We Bought This For Max...

and we bought this one for Ethan:

That's right, Max will be a big brother and Ethan will be biggest brother come Jan 11! I'm 10 weeks and doing fine. Nauseous and tired are regular words for me.  Ethan has been very sick too so the beginning of the summer has had a rough start, but it's gradually on an upward turn. We're very excited and wanted to share the news with everyone.

A Little Catch Up

We've done a lot since March so I'm going to have catch up on everything going on since then...Ethan started soccer this spring and had a great time!  He loved going to soccer practice and learning how to score a goal and having his family come watch him play.  It was so cute to watch!  I have to admit my throat got a little tight when I saw him run up and get his trophy at the end of the season.  Do moms really cry over soccer?  I guess I do.

Max can't wait for the day when he gets his own cleats and shin guards so he can go out there and play too.  He loves playing on the playground while Ethan practices and usually sits in his special soccer chair with a package of raisins during his games.  Too funny!

With Ethan in school during the day, Max and I have a lot of one on one time doing lots of different things.  one particular afternoon we called Dad on a whim to see if he could come with us to lunch.  Sometimes spontaneous things work out and he got to come spend some time with us before we picked Ethan up from school.

Max loves trying to take pictures with my camera so this is one of the pictures that he took of his daddy.  So serious, Dad!

Most of the time Max's pictures look like this....

He likes to turn the camera around and just takes pictures of his eye. The other day he was walking around Target with the camera and he seriously looked like a little tourist. He was trying to take pictures of shampoo, pet supplies, and milk but in the end they all look like the above picture.

Blankie Love

Maxwell loves his Blankie!  Oh how he loves his blankie!  I have to snatch it whenever I can when he's not looking so I can wash it.  Then I sit back and pray that he doesn't realize it's gone.  One particular day I grabbed it to throw in the wash and he totally caught me!  Thankfully our washer locks once the load is washing so there was no way that thing was coming out so Mom had to come up with a plan.  In theory this idea sounded good so I tried this out..."oh Max, come here and watch blankie get all cleaned up!"....

So I set up his little camping chair in front of the washer so he could see his little blankie go round and round and get all clean. Great idea, right?

WRONG!

It quickly turned into this....

And ended up with this...

For the entire wash cycle (34 minutes) and dry cycle (40 minutes).  He just kept screaming, "Blankie!  Blankie!" the whole time and nothing I said or did made it right until that blankie came out clean and dry.  I think he checks the laundry baskets every time I wash now so I think I'll have to wash blankie after he goes to bed.

Hi, I'm Brittany and I'm no longer addicted to chocolate!

So I left off with the funny vacuum episode  that happened oh so long ago on my journey to be free from the addiction of chocolate.  Lot of things happened since then including getting a new vacuum.  No, I didn't get a new one because my old one smelled like chocolate!  It broke, bummer!   So I ended up being completely chocolate free for 6 whole weeks!  I had never been away from chocolate that long in my whole life!  I ended up not missing it at all until I went out to my brother's graduation at BYU in late April and saw my old love, the BYU Creamery brownie (I prefer the kind without the mint)!  Going to BYU and getting a creamery brownie are quite rare these days so I had to take the plunge and break my 6 week streak.  And guess what...it wasn't as good as I remembered.  I actually didn't really care for it.  I had my family eat the rest of it. Wah wah wah.  So chocolate has slowly creeped back into my life but not at all like before.  I enjoy it once in a while usually only on special occasions.  It was a great 6 weeks.  I learned a lot about natural foods and trying to eat organically.  I worked out a lot and I felt the best I've felt in a long time.  I even had a Dr. appointment during that time to check my thyroid and my thyroid levels were the best they've ever been.  Go figure.  Was it just a good time?  Was it no chocolate?  Was it healthy eating?  Was it the working out?  Was it everything?  Who knows, but it's all about learning and gaining new habits and throwing out the old, bad ones.

