Still Christmas At My House...

First, I'm going to catch your attention with a blurry picture of my growing midsection.... because you can be honest, you're only checking my blog right now to see if I finally updated with that baby belly picture I mentioned in my last post. It isn't much bigger than last week, maybe a bit rounder.

I really wanted to finally show you my Christmas decorations, because they've literally been up since the day after Thanksgiving! It is still Christmas at my house, if you were wondering, I took these pictures today (well, Friday... I realize that it is Saturday now). I'm still listening to Christmas music. I'm still planning which cookies to bake. The stockings are still hanging up. The presents are still wrapped and under the tree. My little bitty tree. Isn't it cute?

 

My friend let me borrow this little four foot tree, otherwise I probably wouldn't have put up a tree this year. It isn't real. It is my first fake tree ever. I'm taller than it too, which is also a first. Ha.

I hung the Christmas cards with clothes pins on some garland this year. It adds a little something to my treatment-less living room window.

I couldn't decide where to hang our stockings with our stocking hangers at this house, so I just hung them from the mirror. I love them. We're going to have to make a new one for next year! With a bow or a cuff... no one knows!

I also have some sneaky mistletoe hanging up on the way to the dining room!

Oh, and I almost forgot, I got a real wreath to decorate! Just to make up for not having a real tree. Thanks to the 60 and 70 degree weather we've been experiencing on the regular, it is very very dead.

And I really hate taking pictures of myself in the mirror, but for now it is a lot easier than setting up the camera with a timer.

 19 weeks and 3 days :)

Sending Some Christmas Cheer!

To give you a break from all the catch-up pregnancy posts I've been publishing... thought I'd do a little post about my Christmas cards. I couldn't find any I liked at the store (I mean, Target really failed me this year... they usually have adorable Christmas card options!), so I just made some. 

The list of people I wanted to send them to was a lot longer than I realized, so I tried to keep them simple. All I needed was some blank cards, a stack of Christmas paper, a snowflake paper punch, and a stamp for the inside message. :)

Stamping the inside of the cards probably took me the longest out of all the steps because I was trying really hard to not smudge them!

Then I carefully set the cards out to dry and ignored them for a couple days... just to be sure that the ink had dried by the time I wrote in them.

I think they turned out pretty cute!

Hope everyone is enjoying this Christmas season so far! I can't believe that it is going to be 2012 in less than two weeks!

Baby News & Salt Dough Ornaments

I've been kind of avoiding posting anything for a while because Michael and I had not announced our baby news on Facebook yet and it was getting really difficult to not say anything on here about it. I think everyone who reads this already knows, but....

WE'RE EXPECTING!

I've been writing short (okay... some are on the longer side) blogs every week since I've found out, just so I could write my feelings and memories down while they were fresh. As you probably noticed, I haven't been posting them, so I'll try to post them one-by-one now and then eventually I'll be caught up to my current week. I'll throw in some normal non-pregnancy posts every now and then for variety.

At my house this year, Christmas is going to last almost two months. :) I had all of my Christmas decorations up and the tree decorated the day after Thanksgiving and well, I'm waiting for a certain someone to help me take them down. I'll have another post so you can see my little tree and decorations, you'll just get some teasers in this post.

I decided I wanted to try to make salt dough ornaments after seeing them here. Her ornaments turned out just lovely and perfect, but when I followed her directions I got nothing short of a disaster. Instead of a dough, I made a soupy, gooey, sticky MESS. So, I turned to a Google search for tips. Most recipes I found were the same proportions that she used: 1 cup salt, 1 cup water, 2 cups flour. Go ahead, and try it, maybe you'll get better luck than I did, but that was way too much water. This is what worked for me:

1. Mix 1 cup salt and 2 cups flour and then I added this to the bowl of my KitchenAid mixer.
2. While mixing at the lowest speed I      s  l  o  w  l  y    added significantly less than 1 cup of water. I simply added water until it was the consistency of play dough. If you accidentally get a little water-pouring happy, you can add a little flour at the end.
3. I let the mixer do most of the kneading, and then I only kneaded it by hand for a few minutes until it was nice and smooth.

I separated it into three ziplock bags and let it rest for about 20 minutes before I worked with it. I don't know it this step it crucial. However, do keep it in an airtight container until you use it. If it sits out too long, it'll crack when you're trying to work with it.

Then I rolled it out and used cookie cutters  to cut out the shapes of my ornament. You need to "bake" them at 200 degrees for 4-6 hours to dry them out. It was late at night by the time they were done, so I just turn the oven off and let them sit in the oven until I decorated them the next day.

They look like sugar cookie ornaments when they're ready to decorate!

 

I used a plastic straw to cut out the holes for ribbon before drying them. 

You need to completely coat them in acrylic paint and/or varnish if you want them to keep, otherwise they'll absorb moisture and get icky. I just covered them in acrylic paint, but my friends also used a varnish and gave them a glittery finish (which I highly recommend... they looked beautiful!). I was going to add varnish to mine after seeing theirs, but turns out there are solvents in varnish that you're not supposed to really be around when you're pregnant.

Luckily, acrylics are safe to work with. My ornaments were really bumpy on the back from drying them on parchment paper. You could just give your cookie sheet a little spritz of cooking spray instead and avoid that.

 

After they're done being decorated and dry, just hang with a ribbon!

I'll probably make some again next year and do one with the little one's hand print!

In the Lane, Snow is Glistening....

Michael and I woke up to snow this morning. I opened up the blinds during breakfast and BAM, this is what I see...

We didn't even expect it to snow! I love it. I open the back door and this is what I see.....

I look out the kitchen window, and this is what I see...

I hope everyone enjoyed all the Christmas festivities! Michael and I certainly did. We spent Christmas with good friends and just had a great time.

I think I'm going to go convince Michael to play in the snow with me now. :)

May Your Days be Merry and Bright...

So this past week has been super busy for me! Monday consisted of taking finals at PLU, visiting Meagan to say goodbye, and then hopping on an airplane headed to NC.

I have a friend from high school who works security at the airport. He was working the conveyor belt x-ray machine last time I went through security in November. This time he was helping people through the metal detectors. He took a break while I was waiting to board my airplane and we talked for a bit. Always good to catch up with old friends!

Anyways, I arrived in NC on Tuesday morning and Michael was able to go into work late so he could pick me up. I got some much-needed sleep in while Michael was at work and then we got our tree LATE that night. We got it from Lowe's (sorry Meagan, hahaha). They don't have any tree farms around here. They were kind enough to cut off the bottom of the tree and trim the bottom branches off for us, because we don't have the tools to do that!

We bought a tree topper ($12 from Pier 1, love it!), but other than that we just worked with what we had. I borrowed lights from my parents. I also had ribbon, candy canes, and cheap Ikea ornaments from last year. It is kind of a work in progress. :)


We have one ornament which we bought on our honeymoon, the day we drove to Leavenworth. We decided to get one ornament each year. So, this one is a little corny, but we love it.

I also wanted to make a tree skirt and stockings. I was way too busy with school by the time we got it started. So my mom pretty much took those projects over for me. Thanks mom! Here's the lovely tree skirt:

And I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the stockings. They're just perfect.

I was also super busy this week because I made a bunch of cookies and candies for Michael to bring to the guys at work. I made sugar cookies with icing, surprise kiss cookies, turtles, oreo truffles, and homemade marshmallows. I kept half of the marshmallows for hot chocolate because they were sooooo good.