Starbucks Ban

To the employees and patrons of the rest stop Starbucks, I apologize. Your bathroom will never be the same. A six hour road trip with a seven month old did not go as planned and all hell broke lose at your establishment. As a loyal customer, I appreciate your willingness to spare my dignity and pretend nothing happened. However, I await my letter from corporate asking me to kindly not return ever again.

Your biggest hot chocolate fan and most embarrassed patron ever,

Deya


What prompted such a letter? A simple rest stop back in February. All was well, driving to my brother's house to meet our new niece. We stopped for some coffee and hot chocolate (seriously, order with some cinnamon dolce in it, you will thank me), and to give Will a break.

I left hubby and mom in line to order and took Will for a quick diaper change. I was so excited about the changing table and that I would not have to hide him in a Burger King booth, that perhaps my mind quit working at this point. Diaper changed, and it occurred to me I also had to go.

It was a small one room situation so I had the bright idea I could strap baby onto the table and just be quick. He immediately started reaching for me so I grabbed the first thing in my diaper bag I could reach in order to distract him. Unfortunately, this was a spoon. Second horrible idea.

All of a sudden I hear this horrible choking noise, and puke started spewing out of my baby's red face that was filled with tears. I realized he was aspirating and jumped up and grabbed him. While this was the right thing to do for Will (who was fine), when I jumped up, my cell phone went flying out of my pocket and landed on the floor in pieces. My pants were around my knees and every surface, he and I were completely covered in puke.

I was now too afraid to put him down or really notice my pants, so I did what any logical human being would do, open the door and talk to the nearest stranger. Right? The dignity of motherhood. I kindly asked this gentleman to flag down my mother who walked in hysterically laughing and almost slipped in puke. We cleaned what we could and twenty minutes later sulked back to the car.

Next time we road trip, dad is in charge of diaper changes.

TP Roll Decor

It's never a good idea to call your husband a hoarder (esp. when he's not) for not wanting to throw away old magazines. You can try giving him an explanation that you are a "minimalist" and that you must have no unnecessary clutter in the house, but eventually he will find your secret stash of toilet paper rolls in the hall linen closet.

I fancy myself to be "green". I'm not, but I like to imagine I am. We recycle the same as anyone, but that's sadly about it. So when I see all these ideas on Pinterest of how to reuse toilet paper rolls, I think, "I'm so green and crafty, I can totally do that!" Well, I didn't do the grand project that I wanted to, but I did finally use them! (some of them, I still have a stash, just don't tell David).

For my 30th birthday party, I wanted a pink party. I'm surrounded by boys now and wanted pink and glitter. So I took inspiration from the following:

And I came up with this:

It was more time consuming that I imagined (aren't they all?), but ended up being pretty easy and looked the way I wanted. I cut the rolls with scissors pretty easily in about 5 sections and hand painted them (it was raining for days so I gave up on spray paint). This was the most time consuming. Once they were dry, I hole punched and strung them on cheap thread I had lying around. I hung them from Command hooks and voila!

Secret Santa Sharpie

It's crunch time and no amount of planning can prepare for those last minute holiday gifts you might need. This past weekend I went to a Secret Santa party hosted by my friend Joanne. I'm pretty certain she could publish all of Pinterest, yet swears she's never been on it. If that's true, I hate her for her super awesome creativity.

Why? Every year Joanne hosts a girl's night themed Christmas party and every year is a different theme. One year it was panties, one year movies, and this year recipes. We had to bring a recipe along with a wrapped gift that somehow went along with the recipe. We all had tons of fun doing it. I had a creamy chicken noodle soup recipe and decided to theme my present around the idea of comfort food. I found a super plush blanket in the agreed price range, but wanted to add something cute and fun with it. Wherever would I turn for ideas on a last minute gift? Pinterest!!

I'd been dying to make these Sharpie mugs and thought this was perfect. How cozy is a warm blanket and cup of tea? So I snagged some cute bargain mugs and my favorite markers and read several pins of instructions. Now here is the debate. Several posts say use normal Sharpies, and others say you have to use the greasy, paint Sharpies. I used the regular ones since I already had them and had no issues hand washing with a sponge after baking.

