Valentine's Shenanigans!

The past two days have been an absolute blur, but because I'm a nerd, I took a TON of pictures (it started driving T nuts after awhile...haha). And you all get to share in the love with us!

So starting on Saturday morning, T woke up to these cute little things posted all around our house:

I have an absolute love for post-it notes, and I got these ones from one of my good friends for my wedding. I don't know if you can read them but they all basically start with "I love you because..." Also, I was driving T nuts by telling him "Nope, you haven't found them all." And so he would go desperately searching around our tiny mobile home trying to find them all. It was pretty funny. Eventually he did find them all!

I don't know if you can see it but in the second picture above, the lower row in the middle, it says "I love you because you love pizza almost as much as I do." Well, we LOVE Papa Murphy's pizza, and when we saw this as an ad in their window, we had to get it!

Oh yes, heart shaped pizza. LOVE IT!

T gave me my gift around lunchtime, and he bought me "Ever After" and some sweethearts candy. I have always loved "Ever After" and in high school, I used to watch it probably 3 times a week. When we got married, it got left at my parents house and I haven't seen it since. So he did the awesomely husband thing and got it for me. When I told him "Well, now you know you have to watch it with me," he said, "Yeah, right." (He ended up watching it with me on Sunday though. haha)

Later that night, we had an activity that we have been planning for our job. Basically, we threw a Valentine's dinner for all of our neighbors, and these were the tables we decorated.

It was a crazy event. We started at 4:30 and we didn't get out of there until 8:45. Needless to say, T was little a sad that I was tired by the time it was over, being Valentine's Day and all. (Regardless, I found the energy later...hehe.)

After the dinner, I decided that it was time to give T his present. I had been holding it off from him all day and it was driving him crazy. I had it wrapped and left it on our kitchen table and he had to stare at it all day. It.was.fantastic.

This is going to be a little bit hard to explain, but this is what I did for him. A little background though: the only wedding pictures we've got hung in our house are my bridals and it drives him nuts that he's not in any of them. Well, I got one printed and framed it, and I also framed our marriage license. I stacked them in the wrapping so the picture was on top of the license, and this little note was the first thing he saw when we opened it up:

This was going along with my "I love you because..." notes. Then he lifted up the picture and this note was on top of the license.

This is what it looked like all together.

So that was Saturday. Whoo! One day down. Now on to Sunday:

T was really excited about this part. For any of you that know our family pretty well, T is the chef in our family. In fact, his favorite part of cooking is baking, and he bought these cute little heart shaped cake pans. He decided that he wanted us to make cakes for each other for Valentine's Day and since we didn't have time on Saturday, we were going to do it on Sunday.

Before we got started, we cleaned up the pan and it had this label that had super sticky goo holding it on, and so being the totally awesome wife that I am, I stuck to his back. I made him into CUPID! Isn't he cute with his little heart wings!

(PS. He glared at me after I took this picture)

After all was said and done, and about 4 hours of baking cakes, we had two, double-layered, heart-shaped cakes. This is the cake I made for T. It was a devil's food cake with fudge icing, and then the Triforce (from the Zelda games) in the corner in frosting. T was pretty excited about that one! ;)

And this was the cake he made for me. He swirled pink, red, and white cake batter together, then put red raspberry jam in between the layers, covered it in strawberry frosting and put real strawberries on top. Yeah, his cake beat the crap out of mine, but maybe that's why he's the chef!

Needless to say, we're going to need a lot of working out after this weekend is over with all the junk we ate. haha.

I hope you all had a great V-Day! We sure did!

Twelve Days of Christmas Past! (Day 11)

Hello again! Sorry this post is so late today! It's been a pretty crazy day, as I will explain later.

However, first off....we have...

THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS PAST!!

One of my (probably) lesser known factoids is that I am a drama geek. Besides having done theater all through high school, (another lesser LESSER known factoid: that is how T and I met...funny story for another day) and all that, I am a theater lover. Whenever a show comes to town, I'm one of the first to get tickets. I love it!

Anyway, this summer I had the amazing opportunity to participate in a local theater in a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, in which I played Dorothy.


And no, that's not my real hair although sometimes I wish that nasty mess was in fact, mine. This is me with my sister-in-law and her baby girl.

During the show, I met some absolutely fantastic people, like: LORALEE! (whom we still share an occasion Sunday morning breakfast gossip-fest)


As well as Haley, Michelle, TJ & Fam, and many many others, all of whom I love millions and tons!

So, there you have it!

For the Eleventh Day of Christmas Past, I got to do theater again!

Now, for more nine o'clock news...

A couple of super fun things happened in the past 24 hours that I want to fill you in on. First off, since finals are over (and I passed 3 of 4 classes thus far! woo!! waiting on the last one...), I suddenly feel very homemaker-ish. All I want to do is organize and clean and do more organizing and more cleaning. So last night I made cookies!! Okay, so they weren't very good. Must I mention AGAIN that I'm not a very good cook??? Well, I'm not.

But I. made. cookies. And I consider that quite an accomplishment.

And to add to the awesomeness of my homemaker skills, I made two cards last night, one for a friend that graduated with her master's degree and is therefore leaving our little podunk town for another podunk town, and the second for another friend that is having a baby. (PS, I caught this friend OUTSIDE today in the snow trying to shovel her walkway to induce labor! Go figure huh??)

Let's see if you can guess which one is the baby card and which one is the graduate card...bwa ha ha....

Okay so that was last night. Moving on to this morning.

So I wake up bright and early this morning, feeling really motivated and ready to get things done (remember I'm still on this post-finals adrenaline rush). And I wake up to this:


If you can't tell, it says that it snowed 6 INCHES overnight! (And apparently from what I hear from a friend, that was only since 4 in the morning). Note that this is our first real storm this winter. Oh well, we'll have a white Christmas! (You can also see my car tires in the background for some more perspective!)

Alright, so it snowed. But I was motivated and I persevered. I was on a mission this morning.

Haircut or bust. My post-finals adrenaline rush had pushed me to the edge. I was ready for a dramatic change.

So I spent about an hour shoveling out our car, and then went sliding through the snow to the local Great Clips, pictures in hand of what I wanted. I was ready.

Here is what I looked like before I left the house.


Boring, I. know. It was killing me but school was coming first. It was pretty much some small bangs, one straight cut across the bottom. (I had a really bad short cut in January and I was trying to let it grow out, but now, it was TIME.)

An hour later (and after some bickering between my stylist and the manager of the place, which ended up costing about $20 more than expected....grrr....), I looked like this.


Okay, so not AS dramatic as I thought. T likes it long so we kept it that way. She basically added more bangs for more DRAMA, and cut layers all the way around to take some of the bulk off the bottom. Here's another shot, so you can see the curls.


Did you know that you can make those curls with a flat iron??? I. HAD. NO. IDEA! And I thought my and my flat iron were best friends....apparently not.

So there you go, my new dramatic change in celebration of this semester being over. What do you think?

So Arrest Me.

I have officially broken all laws of my culture.

T and I bought a Christmas tree, and by all that is good and holy, yes: we. put. it. up.

ALREADY.

I love Christmas. Deal with it.

Thanksgiving will come and go, but my Christmas is just around the corner!