Christmas decorating!

I have been pretty much been picking at decorating the house for Christmas this past week. I also realized I really don't have to many surfaces to put things on and the few that I do I'm sure the cats will knock over or break. We have an area at the top of our stairs to the main floor that overlooks the stairs to the basement which would be the perfect place for some decorations...except the cats love running down the hall at full speed then jumping up on it. That really only leaves me the coffee table and the TV stand. At least they are to fat to climb up INTO the Christmas tree now. :)

Last year we bought a wreath for the front door and a wreath hanger to put it on but do you think I can find the darned thing! I finally just went and purchased a new one since we both looked everywhere we could possible think it might be and a few places that seemed so ridiculous but we checked anyways. Nothing. It still drives me nuts especially since I KNOW it was down on top of the Christmas totes. I'm sure I will find it somewhere else and be like 'oh yah I guess I did move it there so I could find it easier.' lol.

Monkey even helped out a bit...er well if knocking the boxes all over the place counts. At least it kept her occupied while decorated the tree without having to chase her every two seconds. 

Before

After

When we moved into our own place many years ago mum gave me my ornaments and some of the stuff that she used to use on her tree. Along with that came some red and green garland that she always kept in this box. Seriously does anyone remember get in shape girl?' It was like this 'fitness program for today's young girl'. HA I remember doing this all the time. It came with lightweight dumbells, a sweat band, 'fashionable legwarmers', instruction poster and a 30 min exercise casette tape.  Ahh everytime I see that box it brings back memories from my childhood. 

Also just for fun here is an old picture of me working out to said tape.

A couple years ago my sister-in-law made this awesome christmas decoration! I love it! So unique and creative! She made it out of just a random piece of bark.

She also made me 6 mini santa clause ornaments for the tree. I love them!

Last but not least our christmas tree. Well without the angel on it. I tried to get a photo of it at night with the lights on but the pictures didn't do it justice. Our tree is one of those ones that has the lights already in the tree so no need to put any on every year. That is my kind of tree!  I also didn't really put to many ornaments on it either, I spent a lot of time doing it last year and I just didn't want to again this year. I think pulling all the branches apart last year alone I must have spent an hour or more. Not again! I think I might get some candy canes though and add them to it. I think it looks alright. 

Monkey surprisingly hasn't pulled it down on top of herself yet, but then again it's probably because I don't give her a chance to get to close to it. :) She did however like feeling the lower branches when Daddy was with her. I'm so excited for Christmas morning so she can open up her presents....and I fully expect her to play with the wrapping paper and boxes more then the toys. lol :)

I'm sure each year I will keep adding stuff. There are a few other things around, like red garland on the curtains and a Christmas mouse I made sitting on the water cooler. I got the tree up though and that is the main thing :)

where did the last few months go?

I haven't really been blogging/journaling to much this past month or so. I've been trying to catch up a little bit and back dating a few posts that I should have added way before now. They are mainly just Monkey's first food posts though. I also still have 10 days left I think of the 30 days about me. I really can't wait till that is over! I feel like it is bumping any posts that I want to make since I don't really want to be posting like 20 times a day. Not that I have time to post 20 times a day, but you know what I mean.

I usually do my postings when Monkey is napping or after Chris gets home from work/after Monkey goes to bed. Unfortunately for any regular readers I have been gaming for the last little while, which eats up any free time of mine. :) I go through my phases, so I guess right now it is gaming. I think I have set a record on how many games I have actually played through these past two months since I have a REALLY bad habit of playing a game almost to the very end then losing interest. It's so annoying because once I go back to it I basically have to start over again because I forget what happened or what I was doing. Maybe that is why I like Warcraft so much. It is never ending! We purchased Dragon Age 2 not too long ago, it's an amazing, AMAZING RPG if you like those kind of games. The first game was awesome to! I have already beat DA 2 twice! Yep twice! We literally just bought it like 3-4 weeks ago. (I had to try a different class lol) Then Steam was having a super mega sale everyday in November and I picked up 3 games for less then $5 bucks each. I beat Mass Effect already and am currently playing Mass Effect 2, which I think I am almost done. This was my first ever sci-fi RPG. I usually like the medieval type RPG with swords, bows, magic, and auto targeting. (I may be a gamer but I really am not the greatest at it.) So this was different. Plus I really suck at first person shooting which is basically how the fighting goes in the Mass Effect games. I can at least pause though to get my bearings. I've gotten better but I still suck at aiming! I miss auto targeting! LOL! After that I have another RPG that seems interesting called 'The witcher', it was less then $5 so I thought couldn't hurt. Chris is currently playing Skyrim, the newest Elder Scrolls game, which looks good as well. I'm sure I will probably play that one at some point as well. Maybe once he is done with it.