Here is what I made :)

I blanked out on what to make after drawing the mustaches and just made a very Rachel Berry-esque heart. I stuffed them with tea and travel size lotion alongside the blanket. Afterwards I found these and kicked myself. So many cute ideas!!!

The possibilities are literally endless!!!!!

Photog fails

Does Pinterest make anyone else feel like they could be a professional photographer? I see so many pins on how to take awesome photos of my kid, cute poses, what camera settings to use, etc. How hard could this be?

When will I learn??!! Probably never, now that I have a kid. And I keep hoping one of these cute poses I find on Pinterest will actually turn out when I try with my super amateur skills.

Inspiration:

My sad attempt 

My advice for future attempts would be to wait for your kid to sit up. This was super frustrating. He also had no interest in the lights whatsoever and just stared at me blankly. This always makes for a good picture. I also could not get the shutter speed correct with the focus. So it turned out pretty blah.

Inspiration:

Cute, right? Here's my not so successful one:

Advice for future attempts: I think the baby in the inspiration photo is older. Moral of the story is I have zero patience and must try everything the minute I see it. Regardless of the fact that my baby may not be ready. Details, details. Also, my baby HATES being on his tummy. This was a key issue. Also, when we can get him on his stomach, he does this awesome skydiver form, and shoves, his arms behind his back. This would be great if a parachute were attached. Not great when trying to prevent face-planting into mirrors. This prevented him from holding his head up as high as the kid in the inspiration photo, another reason mine turned out horrible. Little details to look for. No amount of photoshop can fix this poor shot. Lots of Windex to remove drool and spit up from mirror, though. :)

Last one.

Inspiration:

Mine 

I actually like this one. It's taken in his little cradle which was actually mine when I was a kid. And he's wearing my favorite onsie I got at H&M. You can't see as much as his face like the inspiration photo but I love his body shape and all the browns in the photo. He looks like a little frog which is what I called him at our first ultrasound at seven weeks, my little tree frog. :)

You Wreath Some You Lose Some

For years I have been wanting to make one of those ornament wreaths where you string ornaments on a wire hanger. Like here. I've saved several pins on the subject and waited all year to do this one. I stocked up on shiny silver ornaments, hoarded wire hangers from the dry cleaners and had the instructions memorized. There was no way I was screwing this one up. Ha.

Well, please allow me to share what NOT to do when making one of these wreaths.

• Do NOT assume you have enough ornaments. It takes about a million. No kidding. There are at least 50 on mine and that was after two trips to the store and I finally gave up and just shortened the wreath circle. 
• Do NOT take shortcuts. Out of five sets of instructions, four of them told me to hot glue the ornament tops to the glass balls. The fifth one said I didn't need to. This lazy gal went with the fifth one. FYI - those are not shatterproof, they make a huge mess which my dog is suicidal-ly attracted to, and the ornaments randomly pop off even after the wreath is made, not just while you are stringing. 
• Do NOT use the large ornament balls. I thought this would take up more space on my wreath and the project would go faster. For one thing, it's not as cute in the end with the large ornaments. For another, it's harder to get the ornaments closer together to hide the hanger. And the third reason leads to my next list item:
• Do NOT assume the ornaments will fit on your door if you also have a screen/glass storm door. This was possibly the most depressing blow. I finally finished the wreath, hung it on the door and then couldn't shut it! Project fail! I wished I had measured the depth between the storm door and the front door before starting and even purchasing ornaments. 

So here is my finished ornament wreath on our hall closet door. It was our compromise.

The places where it looks lopsided are where ornaments popped off and broke. :(

So I had to make a new wreath for the front door. And I was definitely over my obsession with Christmas Ornaments at this point. I had a foam wreath and yarn on hand so I decided to try a yarn wrapped wreath like this one. This project went soooooooooooo much easier than the last one. After wrapping the yarn, I just wrapped some holly berries on the wreath with the same color yarn and we were set. 

