The party is over....

Oh no!  She's getting so big!!!

Well, this is my last weekend before going back to work.  I've neglected the blog this summer.  No excuses, but we have been so busy!  This was a great summer and we did so many fun things.  Vivi is at a really fun age that definitely keeps me on my toes.  Never a dull moment.

I spent the entire summer really making sure Vivi was potty trained.  Then we went on a one week vacation to Tennessee and all of our hard work flew out the window.  That's fun, let me tell you.  Vivi doesn't have accidents, she just doesn't go.  I even had to call the doctor because I was so worried.  You know what the term is?  "Toilet Training Resistant".  Just great.   So now I'm supposed to ignore it and hope that she'll figure it out in the next month.  Going back to her babysitter's house next week will be the best thing for her.  For years I struggled with sending her to daycare, but I have realized that it is actually good for her.  She desperately needs to play with some friends and learn how to play by herself sometimes instead of always with me!  We have become so close this summer, but it's time for her to have some space from me for her own good.

Maybe another reason that I'm not so worried about sending her to daycare this year is because I'm actually super excited about my new job this school year.  Plus, I'll have Friday's off!! YIPEE!  So that means I can still have a day alone with Vivi to do some fun stuff like the zoo or library.  I feel so much relief.  It's a great feeling.

This Girl's Life

This girl has the life.  Two years old and living it up in Tulsa.  We're only two weeks into summer vacation and we have been BUSY!  One nice thing about being a working mom/teacher is that we can do all of this fun stuff in the summer.

Vivi at yoga at Utica Square!

Story time at Pottery Barn Kids!

A stroll through the zoo with Josie!

Tulsa Children's Museum

Going through the tape tunnel with Grandma at the children's museum.

Vivi's first ballet class....she was super excited about the big tiara on the wall!

Cold drinks on the patio at the river with Daddy!

Music in the park with friends!

Must be nice to be Vivi! ;)

Father's Day Project

5x7 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.

Working on a few little Father's Day projects....I just love this picture of Vivi and Frank.

I can safely post this now because I know Frank doesn't read my blog. ;)

Don't forget that Father's Day is in 8 days!  I might actually get my stuff to where it needs to go on time this year.  Maybe.

Happy Summer!

So, today was my first official day of summer vacation.  I guess that means I can blog again.  I've been so neglectful of this little blog of mine, but life got in the way.  Thank goodness school is out!  I needed a break!  We took our new wagon (scored that for $25 on Craigslist...regularly $80!) to check out the neighborhood pool today.  It was overcast and windy, but we still enjoyed it.  I can see us really taking part in the neighborhood amenities this summer for sure.

I have a lot to write about and tons of pictures to put on this, but this is it for now.  More to come later!

Spring Cleaning

Yuck....doesn't this look just dreadful?!  I've had that table and chairs set for years and just stuck it out on our front porch with our dead plants when we moved.  It stayed like this for months.  Priorities.

Here's a close up of the table and dead plants in case you wanted a better look. ;)

Ta Da!  It's amazing what a little sanding, staining, and a trip to Target can do!

I sanded and stained that little bistro set in a total of one hour.  Not to bad, if I do say so myself!  I planted some flowers today, pulled out all the dead stuff in the beds, and bought some outdoor pillows....much better.  Now we're not an embarrassment to the neighborhood.

Here's our little backyard table.  Our backyard needs some serious attention.

Here's my temporary herb garden until we can get our back yard under control.  It's not bad, it's just so BORING.  It's a tiny patio and a backyard full of sod.  I can't even bear to take a picture of it for the blog....so boring.  But....a blank slate can be fun!

Happy St. Patty's Day

It's spring break around these parts.  St. Patrick's Day kicked off my week off.  We went to Mollie's Pub again for the 4th year in a row.  Love that place.  It's a pub in our friend's backyard.  No joke.  Like a real pub.  It's pretty awesome.  Everyone that goes there wants one in their backyard too.  Here's our most recent family portrait.  We're going to have some Easter pictures taken, but after Easter so Vivi will have her wrist brace off.  It's time for an official family picture.  I have 20000 pictures of Vivi and no one else.  It's like Frank and I don't exist when you look through my photos.