Games suck up a lot of time! Even though they are fun to play. Mixed into that I have been reading any other chance I can get. I'm almost done the Eye of The World by Robert Jordan and there are like 13 more books in the series? I'm looking forward to finally knowing what happens because I think I only ever got to the 6 or 7th book. I'm sure by the time I get to the end of the ones I have the last book in the series should be out! As always I have a long list of other books I want to read. It really is never ending! To much to do, so little time. The above doesn't really even include all the craft projects I have floating around in my head, nor the stories I want to write (I totally failed at nanowrimo again this year) or working on my chain mail stuff. Then Christmas is coming faster then I would like! Time sure freaking flies by way to fast!

I definitely have some ideas for blog posts that are more then what monkey tried for the first time because I feel like that is all I ever write about anymore. Although I always fill them with tons of cute photos of monkey! :) Hopefully I will get to them soon.

As for me and monkey we haven't really been up to to much, just hanging out in the house. I have been actively trying to lose the last bit of baby weight from monkey but it is harder then I thought it was going to be. Tomorrow is weigh in again and I am scared. I sort of screwed up this past week and I don't want to see a gain! I've lost about 5lbs so far but still lots to go! Plus I have been really lazy about working out the last week or so. Seriously the sun goes down and it is pitch black outside by 5pm and with that goes any motivation of mine to do anything. Monkey has been crawling around to but more of an army crawl then the typical crawl. She is super fast as well! I have to guard the cat food dish, the computer area and now the Christmas tree. She hasn't actually bothered that to much but it is not decorated yet so I guess it's too boring at the moment. Other then that it is the daily routine. Not really that interesting. :)

Monkey's first foods: A bit of orange

Today Chris gave Monkey a tiny piece of the orange he was eating. She seemed pretty interested at first, that was of course until she actually tasted it and the following are what you would expect. She is so cute. We definitely won't be trying oranges again for a long while.

First bite.

First taste.

'Definitely not what I thought it would taste like'

'I don't like it!'

'Daddy I am not impressed!'

Monkey's first foods: Rice Rusks

Today we gave monkey a rice husk for the first time. They are long skinny flat wafer like things that melt in your mouth. She had a good time chomping on that, she is getting to be such a big girl that she likes trying to feed herself. The only downfall to these things are that by the time it was mostly gone the rest was mush in her hand and all over her face and it was sooo sticky that it was super hard to get off! At least she had fun eating it though by the grin on her face. :)

First bite.

"hmm this is really good!?' I love this expression :)

LOL we laughed so hard at these since we jokingly called them her teeth! I know we are mean.. she still looks cute though!

"I think I like them"

I guess we need to start letting her feed herself or 'try' to feed herself more. I just cringe every time I think of the mess she will make. Then I also cringe at the thought of having a 6 year old that I still have to feed because I never let her make a mess in figuring out how to do it herself. lol. ;)

Monkey's first foods: Oat Cereal and Butternut Squash

November 1st 2011 - We gave monkey oat cereal for the first time today. Before that she had just been eating rice cereal. Unfortunately after a day or so she started getting patches of really dried rashy skin and also lots of red dots all over her back. The only new thing that we had tried was the oat cereal so we reverted back to rice and only gave her other food that she had already tried to see if it was the oats that was causing it. 

After a week or so there was no change, so we pretty much ruled out oat cereal being the cause. Instead we looked to baby eczema information on the internet. Chris said that he remembered our pediatrician that we were taking her to before we found a family doctor said that we might have to watch for that because she might have a touch of it. I don't remember him saying that at all but I am sure I was worrying about other things like was she eating enough, did she weigh enough, was she growing enough.

All the information we found pretty much points to that and we followed some of the suggestions like keep bath water not to hot, bath baby ever few days instead of every day, use gentle laundry detergent, make sure her skin is moisturized etc. It seems to have helped so that is a relief. We do have a weight check near the end of December so we will ask the nurse or doctor about it then. It doesn't seem to bother her at all so that is a relief to me.

She ate the oat cereal up though no complaints :) Such a good little eater!

November 19th 2011 - We gave her butternut squash. She has had squash before but this one said butternut on the jar. For the sake of logging her new foods I decided to include it just in case there was a difference. The other jar could have been butternut squash for all I knew but it was such a long time ago that she tried it and I only wrote down squash so who knows. :) Plus any picture of monkey is just so cute. At least we think so.

Food face!

Happy 8th month birthday Monkey!

