Burnt Flower Bobby Pin

Yesterday, while at a wine tasting at Arbor Brook winery with Nathan and my parents, I saw a gal with an adorable fabric flower on a bobby pin in her hair. I woke up this morning wanting to wear something similar to church, but knew I wouldn't have enough time to perfect the kind of folding that her version required.

So I found this tutorial for a burnt edges flower. Rather than stitching the layers together, I used a dab of hot glue between each layer of fabric, to attach the button (which is oyster shell, it just didn't show up very well in the photo), and to attach the bobby pin to the back. The entire process, including cutting out the circles free-hand, only took about 5 minutes, with the following result.

And no, I didn't wear this hoodie to church. I took this photo after a much-needed nap.

I have so much fun doing these simple, sometimes practical, sometimes just for fun projects. I was actually thinking this morning at church, after a friend asked me how to make my dry-erase frame calendar, that it would be a ton of fun to regularly have a girl's project day. We could choose a few projects to do, I would tell everyone what supplies they would need (because let's face it, I'm too poor to buy everyones' supplies), and then we could gather at my place to make said projects. Sounds like fun to m! Especially if we choose practical projects, like the dry-erase calendar. 'Cause who doesn't need more adorable organization in their lives?!

An Angel In Our Midst?

I'm not sure what reminded me of her today, but when the boys were in the NICU in Boise they had an amazing respiratory therapist named Shandi. She was quite literally a breath of fresh air, and there were several times that her kindness helped Nathan, myself, and even my parents keep our sanity in what otherwise would have been an overwhelming time in our lives.

All the nurses at St. Luke's in Boise had these weird intercom things that they wore on their scrub shirts. At the press of the button, you could say someones name and it would let you talk to that one person instantly. Well, one of my maternity floor nurses showed my dad that if you pressed the button and said, "Beam me up, Scotty", it would make the Star Wars beaming noise. It would also say, "Live long and prosper.", although I don't remember what the code word for that one was. Anyway, Shandi had a big enough heart to play along when my dad told her to try it (anyone else would have probably laughed it off and ignored him), and that kind of sealed the deal for all of us. We always looked forward to seeing her, and before we were discharged from the hospital, she gave me her email address so I could send her photos and updates of the boys as they grew.

About two months after we had brought the boys home, I came across Shandi's email address and decided to email her the link to our blog. We had become close with a lot of nurses in the NICU and I would have loved for Shandi to share this with all of them. Much to my disappointment, when I sent the email I got an error message back saying that her email address did not exist.

Another month later, we travelled back to Boise for the boys' preemie follow-up appointment. After getting the all-clear from the doc and the occupational therapist, we decided to take a quick trip over to the NICU to see if any of our favorite nurses were on. Unfortunately, most of the ones we had formed friendships with were on night shift (it's a whole lot quieter in the NICU at night, much more conducive to conversation).

Here's the strange thing...one that quite literally gives me goose bumps. We specifically asked for Shandi, knowing she usually worked days. The girl at the front desk had never heard of her. She asked around. None of the nurses had ever heard of a Shandi. Not even the other respiratory therapists had ever heard of her. This was a mere three months after being discharged from the same NICU. Not nearly enough time to have enough turn over that no one in the entire department would recognize her name.

I believe in angels. Shandi, if you're out there and even if you're fully 100% flesh and blood human, you were an angel to us during a very difficult time. And if not...

God sends you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

Two In One Day?!

I really wanted to post a couple of photos of a project I did tonight after the boys went to bed, and after Nathan and I watched Stephen Hawking's show on OPB about time travel. But I figured I should probably satisfy those of you who really only come on here to see the adorable photos of the boys. Because really, they are pretty stinkin' cute.

Asher at Grammy and Grandpa's.

Levi couch cushion surfing, their new fave thing to do.

Asher couch cushion surfing.

Asher playing in the backyard.

Asher (left) and Levi (right) playing in the backyard.

Levi playing in the backyard.

We've pretty much lived outside for the past few days, enjoying the b-e-a-u-tiful weather before it starts raining again, which will supposedly happen tomorrow. Sad day. Ok, hope that tides you over for a couple of days. :) These boys are getting harder and harder to capture on camera without the blur effect!

