Number 8 on my 30 before 30 List: Update Blog!
Not sure how to sum up a whole year and a half in one blog post. I haven’t done much as far as art goes. A few projects here and there but I don’t even know if I took photos of them! Of course I have a bazillion photos of Julia! Here are some memorable moments. Enjoy : )
I know it’s been over six months and I am still blogging about our wedding haha. BUT it was so busy after the wedding with the holidays, our honeymoon and NOW I am working on growing our baby girl 🙂
Anyway, I wanted to share the reasoning behind our table names. We ultimately decided to go with our favorite locations but had tossed around the ideas of our favorite hiking trails, words relating to love, words related to marriage, favorite places to eat or favorite vacation spots.
Our table names:
Salt Lake City – Where Chris’s brother Andy got married which doubled for our first family vacation with the Halls.
Schuylerville – Where we bought our first home together.
Caroline St – Where we first met 🙂
Malta Drive In – One of our favorite date night places and also where we attempted to take Patty and she jumped out the car window and ran into the snack stand kitchen!
Pharaoh Mtn – The first time Chris met my mom and brother on an overnight hike which turned out to be a complete nightmare of black flies and squeezing four people in a two person tent!
Saratoga – When we first started dating we both had an apartment in Saratoga.
Amigos – Our favorite Mexican restaurant. Best margaritas ever!
Dog Park – Patty’s favorite place.
Myrtle Beach – Where we got engaged 🙂
Congress Park – One of our first dates we spent walking around downtown Saratoga and ate lunch in Congress Park.
Virginia Beach – Our first vacation together.
Race Track – One of our favorite places to go in the summer. We never win anything but always have a great time!
Stadium Café – One of our favorite restaurants in Saratoga.
Canal Trail – One of Patty’s favorite trails.
Battlefield – Where we took Patty on her first long walk and one of our favorite places to go walking and talk about everything and nothing.
Maine – Our healing trip after the loss of our baby girls.
I can’t take credit for the beta fish centerpiece idea…that was ALL Chris! We did half of the tables with fish and half of them with lemons. To give away the centerpieces, since we didn’t want to go home with like 10 fish, our DJ announced that whoever had the next birthday at each table got to take home the centerpiece. For the table names I bought wooden hearts from the craft store and wood burned the lettering. Then we had our florist add a floating flower to each of the fish ones.
As far as the rest of the table goes, my mom graciously offered to make all of the table runners. I had no clue what I wanted when I went to the fabric store so we just picked what jumped out at us. The candles are actually citronella candles to keep away any pesky bugs. Good thing yellow was one of my wedding colors because I could not find any white ones!
I hand made all of the favors/place tags and bouquet holders.
I grew up as the “artist of the family” so when it came to my wedding I knew I had to step it up! For the favors I wanted to make something that wouldn’t go straight to the trash on the way out. I decided to combine the place cards and favors into one. I loved the way they came out and I love seeing them now 6 months later still sitting on mantels and bookshelves of my friends and family! For the kids I bought spinning light up toys that I thought would be fun to dance with throughout the night.
There was a beautiful tree coming up through part of the deck where I hung the seating chart.
My husband has this thing with abbreviating EVERYTHING and for the past 3 years he has been trying to get “t-givs” to catch on…keep trying babe!
Besides forgetting to take out the gizzards for the first 45 mins the bird was in the oven, our Thanksgiving dinner for 11 went perfectly! I didn’t get too creative with the table setting this year besides adding a scratch off lotto ticket to each place setting. Dad won $4 woot!
My 5 yr old nephew made us this turkey centerpiece made out of a potato, feathers and other various craft supplies. SO CUTE! Last year he made one out of a brown paper bag and construction paper cut outs of his hand prints.
As you know my mom and I throw a huge kids Halloween party each year. We usually go all out and spend an entire day building a haunted house. This year we decided to have a “merry not scary” party for the younger ones. Since we didn’t want them to get scared we made playhouses instead. Mom spray painted cardboard boxes a solid color and I added the characters! A little bit of copyright infringement going on haha. The kids had so much fun playing “trick or treat” with the buckets of candy we placed inside each house. It was chaos most of the day but so much fun! We played pin the tail on the cat, pass the pumpkin, find your prize bucket and had a pull string pinata! Oh and had our annual costume parade and contest! This year I made my husband dress up as Goofy. He’s such a good sport haha
Lights strung up through each house provided perfect hide out lighting.
My “helpers” Love these girls!
Stayed up half the night making dirt cups, mini sandwiches, taco dip, jello cups, cupcakes and probably other things I can’t remember.