Happy 8 month birthday!!

Weight: ~ 17.6 pounds. Weighed on our home scale.
Height: ~26.5 inches long. Measured at home. She is going to be tall like the both of us I think!
Hair colour: Still Dark Brown like daddy's. Looking at pictures from when you was born I am shocked to see how little hair you had then compared to now!
Eye colour: Your eyes are still a dark brown.
Diaper size: You are still wearing size 3 diapers and still using the cloth diapers. We added to the collection at the last mom 2 mom sale here since the all-in-one vendor was there again :)

Clothing size: You are wearing clothes in the 9-12 month size now. I still find it strange how one cloth item can be too big and one can be just right and they state the same month size. Strange. Mommy finally went through your closet and dresser and took out any summer clothes and/or things that are to small for you now. We also got some new warm jammies for you because it's winter now and gets really chilly at night.

Sleep: You are so much better at sleeping and napping! What a different baby you are. I had to finally let you cry it out for your nap a while back and it was so hard to do. You surprised me and only cried for less then 30mins the first time and after that I have not had any problems putting you down for a nap. You don't cry or fuss you just close your eyes and go to sleep. I think that has helped night time sleep time because daddy no longer has to stay in there for a long time to get you to go to sleep. Now he can leave after a little while and you go to sleep on your own. You also just love to sleep on your tummy. It makes mommy nervous but I guess you are strong enough to roll over sleeping on your belly so it isn't an issue anymore. You look totally cute and we have found you in some weird positions already. You sleep with your purple sock monkey that Aunt Lindsay got for you from out west. Sometimes you even cuddle up to him. You still sleep straight through to the morning. Mommy just needs to learn to go to sleep earlier so she isn't tired at 7 am lol.

Feeding: You are completely weened now and eating more and more solid food as well as bottles of formula. It took less time and was easier to wean then I thought it was going to be. I was a little sad that I had to give up the morning nursing session before I wanted to but without the donperidone to help me keep up my supply I just sort of dried up. Oh well I am glad that I nursed you for as long as I did and that we made it past 6 months. I am honestly happy to be over that because it really wasn't a fun experience for me. I gave you the best food for as long as I could. 

You eat about half a jar of baby food per meal and about 4 oz of formula. I also have been giving you 4 oz of formula before naps and before bedtime. Right now it is working but as always as you grow we will have to change and adapt. I know at some point I will need to cut out the feeding before naps and nighttime but for right now its working so I don't want to mess with it and plus I need to figure out how to proceed. Parenting definitely has a huge learning curve!

Since last month you have also tried peas, pears and sweet potato. You of course ate them all with no complaints. We did try to give you oat cereal but you seemed to have a reaction on your skin or what we thought was a reaction. So we switched back to rice cereal to see if you got better. It didn't so we researched baby eczema and we figure that is what you have. We followed the suggestions and it seems to have gotten better with a bit of a flair up here or there. Daddy said he remembered that the pediatrician we took you to at the beginning said that you might have a touch of that. It doesn't seem to bother you so we haven't taken you to the doctor yet, however, you do have an appointment for a weight check near the end of December so we will mention it then. I'm sure there is a few others foods that you have tried but since I have been lax in my blogging/journaling I can't remember what they were. Then again maybe that was all? It makes sense since I don't think there were to many new things we tried because we wanted to see if the reaction was due to the oat cereal or something else. Starting new tastes just wouldn't make that process any easier.

Favorite toy: It's really hard to tell now what is your fav toy. Crinkle bug still is the travel favorite though and your little purple sock monkey is your bedtime buddy. You still love the jolly jumper although you are getting so big that you are approaching the top ring so we might have to put that away soon. You also love to jump and spin in circles while you are in the jumper now. I don't know how you don't get dizzy!

Nicknames: Your still Monkey most of the time. I hope that you don't think that is your name though. I try to remember, as well as daddy, to call you by your real name every once in awhile. You also get potato beard sometimes to.

Funniest moments: Seriously what moment isn't a funny one. I do love how you try and bounce while your in your exersaucer and your head bobs up and down. It's pretty darn cute if you ask me! We have this on video and I love re-watching it for a giggle here or there. So cute!

Favorite moments: I just love when you look up at me when I go get you in the morning or after naps and you get this big grin on your face. Or when you jibber jabber but move your whole chin and you can see your teeth. You always sound so serious it makes me wonder what is going through your cute little head!