Btw, McMinnville is a pretty great place for crazy summer-time events that take over downtown. In Baker, there was Miner's Jubilee. Here, there's Turkey Rama. Also the same weekend, there's Who's On Third. But to kick it all off is the ever-entertaining UFO Festival. I kid you not. Evidently this UFO/alien shindig is second only to Roswell, NM in size. Pretty impressive, no? And the thing most of the locals turn out for?

..............................the parade.

(Sigh) I love this town.

And now I'll allow myself the luxury of sharing my evening project - because posting photos of my awesome boys is such a hardship, right? I have this great window of opportunity on most evenings. It happens after the boys go to bed, but before I go to bed. Usually, we put the boys down for the night (they don't fight it very often, it's great), spend some time together, and then allow ourselves some "quiet time", during which Nathan plays video games and I work on a project.

This weekend, Mom gave me this dress, knowing I'd be able to refashion it. Cute dress, but I'm sure you can easily see the problem.

I think the Ringling Bros left one of their tents behind.

Rip the top half from the bottom half, run a couple of seams up each side to trim off some of the bulk, add a band of thick black elastic to the top, and you have a skirt!

And now, as you can probably tell from the circles under my eyes in this photo, it's time for bed. Night!

A Domestic Day

It's been a day of puttering around the house. Nathan spent the day brewing beer in the garage, so the boys and I did projects. Or, more accurately, the boys got into everything while I split my time between keeping their paws off the hot glue gun cord and getting projects done. AAAAH! Have you ever tried to unload and reload a dishwasher with twin 19 month olds in the same room? Try it some time. I dare ya!

Anyway, with how ridiculous my schedule is, I've been in the habit of printing out a paper monthly calendar and putting it on our fridge. Thing is, we're out of printer paper. And I'm tired of printing out a schedule only to have it change two days later. So I found this tutorial online, and then tweaked it a bit. I also found this one, but hated the idea of using chalk in the kitchen, so I modified it to look like the calendar. One trip to Good Will and a trip to Joann's, a couple of hours with the hot glue gun and stickers (and twins) later, and voila!

I'm pretty darn happy with how they turned out! Love the black and yellow! And if I ever need to change it in order to match a different decor, all I have to do is cut the yellow fabric off the backing and hot glue a new fabric to it.

On a different note, on Saturday I applied for a VERY part time job as a receptionist for Weight Watchers. It's only a couple of hours a week, greeting and weighing in WW members at the weekly meetings. While it's nothing major, it will still be a little extra moolah on the side, plus I can't think of a better way to give back to the organization that has helped me, my mom, and my dad to lose weight. I have a phone interview type thingy with a recruiting assistant on Wednesday morning, so we'll see what happens! I'm pretty excited!

And now it's time to go hang out with the family.

PS. Nathan made a comment that all of my posts on here are about my sewing and craft projects. I'm thinking maybe I should start another blog to just put my projects on, and leave this one for just family stuff. Any thoughts?

Happy Mother's Day!

How was your Mother's Day? Mine was great. I loved pretty much every moment of it, up until my energy failed right around dinner time. Then again, that could have something to do with sitting for hours in the hot sun and having drank nothing but coffee and wine all day. Not smart. But it was SUCH a beautiful day here and my parents were pouring SUCH good wine...

Anyway, the first half of yesterday was spent being lazy. Essentially, I went back to bed after giving the boys breakfast (they kept me up most of the night coughing) and took a blissful nap until around 1 pm. Then as soon as I got up, I was struck with motivation. This doesn't happen very often, let me tell you, so I take full advantage of the situation when it strikes. I started cleaning the downstairs, did three loads of laundry, folded and put away FIVE loads of laundry (I had been procrastinating on the folding/putting away aspect for about a week), vacuumed, swept, washed windows, and ended with finally organizing and putting away the huge amount of Christmas decorations which had been cluttering up the garage and making it very difficult to do laundry. I even swept the whole garage.

All of this was finally completed somewhere around 9 pm, at which point Nathan asked if I would like my Mother's Day presents early. Seriously, who is going to say no to that? He first handed over The Jerk with Steve Martin...if you haven't seen it, hunt it down. Now. Go do it. It's a classic, and they just don't make movies like that anymore.

And then...pretty much the best present ever...a wooden sewing table to replace the saw horses and particle board I was using!!!! So ridiculously excited!!!! It's absolutely the prefect size for the space we have, and it's even a folding table despite being nice wood. Love love love! Needless to say, I spent the rest of the evening watching The Jerk and sewing...after enjoying some wine and popcorn, of course!