Along with a guest book we had these custom cut mattes out at our wedding for guests to sign. I used scrapbook paper to fill in the photo hole and wrote “Leave us some LOVE” Obviously I plan of adding my favorite photos from the wedding once I receive them from the photographer. I bought a third matching frame for this sunflower print I bought over the summer. I had sunflowers in my bouquet so I thought it would tie in well with my “wedding wall” as I have been calling it. I also added one of those wall quotes that reads “A true love story never ends”
That’s George (like George of the jungle) the giant plant in the corner and yes those are Halloween decorations sneaking in 🙂
Ever since I lost my own little ones I find it very difficult to welcome new little ones into my life. Before August 4th 2011 I would have been the first in line at the hospital to welcome a new baby, first one to want to hold them and ogle over how beautiful they are and congratulate the new parents and grandparents. Now I don’t even go to the hospital, dread seeing photos on Facebook and avoid the new parents and grandparents. I feel hardened, cold, heartless and jealous. I want my old self back. I wanted to be strong enough to go and welcome my first niece into this world…but I wasn’t. I was calm on the outside and screaming on the inside.
I’m not ready. Not ready to see my parents holding a new grandchild. It is such a huge trigger of emotions. All I can think about is my parents holding our lifeless babies. I hate that I caused them so much pain.
Part of me feels like when I accept and welcome a new baby into my life I am replacing my baby girls. I know this is not the case at all…nonetheless the feeling is there and it’s hard to shrug off.
I hate this new hardened self I’ve become.
I do want to be as close to Lily as I am to Johnathan…it will just take some time to get used to. I really tried to turn my feelings around. I even made these paintings with Johnathan the night before his little sister arrived. I had some blank canvases lying around and dug out my old acrylic craft paints and let him go at it!
And how the hell do you start again? If you have suffered (especially your first pregnancy) a miscarriage, still birth or infant death…how do you get to that next step of trying again? Although my situation was so rare, it doesn’t stop me from thinking it will happen again. I know I will regret not trying to have kids again. But I also know it will absolutely kill me to lose another baby. The doctor said my chances are still the same as every other woman of having a miscarriage. One in six. ONE IN SIX!
How do you even enjoy a second pregnancy after a loss? Will the kicking and morning sickness just be another trigger of emotions? How do you sleep at night knowing something could go wrong again?
For the past week or two I have been hearing this loud noise that sounds like a dying cat. There are a ton of cats around here (and yes I have named them all) so I would check outside to make sure there were no cat fights going on. Nothing. So I just dismissed the noise…until on our afternoon walk Patty almost had herself a nice chicken dinner! Apparently the people at the end of our street decided it was a good idea to buy a rooster and some hens! The rooster had gotten out of the yard and was in the middle of the street as Patty and I walked by! Patty lunged with all her strength nearly ripping my arm out of its socket! It scared the crap out of me haha. It’s always an adventure around here.
Speaking of Roosters, my grandparents bought this ceramic rooster at a flea market in Florida and asked me to paint it for them.
I cleaned him up, painted him with acrylic paints and finished up with some indoor/outdoor protection spray.
In case you were curious what I have named the neighborhood cats here my list:
Holly – my loving grey tiger cat
Shitty Kitty – our skittish black cat who hates my fiancé (she earned this name by having liquid diarrhea the weekend we adopted her…)
Garfield – fat orange cat
Mini Garfield – skinny orange cat
Holly Clone – mini Holly
Creamy – looks like a creamsicle (definitely a MALE since I caught him “marking” our side porch)
S. Kitty Clone – I actually pet this cat on our back porch thinking it was S. Kitty and realized our cat doesn’t have white feet!
Michael Jackson – black and white
Cow – fat black and white cat
Charlie – fat dark grey cat that Patty almost attacked one day on our daily walk
Phoebe – mama grey and white
Scrawny – baby grey and white
Snowman – all white
Tobey – long haired tiger
Dinner – our new rooster friend
Blowing out eggs instead of hard boiling is another option if you want to keep your colored Easter eggs out on display for a while or possibly keep them forever! The first step is to poke a hole in each end of the egg. We used thumbtacks.
Blow into one hole and let the insides ooze out into a bowl. Demonstrated here by my fiance who I made color eggs with me along with my mom and brother.
Color and enjoy 🙂
Where in the world have YOU been??
My Dad gave me these giant maps for Christmas last year. The blue pins are marked for every place Chris and I have been together 🙂 He wouldn’t let me have my own pins because I would school his! If I had MY pins up there I would have places marked like Rome, Venice, Mexico, California, Florida, Canada and so on…hopefully one day we can go to all of these places together.
Creating Confidence 