Milestones/things you do:
- You have expanded your new tastes a bit more.
- You have mastered the rolling over both ways and have no problems at all doing this. You also do the army crawl to get around. It started out with just using one arm but now you got your technique down well that you can use both arms and your feet to propel you frontwards or backwards. You are pretty quick to! I spend my days chasing after you before you get to either the hairy cat house or the cat food dish (we are going to move that soon but not sure where to put it yet). You can push up onto your arms and push back so that your on your knees. You just haven't figured out you can crawl super fast this way. You just flop down on your belly and your on your way. You have also been doing this impressive plank move and you stay there for a lot longer then mommy can do planks. lol. Maybe your super baby?
- You prefer to sleep on your belly now and we never now what weird position we will find you in. The other day I found you after a nap with your legs sticking out of the crib. lol. I don't see how that was comfortable but whatever works?
- You still only have your two bottom teeth but you have been slobbering a bit more again and you like to run your tongue across the top so maybe you will cut some more soon?
- You can bear weight on your legs when held upright but most of the time you think your in your jolly jumper so you try to start to bounce, fun for you, but tiring on mommy's arms.
- You still haven't mastered sitting up by yourself totally but you are getting better at it. At least now you can most of the time center yourself if you are going to tip over.
- you like to try and pick up small debris from the carpet. I don't know where you find this debris either! you must have eagle eyes. I know if your quiet all of a sudden that your trying to get something. At least so far you haven't tried to put anything in your mouth!
- You definitely like music, you will stop what your doing and turn to see where music is coming from, and you love anything with babies or young children on it. (IE some of the baby Einstein or any commercials featuring kids) At first we thought it was just the theme song from 'the office' but it seems like it is any music. Your a little cutie pie.
- You like to throw your toys on the floor when in your exersaucer and then try to look down at them, or lean to look and see where either daddy, me or the kitties went when they leave your line of sight. Your getting more inquisitive every day and have even shown interest in trying to get whatever is on top of the coffee table. I guess that means that we have to drop your mattress down in your crib so you don't fall out if you decided that you want to pull yourself up for the first time in the middle of the night.
-You also love LOVE LOVE playing with the remote. If your on the couch with mommy and daddy and you see it you lunge for it! So far any button mashing damage you have done we have been able to redo, hopefully that trend continues lol. With three remotes though its hard to keep them all out of your little hands.
- Mommy has to now play guard the cat food dish/dvd stand/under the computer desk/cat house from you. I'm sure the Christmas tree will be included in that list very soon. Your fast as lightning to. All I have to say is thank god for the playpen! 

Here is to another birthday month and another month closer to your first birthday! Love you monkey!

Day 20/30 - My medieval inspired Wedding

When I was younger I always thought weddings were always fun to go to. Especially when it was a close family members wedding, since I was around when they were preparing for it. My mother almost always made the faux wedding cakes, (just think the three teared intricately decorated cakes with lots of scroll detail and even hanging strands of icing) and always helped with making and wrapping fruit cake favours that were cut in long skinny pieces and wrapped in saran wrap and doilies and tied off with the wedding parties colours. I also remember making tissue paper flowers to decorate the cars the that bridal party would be traveling in.

So when it was time to plan my wedding I was excited. I did none of those things above but starting to plan made me nostalgic for those times again. Chris and I got married two years ago in July of '09. We had a medieval inspired wedding. We got married in our home town with family and friends helping to celebrate our union. I made a lot of the decorations and hand made our invitations. The bridal parties attire was also made with the help of my mom, my sister and Chris's mom. I had debated on making my own dress as well, but at the same time I didn't want to miss out on being able to go around and trying on dresses. I happened to find the perfect dress at the very first store we went to. It was exactly what I had imagined it would be. It had the split in the front with a splash of colour, it came in ivory and it had intricate embroidery along the edges and was just beautiful. I wish that it fit better then it did and I still think to this day the ordered it in a size that was WAY bigger then it needed to be ordered in since even after they "took it in" it did not fit me properly, but that is a rant for another time. (sorry that is one of two things that really still grinds my gears).

Being a crafty person that I am I made a lot of the decorations myself and tried to keep with the theme as much as possible. Our card box was a castle, our center pieces were castles, even our fake cake was a three tiered castle. Our invitations where sealed with hot wax, and were hand coloured by me and a few family members, (who I love for helping me do that since there was a lot of invites) and then finally highlighted with metallic gel pens in red and gold, our wedding colours. I even made a wedding program with lots of interesting facts about medieval times and medieval wedding traditions so my guests would have something to read while waiting for me to arrive. 

