the return

So obviously I've been on a bit of a blogging hiatus and here's why:

1. The month of February found our whole house over/under/in the middle of the weather. First Mr. Awesome got sick and because we took a vow to share everything he decided to get me sick too. After nearly two weeks of yuckiness we were thanking our lucky stars that Miss K was not even remotely phased. Apparently our stars aren't that lucky after all. I don't think there's anything as sad as a sick baby. Thankfully she didn't get too bad at least that's what the doctor said after four phone calls (one during her families drive home from vacation...yeah she's awesome) and one visit to the clinic. She was just super congested. The upside of her being a little sicklet (don't judge me) was that she was super cuddly...this child is not a cuddler at all normally so it was kind of sweet to be able to comfort her. Which leads me to...

2. There used to be a time that Miss K took lovely long naps and was relatively limited in her movement. This resulted in her being easily entertained and confined to a relatively small area of the house. That is no longer the case. SHE IS MOBILE!!! and currently eating the case to my New Moon dvd, yesterday it was Maya's rubber bone, tomorrow I'm sure it will be the baseboards. Just yesterday she was standing up rifling through her book collection, only after she terrorized the dog from the pilot seat of her walker. Oh yeah and the battle that is changing her diaper has been lost. After one particularly aggressive confrontation I ceded and allowed her to escape onto the carpet bare-bottomed...she quickly marked her territory by relieving herself.

3. I don't know that I'll ever be a good housewife due to my increasingly short attention span. I try to keep up with the laundry, groceries, cleaning and misc. household-y things but we have a puppy and a heated carpet in the living room and an incredibly amusing daughter and a Netflix subscription and a new camera that all plot against my productivity. I really should work on this.

4. With winter continuing to rear it's obnoxiously cold head we are getting increasingly stir crazy...point and case I just grabbed a fussy Miss K and ran up and down the stairs a couple times singing Firework by Katy Perry (did I mention that there's a little more emphasis on the crazy!

a little project for the lovestruck

For Christmas I had printed up some subway art to go above our bookcase, unfortunately Christmas came and went and up until today that frame has been quite the problem child. I wanted something that was valentine-y due to the fact that I love revolving decor, a house that changes with the season's and holidays if you will, but I didn't want a swinging cupid from my bookcase. Enter my own personalized subway art. I've seen a lot of people creating their own versions online and knew that I could put my own twist on it.

It took a lot of tweaking and mulling over fonts and sizes in photoshop but I finally came to a look I liked. The names are all places from Mr. Awesome and my courtship...from the very first time we met at the Seattle Airport to the day he proposed at the skating rink, printed out 16x20 to fit perfectly above our bookcase.

It was pretty fun sitting with the Mr. remembering all the places we went and the memories we made during that season of our lives. It made me excited to think that this is the man I will continue to travel the world and make plans and memories with..

I think I'm definitely in the Valentine's Day spirit:)

x's and o's

So I have some very Valentine-y plans for the month of February the first of which is a free 28 day class over at Willette Designs...

once you enroll in the class you will receive daily prompts, inspiration, and tips to help you document your loved ones over the course of the month. I figured this was perfect timing considering I'm still trying to figure out all the bells and whistles on Miss Reba.

Also over at Willette she has these awesome Valentines templates for photoshop which I may be inclined to send out too...

maybe a Miss K and Miss Mayapolis Papaya (she's been missing from the blog) photoshoot is in order:)

where the heck did January go?

Oh January, you have come and gone so quickly. I'm happy to say that in our little corner of the world we haven't strayed to far from our words for the year. I know that typically people have already abandoned their resolutions by this point, but we're still holding steady. GO TEAM!!

In other (yet semi-related) news, Mr. Awesome and I have signed up for this madness...

It's a race with all sorts of obstacles along the way, including but not limited to, jumping through fire and wading through mud. Even though it's not until this summer we are super excited and I'm even more excited to be doing it with my Mr. I'm thinkin' we need to dress-up, or at least make some awesome t-shirts!

We also welcomed a recent addition to the fam, and since I am particularly fond of naming inanimate objects I should reveal that her name is Reba...our new camera. Reba is lovely and kinda has a crush on Miss K (which I completely understand). Here are a couple from our first day out and about...

