A New Year

A few days after Christmas, Mark and I took the boys to Target, just to get out of the house.  We do that a lot.  Go places just to go.  None of us do very well when we are cooped up inside for more than a day or so, so there are often mornings when Mark and I look at each other (while Grumps 1 and Grumps 2 are melting into puddles of despair at our feet) and say WHERE SHOULD WE GO?!!  This means trips to Lowes, the mall or any other indoor place that has wide aisles for the stroller and is loud enough for the occasional shriek.  The destination on this day was Target.  And not even our neighborhood Target. Oh no, we need variety here and a road trip that is longer than five minutes to stretch these outings as long as possible.  So we went up to Plano to go to the Super Target. Cue angels singing.

Now I can wander around Target with absolutely no agenda or anything in particular I am shopping for any day of the week.  Am I right ladies??!  I could easily kill an hour or two going up and down every. single. aisle. and buying all the things.  But Target is not so leisurely when you have a husband and two one-year olds in tow.  It's more like a rapid lap around the perimeter (must keep moving or Parker will decide he'd rather you carry him than ride in the stroller) looking at holiday clearance and vacuum cleaners (yes, that is exactly what we did).  We might have lasted 25 minutes in there before we were out of Cheerios and getting close to two meltdowns. 

On this particular morning it was very cold and slightly raining.  So basically perfect weather for unloading two grumpy boys from the stroller, strapping them into their carseats, taking off the stroller seats, loading them into the back of car, dumping out all the Cheerios that fell down into the bottom of the stroller, and then folding it up and lifting it into the car.  While we were doing this (and getting rained on and freezing, btw) a pick-up truck was ever so slowly coming up to us in the parking lot.  I thought that he wanted our parking place and was thinking, "Seriously?! Can't you tell that this is not a quick process so you should just scoot on past us and find a spot a little farther away?!" when he stopped beside us and rolled his window down.  An older man, probably my parents' age, peeked over the window and into the cold and smiled at us.

"You're doubly blessed," he said.

And Mark and I looked at him and back at each other, nodding.  We knew he was right.

New Year, New Look

Well, well what do we have here?  A spruced up blog?!  Yes.  It is true.  I gave up on trying to figure out how to make my little corner of the Internet look cute on my own, and instead turned to the shops of Etsy to find someone who could help me out.  Enter Angie.  She rocks my socks off.

I also cleaned the house today too, if that is exciting news to anyone out there.  Christmas is officially boxed up and back on the shelves and I {think} I managed to vacuum up all the glitter that fell of my {two} Christmas trees.  I was really into glitter this year.  I crafted up this topper for our tree, using a cardboard initial letter (less than $10 at Joann's), some gold spray paint, good ol' Elmers glue and GLITTER.

We are already five days into 2013.  What do I want from this year?  Health. Luck. Love. Adventure.

Any maybe some more blog followers?

Chopped

I have this thing where I grow my hair out, forever and ever, then get sick of it and chop it off.  It is usually a quite drastic cut, and then I regret it about 20 minutes after I leave the salon, and thus spend the next 6-9 months growing it out again.  I haven’t done the drastic haircut in over a year now, which means for the past 18+ months, I’ve just been growing and growing it out.

Well I reached that point where I couldn’t stand it anymore.  When it gets super long, I spend 90% of the time with it pulled back into a ponytail or some sort of bun/wrap deal, just to get it all out of the way.  I was starting to feel like I was drowning in hair, and like it only looked good if I spent a good hour on it before work, so basically like never.  Thus, I knew it was time for a change.... but not my usual drastic cut.  Last time I did the cut, I wanted to look like LC in this photo (my stylist totally FAILED  to capture my vision that time):

This time, I just wanted to get rid of the length and go for something lighter and fresh, that I could still wear up or down and style lots of ways.  Here’s how it came out, before and after (before pic is blurry because it was first thing yesterday morning and I was looking rough)

Only four people at work today noticed the change.  And two of them are my BFF’s that I see all the time, so I knew they would notice!  So I guess it wasn’t really that big of a change at all. NONE of my kiddos noticed.  Oh well.  I’m loving it and have zero regret {so far} on the new do.  And these days, anything that saves me some blow-drying time is totally okay in my book!

So when we were in Vegas, I had this awesome idea to make a music video with everyone while we were there.  I wasn't sure how the others would feel about this idea, but on the first night I mentioned it to some of the girls and they were just as excited as I was.  So we, of course, decided to make our video to Call Me Maybe, because hello, it never gets old.

So all weekend I filmed clips of us on my phone singing various lines of the song.  Which means while we were out at the hip clubs, we were trying to listen to the song on my phone, learn the lyrics, and then sing them.  I haven't put together the video yet, but I did make this little trailer to get the hype out about it.

Coming soon to a computer near you: Call Me Maybe.

Third Time's a Charm

Hello world!  What the heck.  Another day, another blog.  Let's see if this one sticks.

Quick life summary to get us all up to speed:

In the past three months, I've successfully scored a new house, a new job, and - dare I say - a new outlook.  Oh and this weekend, I'm even getting a new sister. I'm looking forward to chronicling the new  adventure.  This is kind of a test post, so I'll leave my fans with a photo from when I got a new brother, last summer.

And... the same crowd, a few years earlier (I'm the cat).