carving pumpkins 2012

pumpkin guts.
playing goalie with children.
imitating the pandora halloween station.
it was a grand pumpkin carving session this year.


see 2011, 2010, and 2009 here

happy halloween!

willy wonka time.

we had so much fun dressing up this year (even if it was only for like an hour...)
we mulled over ideas for our costumes for months this year.
seriously, like since we found out i'd be big and pregnant during halloween.
finally, about 2 1/2-3 weeks ago casey came up with the idea of me being violet beauregard who turns into a blueberry!
his brilliance came forth and we were so excited for our costumes! (casey especially)

oompa loompa:
bought green wig at walmart.
bought brown (women's small) long sleeve turtle neck at goodwill.
sewed white strips to it.
sewed together those white straps from fabric on hand.
bought orange eye shadow for face.
casey powdered on flour for his eyebrows (which was the funniest thing ever).
all other materials on hand.

blueberry:
blue graduation gown from goodwill with a few sewing fixups.
bought blue eye shadow for face (came in packet with orange stuff).
hot glued red velvet ribbon together for a belt (perfect tightness too because it made me feel like i was going to pop!)
belly courtesy of baby.
all other materials on hand.


HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

pumpkin carving

apparently the memo "there will be 5 photos, do something silly" did not get across to everyone...

playing dress up

today i'm working on halloween costumes!

we are so excited for them! come saturday, you will see them too!

remember how awesome last year was?

casey and i loved those costumes...i'd honestly totally be superheroes again because it was such a fun outfit.
this photo is the outer cover of our 2011 family album and we laugh at it every time :)

but if we did it again this year i'd be more like mr incredible at the beginning of the movie with his big ol' gut :) (and without the small ankles)

less than a week til halloween!

ps- don't forget my pumpkin carving tip! it will make pumpkin carving 1 gajillion times better, promise.

it's getting to that point...

bigger ankles.

achey fingers.

always hot.

casey's clothes.

endless bathroom visits.

hard to bend over.

...only 6 more weeks, right?

ooy.

(i'd take all those symptoms all year long though in order to be blessed with this little babe this year)

maternity session

we loved the maternity photo session we got done here in lincoln.

our photographer was so awesome, we really loved her.

the weather just so happened to be awesome that evening lucky for us.

it was such a fun time laughing with casey and not having to worry about camera settings and all,

but instead, just enjoy the picture taking process!

and i'm so glad we opted to do these at 33 and 1/2 weeks because before this i was pretty pregnant and after this i was REALLY pregnant.

finding that perfect size is most definitely the key, ha :)

and here were the sneak peek pictures

do enjoy!

four things

thank you for all the kind words on the maternity photos!

we had a lot of fun and i can't wait to see the rest too.

four things from the past few days:

1. another reason why my husband rocks:

he plays just dance...by himself...by his own free will.

he's determined to get the special crowns on all the songs, such a goof.

i love watching him dance.

it's funny how frustrated he gets on a dance game, haha, that's my husband

the other night we were exhausted and didn't really have any plans.

casey wanted to play video games, i wanted him to watch a movie with me.

he challenged me to a just dance battle, best of 5.

i thought, oh gosh, i have this in the bag, i will totally school him (usually i do...)

but that night, i was off my groove, 100%.

i tried switching controllers, standing in front of him, moving the wii monitor, nothing helped.

THE DANG GAME WOULDN'T GIVE ME ANYTHING.

i was humiliated.

I AM THE REAL DANCER, CASEY IS THE FUNNY DANCER, WHY IS HE WINNING?!?!?!?!?

after 4 songs of him winning, i fake cried with real emotion into his chest wondering why he was winning?

i think he then felt pity on me and let us play the songs i'm good at.

i finally won the next 3.

still not good enough, but at least i won something...

after i was finally able to win a few (he probably purposely let me win those now thinking about it...) i started not caring if i won or not and just enjoyed how fun it was to "dance" a little again (even if it was FLIPPING exhausting...)

2. we went to yogurtini the other night.

provoins: you know how you have like a million self serve frozen yogurt places around you?

well, here's the truth, they're all yucky.

yogurtini is so much better.

TONS of actually yummy flavors.

and TONS of really yummy toppings.

definitely my new favorite cold treat place.