This morning Nathan informed me that he should probably stay home from church with the boys since they both have runny noses (wait, when DON'T they?!), so he would drop me off after getting some coffee for us. First, let me say that I love my boys. Dearly. But as I've expressed on here before, they've become pills about holding still and being quiet. Which means we've started showing up late to church so that we don't have wrestle with them through worship. So this morning I got to relax, thoroughly enjoy the worship music, and just soak in Pastor Steve's message. Afterwards, my parents and I met up with my dad's parents at Dobb's Winery in Dundee (about 7 miles out of Mac), where we sat on the patio and - what else? - drank wine! Then it was off to my parent's house to sit on the porch and - what else? - drink wine!

Nathan showed up with the boys after they woke up from their nap and had lunch. It's so much fun watching the boys with my parents, and it was wonderful to be able to let them just run around the yard to their hearts content.

On a different yet related note, both Mom and I were asked by our Weight Watchers leader to be part of the group to share weight loss success stories at a meet & greet event they're having on the 22nd. Wow, how flattering! Along with telling our stories, she asked that we bring before and after photos; so Mom and I searched through photos dating back to just before we started WW in August. Here's mine.

SHUDDER!

To celebrate how far we've come, we had a mini mini photo shoot for our 'after' photos. Here's those photos, along with a few others from the rest of the afternoon. But before I leave you with those, I have one more thing to say.

If you haven't seen it, watch the latest Saturday Night Live with Betty White (short gal from Golden Girls) on Hulu.com. I've been cracking up pretty much non-stop.

And now, photos! (For a point of reference, Asher is in the blue shorts, Levi in the orange.)

GOOOOO BLAZERS!

Ok, so the Portland Trail Blazers haven't exactly been playing up to par for this round of the playoffs (let's face it, three out of five games have been pretty painful)...but the good news is that we went to the one home game that they actually won! And it was an awesome game!

Backing up a moment...

I was at work last Tuesday when I got a text from Nathan asking if we would want to go to game 4 of the Blazers vs Suns at the Rose Garden on Saturday. Evidently a couple that is a part of our small group had accidentally bought four tickets instead of two, and were trying to get rid of them...Nathan just happened to see Matt's Facebook status just minutes after he posted it and immediately said something along the lines of, "I'm pretty sure we'll want them, but let me ask my wife!"

Let me tell ya, it was a rough week at work last week, so having the prospect of a fun outing with just my hubby (Nathan's mom offered to watch the boys for us) was the only thing that really got me through. The rest of the week seemed to draaaaag, but finally Saturday arrived. Nathan and I were upstairs getting ready when I heard crinkling of plastic downstairs. I ran downstairs to see this...

That's a full box of Cheerios all over the floor. Evidently the boys are now able to grab things off of the window sill where we WERE keeping the Cheerios box. It's moments like these where you have two options: a) freak out over the mess, scold the children, and generally get your dander up or b) laugh your butt off, grab the camera, and snap some photos before cleaning up the mess. We chose option B, obviously.

Finally we got out of the house, dropped the boys off at Grandma's, made a quick stop at Fred Meyer to pick up some Blazer apparel, and made our way into Portland.

The game was SO MUCH FUN. I think the average score difference was about 3 points, and I was either on the edge of my seat or on my feet the whole time. Oh, and the best part...we won! I am a big fan of watching sporting events in person rather than on tv, and whooboy do the Blazers have some awesome fans!

Getting food.

Warming up...Blazers on the far court, Suns (boooo!) on the closer half. If you look close, you can see Nash's greasy hair to the right of the basket.

Blazers WIN!!!! 96 to 87!

Fun was had by all!

After the game we joined Matt and Amanda at Deschutes Brewery in downtown Portland for an early dinner then headed home. All in all, it was a great day.

What I Learned About Patterns

Up until now, my experience with sewing patterns has been limited to the simple purse patterns I've found online. After making SO MANY PURSES (which I still love doing), I needed a bit of a break...a change...a challenge. But not too much of a challenge.

Last Saturday, I sent Nathan to his best friend's house in Hillsboro for the night, and my parents took the boys for the day. Which meant I got to spend as long as I wanted at my current favorite place on earth...Joann Fabric. On a side note, have you ever smelled the fabric from Joann's? It smells wonderful. Anyway, I spent a good hour just leisurely wandering through the different fabrics, changing my mind, gathering supplies...and picking out a pattern for a dress. I've loved wearing dresses since losing all this weight, and at my last Weight Watchers meeting I saw one of our leaders wearing the cutest dress ever. So I found a pattern very similar, scooped up some Springy fabric that had caught my eye a couple weeks earlier, and headed home.