I feel that these pictures make two things very obvious:

1. Reba is a super sweet step-up from my old point and shoot

and

2. Miss K is wearing that hat until it falls apart!

Hope everyone had a lovely weekend...HAPPY MONDAY!

what i do to fight the winter blues

One of my favorite things these days (besides the soundtrack to Glee) is picking out Miss K's clothes in the morning. All the bright colors organized by size, so sweet and two rows deep, is my newest favorite pick-me-up. It may have something to do with the fact that she looks adorable in just about everything regardless of whether it matches or not. And even though it takes all of two minutes before it's covered in drool she can still pull it off with that killer smile of hers.

confidence

I can currently hear Mr. Awesome and Miss K upstairs...they're singing, well the Mr. is singing and I'm sure Miss K is gumming it up. She's loving having her daddy home on a Monday, she's been cheesing at him all day. In just a little while they'll be heading off to the mall to do some running around and I'll be left alone with my thoughts!! I'll be sitting right here due to the fact that I have a battle to tend to. You see for almost two years now I have been working on a young adult novel called Swept. A year and a half ago I went to a writers conference and had interest from several agents and some great feedback and it lit a fire under me for all of a month before I was plagued with fear and insecurity:

"everyone and their mom wants to write a book"

"what makes your book any different"

"you'll never be able to finish it...let alone get it published"

"you don't have time for that...you have [a baby, a home, a husband, a dog, an unruly head of hair] to take care of"

"you should probably just check your email and Facebook twelve million times that would be much more productive"

So I have to ask, what is it in us that makes us afraid to succeed? To extend ourselves and take risks? I am so fearful and scared to death of failing that Mr. Awesome has slowly been trying to push me off the cliff, taking those risks for me. He's gone so far as to not allow me to work until I've given 110% in pursuing this dream of mine. So I sit here and look at pages and pages of notes, pictures I've gathered for inspiration, character descriptions and difficult plot points, chapter after chapter and I think: One of the words we picked for this year was CONFIDENCE!!

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (or creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way." - W.H. Murray

I saw this quote on a friends website today and spoke to me in regards to my plans for the year. It inspired such confidence in me that I had to share it...but of course now I must get back to my book:)

Have a wonderful Monday!!

because we've definitely been lacking in the pictures department

first my laptop was out of commission due to an unfortunate passive aggressive moment on my part and then my camera went on hiatus (later to be found in the depths of my diaper bag) now that everything is back in working order here's some Miss K awesomeness...

it really is amazing how big they get and how quickly that happens...I've already had to say farewell to some of my favorite outfits when I realized that she couldn't straighten her legs (technically it was when Mr. Awesome who realized she couldn't straighten her legs because I felt she could straighten them just enough).

So because they grow so fast and because one of my personal words for 2011 is DOCUMENT I've made a plan to keep track of all these milestones in several ways...

1. 52 Week Project

over at Young House Love

I absolutely love this idea by John and Sherry and hope to have the perseverance to make it through the whole year! However, since I didn't start with her first week I'm going to just document every week of 2011 with a weekly photo. To make it even more awesome my bestie is doing the same thing so each of us will just be buying two yards of fabric a month (instead of four) and at the end of the year each of our girls will get a quilt and the grandparents will get an awesome coffee table book. Booyah!!

2. Month in Review

Fiskars

What can I say I love a good template and I am a frequent reader of Kelly Purkey's blog. Her clean, simple aesthetic really appeals to me so I'm super excited about this project as well. Since I can guarantee that I take at least ten pics a month this will serve as an easy way to document our year along the way. And while Miss Purkey does hers as a year in review, I hope to finish each two page layout at the end of each month.

3. 3 People 12 Times

over at Tara Whitney

Go check this project out!! Last February Tara decided that she loved getting pictures of all six of her family members together and so she made a plan to, once a month, make sure that they got a family portrait. The results are just awesome and she actually made it through the whole year. I chose this project because after looking through the last 5ish months of pictures I only have a couple pictures of my whole little family together. What a bummer! But not this year people...I'm all over this:)

HAPPY MONDAY!!