3. a bomb went off in my kitchen this week.

it started sunday night,

got bigger monday,

and got HUGE tuesday.

it was so terrible,

and there's honestly no excuse because i stay home practically all day, ha.

so wednesday i cleaned up the debris.

it only took like 45 minutes, yuck.

even if we have to wheel our dishwasher in and out of the kitchen i'm still grateful we bought it.

it makes all the difference in our marriage and dishes mood :)

4. tuesday night, my super wonderful and kind friend/neighbor, katie, put on a baby shower for me!
can't wait to share all the photos with you!

sneak peek

33 1/2 weeks.

love them so much already

all pictures from oh, snap! photography

from the last week

1. cinnamon rolls during conference. such a wonderful weekend listening to prophets and apostles, in pj's all weekend, lounging, cuddling.
2. fall has arrived in nebraska, yay. and even the evergreens are celebrating by changing colors.
3. dug into casey's wardrobe for the first time, yay.
sent him this picture during the day and he replied with "savage"
4. got sent this picture during his school day, his first (for fun) fillings on (stinky, decaying) teeth.



the word lazy sums up my week pretty well after completing those dressers.
thought i deserved some kind of break.
i did walk casey to school twice this week, which was nice.
it's so strange not going to school.
i feel empathy for casey now that i'm enjoying my stress free life (aka no tests).
but when he did leave me for class i felt jealous.
it's so invigorating to learn new things and be challenged.
and it's so fun to have those friends at school that are going through the same things as you and you have a camaraderie with them even if you wouldn't normally hang around them.
school does that for you.
then again walking group with a bunch of other mothers is kinda the same way...



i did however organize some more of the bajillions of boxes in our basement, yayyyyyyy.



this weekend:
touring our 2nd hospital to choose from.
picking up more things for baby boy!
dinner with friends.
studying (for casey).
making baby sheets.


happy october weekend.

THE DRESSERS ARE FINISHED!

DISCLAIMER

this post is bound to have exclamations at the end of every sentence due to frustration or excitement.

i will therefore add no exclamation points.

 just know that there's a lot more emotion in all these sentence than just a period.

refinishing 3 dressers between the months of 6-8 months pregnant is a ton of work, 

but totally doable nonetheless.

when we moved to nebrasaka we literally had no furniture other than a bed and a few random little pieces.

couch, table/chairs, and dressers were our first priorities.

i decided from the get-go that it'd be much more cost effective (and fun) to buy dressers off craigslist and paint them to my specifications.

we were finally in a position of our lives where we could do so.

DRESSER NUMBER 1: our bedroom.

this was actually the 2nd dresser we got but first we began working on.

some saintly woman was giving it away for free on craigslist and i jumped on her like kids on candy.

it was really a great piece to begin with.

a dark wood, a few scratches here and there, drawers slid nicely, but overall in awesome shape.

casey sanded his poor little hands off on this sucker (actually he did on every one)

i'm so thankful for his help on sanding, i just don't like that job at all.

we had put on 3 coats of primer and i hadn't yet decided what color i wanted for it yet.

i finally decided on a brighter light blue to go along with our bedspread.

in the middle of painting, i went to hobby lobby and saw that ALL their knobs were 50% off.

hallelujah.

that made it possible so i didn't have to go back A MILLION TIMES with my coupon.

i bought the 12 for this dresser, 9 for the one i knew we already had, and 12 for the future one i hoped to be getting...ha.

casey helped out a lot with priming and painting of this dresser.

we rolled on most of the paint with a mini roller and used a brush for small parts.

this dresser definitely took the longest to paint.

after painting it blue, my neighbor, katie, helped me tape and paint the white rectangle.

her time was SO HELPFUL.

there's no before picture on this dresser but here is the final product.

also, if you care to know, pinterest was of course my bff on a lot of these products.

when i was looking up directions for taping of things to paint lines they suggested taking off the tape between every coat to ensure really sharp lines.

even when people did that though, it still bled a little.

that would have taken forever with all our lines taped off.

katie encouraged me to keep them on since we were doing 3 coats of white to cover up the blue.

so glad it did.

sure, i had to go back through with an itty bitty paint brush of blue to clean up the white that bled but it took way less time to do that than retape.

also, it's better to pull the tape off at a right angle...

DRESSER NUMBER 2: THE BABY'S ROOM

this was the third dresser we obtained.

a craigslist ad said there was a free blak dresser on the curb, so we jumped in the car and went looking for it.

not going to lie, it was nasty when we got it.

super dusty/dirty and the bottom was covered in old spider webs and the inside had dead spiders in it.

even now thinking about it i'm disgusted that we actually took it on...

i was super hesitant at actually putting it in our house (and using it for our baby's room) because of the worry of bugs.

so i washed it down with soap and water

and sprayed bug spray ALL OVER IT multiple times,

the first time just a bug repellant because that's what we had on hand and the second time an actual contact killer.

we sprayed it crazy well (2 times) with the killer stuff so i'm not worried so much anymore about it...

so it began nasty black with this yucky plastic gold lining between the rows of drawers and bottom.

