Here's What's Happenin!!

Well it's been awhile again...that seems to be how all my posts start...But here's what's happenin!

First off-
Josh has been gone for 14 months tomorrow! Yay! So that's very exciting.

Also, David has received a promotion to Warrant Officer Candidate (W.O.C.) And he will be going to a school in April through May. Which is pretty intense, basic training like. He has been training hard for that. And then July through September is the second school. When he is finished with that he will be Chief Liddle. And that will come with a nice raise, so that's always good.

I am participating in a Biggest Loser competition with people at work. And ironically coincides with the delivery of girl scout cookies. Bummer.

Erika is preparing for the ACT diligently with after school classes and practice tests.

And we have another Disney vacation in our future! Spring Break baby! And the best part is the 4 of us get to fly instead of the 10 hour drive. So we're pretty excited. We are most anticipating: Pirates, Radiator Springs Racers, Space Mountain, and the Haunted Mansion. We love us some Diznay.

We are eagerly awaiting spring. We are sick of snow. Although Elder Liddle tells us we need to appreciate it more because snow does not stick in Japan. Blah blah blah...Nobody wants spring more than our little puppy who is tired of 'goin' in the snow.

Our Interesting Gardens....

Earlier this year, in the Spring, we decided that we were going to plant a garden this year. David spent a lot of time and labor digging and building the garden boxes for me. By the time he was done building, it was soooooooo hot during the day! And we flaked out on planting :( So just some weeds grew for a while. Fast forward a couple months. We are eating dinner outside on our patio, and we notice this strange thing growing in one of the garden boxes. We investigate and we don't recognize it at all, so we leave it alone to see what happens. A few weeks later, we check it out again, and guess what? It's a tomatillo plant!!! What?!! And it's flourishing and has lots of tomatillos growing on it. Where in the world did this come from? I asked out neighbor who had threatened to throw seeds over the fence because we didn't plant anything. She said that the previous owners planted tomatillos and now they just randomly pop up in different places. I guess one of them decided to pop up in the middle of one of our garden boxes. I even took pictures to prove it to you!

 

 The giant plant above, the tomatillo below. And there are a lot of them!

 

 I can't wait to make creamy tomatillo dressing with them. I hope they taste good...


Now on to the other "interesting" garden. In our front flower garden, we have a bunch of snap dragons. Many colors, so beautiful! They have spread like crazy and morphed into new colors. Lovely! Now, who would have thought that when these pretty flowers die, and the petals fall off, they would look like tiny little skulls!! Look below for proof!

 

 I know these pictures are a little fuzzy because it was hard to get a close up of these little things, but you can see what I'm talking about. Tiny little skulls. I have tons of them now. I'm tempted to make little Halloween necklaces. Glue hair on them...you know. The possiblilities are endless! If you want a close look, feel free to stop and look as you pass by sometime.

 

So, random tomatillo plants popping up in the garden, and a little skull garden in the front. You're jealous, right?

Darkness+Stairs=Sprained Ankle

So, last Wednesday night, my sweet hubby spent a few hours helping his brother lay sod at his new house. When he got home, he was waaaay tired! Poor guy. Well, at about 11:15 that night, David was in bed and I went downstairs to fill my water bottle (I need the filtered water from the fridge, not tap water because I'm a water snob). I thought I knew my house enough to make it down the stairs without turning on the lights. I actually thought the soft glow from our fish tank in the living room would be enough. WRONG! I was going along and suddenly found myself hurtling down the stairs and landed at the bottom in A LOT of pain. I heard a pop from my ankle on the way down, super gross! So I was sitting on the floor moaning and saying 'ow ow ow ow". Luckily my sleepy husband heard me and came down to see what the big thump was. He got my some ice while we watched the swelling begin. I guess I'm not a super good blogger because I didn't have the presence of mind to snap a pic while the ankle was massive. Anyway, David took me to the ER to have it x-rayed. Of course, the doctor comes in and pokes it "does that hurt?" Yes! Duh! Then the bring the x-ray machine to me (not gonna lie, that was neat) and he proceeds to make me bend my ankle in many ways that caused me to want to shreik like a little girl (Why do they do that?!) And the result was just a sprained ankle. They gave me a splint and crutches. I've since ditched the crutches, but I still need the splint because my ankle pops in a gross way sometimes.

This last weekend we spent with the Liddle clan for a family reunion, and I am now enjoying giving my foot a break from all that action!  Here are some pics of my ankle journey:

                                              This a picture of the splint I have to wear

                                    These are the cursed crutches that I'm glad to be rid of!

                          The beautiful fish tank that caught my attention just before the tumble.

These are the stairs I went down

You can kind of see the purple bruising. It refused to show up good in pictures. And the swelling is way down at this point.

I have this sweet friend who brought this to me. It's a motion sensor light for the stairway! What a sweet woman :)

Kate drew this on our white board. She also took great delight in calling me "stomp n' drag".

That is pretty much the joy I've been experiencing this week. BTW, While we were in the ER, it became our 22nd anniversary at midnight! We shared a small kiss and said "happy anniversary" :)

It's been a year......

Okay so. It's been a year. Or more. I have been bugged and bothered by my eldest daughter to update this for a loooong time. Long time. There has been too much that has happened to go back and try to talk about everything, so I will just start from NOW!