A Recovering Chocoholic's Nightmare...

I've now been sober from Chocolate for an entire week! Can I get some love?! So proud of myself! So Max decided to celebrate my 1 week by doing something special for me. We're on Spring Break right now so I was having the kids help me clean the house for "Monday Cleaning Day." Well, Max decided he wanted chocolate milk and proceeded to bring the box of Nesquik to me while I was cleaning the bathroom. By the time I turned around to notice that he was carrying the box of Nesquik upside down, the container opened and ALL of the chocolate powder contents were on my bathroom floor. Great! Thankfully it was on the tile so I just grabbed the vacuum and suck it up real quick. No biggie. So I go on with the rest of my cleaning and finish up with vacuuming the house. Well, as I'm going along I begin to realize that I smell chocolate. The entire house smells like chocolate. What the heck! I'm dying here! I guess the powder that I sucked up was releasing all sorts of delicious odors all over my house! I resisted the urge and just enjoyed the smells and went on with my day. Maybe I'll take the vacuum for a spin a little more often now, just to get my fix. (This is not an actual picture of what happened, it's just what I found when I googled images for spilled nesquik...you get it)

Chocolate Rehab, Day 3

I have now gone 3 days without chocolate. Wow. Who would have thought? Now I spend all day singing Rihanna's song "Rehab". Chocolate, you're my disease.

Chocoholics Anonymous

Hi, my name is Brittany and I'm a chocoholic....(insert "hi, Brittany").  Seriously, it's ridiculous.  The only flavor of dessert that exists in my life is chocolate.  No lemon bars, plain cheesecake, key lime pie, or any other sort of stuff for me.  Blah!  It has to be chocolate.  I come from a long line of chocolate lovers, it goes way way back in my ancestry.  Anyway, as much as I love chocolate, I hate that I have to have it.  It's my addiction.  In order to conquer my addiction, I'm putting myself into "Chocolate Rehab".  I'm not even joking here, cold turkey.  I haven't really set an exact time frame for this rehab, but I'm going to try to go without for the rest of the month.  Can I do it?  I'm certainly going to try and buy myself a new outfit when I do!

Organized: Pantry

I've been working on organizing my kitchen so the major factor in that thing is the pantry.  I couldn't even take a before picture because it was a nightmare in there!  I had all these mismatched bins to hold all my baking stuff and my flour bin was being held together with duct tape (it got set on a hot stove and melted).  So sad!  So I went for it and took everything out and started from scratch.  I went to Wal Mart and got their new Rubbermaid bins.  They are tall and recantuglar, not round like my previous ones were.  This way you can put more in the same amount of space and they stack nicely.

I used my new labelmaker to differntiate the different baking items. I love that they all match and my flour no longer has duct tape! Hooray! I also picked up some bins at Ikea to put my rice and pasta items in. I got different bins for these because I wanted to have a pour spout on the top. These were on 2 or 3 bucks a piece and work really well.

My other bins that I had before did not got to waste. I ended up putting chips, pretzals, oats, and pancake mix in them and labeling them. I like it a lot better than having random boxes and bags in there. So here's a tiny look at the finished product. You can't really see the whole pantry, but you get the idea.

I even have room to spare!  Wow!  I love being able to see everything and know that everything is in it's place and stocked up.

Organized: Recipe Binder

My recipe binder from here was bursting at the seems so I decided to upgrade.  I went through all of my favorite cooking magazines that I had piled in my cookbook cupboard and picked out my favorites and ones that I wanted to try, tore them out and threw the rest away.  No more clutter!  I also print out tons of recipes from Cook's Country, America's Test Kitchen, and Allrecipes.com so I had to organize those too. 

So I got a 2 inch binder and put in some cute scrapbook paper and used my label maker and put in dividers for each section.

Here are some chicken dishes I want to try from my Eating Well magazine. Looks yummy!

