Merry Christmas

Want to see a bunch of blurry ipod pictures of Christmas? You do?! Great, here we go:

Henry was SPOILED!!!

Grover "remote control" from Mok and Pok. He loves it.

Toy explosion...

Playing w/his wooden ABC blocks from Mok and Pok.

Lots of fun toys from his cousins (and handmade wooden car from my parents!)

Henry thinks this personal massager is pretty awesome.

Musical toy from Uncle Ryan and Aunt Sarah.

His face when I opened the wooden blocks for him. I wish it wasn't so blurry, he was SO excited!

Cute Christmas face :)

Also, one of my presents was Sensationail! It's an at-home gel nail polish kit that comes with an LED lamp. After researching a lot of at-home kits, I decided this is the one I want. And Joshy is so nice, he got it for me! He also got me a Kindle (yay!). Anyway, I opened this kit on Christmas Eve and did my nails immediately, and they came out SO NICE!!! This manicure is supposed to last about two weeks, and I'm not obsessed with the color, so I'm sure I'll be redoing them soon enough haha. Up next I want to try using regular nail polish between the gel layers, and see how it lasts.

two days later and they look exactly the same

Anyways, I know this post is all about gifts (mostly Henry's), but we really have loved all the quality family time that we've been enjoying. Luckily we have two weeks off of work, and it has been amazing so far. I LOVE VACATION!!!! How has your holiday season been so far?

PS: If you want to see adorable pictures of Henry with Santa, click here!

putting pinterest to work

i remembered this pin i posted to my organization board on pinterest, which comes from this site. i've been thinking about organizing our medicine cabinet for a while, and i've been in a project-y mood lately, so i made a pass in the storage bin aisle at walmart today. i wish i had taken a before picture of our medicine cabinet, because it was a hot mess. i know this isn't an extremely riveting blog post, but i love organization ideas, so i thought this might give other organization-nerds an idea or two. also, i got to whip out my label maker :)

stomach stuff in a box, pain/first aid stuff in a box, our daily meds out (vitamins, etc), and cold/flu/allergy stuff in a box

voila!

happy organizing! also, i have a [potentially] awesome project in the works, so i will post about that soon. to see my pinterest organization board, click here. if you have an organization board, leave the link so i can check it out!! :)

fire!

last weekend the mountain right behind our house was on fire. it was kind of frightening. here's an article on it, it was called the dump fire. some dumb-dumbs were shooting out in the mountains in a RED FLAG WARNING and in high winds. umm...yeah...don't even get me started because i will go off on those hillbillies! anyways, so on thursday i was headed home after taking henry to the doctor, and i saw crazy smoke in the distance. i was like "oh great, another fire!" it wasn't until i started driving a little closer that i realized it was in our neck of the woods. by the time i was about 20 minutes from our house i realized it was actually our mountains.(more pics on sarah's blog taken on the other side of the mountain)

the view from our house on thursday

the view from our house on friday. there were no clouds in the sky, that's all smoke.

all weekend long it was extremely smokey. about 600 homes were evacuated, and over 5,600 acres were burned. i was pretty on edge because you could see flames outside our window. i even packed some essentials and important documents just in case we were evacuated. some of our friends on the other side of the mountain were evacuated, and i was really hoping we wouldn't be in the same boat. and even though josh was teasing me for packing, i knew that if we did have to leave, he would be grateful. pshh...silly boys...

the fire was declared contained on monday, and there were just small pockets of smoldering/smoke left over. by tuesday the air was back to being clear and normal. thankfully no houses or people were harmed, but now the rest of utah is on fire... i just heard on the news that there are 3 active fires burning right now. and unfortunately some of these fires are much more dangerous to human life and property than ours was. i just hope that: a) these fires get under control ASAP; b) people stop being stupid; and c) my house is still standing after vacation.

home reveal: part 5

da da da daaaa! the master bedroom. we just finished it yesterday. without further ado, here are a billion pictures (sorry, i just took a lot of pictures, so...............if you dont like pictures just come back to my blog later?). and just a disclaimer...i'm not a professional photographer and i dont have a fancy camera that will make all my pictures look good, etc. so please dont judge my pictures, k thanks. ok. here goes:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

obviously the theme is purple. duh. and all the colors in the room were pulled from our bedspread (made by my mom)

the picture on the wall is actually a framed piece of ikea fabric. super easy, super cute, and unique (-ish, as long as all of you dont go out and copy me right now... i know its hard to resist because i am so awesome)

no picture of our bedroom is complete without a picture of kitty. he is in love with our bedroom, and is king of the castle. he's always in here. also, we just got this chair and he's obsessed with it.

pictures on our nightstands :) these little framed pictures are from our wedding reception

this is my self-made vanity. its really just a desk. its really hard to find an actual vanity in stores, and at ikea they only had a gray one (and all our furniture is black). so i got the desk, the mirror, and then 2 storage boxes to go underneath to hold all my hair/makeup crap.

josh got me this jewelry box for christmas, and i found the cat ring-holder in a shop in arizona.

works for me!

and here's an up-close of our curtains (ikea of course).

we just bought a plant for our room. and i took this picture to show the colors of the room. i'd say this picture shows the colors pretty true-to-color. just the wall behind the bed is the "accent" wall with the darker purple. its not super noticeable, but i like it that way.

theres our bedroom! the only update we might make is to get a matching bench for the end of the bed. almost our entire bedroom is ikea... so yeah, we might be obsessed. but its cute, so who cares, right? ;) we still have a lot to do around the house, but most of the bigger spaces have been tackled successfully! hip hip hooray!

home reveal: part 4

ok, i lied that the next one was going to be the master bedroom. i decided to do another small reveal tonight, just of the stairs. we only made a couple minor changes, but go ahead and take a look!

BEFORE:

AFTER:

josh stained the banister to match the mantle.

and paintings from ikea of course, just to spruce things up. eventually we might add some family pictures or something, but we'll see as we go along :)

ps: make sure you catch our bathroom reveals here

home reveal: part 3

bathrooms. not super exciting, but i need to build up the excitement for the master bedroom (probably revealed tomorrow).

master bathroom
BEFORE:

AFTER:

our themes for the master bedroom were purples and gray. nothing too fancy, but we like it :)

guest bathroom
BEFORE:

AFTER:

at first i didnt like the color of this bathroom. but then it started growing on me, and so we kept the color and worked around it. the 'theme' for the guest bathroom was kind of beachy, but not too overboard.

there are the bathrooms! do your bathroom(s) have any themes? up next will be the master bedroom! i hope you've been liking the home reveals!

home reveal: part 2

the kitchen!!

before:

in progress:

after:

we [aka jeff] took down the hood and put in a new microwave above the stove!
the walls are all the same gray as the rest of the main floor, with an accent wall of a charcoal-y color in the back. it's a cool color, because it can look like so many different colors. it's called "space" and i LOVE it!

we moved our zebra to be part of the dining room, which is a nice fit for it that we never would have thought of before (it was actually a family friend who was joking about animal print who even made us think of it!)

someday we might switch out the stools for real chairs, but we bought them when we were desperate and poor, and now we just havent found the perfect high kitchen chairs. if you see any cool reasonably priced ones, let us know!

i have all my chickens along the counterspace. eventually i might put them on top of the cabinets, but for now they are roosting [haha] on the countertops (theres more that arent in the picture). i love my little chickens :)

thats it for now! i'll continue to [slowly] keep updating you on our home reveal! do you like it? ♥