(imagine all black, flat drawers...)

we finally figured out we could just rip the gold stuff off.

yay, for less hassle of figuring out how to paint that stuff.

casey, again, was the wonderful man and sanded the crap out of that thing.

i sincerely felt bad for how long he spent on it.

thank goodnesss we bought and electric sander to begin with...

i knew form the start i wanted the baby's room dresser to be a bright, fun yellow.

something that just pops, with black knobs.

there were no black knobs when i was at hobby lobby that i liked but there were white ones.

so i got the white, gave a quick sand down to roughen them up, and spray painted them black.

loved the way it looked.
because there were no knobs on the drawers to begin with, we drilled holes for new knobs.

i think all together we did 3 coats primer and 3 coats yellow.

i also had to use gorilla glue to glue the sliders underneath the drawers back on.

and although i washed out the insides and outsides of the drawers with soap, i lined the insides with a wrapping paper i love that i had on hand because a) then the baby's stuff will be touching the paper and not the drawers and b) it looks better that way :)

this dresser wore me out physically with all the sitting, bending, attention to detail needed.

i had to take like a 3 day rest from doing anything laborous to heal my (pregnant) back.

DRESSER NUMBER 3: THE TV STAND DRESSER

after seeing a few pins on pinterest that showed how dressers could work as TV stand i knew that's what i wanted to do for this place because of the limited space.

it was a matter of finding a dresser deep enough because we'd have to angle our TV.

the 2nd day we were here in lincoln we found this puppy on craigslist and got it for $20.

it was in some old persons house and in great condition.

it was just a boring yellowy wood color.

we used it as our dresser til we were able to get all the other dressers worked out.

i saw this pin and knew that's what i wanted to do to it.

it began looking like this was going to be the easiest of the 3 dressers.

sanding was a breeze and so darn fast.

the next day possible i had gotten 3 coats of primer on the drawers and 1 coat of stain and clear coat on the dresser itself.

the next morning when looking at them there were brown spots all over the drawers.

it must have lightly rained with a little wind and all the drawers had brown ringspots littering them.

we tried cleaning them off, that didn't work.

then tried putting 2 coats of primer on top, that didn't work.

it was back to sanding...

blah, i was so frustrated with having to still work on this, they should have easily been done.

and i wasn't about to sand them but casey was so busy with school and such.

it was quite a few days til casey was able to get around sanding them with school and it being so cold out.

it seemed like it was never going to get warm enough to paint them.

the coming monday was going to be the warmest day we'd had in 5 days and the warmest of the coming week: 72 degrees.

casey came home at lunch and went to work sanding for me, that saint.

while he was sanding them, i decided i should use a finer grade sandpaper on the big one just to make it feel smoother because it just felt a little too rough.

after using the fine sand paper the dresser turned gray and i couldn't get it to look good again.

back to staining it...mmeh.

but that monday proved to be exceptionally productive.

i got 2 coats of primer and one of the paint on the drawers and the dresser was stained and clear coated.

plus i got the legs painted this time around.

also, you can see in the before pic that there were 2 knobs per drawer, lamo.

so we patched the old holes with wood glue and drilled a new hole in the middle.

that night we brought the dresser in to be put together.

once putting the drawers in i realized there was a little lip right below the bottom drawer i hadn't stained because i thought it got covered by the drawers.

so frustrating.

so that night, casey hand sanded the little lip while i followed him with the hose of the vacuum so we didn't get sawdust in our whole house.

i did one coat of stain and called it good on that part.

and finally the finished dresser.
we love the way it turned out.
we also don't want to ever have a staining project again in our lives.

(the dresser is actually a dark brown, not black as these pictures show...)

tips we learned along the way.