I loved our wedding, it went by so fast that I honest can't remember half of the day. I can't believe that it has already been 2 plus years since the day we got married! There were some things that I wished were different or better but I am thankful for the pictures I have (another rant for another time) and for the great memories that were made that night and am thankful that so many of our friends and family were able to come out and help us celebrate. There were some photos that we missed out on since when we went to our picture location it was sooo windy out that I was stressing that the photos wouldn't turn out and honestly now seeing the ones that we took outside you can barely tell that the wind was whipping our hair every which way.  We moved to the basement of the hall which had a really nice decorated room so the rest didn't turn out as bad.

This is my invitation assembly space. You can see in the folder the invites. They had a woven vined border that had flowers on it. The vines were coloured with green pencil crayon and the flowers were coloured with gold and red metallic gel pens. They took a lot of work but they turned out so beautiful! The return cards were made to match with a small segment of vines and flowers. You can also see the stamp I used for the impression on the hot wax on that ice block as well. This was the tedious part of it since I could only impress about three or four before the stamp got to hot and I had to wait for it to cool down again other wise the wax stuck to it and was really hard to get off. I had found a place online that sold coloured wax sticks that you could put in a glue gun. With the amount I had to do I doubt that I would have sat there and dripped wax on that many invites :).

Here are some of the envelopes newly sealed and waiting to cool down enough to stack. Sadly I just wax sealed the ones that were being hand delivered since I didn't think the post office would appreciate wax going through their systems.

This is our marriage program that was given to everyone at the church. The font you see is the font that we used on the invites and everything else with text. It was quite big having about 4-5 full sized sheets of paper. So they were pretty thick once they were folded and assembled but I love how they turned out!

Our guest book was a photo mat with our engagement photo in it which is now hanging on our great room wall. I loved this idea so now we can see everyone that attended 365 days of the year. There was even some gold treasure in the treasure box to the left.

Our faux cake and the cake to eat with jousting knights on them! We actually totally forgot about eating the cake later and since we had the food catered we had no plates! We did have napkins though but no plates or utensils. So there was lots of cake left over.

My center pieces with little medieval army guys. They took awhile to make. I cut cardboard pieces, taped them together then used paper mache and then painted them.

Our card box that was totally secure and there was no way anyone would get into that thing without cutting open the bottom. I love how it turned out. Also a knight guard with my brothers chain mail armor, helmet and sword. I kept forgetting that it really wasn't a person standing over there.

Our head table. Part of the wedding parties gift from us was medieval tankards and goblets that you can see here in the picture. We had a slideshow being projected on the back of this wall throughout the night with pictures of Chris and I through out our lives.

These are the wedding favours. Since I make chain mail inspired jewelry and other things I made everyone chain mail key chains in our wedding colours. This is the flower version but I also made a diamond shape. Chris came up with the little rhyme on the tag which said "come celebrate our rein with this finely wrought chain".

The beautiful church that we got married in. This is the Catholic church I have attended since I was born.

I did not carry down the traditional bouquet of flowers. Instead I carried down the same bible that my sister carried down when she got married. Mom just changed the flowers and the ribbon that hung down from the bottom (and we even changed the few tissues that were still in between the pages from my sisters wedding). This was my something borrowed. I also added a picture off my father on the flowers since he passed away when I was four years old. This symbolized to me that if he couldn't be here at least he was with us in spirit.

One of my favorite shots. The one before was beautiful as well since it captured the stain glass window above the door.

 My beautiful ladies in waiting. I really wish that we could have had pictures like this outside.

The knights and one of our little squires. I love our wedding colours! The pictures picked up the material so well. The gold crosses were hand painted on by me a few days before the big day and I have to say I was SCARED TO DEATH of screwing them up! I had to take like two hour breaks between each one because I was afraid of not getting it centered properly or getting paint somewhere where it shouldn't be.

We even surprised our MC aka the court jester (my brother in law) with his own medieval inspired court jester outfit. He literally found out about it minutes before he was going to introduce the wedding party after pictures were done. You should have heard the roar of the crowd and the applause he got when entering the hall. :) The jester hat also played a part of our kissing game since anyone that wanted us to kiss had to go and get it from him and do something to entertain the "court", like juggling or hula hooping while juggling.

I think this is my favorite picture of the two of us! Love it! I really wish that we had all went back outside to take photos but I can't change the past. I am definitely thankful for the photos that we did get! I have heard horror stories of photographers never given brides their photos!

I love this one as well. It was a awesome day and it really is crazy just how fast the day goes by! It felt like it was never going to get there then it's two years later! It was a lot of work but it was worth it!  There are so many other things that I made for the wedding but these are just the highlights. I hope you enjoyed seeing our medieval inspired wedding!

Did you do anything special or unique for your wedding?