Happy New Ears

You want to know what I'm dealing with right now? My ears! I don't know what's going on but for months now they have constantly felt like they need to be popped but I can't seem to get that feeling to go away. And it's getting worse and worse. I probably need to go to the doctor but oh how I hate going to the doctor!

So basically that's all I can think about. I wanted to write a post all about the last 10 years and what I wanted out of the next 10 years but all I can do is sit here and be miserable about my ears. *Sob*

Christmas Crafting

Christmas is over and I seem to be back in "no inspiration valley." Of course, this probably has more to do with the fact that I have let myself become a lazy lump, than anything else. I'm justifying it by mumbling things about the "New Year" to myself.

O New Year! Please bring new inspiration to me!

So...as promised. I'm going to post some pictures! Hazah! *please forgive the quality as I took them all with my phone. Yes, I am that lazy*

First some decor:

Yay, our empty little tree. I was not up to buying ornaments, seeing as I was barely up to getting a tree at all, so it is mostly bare minus some candy canes, icicles and a small random assortment from Trey.

I got the idea offline (read: Martha Stewart) to use shaved crayons and wax paper to make little shapes to hang in the window. She did hearts (which I like much better) but I tried making trees, snowflakes and stars. Ya. I like the trees...that's about it. I will also never use thick ribbon like that again. I hate it. Feburary might present a chance for round two.



Pipe cleaners provided us with a mini Santa and some reindeer and trees. This is also thanks to Martha.

Now for some presents!
First off...each family got a homemade card and some snowman poop. The snowman poop is marshmallows covered in glue and glitter and set in a little condiment cup. It took me forever to find something that looked like a bucket to put it in and I finally found these condiment cups (they come in packs of four at Walmart.) I also put a ribbon with a button on each cup. It was supposed to be for decoration but ended up making the little buckets work as ornaments too. Bonus! Snowman Poop goes with this poem:

You've been bad,
So here's the scoop:
All you get is...
Snowman Poop!

Haha. Anyway...


I read about doing these in an All You magazine as hostess gifts but decided to give some of them as Christmas gifts as well. I think I'll always keep them on hand from now on in case I ever need a last minute gift. All it is is teacups glued to their saucers with a candle in it. So easy but so cute. You can also take the candle out and use it for a place to throw jewelry or whatever. Love!



This is what I gave Trey's mother, step-mother and sister. They are heating pillows that you can put in the microwave to warm up or in the freezer to turn into a cold pack. They are filled with rice and cinnamon (to make them smell good):). I was so excited about making them and I made them with my new Christmas present from my mom:

Thanks mom! I've got big plans for this baby. Course...I'm still learning but I'm super excited. I'm keeping a running list of projects! Plus I have a little neice coming along in March. Hello cute little girly stuff! Eeeee!

Last but not least:
I made this for my mom. She requested a scarf when I told her I had picked up knitting again. I'm probably most proud of this because, as long as I've been knitting (since about 7 or 8 years old) I've never actually finished a project. So ya...I'm proud of it. And it's HUGE: about 10 inches wide and probably 7 or 8 feet long. She wanted a long scarf, what can I say? Now I've just got to figure out how to knit something that isn't straight (like scarves and blankets). I've got something in mind and I can't wait to check "Knit something that isn't a scarf or a blanket" off my life list!

Alrighty there ya go. I'm deep into loving crafting right now and I'm hoping to start a craft section of the blog (it's on the 2010 to do list) so hopefully many more projects will show up here. These are just my first attempts and I am very happy. Yay! Ok now have an awesome rest of the holiday!

Mewry Chrustmas

It's Christmas Eve! And guess what I'm doing? WORKING! What?! This is officially my first "adult Christmas." For some reason I accidentally keep typing "Chrustmas" and I keep correcting it but, now that I think about it, working on Christmas Eve kind of does make this feel like "Crustmas": crusty and no fun.

However, there is hope on the horizon as I get off early and prepare to head to Atlanta to spend some time with Trey's family. I can't wait. I know I've said it before but I really lucked out in the family category and I can't wait to begin the holiday festivities with them!

