10 Things I Loved About The Weekend

1. Eating garlic breadsticks for breakfast. Twice.

2. Waking up early to work out. Exhausted. Then crawling back in to bed with husband.

3. Doing dishes together, and actually enjoying it.

4. The smell of homemade brownies in the oven.

5. Staying in pajamas til the late afternoon.

6. Getting the news that our friends are pregnant :D

7. Playing checkers late at night with hubby and watching him try to put off obliterating me. He ended up with half his checkers still on the board when I died off.

8. Holding sweet baby Eli and playing with his tiny fingers and toes.

9. Watching only the last 15 minutes of "The Guardian" and trying not to bawl my eyes out.

10. Finishing my second painting.

My new hobby

I think I slightly mentioned before that I found out I liked to paint. At least painting our coffee table. Well I decided to give artwork painting a try, and good news.. I like it! Last week I painted my very first painting and I think it turned out fairly well.

What do you think?

My goal is to be able to open an etsy shop sometime in the future. I am currently working on some paintings to hang in our bedroom, and am excited to show them to you when they're finished!

February 14th on the 15th

Yesterday was picture perfect.

Don’t you think???

I think so. The 14^th was full of mandatory work and school and tests, so we celebrated Valentines on the 15^th instead this year. Although I did prepare a yummy meal Monday evening anyways. And got a good story to go with it. I was making some garlic bread to serve alongside fettuccini alfredo and so I went to work melting the butter.  Our microwave doesn’t fit on our counter space so we have it on a shelf above the fridge. I set the microwave on power so the butter could soften and after 30 seconds I took it out and it wasn’t quite ready so I put it back in. Apparently the second time around the power button didn’t get pushed in far enough so when I took it out it had melted. Except I’m short and can’t see that its been melted completely so I pull the plate out and it spills all over the microwave, shelf, fridge, my hoodie, the floor, and my feet. It was great. Butter isn’t too easy to clean up off of the floor, just in case you were wondering.

We took the 15^th off and abandoned all of our responsibilities to go have some fun. We went up to Salt Lake for the day and went to a new restaurant right across from the temple, called Blue Lemon. It was delicious. I had some tomato bisque soup and Gabe dined on their grilled balsamic chicken panini.  Afterwards, we walked across the street and strolled around the temple grounds for a bit. It was nice to not have anything to do. We then went to the Clark Planetarium at Gateway and played around with all the fun toys and gadgets. I thought it would be fun to grab some dessert at The Chocolate Factory that’s in the Gateway, but the thought wasn’t as appealing once I saw that they wanted to charge us $4.95 for a chocolate covered marshmallow on a stick. That’s not that great of a deal. So frozen hot chocolate from Dairy Queen it was! That was our day. We had lots of fun and don’t want to wait too long to do it all again.

Watch This!

Here is a movie recommendation. Recommended by me :D

It has changed the way I look at the food I put into my body for good. Go watch it! And let me know what you think..

Needing Some Kneaders

Gabe, being the awesome man that he is, surprised me after work today and took me to Kneaders bakery so we could get some pastries. I ended up with one of these beauties:

(A neapolitan fluff pastry)

Gabe ordered some carrot cake. He was making some sort of excuse that it was made of carrots, so of course its gotta be super healthy, right? I say, why not!

                                  
    Along the way to our next errand, Gabe debated whether or not he liked the name Avery. He decided against it because he thought the name was too long :) It is 3 syllables after all.                              

      We took a trip to the safety and emissions place last week....

               And ended up with one of these:

We got new tires put on our car over the weekend so we went back so we could get passed. We got just a little bored while we were waiting so we entertained ourselves by making funny faces.

          And, after a few minutes, we were handed this:

SUCCESS!!!!!

Sunday school madness

Sunday School was really weird today. I left with an uneasy feeling. It’s the fifth Sunday, so we had combined classes for Relief Society/Priesthood.  The bishop was in charge of the lesson and he talked about marriage, specifically how to handle arguments and disagreements with our spouses.   Not too many of the couples in the ward have been married for a few years, and there are a lot of people having serious marriage problems already and I think it’s so sad. I was just amazed sitting in class at how many issues were being brought up. What hit me hard was how common it is for couples to have “meetings” where they get together and tell each other what bugs them about each other. Apparently there are so many instances in the week where their spouse gets on their nerves that they just let everything build up and then let it all come out on a certain day of the week. How horrible. We kept looking at our friends from the ward thinking, “do these people not like each other?!” I don’t mean to sound braggy or superficially positive, but Gabe and I have a happy marriage. We got married because we want to be together. We like each other and we don’t bug one another. We don’t have problems in our marriage because we knew that each other was the right person to be with and why not enjoy life together? We make fun of each other, we let each other know when something bugs us, we have fun and we work things out when something comes up.  Our marriage is filled with happy moments, not constant battles with one another.  I have a testimony of temple marriage and I know that our family is sealed for eternity. I know that marriage is ordained of God and I know that he has blessed our marriage.  Be grateful for your spouses.

Itchy Itchy Scratch Scratch

I have an itch.  Its taking all my patience to not post pictures of our home. I don’t think we ever updated you all on what happened with our housing situation..? Maybe, maybe not. But we were trying to get into a condo and ended up not getting into it and so we are currently just renting out an apartment. Which is totally fine since we have some awesome friends in the ward.. even though they serve us meatless ribs :) ha ha love you guys! Anyways. So since we didn’t get into the condo that we were so hoping for, we were bummed and decided to put some money towards the apartment we're in so we redecorated the place. We redecorated quite a while ago, like a couple months ago, but I haven’t been able to post pictures because there are just a couple things I want to finish before I take the final pictures. And its driving me INSANE! I want to just finish it already. All the big furniture pieces are taken care of but I just have the little details to finish, which personally, I think make all the difference. For example, I want to sew some pillow covers (but don’t have a sewing machine), put another frame on the wall (too lazy to drive out to IKEA), make our headboard (don’t own a saw or a truck), and I want to paint a canvas picture for our bedroom wall. I realized that I LOVE to paint. We have had several intense games of Liars Dice played at our house the last few weeks and it has taken its toll on our coffee table. I had to repaint it and I realized how much I like to paint. I think I could probably paint our coffee table every week and be happy. Here's a few pictures of my current design inspiration:

 Okay, take a guess as to what those squares in that last picture are made out of. 

They look like iron right?

Nope, they are made out of toilet paper rolls!! crazy huh? My jaw literally dropped to the floor when I read that. The designer in me wants to make some but I don't think we have any wall space for them to take up.

Welp, stay tuned for pictures posted.. hopefully sooner rather than later!