Baby's Room

After my baby shower almost 2 weeks ago, we finally have enough things in Baby's room to make it worth while to take pictures and share!

Everything in Baby's room fits in one corner!

Tim and I are both really excited about how the room looks.  In fact, one Saturday morning, Tim got up and walked into Baby's room, saying, "I love this room in the morning!" and that was before we had all the "stuff" in there and just had the walls newly painted.
The colors we used are Behr Premium with zero VOC (Dad says that as well as being okay for preggos, its better for the environment).  The two darker walls are "Asparagus" and the two lighter ones are "Celery Ice".  Yes, we are brainwashing our child to like veggies!  (Most people think we picked green because it is gender neutral, but we probably would have picked green anyways, we don't want pink or blue!)

February Decor

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

We're celebrating today.  :)

Tim actually dislikes these decorations.  They're probably coming down this weekend...he just thinks they are "too much".  (He's not much of a "pink" guy...when we started dating he had to get used the the fact that I liked pink and I even wore pink)!

I decorated the wreath this month with 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a in mind: 

"Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no records of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  Love never fails." 

always perseveres, always protects, is kind, never fails, is
patient, always hopes, always trusts

A Productive-Type Weekend

Having nothing planned, and just having had like 10 days off from work (for Tim at least), this long weekend we decided to be productive!!!

On Friday, I cleaned up Christmas and it's decorations (still fitting it all into one rubbermaid tub.  Win.) and Tim started looking through our photos to decide which ones to put in frames in the living room (so we could get the frames out of the study so he could do drywall the next day)!  After taking out the Christmas tree, our living room looked so bare, so I changed it to a winter theme!

Showcasing photos of our little family!

After looking at pictures all day, we decided to go to Home Depot (because we go there every weekend, DUH!) to pick out some maple to make shelves for the living room.  And then we came home, and he made them (part of them) that night!  They're unfinished because we are going to use some of the leftover Murchison Gym floor from Westmont College (that we used for our still unfinished coffee table) to go around the edge of the shelves to add a little bit of character.

We got our Christmas Tree!!!

Tim loves Christmas season.  He loves getting the tree right after Thanksgiving and lighting candles and reading books and watching Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings and drinking hot chocolate.  We finally got our tree today (our first tree in our new house, yea!) during a break in the rain.
I couldn't wait for Tim to come in from projecting in the garage to put the lights on, so I started myself, using my t-shirt as a "sack" to carry the lights in as I squeezed around the tree (thinking, "well I'm glad the baby isn't bigger or I wouldn't fit back here").  Tim thought it was so cute that the baby held up the lights that he took a picture.

The black shirt makes it hard, but you can kind of see my baby bump!

We also hung the stockings on the mantle, which Tim built (when we realized we needed a mantle to hang stockings on!)

Tim built this mantle from leftover shelf wood from his parents

Then I remembered some of the photography ideas I've been seeing on Pinterest, and wanted to try them out.  This is what I came out with:  

24mm, 0"5, f5.0, ISO1600

36mm, 0"5, f5.0, ISO1600

They aren't perfect.  But there's only so much you can do with a standard lens and two dogs who just want to jump at the piece of leftover taco meat that is sitting on the floor 2 feet in front of them :)  

And it was kind of fun to practice for taking Christmas light photos of the baby next year (who at ~8 months old then won't wiggle any less than these guys...)

How the Dogs got Chicken & Potatoes for Dinner

So last Friday, Tim had the day off work so we spent the day doing chores around the house, going to Home Depot, and shopping for a birthday present for our nephew Nathan.  I decided to make Tim these potatoes we had kind of made up when the Hasenfus came over for dinner the other week, along with some chicken.  So I boiled the potatoes and marinated the chicken and preheated the oven.

We have a terrible oven.  When we moved in, the first time I used it it was really hot, on the outside.  Like the kind of hot I don't want to touch and definitely don't want the doggies noses to touch.  So I Facebooked our family friend Laurie whose family owns The Factory Applicances, and she said that it just wasn't a good brand, but don't buy a new one until it really breaks.  So oven was fine besides being hot, until recently, I guess we make potatoes in olive oil often enough that it got spattered all over the oven enough to start making it dirty and smokey, only I didn't know it was smokey until the smoke detector in the hall started going off every single time I opened my oven!  So last time I cooked, I just took it down and pulled out the battery.

I guess I forgot about the smokey oven in my happiness of making Tim yummy potatoes.  I put the chicken and potatoes in, and some time later went to check on them.  The marinade around the chicken was getting brown and maybe smokey, yup, about 30 seconds after I closed the oven, the smoke detector in the hall went off.  They really, really hurt my ear, like make me want to cry hurt.  I stood on a chair, pulled out the pin, twisted the smoke detector off, opened it, and pulled out the battery.  Ha.  Beat you smoke detector!

The the smoke detector in the entry way went off.  I waved a magazine at it.  No other smoke detectors had gone off before this!  That one went off again, and I dismantled it, starting to get angry.  Then the one at the end of the hall in our room went off, and as soon as I got that one down, the one in the baby's room went off.  At this point, I could not believe how many smoke detectors this house had!!!  They're like, 4 feet from each other!!! Tim came back in the house at this point, and I screamed at him as another one went off,  "I don't even know where it's coming from!!!"

At this point I was so angry that I opened the oven and, seeing the marinade around the chicken smoking, I grabbed hot pads and opened the patio door and threw the chicken and potato pans outside on the patio and slammed the door, throwing the hot pads on the floor too, and retreated to the driveway outside (ie. the only place far, far away from any unknown smoke detectors).  After I had a cry, I came back inside, where Tim now had fans going and every window and door open.

He informed me that when I put the chicken and potatoes outside, the dogs were outside.  He had just come inside from giving them dinner.  Of course being the starving beasts that they are, Cole and Kensi ate the chicken and then were working on the potatoes when Tim saw them and went and took the pan.   This made me cry even more that our dinner was now unsalvageable, and the doggies probably burnt their tongues.

We ended up having In-N-Out for dinner (because Orcutt Burger was not taking cards).

We think Kensi did burn her tongue, even after giving them some milk she sat all evening licking her lips.

They didn't get breakfast the next morning.  They still looked full from the night before.

And I need to clean my oven.  Good thing I don't plan on using it until Thursday.  Does chicken cook in a toaster oven???