So, in honor of the Day, I thought I would entertain you with a little poem about Christmas (yes I just typed that word three times before finally getting it right). Unfortunately I haven't actually written a poem yet so this is going to come right off the top of my head and will probably be exceedingly bad. Enjoy!

Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the store,
Not a thing was a-happinin, the employees were bored.
The papers were stacked, and ready to file,
But the office was slow, so that might be awhile.

The workers were sitting, bored at their desks,
While visions of leaving danced in their heads.
And I was a-sittin, ready to leave,
Wondering why it was here I must be.

The minutes ticked on, and drug by so slow!
And all I could think of was when I could go.
My first Christmas Eve as an adult and I think,
I liked Christmas much better as a child. This stinks!

The phone had rung once, but it was only some spam,
The rest of the day went on, dead as a pan.
I thought of home, with presents and snow!
And wondered when, there, I could go.

"I can't wait for tonight!"I thought with a grin,
I couldn't wait to be with my family again.
I knew there would be food, delicious and warm,
And I could think of this season when my Savior was born.

"Tick Tick!" Went the clock, has it been only three minutes?
This poem sure has an awful lot of words in it!
It is very long, and I'm trying to find,
More verses to fill this up, come on Mind!

I'm all packed to leave, with presents on the floor,
Ready to go, as soon as I walk through the door.
Christmas would be much easier if Santa would help,
Or at least if he had sent me some of his elves.

Still, this Christmas has not been so bad.
It's new, and it's different, but I can handle that.
Soon there will be children, running around!
And then I'll probably be rushing all over town.

So I think I'll sit back, and enjoy this holiday,
Before things get crazy and all my free time is taken away.
By children who need food, clothes and toys toys toys!
Hopefully I'll have a girl, not just all boys.

And now I am not going to write anymore.
This poem still goes on but I'm getting a bit bored.
But have a Merry Christmas and don't forget,
That "Chrustmas" can be "Christmas" yet.

Didn't I say that would be awful? Well, Merry Christmas anyway. I hope your holidays are everything you could ever want and that you keep in mind the Reason for the season.

XOXO

Bits

I'm going to go ahead and preface this post by saying this: I've got a lot on my mind right now and this is going to be a kind of dumping. I'm not sure what it will look like yet and I'm not sure where this is going so read on, or move on to the next blog on your list. Here goes:

• I love reading "my blogs" in the morning. I don't know what it is about them but each new entry in the blogs I read is like opening a tiny present. I look forward to it so much. I was reading this morning and just thinking about how grateful I am to the bloggers I read for letting me into their lives.
  
• On a related note, as I was reading blogs and looking through the pictures I realized that I hardly ever post pictures. Part of the reason for that is that I hardly ever write from the computer where my pictures are stored and part of that is because I don't take nearly enough pictures. I'm sorry. I'm going to try and post more pictures in the new year. First up I'll be posting some pics of the presents I made. Yay! Anticipation! lol
• I've been thinking about babies, family ect. again. It seems like every time I get on facebook, someone else I know is pregnant. It happened today in fact. I still want to be pregnant. The feeling isn't overwhelming like it was at one time but it is still there on the back burner. I am at peace with waiting right now and know that the future is probably a better, and more practical time for us to have a baby. I'm not going to lie and say I don't think about it. I do. A lot. And with thinking about having a baby comes thinking about how I want my family as a whole to be. Obviously, I have a LOT of time before that happens to prepare (lets start with one please!) but it is still fun to think about. I'm torn between having just a few (which would be easier, probably, and make for a smaller one-on-one feel) or having a lot (which would probably be harder, especially when they are young but leaves me with a lot more options of who to live with when I'm old! haha). Things to ponder...
• I think that the older I get, the worse my milk alergy gets. Yesterday I had a drink in the cafe that contained eggnog and I got so sick after! I might need to think about giving up milk products all together and re-trying soy or other lactose-free options. And I REALLY need to start taking calcium. I don't want my bones to turn to dust before I'm dead!
• Speaking of giving things up, the fast is coming up next month. If you don't know, our church does a 21 day fast every January. When I was in 24/7 we were required to do a total fast (just water) for the first 7 days and then we could choose our own things to fast the last two weeks (guidelines included: no entertainment, no resturants and, I think, no junk food? Not sure on that last one...). I admit, I didn't fast anything last year. Of course, I wasn't going to this church because I lived in Utah at the time, but still. So, the 2010 fast is approaching and the time has come to decide what to fast. I've pretty much already decided not to go on a full fast. It's so different when you work in the real world and, honestly, I'm not up for it. I've been thinking about a Daniel fast or just fasting certain things. I have no idea...All I know is that, considering I want 2010 to be AWESOME, and also considering that Trey and I have a lot of decisions to make and things to pray about coming up, I think fasting is going to be especially important at this time in our lives.
  