And here are some of the typed of recipes that I had from my recipe card box that I did up a few years ago. That's one thing I totally recommend...type up your recipe cards and streamline them into a cookbook! No more filing! Plus once you're all done typing them up you can save and print them for you and for your extended family!  Now my recipe binder has all my favorites and new recipes ready at my fingertips.  Now I don't have to look through my magazines or make them sit on a shelf forever!  Plus when one of my new magazines come through the door, I can immediately pull what I want and chuck the rest!

Spice Cupboard Makeover

We all know I like to cook and you have to have a lot of good spices and magic tricks to make your recipes taste really good.  Well, my spice cupboard was complete chaos.  Check it out....

I had to rummage through random spices to find what I needed every time I was cooking dinner.  Plus the amount of sprinkles I had accumulated with kids and Activity Days was ridiculous!  On top of that, my friend let me raid her spice cupboard when she moved so I got some extras and some new stuff that got sucked into the vortex of the chaos.  So while the kids were playing around with Ry during the ice storm I decided to go through everything.  I threw out stuff, I put things in different containers with labels, I condensed down stuff, etc etc.  So this is what it looked like after that...

Better, but I still didn't have easy access to things when I was cooking.  So I headed over to Target and got 4 turntable/lazy Susan things and put some of my stuff on there.  Now I feel like I can see everything, I can get to it quickly, and everything has a place.  So this is the final result.  It's a close up picture so it only shows the first 3 shelves.  The 4th shelf has a basket that holds all my sprinkles and cake decorating items.

It feels so refreshing! And can I just say that a label maker goes a long way! Everything looks better labeled! So what do you think?

@$%&

We don't use foul language in our home so it's not a normal thing around here. Well, Mr. Max is really picking up on new words and trying new phrases and some of them totally sound like he's swearing or using inappropriate language!

Max loves puzzles and he constantly asks me to play them with him or get them down from the shelf. So imagine saying puzzle without the "P" and saying it really fast. What does it sound like? Yeah...not good.

This one is horrible! We have a special movie that Max loves to watch and it's all about construction stuff. Well, one of the songs that they sing on the DVD is "Digger, Digger". Doesn't sound like that at all when he asks for more. He doesn't quite complete the D's and they come out like N's. Not good.

The other day I was at Bath and Body Works picking up a few freebies and Max loves to smell everything in there. So while he's walking out of there with lotion on his nose, he demands to smell more. Well, instead of saying "smell it" it sounds more like "smoke it"! My kid is yelling "smoke it!" over and over all the way out to the car. Gotta love it!

...And Today and Again Tomorrow!

What in the world is going on around here?  We've had -3 temps, ice everywhere, and rolling power outages!  We've already checked the news and school is closed again tomorrow!  We've been hanging around the house again today.  Finished any sort of laundry I could do, organized, cleaned my house, made homemade cinnamon rolls, held a feverish Max, and clipped all my coupons.  Now I know I have a whole other day to get stuff done around here.  Kind of nice, but I think my kids are wanting to get out and do something.  Max is sick so it's good to lay low with him and let him get better.  Hopefully it will warm up around here before the Superbowl!

School is Closed Today!

We had a little winter storm come through the area and it left us a bunch of ice and a little snow.  School is out today and Ry isn't going into work until later so we're enjoying a little bit of free time.  We don't really have snow clothes like I did growing up in Ohio and Pennsylvania so we have to make do with what we've got...including our fun snow equipment.  Ry made a little sled and pulled the boys on the ice for quite awhile.  While they were outside and freezing, I was washing sheets and organizing my spice cupboard.  So fun, right?  Now we're enjoying some hot chocolate and snuggly warm blankies straight from the dryer!

Office, continued

So here is a pic of where we moved things.  We took the big desk and moved it out from the window and put up against the wall and we took the little computer cart and we're going to sell that at the neighborhood garage sale.  We took one bookshelf and put it where the computer cart was and kept the other bookshelf where it was.  Then we took the big chair and put it in the opposite corner of where it was. 