1. if you're going to stain it, your sanding needs to be PERFECT.
2. if you're staining, sand with the direction of the wood.
3. use tape even when you think it'll be fine if you don't, it'll save you so much time in the end.
4. if you don't want to sand you can actually use a higher class primer, zinsser in the gold can and it works great. it's oil based so you have to throw your brush away but it sticks to ANYTHING. i got a small quart for a little bookshelf i did not want to sand and it stuck to that laminate wood like it was real wood.
5. the flatter the piece, the happier your painting experience will be. i made an effort to get pieces that had were super flat everywhere with this in mind. curves are a beast.
6 invest in pretty knobs, it makes your dresser all the better

although taking on 3 dressers was a beast, we love the way they all turned out.
so glad we can have these pieces for quite a few years and thoroughly enjoy them :)

looking back

sometimes i look back at our blog and fall in love with life we had last year, 2, and 3 years ago.

tonight i randomly looked through the labels christmas and wyoming.

all those pictures made me so happy.

(and i remembered we're going to add a stocking to our family this year!!!!!!)

do you ever go back and look at your blog?

last weekend when we were watching the BYU football game (we thank our lucky stars their games are all broadcast on espn now) the espn-byu commercial came on.

every time we see it come on, we get really sad because we miss it so much!

casey especially was saying how much he missed it.

he said something like "i didn't have enough fun there, all i did was go to school and work..."

i couldn't think of any of the fun crazy things off the top of my head that we did except i knew we made an effort to do fun stuff...but what was that?

so i hopped on the blog and looked up the labels provo bucket list and byu (i should have labeled so many more things byu...).

granted it wasn't all the fun stuff we did but it was a good chunk.

reading through the posts made us so happy with our time at byu (and more nostalgic) but it did remind us that we had fun!

i love blogging.

i love that i can (quickly) write down memories with pictures.

i love being able to look back at life.

i love seeing how we've changed and grown as a couple.

i love that i have all our married years documented on this blog.

i love that soon this blog will show our  journey from 2 to 3.

i love our blog.

32 weeks and conference this weekend!

we have made it to 32 weeks!

thirty two!

that means we are down to less than 2 months which is so totally crazy.

i'm amazed that in 2 months time i will have a child to take care of, my very own child!

it's overwhelming to grasp my head around.

went to an appointment to day and she (my doctor) said everything was looking wonderful.

it's so wonderful to hear that little heartbeat each time.

and then getting to see him on the screen, it's just so fun.

like last time, the little boy didn't feel like showing his face, instead he was doing the cry baby with his fists, covering up his little face...oh little baby...

so apparently, i'm beginning to look super pregnant.

lots and lots of strangers are always asking me when i'm due now, ha.

which is totally fine, i really don't mind.

they're always so sweet though in congratulating me and seeming genuinely happy for me

lately when i'm walking past store windows i'll catch a glance of myself and think "woah, when did i get so big?! i didn't look that big in the mirror at my house!"

and then the nurse at my appt said i was only going to triple in size over the next two months...how lovely.

belly button=80% out

hot flashes=totally real

face=crazy dry and still a little red

my right arm easily goes numb these days.

i was putting mascara on and my thumb was losing feeling!

sleeping, well that's always uncomfortable but having you arm(s) go numb when you're lying on your side is not cool... but apparently normal of what my doctor says?

i've begun reading this book and am totally learning tons!

it's like the first pregnancyish book where i'm reading about things i hadn't heard before, love it

another funny thing, i went around shopping with two of my friends the other week, who happen to be due in december and january.
we made quite the scene walking around as 3 big pregnant ladies together.

lastly,
THIS WEEKEND IS CONFERENCE!
YAY!
love listening to the prophets and apostles.
we'll most likely be watching it via internet and connecting it to our TV,
hope you join!
and did you happen to watch last weekend's women's conference?
it was beyond splendid (and super emotional...or maybe that's just because i'm pregnant...)



ps- we have 2/3 dressers finished!
so close to finishing the last one it's just been too cold to finish painting the last few days, boo

once the last one is finished i will share them all.
so happy with how they're turning out!

on becoming a dentist.

oh dental school. we (although it is mostly he, i just am moral support) are 7 weeks into the 1st semester of dental school. some classes are relatively fun, ie- the ones he gets to play with drills and real dental materials. others are less fun: biochem and anatomy. the anatomy class has this history (like 20 year history with the same professor) of being so crazy incredibly hard. it is a ton ton of work. from the outside looking in, i have no idea why he's learning ALL the bones, muscles, veins, etc of the body when it's really only head and neck he'll be dealing with the rest of his career; i guess that's why i'm not the professor. he's been waxing up teeth and making molds. i came in one evening while he was practicing for a tooth wax up and got to watch him a little. he probably felt like he was in a test of his own with me firing off a bajillion questions at him, it was fun sitting there and watching him work though. he's doing great and i couldn't be a prouder wife.