Ruler of the Elves

Life has been pretty interesting the past couple of weeks. You know that saying “Time flies when you are having fun,” well what they meant was time flies when you are extremely busy. Over the past 2 weeks, we have…

-Finished spring quarter of school. Finals are over and I’m off for the summer, so I look forward to spending time with the fam and tackling all of those projects I’ve been putting off. There are a lot!

-Traveled by car for 14 plus hours; half of that with a 4 month old, who was an excellent passenger.

– Prepared for a wedding. My cousin, Brittany, had asked my sister and I to work on her wedding decor and of course with my party planning love and inability to only take on what I can comfortably handle, I happily sad YES! This included preparing the entire reception decor, designing invitations and save the dates, miscellaneous other little design projects and of course providing moral support. More details on the wedding later.

– Cried. Last week, we attended a funeral for my grandfather who was 92. He passed away right before we got to our destination, but we had all known that this was coming for awhile and I think that made it slightly more easy to deal with. He had a good life and was loved by many.

-Attended a wedding. After dealing with sadness for a couple of days, it was time to get into happy party mode. Both Pinky & I were in the wedding party and Chris played videographer for the evening. After all of that decorating, which looked pretty freakin’ awesome if I do say so myself, we all lived it up on the dance floor and celebrated that time we had together with the people we love.

-Dealt with mosquito bites. Like the one featured here in the middle of Pinky’s forehead.

-Attended Tribal Bible School. At least Pinky did.

-Sorted through memories. With the funeral stuff, we compiled a huge assortment of photos and talked about the past. I happened upon this gem of myself from back in the day.

My Dad had also corralled all of my sister’s and my childhood toys, art projects and random belongings in his garage and was pretty eager to pass it all on to us. However, with a small SUV and an even smaller memory, we only ended up taking a train set, some Barbies, two small chairs, a couple of dolls and a box of cards and projects from when I was little. The rest will be passed on.

-Visited friends. I carved out a couple of days to hang out with my best friends and had an amazing time.

-Painted my grandmother’s bathroom. Lavender. It’s no secret that I have an affinity for paint.

-Visited family and spent extra time with Grandma. I think Grandma is feeling especially lonely these days, so I thought it would be good to hang out a bit while we are here. Since the days have been dry and sunny, we played around in the yard a bit.

-Blew bubbles. Some from gum…

And some in the bathtub.

Way back when, you may remember me mentioning that we were giving Pinky’s bedroom a much needed makeover. Slowly, but surely, we are getting things accomplished and this past week, we finally got some cheapo art work made and hung. The mood board that we originally did featured 3 framed pieces: an alphabet print, a silhouette, and the word love.

I have a ridiculous number of home interior photos saved on my computer for inspiration. We are talking more than several hundred photos organized by room in folders in a folder on my desktop. (I’ve even had to move some to my external hard drive to free up some room!) Anyway, several months before we moved, Pinky and I were perusing through the photos in the kids’ room folder and she pointed out that she really liked the pieces in the following photo…

This photo is not mine. I’m not sure whose it is, but if you happen to come across the owner, please let me know so I can give credit where credit is due! Thanks.

Look familiar? Well, being the total DIY girl that I am, I whipped up some of my own in Photoshop. They aren’t exactly the same, because we obviously have a different color scheme going on and along the way I decided I also wanted to incorporate an owl for the O in LOVE. (That change happened a few weeks ago.) However, the alphabet and love prints are pretty much knock offs of those. And the silhouette? It’s just a super easy project that I had wanted to do for awhile and I thought that it might be cute to incorporate it into Pinky’s space.

The reason I called this project cheapo was because we used stuff we already had for the whole sha-bang! The frames, originally from Wal-Mart, were already ours and had been transformed from brown to black a couple of years ago. I dug them out of one of our storage boxes and slapped on a quick coat of white paint to make them pop against the darker gray wall. There’s nothing like a fresh coat of paint to give something unused a new life! The prints themselves were tremendously easy too. I used my own home printer and regular old cardstock we had lying around. We love the end results and Pinky is thrilled to finally have something pretty on her walls.

So, what do you think? Did we pull of the DIY artwork or should we have gone with something already made? What kind of homemade art do you have around your home, if any? Spill the beans!

Raise your hand if you hate tests? Wow, it’s good to know I’m not alone. Ok, I just had to get that off of my chest. Phew.

Besides studying, we got to spend some time outside helping Pinky conquer the mighty world of bike riding this past weekend. I know that there are probably plenty of other 5 year olds who are way ahead of the class when it comes to the bicycle, but our little Pinky is extremely cautious and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She definitely likes to do things in her own time, so after several months of easing herself into the idea of navigating a bicycle without the trusty help the 2 extra side wheels, she finally decided it was time to go for it. In less than a few minutes she went from barely riding 3 inches to doing laps around the block with her dad. Good bye training wheels! I was even able to capture some of her antics on video and compiled a little montage of her newly found techniques.

I Love To Ride My Bicycle from Erin on Vimeo.

Weekends here are pretty much awesome!

I hope that all of the Moms out there had a wonderful Mother’s Day! Mine turned out perfect, but more on that in a minute.

On Saturday evening, we had quite a scare. Piper, our 7 year old golden, had a crazy seizure and we were all very worried. She would lean to her left side and couldn’t walk straight, then all of the sudden, she flipped back and to the side, then started convulsing. I frantically called around to my friends and neighbors to see if anyone had a number for a local emergency vet, while Chris attempted to keep Pinky and Maverick back so that no one would get hurt. Unfortunately, the closest vet ended up being about 40 minutes away. So, Chris carried Piper out to the car and we piled in and attempted to rush to the vet. Rushing in the city is quite a complicated thing to do. Especially when everyone here considers themselves King of the Road, including my husband.

When we got to the vet, we brought her inside and sat her down, only for her to act like the perfectly normal, happy puppy that she is. It was literally a 180 from when we left the house and I’m sure that the receptionist there thought we were crazy story tellers. Piper was checked out and after some blood work, we were sent on our merry little way with really no explanations. Her blood work came back and showed nothing strange or out of the ordinary, so we are still at a loss and just hoping that this was a one-time-freak-occurrence.

We woke up Sunday morning to 2 chipper pups, so after some homemade brunch, thanks to Pinky and Chris, we all headed down to the beach for some fun.

Here is a mini recap of the rest of my wonderful day…

Trying to catch hermit crabs in tide pools. Spying on boats in the water.

Walking with the dogs. Relaxing with my family.

Dinner with friends. Ice cream. Spending time with my favorite people. And this super yummy Cinnamon Dolce Latte.

I really could not have asked for a much better day!