My birthday was on Monday. My beautiful daughter, Kate, cleaned out my bakery cupboard by buying cute little bins and whatnot to organize it all. If you want to see it, go to her blog (link on the right side). My equally beautiful daughter, Erika made my yummy birthday cake. YUM!!! I've been eating it for breakfast for days. We went to eat at the Training Table, which is one of my favorite places to eat. Again, YUM. Then my sweet husband got me a new sofa from IKEA!!!!!!!! I was really hating our old sofa because it was old and green and our carpet is green. Yuck. Plus, you can clean the covers of the IKEA sofas. Here is a picture of my new, lovely sofa.

Isn't it beaufiful! I love it! Now, when we were moving the old sofa out of the house, I heard all this "stuff" falling inside of it. What? I mean, it sounded like a LOT of stuff!! We had taken off the cushions, so it wasn't there. Must be deep inside. So today, Kate and I went into the garage to investigate the "stuff" noise. I removed some stapes from the bottom lining and reached my hand inside. Oh. My. Goodness!!!!! My first HANDFULL was mostly pens and pencils. I kept reaching in, and pulling out more. And more. And more. How many times did I reach? I don't know. But here are some pictures of what we found, minus the extreme amount of trash:

This is 22 pencils, scripture markers, 12 markers, chalk, and legos. I'm really surprised that is all the legos that escaped.

 This is a key of Josh's and he stole the "ring of power" from our Lord of the Rings Monopoly game and put in on his key ring! I always wondered why he would disappear unexpectedly.....

 2 combs, hair stuff, make up, and a package of sewing needles.

Only 2 pieces of candy. I guess you know we won't let much of that get away.

 22 pens.

Assorted toys. And know, we haven't had Bratz dolls in our house for years! So those shoes were there quite a while.

An old remote to a DVD player. I think we actually had to buy a replacement for that....

Crayons, paint brushes, glow stick (which was unbroken until today) and some nerd glasses.

One Disney dollar, a quarter, and a small curtain rod. Yep. A curtain rod.

2, count 'em, 2 rulers. And a cute star eraser.

 Various jewelry.

And a note from one of Kate's friends back in Springville. We moved from there like 7 years ago.

So there you go. We never clean out our furniture. I'm not gonna lie, I was hoping for more money! Oh well.

I know I posted last summer about some chairs I was redoing. I haven't finished, but I hope to by the end of THIS summer and then I will write a new post.

Paint!

Ok, so I have been wanting to paint my living room and kitchen since we moved in six years ago! I've never been a big fan of the olive green walls and carpet. And to make matters worse, we just happen to have a green couch! Too much green! And the kitchen was a very pale pinky white color. The reason it took so long to paint is because painting is a pain and everybody hates prepping. Yuck. So, there was a week when Josh didn't work, so he just said, mom, let's go to Home Depot right now and get some paint, and I'll do it for you! what an awesome kid. He prepped and painted it all (with some help from the girls). So we went to Home Depot to pick paint. I was freaking out a little knowing that it was really the time to commit to colors. I chose "Cloudy Day" for the living room. It is the most amazing blue and I love it! The name is strange since it totally made my living room bright like sunshine. The pics below really don't do it justice. It's beautiful.

Now, for the kitchen, I decided to go BOLD! Initially, I was going to go plain and neutral, but at the last second, decided to do a beautiful coral. The first one I chose went on the wall really pink! I almost died! So the kids went back to Home Depot and got a darker color, which I love! It's really better to see in person, but the pics will give you and idea. It's so lovely next to the white of the trim. It has personality now! I now many people will not like it, but I love it.

Now I just need to find money to buy paint for my "new" chairs for the kitchen. I also have fabric to make valances for the kitchen windows. I'll keep you updated on that little adventure!

My poor husband hasn't really been involved in these decisions since he has been working like crazy lately. I think we figured that in the last 2 months, he's had only a couple days off. But we are excited that he gets a 4 day weekend starting tomorrow! Yippee!

Back Again!

I'm REALLY going to try to keep this up-to-date! We've been doing some work on the inside of our house, painting and rearranging. The kids and I have rediscovered the joys of finding deals at thrift stores. I found some chairs to replace my kitchen chairs. I'm going to paint and redo the fabric on the seats. I'm also going to make some valances for my kitchen windows. We have replaced the lacey curtains in the living room with blinds, and it looks sooooo good!! I will get some pics today to give you an idea of what we are doing. We want to do our patio, but so far, all we have is a new patio set from IKEA, which I love!

It's been a while!

Well, it's been well over a year since I updated this blog! I guess I should keep it up better.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving at our house this year. Just my little family and my parents. It was really nice to have all the leftovers to ourselves! I think we had a Thanksgiving meal, 3 times a day for a week, in some form or another. Ever have pie for breakfast? Yum!

We are looking forward to Christmas. Our tree is up, house lit up, village up, etc. I love this time of year! Everyone is so excited. I must say that the shopping part is not as fun when it's so crowded and people let it get to them and they become rude. I'm not one for the crazy middle of the night sales. I'm almost done with my shopping, yay!

We've had a busy past 8 months. Many ups and downs. We had my nephew living with us for a while. It kind of flipped our house upside down, all the kids had to change rooms. He was able to go back home to a very happy family just before Thanksgiving! So now, we are trying to adjust to the empty room we have now. Beds are being moved and now decisions will be made on who will move or not move. I vote we all stay where we are! Kate had her new room painted and decorated, and I'm not doing it again, so I think she's staying put. Erika needs to clean the room she's in, but we won't go there.

It's kind of late right now, so I'll leave this for now. I promise not to wait so long to update!