As the day progress, we went through all the stuff that we took out of the office and tried to see what would could part with. Thankfully I had previously gone through ALL of our files and paperwork to clean all that out a week ago so we didn't have to do that too. Here's where we're at now. Still have a few boxes left to go through so this isn't our finished product yet. I still need to go to The Container Store for a few things and find some artwork.

I really like this layout better than the one we had before. It lets in a lot more light and I feel a lot lighter having thrown out all that stuff. I guess I grew up moving so much that we just purged each move so not moving anywhere for the past 4 years is really throwing me off. More organization to come as I attack my spice cupboard and my "station" so get ready!

Office Organization

Still working on the office right now, but we have rearranged some things.  I've got a general idea of what it's going to look like, but I've still got to work on the little things.  I really need to head to Ikea and The Container Store for some organization helpers.  And I need to get some cute stuff to hang on the walls.  Any ideas?  Here's some before pictures:

It was just not working for me.  The desk was covering part of the window, my overflowing church bag, binders everywhere, disorganized papers, books, no decor on the walls.  Not good.  So we took everything out of the office Friday night and then started moving furniture around.  As we were moving stuff I was getting a little worried since I wasn't really liking any of the layouts that we tried.  Plus with Internet plugs and furniture sizes we were limited to where things could go.  I started saying the line from Meet the Robinsons..."I'm just not sure how well this plan was thought through!"  Finally we came up with something that worked and once the furniture was in the right places we went to bed.  So I'll post some after pictures of where we're at right now.  Definitely not a finished product right now, but we're getting there.  I'll keep you posted with any good finds! 

Suzy Q 1996-2011

I feel the same feeling that I felt the night I read Where the Red Fern Grows with my mom in 3rd grade.  Remember how sad it was when his dogs died?  I'm seriously crying with tissues right now.  What in the heck?!  My poor little cat had to be put down today, so sad!  The cat is technically mine, but she's been at my parents since I left for college.  I begged and begged for a cat and finally when I was a Junior in high school, my parents broke down and let me.  We got her when she was about 3 years old.  She was a feisty cat and would rarely let you hold her or pet her, not a lap cat at all.  But she was lovable and would do funny stuff.  She would always be up in the mornings with me when I was getting ready for seminary and then she'd tried to sneak out the back door when I left.  There were many times that I had to chase after her in frigid Ohio temps with wet hair trying to get her back inside.  A few years later I left for college so my parents had to keep her for me and they permanently kept her after I married Ryan since he's not too fond of animals.  So we visited her regularly whenever we go over to my parents.  My kids loved her, but were also petrified of her.  She would randomly hiss at them so if she was near by they would want an adult close in case she pounced, haha.  Well, she got really sick these past few weeks and if got bad enough that we felt like she was suffering.  So sad, but I'm glad she's not suffering anymore.  Okay, seriously I'm going to stop crying now, this is ridiculous!

Office Makeover

This weekend Ry and I will attempt to do a little face lift on our poor office.  It tends to be the dumping ground for papers, books, studying materials, random projects, stuff for callings, and all that kind of stuff.  I'm just going to try to work with what I've got, maybe just change around the layout.  I think we're just going to take everything out of the office and try to get a vision for the room.  I saw that on Peter Walsh and I'm hoping it works out for us.  I'm about to take apart he computer so if you don't hear from me for awhile, you'll know what.  Wish me luck!

Big Boy Bed...sigh...

Sleeping in a bed is a novel idea, isn't it?  You'd think one would want to sleep in their bed, but not in our house.  Max has said good bye to the crib once he started escaping during nap time so we went straight to the bed.  Now if we could get him to stay there, that would be great.  I tallied up how many times Ry and I put him back in be done night and we got up to 61!  We're trying out the Super nanny method where you have your normal routine, say good night, and walk away.  Then once they come out you tell them to go back to bed and you put them back in.  If they escape, you don't talk to them, don't make eye contact and then carry on the process of returning them back to bed over and over until they realize you mean business. So far, not much progress.  With Ethan we just ended up locking the door, but Max's personality is so different than Ethan's.  He's totally fine if you sit in the rocking chair in his room and read a book until he falls asleep, but that's just not realistic.  Eventually he'll learn, but until then..."back to bed, Max!"

