Shoutout for ideas & inspiration

hey everyone, my sister in law and i are redoing my kitchen cabinets. The frame of the cabinet is brown and the doors are red all with a black glaze and a satin finish. i am totally stoked about this!!!!--trust me--it looks so much better than it sounds.

BUT

I need ideas for backsplash.

I have seriously considered beadboard (no color picked out yet) however i read some opinions online saying it is an absolute pain to clean. Considering my love of cooking and my absolute detest of cleaning up my monumental messes that probably won't work for me.

Also, i love the look and ease of tile but i am not redoing the countertops yet and to redo countertops after tiling the walls would be a pain. I have dreams of making it all look like one with tile/granite backsplash and countertop--like i said...dreams. So this is an interim-type option.

so any ideas/experience you can share would be fabulous

2nd Birthday

We celebrated Caleb's
second birthday (woah!) on sunday with our families. Here are a few pics.

We loved having everyone over and the gifts for Caleb. He was asking for his bubble machine all day. Thanks again! We love you all

Story: Jail pics of the dog.

Every day when Rob comes home from work i ask him if he has any 'stories'. This is a long standing tradition dating back to when we first became friends ten years ago. So, today when Rob comes home, i will have a story for him. I dressed our dog in our son's clothes and made her pose for pictures. i should have put her in the red onsie however i didn't think about that till it was too late. Caleb thought this was the coolest thing ever and i am sure i will find him trying to dress gabby one day soon. All my crazy fun ideas are going to get me in trouble one day!

So for your viewing pleasure, the pictures that make my dog look like she just got arrested:

TV

Caleb has never really shown much interest in tv. sometimes something will catch his eye but his short attention span ends and he is onto the next thing.

Except Barney.

We have netflix and Rob found two episodes of Barney. So every night Rob and Caleb alternate between Lets pretend with barney and On the farm. We are both sick of these episodes so i found Barney on tv and am going to dvr it. I am not sure if this is a good thing or not.
But caleb loves barney! He dances, and stares at the computer screen enraptured. It is so dang cute and today it afforded me time to wash my face and brush my teeth uninterrupted. It was refreshing! So, in the realm of kids shows to watch-even though it is over-the-top cheesy-i guess this isn't that bad.

Overnight Change

Ok, i took these pictures b/c i was so excited that i finally have a nice church shirt for caleb and i thought he was so dang cute!





Then we got his hair cut today by my sister-in-law. I always thought he was cute but now...wow. He really looks like rob's kid! He also grew up. I am glad i delayed this day. I have love my little boy but now, he looks so much older-so much closer to Two than i would like him to be. :)















Ahh little boy, i love you so. Your dad is my sun and you are my moon. I could not exist completely without either of you.

Power to the women...

When i was in high school i was easily bated by guy friends just with them calling me "woman" with a certain tone. Those jokes about wives only cooking or having babies-those have always pissed me off. Without knowing anything about the feminist movement, i heartily counted myself as a fringe member. Power to the women baby--equality and all that stuff.

Well, I may be rethinking my stance. Don't get me wrong, i am all about fairness in the workplace and whatnot but there is a growing trend that either exposure or maturity has exposed me to. The paris hilton commercial for a Carl's Junior hamburger is mouth-dropping offensive (if you haven't seen it, count your blessings, it is pretty much soft porn) I mean seriously--this is an ad for HAMBURGERS?! Notice what all women's halloween costumes have in common: Sex appeal. It is halloween for heaven's sake! Can't i just dress up?! just be goofy-?

Here is the issue, with all of us girls seeing everything being sold with sexy women, we think that is what we need to be like. rediculous (kudos to you if you are immune to this. I however am a bit of a weakling)

It would seem that the only thing women have to offer is being eye-candy. Now, this is not a diatribe about normal women not being seen in advertising (that is for a different day); no, this diatribe is about over-sexualization of women in general.

Rob was telling me about an add someone put on his computer as a joke...a flier for a 900 number, on the back side manifested a Carl's Junior logo. Now, i don't really care about Carl's Junior, they seem to have ample choices for examples at this moment. When Rob told me about this, i got thinking and it hit me:

women are not empowered by their sexuality-they - WE- are objectified by it.

it is all such a lie. Amazing.

So, in the name of equal rights and all that crap, women are everywhere but the only way we are everywhere is if we are beautiful/sexy. i thought we just wanted to vote.

hmmm
Somehow i think somewhere something got screwed up.

Mind you, i am not against being sexy people, heck, i love to feel sexy (don't you?!) i am arguing that it is not my defining feature. something, somewhere got out of balance.

Not dead, i promise!

so i realize that i totally suck with blogging. So to spare you all my verbose tendencies, here are a bunch of pics to update you.

unfortunately the pics are in reverse order. lol
This is my pantry addition Rob made for me over christmas break. It probably adds almost double the amount of space. i am in heaven! and yes, the ladder situation was somewhat sketchy.
Chronological enjoyment of the 'first' shake with our new VitaMix (thanks mom and dad!!)