I thought I would be able to complete the dress before going to pick up the boys four hours later....WHOOO BOY was I wrong!

Here's what I learned:

• Pattern measurements aren't truly accurate...they run big...especially if you're only 5 feet tall.
• Patterns have a bunch of symbols that take deciphering. It's a pain in the butt.
• Bodices are a pain in the butt.
• Concerning the above-mentioned item: if you get half way done with the article of clothing, only to discover that you made it too big, you have to take it COMPLETELY apart in order to cut it down to size and then sew it all back together.
• Sewing clothes takes a lot of patience...something I do not possess in large quantities.

And finally...

• There's nothing quite as satisfying as completing such a project, putting it on, zipping it up, and having it fit perfectly. To look at it and say, "I made that. 100% from scratch. Cool".

There's the finished product.

I think I'm going to make a clutch to match...I'm just trying to decide whether to make it black with a accent flower out of the, er, flowered fabric, or flowered with a black accent flower. Did you follow that? 'Cause that was a whole lot of "flower".

In other news...we will possibly be facing some major changes in our lives, but I can't really talk about it on here yet. (No, I'm not pregnant.) But I promise I will share as soon as I can. The boys are growing in leaps and bounds; they're running, babbling like crazy, and climbing on EVERYTHING. The other day they gave each other real kiss for the first time...just about melted my heart.

I have to admit, having 18 month old twins has its share of frustrations. First of all, it is pretty much impossible to keep them happy and quiet during worship time at church. Monkey-see-monkey-do is the main culprit, since as soon as one sees the other one moving around, he wants to be moving around too. They are in such constant motion that holding still for longer than about 30 seconds is pure torture. And let me tell ya, these kiddos are pretty vocal about their displeasure...and since church is in a big open ballroom, there's really no where to execute the ever-important 'timeout'. Thankfully, our church has an amazing nursery where the boys get to play with all the other kiddos under 2 years old during the sermon. Praise God! Otherwise, church would not be an option for the next year or so.

The boys have also decided that their nap time take place starting at around 11 am and going until around 2 pm. We're down to one nap per day. So going out to lunch after church is also currently out of the question since church gets out around noon. I tried taking the boys to McMenamin's Rooftop bar (it's on the roof of Hotel Oregon and is one of the best places to eat outside during the summer) with my parents and grandparents. Of course, it was the day it got up above 70 degrees out. The boys were tired, hot, squinting because of how bright it was...all a wonderful combination for tempter tantrums. My parents and I ended up whisking the boys back to the car, I drove them home, put them down for naps, and got my lunch about half an hour later when my parents delivered it.

So here's our list of things to avoid taking the boys to for the foreseeable future:

• Fundraising banquets where teenagers are giving their testimonies...and where your children are the only children under high school age.
• Anywhere that keeps them away from their cribs during nap time...unless it is in the car, where they sleep wonderfully.
• Basically anywhere that requires them to be quiet and contained for long periods of time.

There's really it at this point, but I'm sure the list will grow. And before you judge and say that we need to be teaching our boys to be quiet and respectful, consider that we are dealing with twins...twin BOYS no less. Before you tell us we should be exposing our boys to these situations, pop out a set of twins yourself, wait 18 months, then try taking them into these situations. I wish you the best of luck. We'll get there. But I also value my sanity, and some things just aren't worth the grey hairs.

Plus, I'd rather enjoy the time I have with our boys by keeping them as happy as possible.

Asher with the bucket hat.

Levi with the bucket hat.

Asher, Nathan, and Levi. I love my boys!

One last silly thing to share before I wrap up this ridiculously long post. The other night, I was going through my closet and decided it would be fun to try on my wedding dress. The last time I tried it on was right after I found out I was pregnant with the boys and was almost 20 lbs heavier. I actually had to pin the darn thing on to keep it from falling off of me! I have to admit, I wish I looked like this on my wedding day.

And with that, I'm off to bed. I ran just over a mile in 10 minutes tonight, which kicked my butt but felt really good. I then walked three minutes and then ran another mile in 10 minutes. Tomorrow morning, I plan to do it all again before tackling 2.25 miles in 25 minutes on Friday. So, yeah...bed is calling my name, loud and clear. Night all!