutest blue eyes, she had quite a sweet tongue:

but I had to share one of the top favorites for last:

seriously, just one more, pleeease merrill?

(I am shameless.)

what is wrong with this picture I ask you?

really.
this is what happens, apparently, when mom is unconscious on the couch, suffering with “the plague”.
little bo peep here, I have since discovered, is very proficient in the following:
a) finding temporary tattoos confiscated from her sister’s room and kept in that room where her belongings live until she earns them all back.
(looks like ash really doesn’t care about these items in particular, eh?)
2) finding scissors ( I have them all hidden, have no idea where she got some) to separate tattoos.
c) cutting aforementioned temporary tattoos without harming the images to be tattooed.      (or severing the appendages of the tattooee.)
IV.) applying temporary tattoos.
(very expertly I should add.)
so happy to be healed, and able to head-off any more similar tests of proficiency in this four-year-olds life.

in other news, spring has sprung:

splendid fiins

it’s another spotlight!

(I love these.  so much fun!!)

nisa of splendid fiins has such a fun style.  she is another one who is a go-to when I am putting any layout together.

(I especially love her messy stitching.)

(and her border punches, set one or two.)

(oh, and anything “@ the office”.  love.)

as per usual, her entire store is on sale thru sunday night.  so run and stock up on some favs!

and I will share some more of mine with you now:

(click on layout for full list of credits..  yadda-yadda-yadda…)

my newfound membership in the “ffa”.

are you singing “the dixie chicks” song, “goodbye earl” in your head now?

no?

I know I have been.

so let me explain somethings to you.

1) “ffa” doesn’t stand for what you think it stands for.  it stands for “fearlessly finding awesome”.

b) it’s a club of sorts.

III.) I am hoping it will help me to un-funkify my bedroom.

(as well as other areas in my home.)

there is this blog, that I have happened to love for quite a while now.  I just love this chick’s attitude.  her personality rocks, and what’s best is that she is real.  she shares her incredible talents and gained knowledge (don’t you love it when people don’t keep cool ideas to themselves?) but she also shares bits of her real life.  I think that is what has attached her to me in a very irreversible way.

well, that and her sense of humor.

so usually you join a club because the club is based on something you enjoy doing or something you want to enjoy doing, or learn more about, or if you just need help in that particular area.  the latter is the reason I joined.

now our first assignment is “catch a dream”, we are to put into words what we want our home to feel like.

- organized.

- fun.

- peaceful.

I guess that the first thing listed totally describes me.

but in no way do I want my home to be a stack of blocky shelves stacked with boxes all labeled very uniformly with a label maker.

dude, I said I wanted it to be fun.

I attempted to hunt around the interwebs (mostly the pinterest) to find pictures that would define how I want things to be around these parts and for real, I started to get waaaaay ahead of myself.

baby steps.

for real.

so for now, no pix.

and for now, I will focus on my bedroom.

thing is, I want my bedroom to embody all the aforementioned traits, but I want it to be secksy as well.

it is so not any of those things right now.

(I could show you, but that would just be beyond comical.)

I am not sure I would even post a picture if it was assigned to us in one of our club meetings.

it’s that bad.

thing is, at our old house (as in the place we lived about three years ago) everything had an order to it, everything had it’s place.  we had worked our butts off and made that little home OUR home, and I loved every area in it. (well, except for two of the bathrooms.  they still needed an intervention.)  our bedroom was shoved to the last item on the list to be re-habilitated and that kind of sucked, but I was able to narrow down the vast list of what I thought I wanted, to what I really wanted by the time we got to that room.  and I got it all put together.  it was a space that we loved.

and then, we moved.

everything got shuffled and re-organized.

don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun.  I love our house.  it just isn’t ours.  yet.  I mean, it is “ours” it just doesn’t feel like “us”.

I am slowly trying to get things to a point where they function for me (uh..  I mean us.) to where life just kind of flows and things make sense.

so I guess that is where the organization being #1 comes in.

I could give  quite the descriptive list of things that I would change in/about my house now, but that would be lengthy, and merrill would roll his eyes and then he might roll them too much or too far back that he might fall over and lose consciousness.

that could be scary.

(he’s that enamored with my dreams for this place.)

so I won’t.

and that is also why I have decided to start with our bedroom, put all the other stuff that will likely not happen for a very long time, on the back-burner and get to this space that drives me batty.

I deserve a pretty place to lay my head, don’t i?

so I lied about the picture bit, because I do have some inspiration for this area of mine (and merrill’s)…

art:

I love this!

and I have been dreaming of this headboard ever since we saw this movie..

(the change-up)

I want my base colors to be neutral (thinking “revere pewter” for the walls), but want some pops of color.  I just want to make it easy for when I need to change things up a bit.

and I love this technique on the wall.

 

the used an eggshell for the majority of the wall, and a high gloss for the stenciled part.  I love the way it looks.

and then there is this….

like my husband is going to go for a big bunch of ruffles on his bed?

yeah, I didn’t think so.

if you would like to jump out of your comfort zone/beautify your home/be inspired/join the ffa, click on my friends!

hopefully, someday sooner rather than later, my bedroom will not be blah.

the woodbury’s

this shall be what I will lovingly refer to part one of a three-parter.

this is sweet luke.