• Christmas has been totally weird this year. I'm not sure if I'm more excited or more ready for it to be over.
  
• I have noticed that my interests change almost on a daily basis. One day I want to sew, one day I am interested in food and making meal plans and couponing ect., one day I just want to write all day, one day I want to read all day, one day I want to scrapbook or knit or just do nothing. And now I'm trying to figure out if I've always been like this or if I'm going through a phase....
• My cat is BAD! It seems like we just get over one bad habit of her's and she starts another. First she was driving me crazy by whining at the door and trying to dig her way under everytime we shut her out of a room. That ended and then a few weeks ago she was jumping up on the counter and getting into anything baked (muffins, bread). We got over that and then she was playing in the tree. We got over that and now she is tearing things up. At first it was small and didn't really matter, but then yesterday I came home and my duvet cover was completely tore up! Like, as in holes. Lucky for her it was an inexpensive duvet and I want to replace it anyway. Unlucky for her, I was not planning on replacing it soon. I could have killed her. Moxie is getting declawed after the holidays.
• Holidays as a grownup are not as fun as holidays as a kid. They are stressful and BUSY and don't include a Christmas break.
  
• I'm currently obsessed with photography. I wish I was good at it and I wish I had the time to learn more about it.

That's all for now. Ta.

Snow

Snow is never something I thought I would miss. I have disliked snow since I was about 14, which also happens to be the last time I went skiing. I hate the way people drive in the snow and I hate how it makes everything WET and FREEZING. So, when I moved to Birmingham for good, I was so happy to finally be rid of snow in my life! That is, until I realized this will be my first winter, in the history of ever, without snow. And it sure doesn't feel much like winter at all.

The past two years, even though I lived in Birmingham, I got to go home for a couple of weeks at Christmastime and I always saw snow. And now this year...well I think I found the reason it was so hard for me to get into the Christmas spirit: it didn't feel much like Christmastime. In fact, it has felt closer to Halloween-time than Christmastime for what I'm used to.

Winter and snow were synonymous to me growing up. I mean, what is a winter day on the elementary playground without building huge snowmen and getting in trouble for secret snowball fights? I remember one year we spent the whole morning out on the playground trying to build a snowman with snowballs as big as we were. It took several of us little ones to push the massive mounds around the grass. We thought it was the best, and longest, recess ever. I don't know how we thought we were going to stack up that snowman but we never got to try because school got out early.

School got out early and got canceled all the time. "School canceled because of snow," is what you wanted to hear when you rushed to the T.V. in your pajamas in the morning. Yay for snow days! Does school ever get canceled in the South? One year we had an extra long Christmas break because of a blizzard. When I was in high school we had and extra long spring break for the same reason.

I remember standing at the bus stop, smoothing out the snow with my Keds to make the ground slick enough to slide on. Keds were the perfect shoe for sliding in the snow because they had absolutely no tread on the bottom. I would get a running start and then sliiiiide as far as I could across the snow covered street, loving the shiny trail my shoe left behind me. There were snow covered caves in the back yard, expeditions across the unfamiliar white terrain that made my neighborhood into a sparkling fresh mystery world and snowmen that stayed up long after the snow on the ground had melted.

I guess I always took snow for granted. I knew that there were people who didn't get snow where they lived and people who had never even seen snow; but I never thought of that as a big deal. Now I see it as a loss. There is just something about snow that makes Christmas seem more magical.