Ahhh bliss

Preparing for the adventure outside. K doesn't do very well keeping his gloves on so there are rubber bands around his wrists. dad's idea.
The christmas eve present (the tube) and first 'sledding trip'

Unfortunately i don't have any pics of our sledding hill. it is at the playground next door and this tube does great. the only down side is that it terrified caleb.


Tug-o-war with his friend Noah

Rob had to be on the watch with K. Caleb gets pretty excited with his friends and had a tendency to try to hug them but that usually means pulling, poking of eyes or holding on too long (do you remember those guys?!!) or some other disturbance of their personal space.
She just looked so content. :) i love my dog. even though she isn't exactly well socialized (my fault) she is a great play mate for caleb!
Ok. Caleb loves this. it looks like child abuse but i swear it isn't.
Going in
"Shut the door!"
Halloween. I am supposed to be a glamorous Hollywood movie star
Rob, the Construction Worker. yes, he has a fake earring. (not quite sure if you can see it).
My happy giraffe. He hated having the head on. I thought it completed the outfit so i forced the issue.
Dejected

Me at Walden Pond. I went to Boston in October and stayed with a friend. I am an english major so Walden Pond has much significance in my book. I studied writings of Henry David Thoreau for a semester; this was a highlight of my trip. Forgive the funky hair. I struggle with what to do with it when i am in humid conditions. :)

mullet head.
Learning to kiss
um.... (cracked me up after i took this!!)
Got it!

Fall family vacation to Park City. We 'illegally' took caleb down the Alpine Slide. He loved it! i couldn't go fast enough for him. He will end up just like his uncles: daredevils.
he was jumping/dancing on all the grates. so cute!

Looking at a statue with some animal(don't remember which) he recognized
Cute outfit

Mullet Baby
This is my first complete dinner failure. These are supposed to be beef ribs. I tried to follow my grandpa's advice on how to cook these however my grill was a cast off we found for free off the side of the road (please laugh, we do!) and it ignited these. To add fuel to the fire-literally-the ribs had a lot of fat on them so i had a bondfire. i actually had flames coming out of the bbq. This makes me laugh--i have never failed so completely with food and this...what a complete failing. so worth documenting, all b/c of a free bbq. haha
excited to color.
discovery of a pen. i was working and he was playing. obviously i was pretty focused on what i was doing.

All innocent. right

Long Lost

i have been out-of-internet-commission due to rodents. RODENTS. honestly, somehow i thought rodent damage was something out of a turn of the century novel. i don't know why i didn't think it could happen now. my internet was down for a whole week. ironically i am the only one the rodent damage impacted so far as the company can tell. if you are with MSTAR and your internet spontaneously goes haywire-perhaps the rodent impeded you too.

So as a matter of catch-up i wanted to upload the pictures from the trip caleb and i took Bear Lake with Aunt Juli, Toni, Lindsay, Keeley and J.




Me and Caleb
i am embracing my natural wave.
caleb is enthralled by grass. or J's phone was nearby. caleb has a sincere weakness for cell phones.








Linds and Keeley
we thought keeley started teething on this trip. she wasn't the happiest i have ever seen her but it was so fun to have here there anyway! i loved watching her with Caleb. it is so much fun to watch them become friends.










Caleb giving Keeley kisses.
Notice how he is poking her eye out. he made big slobber marks on her head. it was so cute. i haven't been teaching Caleb to give kisses-he did this all on his own.











Looking somewhat confused when keeley got plopped in Caleb's lap this pose just happened. it was so dang cute to watch them together. Caleb loved trying to cheer up Keeley. Any time she was crying Caleb would go runnin to her to try to talk to her and see how she was doing. it was adorable! keeley loved trying to move like caleb. i have a feeling we will be in trouble when keeley gets bigger. mistchif makers in the making. :)














picture pose.









Linds and keeley
we were so glad they came! me and linds drove up together and it was great. well...the ride up was a little challenging. the kids weren't thrilled to be in the car. but the ride home was better. so glad you came linds!! her car fit all kinds of stuff! i am a horrible packer for trips. inevitably i always have the most stuff. my family is so patient with me. they just laugh which is the best thing with me. my only defence is that i used it all. :) anyone who has pointers of how to pack lite-i would love them!!!!!












Happy Caleb
anytime this kid is outside, everything goes in his mouth and he is happy as a clam. adorable little busy boy. holding still is not a skill this boy has.









Aunt J and Caleb
these two had fun. J thought it was funny to watch caleb run around the condo and me go after him trying to stop him from ruining/breaking things or getting hurt. she was also an awesome help! her and toni watched caleb for me so i could go running-which was awesome!










Enjoyin' the sun. really, if you can't tell, the day was overcast. According to Aunt Juli you can't get sun on an overcast day but she was proved wrong as we discovered later ;)
we had tried to find a beach to hang out at but after an hour of driving we ended up back at the condo which proved to be the perfect hang out. caleb played in the sand. Keeley ate her rice cracker. and the rest of us got sun.



The vacation was awesome! i love to hang out with the women in my family. Linds and J are the best sisters i could have asked for. i am so glad they have accepted me with such open arms. every woman should be so lucky to get a mother-in-law like mine. she is sincerely my other mom. i love her.
thanks for the girls trip!