(remember luke?)

and this would be sweet luke with his sweet mom and dad.

these would be the “non family portraits” that we took of them.

candidness is quite lovely, if I do say so myself.

and luke is quite incredible himself.

baby boy pooped it up big time during these photos.

it was honestly the funniest thing I have experienced behind the camera in a very long time.

his pooping skills were also quite the trick to get some fantastically natural smiles out of his mom and dad.

you can see more of luke soon with his darling cousin.

and then, when you miss his cuteness, you can see it again, later, in the pictures I took of his darling cousin.

genetics like these, lend to rather cute picture posts.

the most perfect monday.

maybe it’s because I am finally back to the land of the living, maybe it’s because it’s clean house monday, maybe it’s because peyton went to her very first tumbling class this morning (and loved it!), maybe it’s the weather (perfect open window weather, plus a thunderstorm that turned into a snow storm), maybe it has something to do with beachy/summery new product at jessicasprague?

(click on layout for full credits)

or maybe it’s because there’s a groupon for a rockin’ deal on classes at jessicasprague?

(perfect beginner classes!)

I don’t know.

it’s probably a combination of all the above I would guess.

the queen of quirk

I will never forgive myself for missing last week’s designer spotlight.  it was danielle of kitschy digitals.  you know, I love her, but what with me dying of the plague and all on my couch..  what was I to do?

*sigh*

but here is another go-to in my stash.

jan = “the queen of quirk”.

she and I have a few things in common.

- digi love

- three little girls

- great taste

her store is on sale until sunday, 40% off!

now, inspiration:

no coincidence.

I don’t believe in coincidence.

it’s no secret that I have not been feeling well.  posts composed at 1 in the a.m. usually divulge too much information.  but it’s not just that.

I have three kids.  three girls to be exact, and while it is a terrible mess of emotions, fun, and happy times, it is also entirely too stressful for my own good.

every day there is some kind of sister or girl drama. 

there is homework, some that drives a mom to think horrible thoughts about what to do with sharp pencils and orifices in their own head.

(the only thing that could possibly be worse than the third grade homework packet would be what will take place next year, which will inevitably be second and fourth grade homework packets.  ugh.)

then there are the other normal, everyday type stuffs:  cooking, cleaning, laundry, mending, ironing (which someone has taken-up again after their husband was spoiled on his last trip and had dress shirts starched and ironed.), bathing, fixing four heads of hair (sometimes repeatedly throughout the course of an ordinary day), not to mention any other task or need that arises any given day.  you know, all the normal “mom stuff”.

then there’s the list of stuff I “should be doing” or the stuff that I do, just not often enough.

we pray as a family daily.

we don’t hold family home evening, well, a structured one, often enough.

we don’t read the scriptures, unless it is during a structured family home evening (which I have already stated, is not held often enough).

I should also be helping my third grader more than I already am with “homework” type things, like memorizing times tables and junk.  I have my list of excuses as to why we don’t take more time doing that as regularly as we should, it does have something to do with family time, homework, tumbling, getting in reading minutes, and allowing my kid be a kid.  needless to say, she isn’t having the easiest time, and that is only aggravated by the situation in her classroom. 

there are some punk kids in there.

it doesn’t help that she is so easily distracted in the first place, but to have boys that I would like to discipline myself, causing problems and distractions daily in her class, makes a difficult situation that much harder for her.

the other day, feeling tired, drained, quite emotional, and not at the best health-wise, my best friend allowed me to cry to her for more than a few minutes (on the phone, where she would be at a safe distance from the plague, you know).

I let out my feelings of inadequacy.  how I feel that I am not doing enough, but equally frustrated with how+where to find the time to do all of the things I should, forget what I “want” to do at this point.  I worry about the state that our world is in today, about best protecting my girls, teaching them what they need to know to be safe, successful, and happy.

I know what I need to do, and feel guilty that I haven’t been doing it regularly.  I have been shorting them.

I beat myself up for a while.

then, quite timely, the next morning, my dear mother, who chastises me so well, posted this on facebook:

I feel a bit better, not so bad about myself, but hopeful that I can do just what I need to, and that I will have some heavenly help on my side.

thank you mom.

a mom + me journal follow up.

did you enjoy that idea?

did you have questions?

do you by chance want to know how to make them?

has it been keeping you up at night? 

(really, you can tell me.)

well, if you answered yes to any of the above, there is a treat in store for you.

no, not a treat at the store, although that is probably true as well.

I have been invited to guest post (!!!!) at my dear friend mandi’s blog.

(okay, it’s not just hers, but that is my connection, yo.)

there is not only a whole tutorial, by yours truly, about the ins and outs of making the mom+me journal, but there is also a give away.

(!!!!!!!)

you, my friends, have a chance to win either a darling girl or little guy version of the mom+me journal so you can start to have the kind of fun that me and my girls have been having.

(ashley is sticking to a rather extensive list of “what’s your favorite…” questions, while lynnie-lou and I have had more heartfelt dialogue.)

so go on over, give them a visit, and well, me too.