So I hope I get to go home for the holidays and see snow some year. And I hope my kids get to have at least a few White Christmas's. Here's to snow: sorry I never saw your worth.

My list

I started working on my life list today. Well, not started, but worked on for sure. I posted it in my sidebar if you're curious. I also tried to learn how to post tabs at the top of my blog so I could display my list on a different page, but that was too hard so I settled for learning how to strike through words on blogger. See TaDa! Now I can cross words off my list as I complete them. Score!

Anyway, as I was working on my list I started to come into the thinking that my list was way more important than the other things in my life right now (excluding God and Family of course). Did that sentence make ANY sense at all? I guess what I'm getting at is that my list looked way more fun than my job and I decided I'd rather do it than work. Haha. Maybe someday.

Another good thing about this list: it lifted my spirits. When I actually typed the whole thing out and looked at it I started thinking "I can do these things! My life can be exciting!" And it pulled me out of my spiral of mundane despair. For now, at least, I have something to look forward to! Completing the tasks on my list! And they are all things that I want to do so that doubles the fun! I mean, who wants to check off things on a list of things they hate? Not moi!

Now, most life lists are things that people want to do before they die: "Bucket Lists" of things they want to do before they "Kick the Bucket." MY list started off as more of a "Things I want to do before I'm 30"--List. So, most of those things I want to accomplish in the next 8 years. Some of them, like "Take my kids to Disney World" or "Visit all 50 states" are more of life long goals but most are for before I kick my 30-bucket.

Soooo...a new year is about to begin. I am counting the days, (21) because I just KNOW 2010 is going to be a great year. And I'm looking forward to starting my journey of crossing things off my list! Let the strike-through-ing begin!

Faith

Why are some times so much easier than others to have faith?

Although 24/7 encompassed some pretty stressful times in my life, it always seemed easier for me to talk to God and to have faith. I find, as I am outside the little bubble, that faith is not always so close to grasp. So often I feel that I've fallen so far away. Times are tough when you have to be an adult! I never knew. And here I am, barely 22 yearls old, newlywed and totally lost. I find myself struggling almost daily with stress, anxiety, fear. I've started developing body aches I'm too young to have because of the stress.

And it all just makes me feel like the biggest failure. A failure who didn't go to college. A failure who can't take care of her family. A failure who didn't plan enough ahead, didn't save enough, didn't choose the right path. The funny thing is, I am a planner, a saver and a thinker. Also, I'm a worrier but I'm not sure if that applies or not.

So as I'm feeling all these things, I realize that I have been being the worst friend to God. I don't trust Him enough, I hardly talk to Him and I am DEFINITELY not listening. What brought me to this realization was when I went to him asking for help. Lately the life-stress that I wasn't prepared for is eating me alive. I didn't have anyone to talk to and I had nowhere to turn and I turned to God. And I asked for help: for protection, for wisdom, for a miracle. And then I realized that I had no right AT ALL to be asking for Him to be a good friend to me when I had been such a terrible one to Him.

Now listen, I know, in my head, that there is nothing we could EVER do to deserve God's love and help. And I know that, for some strange reason, He chooses to give it to us anyway. So I knew that my feelings of unworthiness were just more lies satan was trying to slip in among the feast of other lies he was feeding me. But that didn't really help. I tried to struggle through it and go to God anyway but the whole thing just made me think "after this I'll do better. I'll do this, I'll do that."

It can be very hard for me to have faith. I'm lucky: both my jobs are full of Christians. I have a wonderful, God-fearing husband and family. So why is it so hard for me? It's not like I'm struggling alone in a secular enviornment. And yet I'm not doing much better than if I was. It's all very sad.

So much to do! So little to blog

I know I have been absent again. I guess it is becoming the theme of my blog. BUT I have had so many things I've been working on what with crafts to make and the holidays being here now. I plan to post the stuff I'm making on here but most of it is for Christmas so I'm going to have to wait until the holidays are up!

So many parties and crafts! O this season is going to FLY by. I might be out of commission till the holidays are over. Happy Holidays to you and yours!