For the party I made thin mint truffles.  They were intense!  Vivi now likes to pull up the step stool and "help" me with everything I'm doing in the kitchen.  Such a little helper.

If you like Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, then you'll love these.  You take two boxes of Thin Mints and crush them up in a big ziploc with a meat tenderizer/pounder.  Then you add a block of cream cheese.  Yes, cream cheese does make everything better, thank you very much.  You mix it all together until it forms a sort of dough, then you roll them into balls.  I melted white chocolate and regular chocolate almond bark according to the package directions.  You just roll the "truffles" into the melted chocolate and place on wax paper.  I sprinkled some green sprinkles on top just for kicks.   That's all you gotta do!  (Yes, I just had to say that!)

Here's Vivi at the party.  She had a blast.  She danced to celtic music, ate, socialized, snacked at the bar....she's a party animal.  Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The Cloffice

Slowly, but surely, the house is coming along.  This is my laundry room that I recently discovered has a little bit of extra space.  It's amazing what you find when you finally clear some of the moving clutter out!  I decided to make a "cloffice."  A friend of mine termed that word and I love it.

Cloffice: (claw-fiss) noun - making a personal space just for you out of a closet in your home.

 (in my case, a laundry room)

So, it's no secret that I like to get all crafty sometimes.  I had multiple plastic storage containers in my garage filled with random craft project supplies.  I decided to actually go through them and organize them.  I bought some cute baskets at Michael's and some little tags....I got all crafty on my craft supplies.  I lined these up on the top shelf in the laundry room.

I got that adorable rug at OneKingsLane.com for only $149.  I thought that was a pretty good deal for a 2.5 x 8 foot rug.  I took our old drafting table and got some cute fabric to dress it up under the glass top.  Add a little bulletin board from Marshall's and viola....you get a cloffice.

My very own space to pay bills, blog, craft....ahhhh...

Coming soon: pictures of the new office!  The guitars are on the wall and it's just about finished!

The Entryway

The entry before I got my hands on it....

Not bad, but a little boring....

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it.  I was looking into benches and entryway tables, etc.  I stumbled across this cute little entryway table at Marshall's for only about $50.  I got the lamp there too.  It's a Valerie Bertinelli lamp...who knew she made lamps now.  Weird, but whatever, it's a cute lamp.

I had the mirror from our old house.  It works perfect here.

Ta da!

The Master

This is what the master bedroom looked like when we bought the house.....

Then, we had it painted gray.   Don't get me wrong, I love a pop of color, but not lime green!  We bought a new king size bed as our Christmas present and laughed and laughed at how big it looked in the room!  See our old nightstands?  They look like miniature night stands next to that massive bed! :)

And here it is finished!  The curtains are from West Elm and they were my inspiration/starting point for the whole room.  They are ivory with gray swirls on them and that is how I decided to use ivory, cream, grey, and metallics as an accent.  

I already had the Pottery Barn gallery shelves from our previous house and they just seemed to work well with our wedding pictures on that large wall.  

The bedding is a silk quilt from Pottery Barn in ivory.  The grey throw blanket is also from Pottery Barn and it is so soft and cuddly!  I still need to buy the shams that go with the quilt.  I didn't think we needed them and was going to save another $120, but then I got home and realized we probably do need them.  I'm waiting for them to go on sale because $120 just seems a little bit ridiculous to spend on two pillow covers.  Although I've already spent so much it shouldn't matter at this point, but it does.  The pillows are all from Target!  Nate Burkus has a new line of linens at Target and I love it.  

We totally scored with the nightstands.  I found a guy that custom built them for us on Craigslist.  He only charged $175 for both!  They are tall (31 inches!) and fit our ridiculous bed.  They have a gray wash/stain on the bottom part and a dark espresso stain on the top to match our bed perfectly.  I hate a matchy/matchy room where you buy the bed, the dresser, the night stands, the mirror, etc.  This was a solution.  They look great with the bed but are quite different.  I bought the mercury glass knobs at Anthropolgie and added them to the drawer.  