Now one of these days, I will be smart enough to stop when I'm ahead. But I get this project high and must...keep....going. I have more yarn, and an entire house to decorate...what else can I wrap? 

How about making paper cones, and wrapping them into Christmas trees? How cute would these be on a table? I started with a cliche green yarn tree. Worked great. Then I started getting creative. I found some red twine. This was harder to wrap tightly enough, but turned out quite cute in the end. Then I went too far. I have always been distracted by sparkly/shiny objects. In my box of ribbon I found silver metallic cord. I will say I gave this a good three tries and below is what happened. The cord kept twisting on itself and then popping off. I'm going to redo the third three with grey yarn, but I just need a wrapping break for now.

Funnies

Wedding Projects 1

So my project frenzy started when we decided to move our wedding from August to February. My previous obsession with Pinterest only heightened and I literally became glued to my iPhone.

I had been scouring and pinning for several months. Given the success of my first project (see previous post) and the fact that I fancy myself as quite crafty, surely an event as large as my wedding would not need any trial runs for any of my projects (cough**mistake**cough). Also, being pregnant, having morning sickness, and being unable to bend over due to injection sites in abdomen are all pretty unproductive for projects. Did I consider any of this? Nope. Just organized the supplies I thought I needed/wanted and waited for my mother to arrive the week before the wedding. Hey mom, welcome to Cleveland, and I saved some spray paint and epoxy for ya!

Here are my hits and misses for our small and intimate wedding. We decided to do immediate family only at the country club we had already paid our deposit on for the summer wedding. I did not like the backdrop so we had to make our own. I also did not see the point in spending a lot on decorations for only 30 people, so I tried to dress the place up a lot with handmade decorations.

I knew I wanted a picture clothesline like these to help personalize the space of our reception. What I didn't account for was where would I put it. I thoughtfully picked out almost 100 pictures from our dating journey, had them printed and this cute clothesline I was ready to paint silver. Mom spray-painted for me and we quickly realized we needed more string and clothespins. We found those cute mini ones for scrapbooking and painted them silver too. This was all going perfectly in my head.

Well morning of wedding comes and we head over to the venue to set up and we are not allowed to tape or pin anything ANYWHERE (file under, questions you should've asked months ago), but since I have so much string, I'm welcome to tie it to anything that's already existing.....which is not much. My dad and about to be FIL notice a security light (yep, we're classy) and an old nail that we manage to make bunting-like clotheslines above the favors and seating card table. Here is the inspiration photo and what is clearly my unprofessional photo after.

What I would do differently next time is scout out a place to put this! And if I couldn't use it (come up with an alternate plan. I had not really planned where to put things until that morning...bad idea. Also, as I look back at all the other clotheslines, I see the pictures are all uniform size. This looks much more polished than my mishmosh of horizontal and vertical.

Then there is the original pin from babble.com for my lighted backdrop to cover the accordion fold wall:

My poor mother was handed a tangled mess of Christmas lights, some chiffon curtains I found on clearance at Bed, Bath & Beyond, and shown this picture. She looked at me like I was crazy. So we went shopping. We found additional purple curtains and curtain rod on clearance at Target, and a super cute wrought iron garden table at JoAnns. Combine this with some curtain rods I had at home, fishing wire, and silver spray paint, and we (by we, I mean my mom on this one) went to town. See, mom is smart enough to realize you have to make sure it works before you take it all the way to the event venue and set up. Two days later she had it working. With all that, and mostly set up, it still took two hours to set up at the venue. Here is her awesome handiwork:

It was at this point my mother turns to me and says, what goes on the table? The unity candle. Where is that? Um.....So we went to my favorite craft store (did I mention this is the morning of the wedding, btw???), Pat Catans, and grabbed three candles and some ribbon. I convinced my mother I did not need tape that I had plenty at home. Turns out all I had was bright blue painters tape, so we have no pictures of my really awesome unity candles. :) But it all turned out quite nice in the end: