yes.

my trusty (if janky looking) car has only 1,000 miles to go until i hit 300,000! I bought this car when i was 21 years old, and it has seen me through many a life season. i'll write my ode to it when it hits 300k, but suffice it to say...i heart my toyota, even it's always the oldest car in the parking lot!

out with the old, in with the new!

maybe you remember that we painted the wall at the top of our stairs with chalkboard paint a couple of years ago. we wrote on it all the time, and it was often a congregating spot for kiddos at our parties.

i wrote this on m's last hearing birthday party, but we changed it all the time:

and then i had this spontaneous desire to wallpaper that wall. i found a roll of cool vintage wallpaper on etsy. it's now been sitting in our closet for a year because i never have gotten around to wallpapering. it seems kind of complicated and messy, so the chalkboard stayed. but months ago i was a big talker, and supposedly going to wallpaper, so i had matt prime the wall. it sat, looking undone, taunting me for months. finally i couldn't handle that roll of wallpaper mocking me any longer. 

matt painted the wall the pale neutral of the other hall walls, and one day in november i decided to paint some faux wallpaper in gold paint. i kind of love it even more than the wallpaper! so until i get my mojo up to wallpaper for real, this will stay:

(my favorite part is how it spills onto the ceiling and adjoining wall)

it was such a fast. gratifying project!

monday mish-mash

guess what? i've been loving reading your comments on the 1,000th post. thank you for kind words- and also for reminding me of way in the past posts! (please check in here on thursday for the big winner announcement! and if you haven't entered yet, you have until wednesday at midnight)

it's monday morning, and so in honor of a slow beginning after a holiday week, a couple of links to get you started.

are you a mama? do you actively define beauty for your kids or do you let culture define it for them? my friend amy passed this fantastic blog post along to me about talking about your own beauty with your children. i think it is pretty powerful whether you have sons or daughters- after all, our sons learn about what they think is beauty and attractive just as much as our daughters do. i have to say that when i told matt "i've started telling our daughters i'm beautiful (even when i don't really believe it myself)" he said, "i've never heard you say that before." it feels very uncomfortable at first (at least for me), but my girls definitely respond when i say it.

have you watched this show? it's funny.

have you watched this show? it just keeps getting better and better!

do you suddenly have an inbox jam packed with emails but none of them are fun personal messages but just cyber monday related? take a few minutes and write an actual piece of mail and send it!

speaking of cyber monday, i saw this yesterday and it was pretty thought provoking (even though it is nine words)

i'm catching up on posts, so see you often this week!
xo

i scream, you scream

we all scream for...pie?

this year's mostly annual pie party had a twist!

in the past it's always been an apple pie party.

this year, you could bring any kind of pie.

the rules:

* homemade, not storebought, crust & filling

* leave your darling children at home

*matt & i provided dinner, all the guests provided desserts

the payoff:

* a year of bragging rights

* a belly full of pie

* fabulous prizes (yes, i defined fabulous)

i've been experimenting lately
with crepe paper, so i festooned our downstairs with these decorations i cut in all different widths in autumnal colors.
i'm kind of a sucker for streamers, y'all.

it was a cozy night, perfect for a pie party!

 people started to trickle in, pies in hand...

for dinner matt and i made a big green salad with roasted beets and avocado, and savory pies: my go-to carmelized onion tart and this fantastic guinness pie from the ny times magazine a few years back. (it's delicious & the crust is phenomenal)

3/4 of the table was crowded with the potential pie winners!

 the food went fast, and then it was time for tasting dessert (and judging it!)
i definitely need to revisit the judging next year. i made it way too complicated (since there were so many entries!) i think next year it will be super streamlined.
the final categories were fruit, chocolate & other.

 (this is after everyone has eaten pie- but you get an idea of the spread)

 


taylor made a key lime pie with meringue and did some last minute torching action before the judging: 

 i don't even know if this qualifies as a pie, and it certainly didn't take home any prizes for looking pretty, but it was crazy good:

 a little 4 year old camped out on the landing and watched all the commotion as usual

 some taste testers were very serious...

 while my mom (who is an amazing pie baker) rocked dishes in the kitchen

 other friends caught up

 it was fun to listen to everyone give their opinions (since they were all over the place. amazing how different our taste preferences are!)

 a little sampler plate to go:

after lots of tasting, chit-chatting and hanging,
i tallied the scores and handed out prizes!
i won't lie, i didn't vote, but if i did, the results might have looked a little different.
but can anyone really lose with FIFTEEN pies to snack on?
i think not.

some prizewinners got these dazzling handmade medallions...

and others got to spin the wheel for a prize!

didn't i say our prizes were fabulous?

the final lesson of the evening?

cheaters never win.

a certain guest (i will let him remain nameless) decided to go above the law and bring a pre-made pie, stashing his pie box behind the bushes in our front yard! tricky wicky, yes. but in the end it didn't matter sine the key lime pie blew his blueberry cheesecake pie out of the water.

shame on you!!!

i look forward to a homemade pie out of you next year!

any good pie recipes you want to pass along?

i've been making this one lately but substituting raspberries instead and it is delicious! 

matt made this one and this one for thanksgiving and they were epic.

1,000th post!

for. reals.

this pictures are completely unrelated except that they are awesome 

(especially because they are not staged!) 

the other morning these two munchkins apparently decided it was glamour breakfast because i walked in on them eating breakfast with sunglasses on.

 

 

we like to be fancy around here.

but more importantly?

this is my 1,000th post on this blog.

here are the very first posts i wrote, 

in the haze of newly deaf two month old baby 

way back in june 2008

and 

here are the posts i added on slightly retroactively to the month before, 

from emails i sent out about m's hearing loss diagnosis when she was about a month old.

so
1,000 posts later

that little baby looks a whole lot tinier than this four year old channeling a movie star!

i like-ahem, love-presents,

so how about an impromptu giveaway?

the present will be a little box full of surprises to show up in your mailbox.

just leave a comment in the comment section with either your favorite specific blog entry (it can't be this one you lazypants!) OR your favorite type of post on here (recipe, kid-centric, mish-mash, tear inducing etc) OR a post you propose i should write. 

i'll pick a winner next week!

(and thank you for putting up with me for so long!)

***UPDATE Winners have been chosen! Go here to see if you won!***

thanksgiving, more or less

(in no particular order + totally incomplete...glimpses into thanksgiving today)

ps workout motivators- two days back on the workout wagon! Xo

{thankful}

“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”― Deitrich Bonhoeffer

Grateful ~

for the goodness and beauty that ultimately triumphs over life's dark moments

for the laughter of my daughters playing together

for the gift of a healthy strong body

for those in my life who have survived or are still battling cancer

for a God who takes me as i am, flawed but trying to follow in the way of jesus

for my family through blood
my family through marriage
my family through friendship

for the moments of quiet after my children go to sleep

for ten years of marriage + partnership with my best friend, and for the safety of vows that allow for discord and reconciliation, for laughter and tears, for yesterday and tomorrow

for a husband who believes in me, champions me, and makes really good food for me

for the eggs our chickens give us daily

for the right to vote + work towards a better world

for nonfat lattes

for real mail + magazines in my mailbox

for the neverending miracle of cochlear implants, and a daughter who is deaf but never stops talking

for close by friends and far away friends

for the supercute + nonfunctional things that make a day a little prettier

for two children who are both so delightful and completely unique individuals

for a home that is a haven

for friends who live close to make living in an urban space sustainable

for creativity in making, playing, cooking

for those of you who read this blog

for good friends who share half a lifetime of history
for new friends who open up your world

for a job that lets me still be with my girls in the daytime

for a studio and time to work and think and paint

for the imagination of my two children - for their world of make believe + pretend

for the joy of living in proximity to my mom

for the hope of a new day every morning

and for so much more

happy thanksgiving to you and yours

getting back on the wagon

october felt like the month of sickness in our house- i went from a cold to a flu to a cold, and all of them knocked me out big time. it was as if a plague cloud settled over our house and just kept sprinkling new maladies down on me. in the midst of all of that sickness, i fell off my workout wagon and haven't exercised since. yep, it is now the end of november, and i still haven't worked out in a month and a half. i can tell from how i feel to the way my clothes are fitting, but i still have no motivation to start up again! does anyone else have that initial reluctance to get back in the swing of exercising? this month has been one where in some ways i feel like i've said yes to too many things, and have been juggling more than i really should, and so to add exercise back into the routine is daunting and overwhelming. thanks in great part to genetics, even when i work out pretty religiously my body type is not long and lean, so as soon as i take a break from exercise i almost immediately turn into a blob. fun times. if i had a stronger sense of self i would post a very unflattering photo that was in the pictures i just uploaded from my camera to prove my point, but i think i'll just keep that image to myself.

so gentle readers, i come to you with a two part question:
one, do you have any motivation for me? cause i'm having a rough time mustering it myself. i know that most of it is getting past the initial few days of working out again, and that's the part where i'm dragging my feet. i should've been motivated when m said to me, "mom, you haven't exercised in a long time. why don't you exercise anymore?" rad. good thing i'm modeling physical fitness to my kids. i guess at least they recognize that it's more normal for me to exercise than not.

two, any good dvd's i should attempt? you may remember i am a jillian michaels fan (at least i am a fan of her routines.) i kind of like intense, knock it out workouts, mostly because of limited time. (but not so intense that i die.)

my tummy fat thanks you in advance.

and on that note of sloth and complete inactivity, have a happy thanksgiving week of feasting!


ps yes i notice that i'm 6 posts behind...i've got some catching up to do! see you here a little more often in the next ten days!

get my husband his own hgtv show, please

ten weeks ago, matt started to build a shed in the back of our backyard. we lost our garage when it got renovated into my studio, so our backyard has looked like a junkyard for a while, with lots of randomness strewn everywhere. 

we'd talked for a long time about matt building a shed instead of getting a prefab one from somewhere like home depot. 

since we moved in to our house two years ago, matt has done quite a few big projects, including renovating the studio, painting the exterior of our house, and tearing out the massive built in bunk beds in the downstairs bedroom. he saved all of the wood when he tore out those bunk beds and all of the built-in shelving in the garage, plus some extra scrap wood, with the vision of repurposing that wood for the exterior and interior of the shed. we both knew what we wanted it to look like, and he was pretty sure he could do it with some consultation from friends who know more about this stuff than he does. (i smiled and nodded, but was kind of incredulous)

trying to be a helpful partner in home renovation, i decided to go online and find a bunch of shed plans. i came up with an entire pinterest board of free modern looking shed plans, dimensions and all, and presented them to matt. i drew a wonky little sketch of the front and side view of the potential shed. 

matt looked and listened. then he proceeded to ignore my nicely collated online plans, took my lame sketch, and started to figure out dimensions. every so often i would ask him, "are you sure you don't want to use these plans? they have all the numbers and directions and everything." (i've been wrong before- i had pretty low expectations for the diningroom table he was building out of scrap wood and then it was *amazing*.) but somehow it seemed like building a shed with jerry-rigged sketches and numbers scrawled on a piece of paper wasn't going to work so well. i think it comes down to the fact that i would've had absolutely no idea how to build a shed or any kind of building at all. i mean, maybe if it was held together with duct tape and gumdrops it would last a day or two, but a permanent structure? but i (kind of) trusted matt, and considering i was so off base last time around with the table, i had no choice but to rally and believe the shed was going to happen and that our back yard would stop channeling a rusty abandoned lot in rural arkansas.

see for yourself what happened...

m has a dance party in the shed!

(the greenish boards are from the bunkbeds, 

the white and grey/blue used to be shelving in our garage)

viola! less than three months of piecing together random snippets of time and scrap wood, and our shed is finally done, barn door and all!

and our local dump has less in it, thanks to our own backyard pulling double duty as a lumberyard for a couple years.

i'm slightly obsessed with its awesomeness & that matt pulled it off 

(thanks, chris magnuson for construction consultation)

 

(not pictured-awesome interior shelving action)

* also not pictured, the big fat take-backs i had to do for doubting husband's shed-building (both functional and aesthetic) abilities.

happy almost weekend!