And this is Vivi helping Frank put up the curtains.  She's pretending to be asleep. ;)  Gotta love 2 year olds!

Vivi's Room

Vivi's room was the first finished room in the house and somehow I'm just now blogging about it.  Frank's laptop died and he's been using mine for work....hence the few and far between blog posts.  I decided to take a few pics of her room and she decided to be the model.  We used a more mellow kind of aqua for her new room than the other house.  It's called Stratton Blue by Benjamin Moore and I absolutely love it.  I think it will be a color she can grow into.

Vivi has a large wall next to the window that I wasn't sure what to do with.   We have a lot of little art/wall pieces and it just wouldn't work on that big wall so I decided to do a sort of gallery wall with her stuff.  I think it kind of goes with the eclectic style in her room.

Here are her shelves filled with little girl chotsky's (is that how you spell it?).

Her crib is in the opposite corner.  We had a hard time placing the furniture in this room and put it every possible way before deciding on this.  I picked this room for Vivi because it has a huge double door closet, but in turn that double door closet made the furniture placement tricky.

Her little coat hanger.  I found this at Anthropologie years ago and used it in my house for years before Vivi was even in the picture.  It somehow is perfect in her room.

Here's Vivi sitting on her poof that I found at a garage sale for $7.  Serena and Lily has similar poofs for WAY more than $7.  I love a good design bargain!

Best. Dinner. Ever.

I highly recommend you make this dinner.  Every single part of it.  Start to finish.  The flavors of each individual dish were perfectly matched with each other.  This was our New Year's Eve dinner.  What a way to end 2012.  So, on our menu was filet mignon, creamy onion blue cheese steak sauce, mashed potatoes, Caesar salad, and homemade bread.

Let's start with the steaks.  This was a Barefoot Contessa recipe using a cast iron skillet.  There were 17 reviews for this recipe.  I read them all.  So many of these reviewers said they'll never grill a steak again.   Searing it in the skillet to form a crust, then putting in the oven for just a few minutes was amazing.  Make a filet like this sometime.  I beg you!  Here's the recipe:

Barefoot Contessa's Steakhouse Steaks

Now the sauce.  I watched the Pioneer Woman make this steak sauce once on her show and I haven't truly forgotten it since.  I'm not even a huge blue cheese fan, but you HAVE to make this sauce sometime.  It was so delicious and a perfect addition to the steak or the potatoes.  Here's the recipe:

Pioneer Woman's Onion Blue Cheese Sauce

Mashed potatoes.  A favorite of mine.  These weren't just any potatoes.  This was also curtesy of the Pioneer Woman.  Only she can add butter and cream cheese in her mashed potatoes.  They were amazing.  I actually only used one stick of butter instead of 1 1/2 to 2, as the recipe suggests.  Believe me, these were decadent.  Here's the recipe:

Pioneer Woman's Creamy Mashed Potatoes

The bread has quickly become a favorite recipe of mine since the development of Pinterest.  I have probably made this bread 10 times so far.  It is SOOOOOO easy.  I can't stress that enough.  And...I bet you probably have the ingredients already in your pantry.  The only catch is that you have to have a Le Crueset cast iron dutch oven.  Well, I suppose it doesn't have to be Le Crueset.  It does have to be cast iron though.  When you take the cover off your pot 30 minutes into the process, you will not believe your eyes.  Can bread be beautiful?  I think so!  Here's the recipe:

Crusty Bread

And finally the Caesar Salad.  This was my brother's recipe.  I always call it "Bryan's Caesar Salad recipe.  You know, the one with the hard boiled egg in it?"  Turns out, he says, it's really Fannie Farmer's recipe.  I can't find the recipe anywhere online.  So here it is:

1 hard boiled egg
2-3 cloves of garlic
1/4 c. olive oil
juice from a lemon
couple squirts of Worcestershire sauce
salt/pepper

Put all ingredients in a blender and viola!  Just add romaine, croutons, and shaved parmesan.


Okay.  This post was dedicated to all the other foodies out there.  If you're not one, I apologize.  You probably didn't read past the first sentence.   No hard feelings.