Sad Days Ahead!

I knew this day would come, but I tried to not think about it so maybe it wouldn't happen.  And now she's gone and it's so sad!  This picture was taken right before I had to say good bye and you can tell we're both about to cry :( Kaitlyn and I met here in Texas almost 4 years ago.  Ethan was barely 16 months old!  She was in my ward and lived just a few streets over and she had a little boy Ethan's age.  I remember that summer we hit it off and have been friends ever since!  We have been through a lot together...motherhood, pregnancy, new babies, colic, busy husbands, Activity Days, crafting, sad days, good days, you name it.  I feel like she's the sister I never had and has been a true and loyal friend.  I could always count on her to be there for me and I could always just be me and never have to explain myself.  She never judged, always listened and I just love her!  Her husband recently finished school and a few weeks ago they packed up and made their way to Colorado.  It's sad to not have her here, but when it's really bad I just watch "Baby Hands"

I even sent her to Colorado with her own set of "baby hands" for when times get tough.  When I gave them to her I was half laughing/half crying.  How sad is that?  Anyway, Kailtyn, I miss you!

Making A Come Back!

Excuses, Excuses!  I know!  I know!  I haven't blogged since October!  Maybe I'll try and come back to this whole blog thing.  Should I?  I think I might.

Things have been going really well in our little household.  Max has turned 2, Ethan has turned 5, Ryan turned 30 and I've had a birthday too.  We had a great trip to Europe, celebrated the holidays with family, and now it's time to get on with the new year and have new experiences.  Hopefully documented experiences on the blog!  So here's to 2011, and trying to get back to blogging.  I'm posting a few of our recent family pictures that we had done by our favorite photographer, Toni. 

Now here's a little bit about what we've been up to lately...

Maxwell:  Max has turned into such a big boy!  He's sleeping in a big boy bed now and is trying to start on the road to potty training!  He loves trash trucks, trains, school buses, semis, motorcycles...you get the picture.  Every Wednesday morning you'll find him waiting by the front door to catch a glimpse of the trash truck.  Thankfully his uncle found a way to burn clips of trash trucks to DVD!  Best Christmas gift ever!  This boy is just so darn cute!

Ethan:  We all know this boy is full of life.  He still says the funniest things and his teacher at school calls him her "old soul" since he acts like a man in a boy body.  He loves school and has started reading.  It feels like a new world has opened up to him!  He gets to start up soccer this spring and I look forward to my days watching my boys playing sports.  Time to break out the camping chair!

I'm busy doing the usual motherhood deal.  Trying to balance being a wife, taking care of kids, household, myself, calling, etc.  I really want to get my house totally organized.  I've been feeling the urge to purge!  Hopefully I'll have some fun projects to post in the next little while.  I'm feeling inspired, just have to find a way to do it!  If you have any great ideas for office decor or what to do for my spice cupboard, send them my way!!!

Oh Ryan, the love of my life!  Working, working, working!  He's doing the balancing act too.  He's been home a little bit more lately so we'll enjoy that while we can!

So how have you been doing since I've been away?  I've finally got all my blogs migrated over to Google Reader.  What a fiasco!  I used to be a Bloglines user, but since they switched to Merchant Circle everything went crazy and I seriously didn't read any blogs for 2 months!  How sad is that?  Now I've got everything set up and I finally feel like I'm back to the blog world.  I feel like I've missed so much!  I'm hoping to get some pictures uploaded from my camera and put a few old ones from the past few months and then I can start some new stuff.  Drop me a line and let me know how you're doing!