Weekends Are Good For

Shavy Jones shaved ice: our favorite hang out in the neighborhood.  A bonus that one of my friends owns it so we like to support them.






Building Stuff: Marc built this picnic table for us since our last one, a glass topped one, shattered over the winter.  He used plans from the awesome website Knock Off Wood.  It is sanded and the edges are routed, but it still needs to be finished (painted/stained/water-sealed).  Be careful when you visit that website, she's got tons of awesome plans for cool furniture.  I've got my eye on the Farmhouse bed for Marc to make next.  Like he needs something else to do in his "spare time".  :]

Water Balloons:  self explanatory.

Riding the train at the zoo:  more to come about this.

Discovering cool new parks with friends:  Conservation Water Park is an awesome place to go to hang out and dig in the sand and run on the paths and trails.  It's like the Thanksgiving Point gardens - only free and less crowded!

And doing a little sewing: Made this new camera strap for my camera. So quick and fun and easy to make. Who else wants one?

Happy Father's Day

to the Daddy in our house that ...

makes us laugh.

cooks us good food.

works hard for us.

takes us fun places. 

plays marbles with us.

watches movies with us.

is very smart.

likes gingersnaps.

love, Mason & Grahm

Weekends Are Good For

Weekends are good for:

Trips to Costco (wearing Bees hats is mandatory):

Riding in the bike trailer (I can envision Grahm as a teenager giving me that same "come on, Mom!" look):

Building forts in the backyard with a string tied between two trees and a bunch of blankets:

Telling your brother the rules of the fort (no more eating crayons!):

Reading in your fort:

Eating bark:

Scootering:

Having to get corralled in your high chair, and not being happy about it,

Because you won't stop crawling under the desk and unplugging random cords.

Then proceeding to sit in your highchair, plotting your revenge,

and give everyone who will listen (and even those that won't) a piece of your mind.

Then get really upset when you're left alone.

Also more being in your fort.

Grahm at 9.5 months

SOMEBODY is pretty proud of himself that he's pulling up on anything and everything already. I'm telling you - this 2nd child is a whole 'nother SPECIES of kid than Mason was. Mason was completely content to s.i.t. and didn't crawl until 11.5 months or walk until 15 months.

Grahm is 9.5 months and has been crawling and scooting around already for 2 months, and now he's well on his way to walking. He'll be walking by his 1st birthday in August for sure. He's also much more of a cuddler than Mason ever was, which is nice.

He's got 6 teeth, weighs around 26 pounds (a chunk but not as much as his brother was) says "da-da-da" and "may-may-may" (Mason). Loves green peas the best. Claps his hands "horray!" and jumps up and down in his crib. He wants my phone more than anything and always lunges at me when I'm taking his picture resulting in lots of pictures like this:

Mason has never had so much as a skinned knee and Grahm, let's just say because of Grahm I have the pediatrician on speed dial and know the fastest routes to the ER. I just know he's going to be my first broken arm or stitches experience. He already got this nasty cut on his nose by managing to pull the bottom of the front door across his face (?!!).

Such a sweet, loving, happy little boy, my Grahmmy.

Marc's Birthday and Red Rock

A few weeks ago it was Marc's birthday ... we did all the things Marc likes to do ... spent the afternoon at a Bees game ... took a drive up Emigration canyon  ... and ate dinner downtown at Red Rock Brewery.

In keeping with tradition of baking him some sort of cake/dessert made with peanut butter (his favorite) for his birthday I made him some peanut butter/graham cracker/covered in chocolate ganache bars that were absolutely amazing .... but failed to take a picture of them.  Just trust me, they were good.

One of the buildings on the U of U campus.  A cool old building - but not one that Marc does research in.  (He's getting his PhD in Bioinformatics).

We ate dinner at one of Marc's favorite restaurants: Red Rock Brewing Company. We got an appetizer of flatbread with roasted garlic, Gorgonzola cheese, kosher salt and fresh sage and practically had to order another one because Grahm was scarfing down the flatbread. He LOVED it.

I got the Barbecue Pork Tenderloin Sandwich – Topped with coleslaw & barbecue sauce in a wood-fired pita pocket - which was one of the most amazing sandwich's I have ever eaten. I crave it now.

Silly Mason was feeling pretty adventurous and got the flatbread cheese pizza ... again it was soooo good. Just everything we've ever eaten there is delicious.

Mase loves playing with the ShakeIt Photo app on my phone and he took these 2 pictures that turned out looking pretty cool. (Our silverware and the wood-fire grill)

They have this awesome reddish orange wall outside that is great for taking pictures - plus the sun was just setting and the light was gorgeous. I love all of these pictures I got of my boys ...

Mason looks so small next to this giant wall.

The sun setting behind their cool building.

And my boys. I love that I'm the only girl in a family of all boys!

We then stopped for ice cream on the way home and enjoyed the warm summer night.  Happy Birthday, Marc!

Kelsi's lemon + lime theme bridal shower

Update:  I decided to offer a few free downloads of the invitation, water bottle labels, and sugar scrub jar labels I made for the party.  To learn more and download them, visit this post.

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My family has always been very close, and when my cousins son Collin announced he was getting married, I immedietly knew I wanted to throw a bridal shower for his fiancé. In some families your soon to be 2nd cousin in law is someone that you barely even know, let alone want to host a shower for at your home, but not in our family. I adore Kelsi and couldn't wait to have a shower for her. Plus - party to plan!!! Here's all the details and a ton of pictures:

I started with the invitation. Prior to making this I had no idea of a theme, what we wanted the shower to be about, or color palette. I found the yellow background first and loved the pattern. I created the invite in photoshop and just randomly paired the kelly green with it (as most of you know green is my favorite, and it just looked spring-y to me with the yellow.) My mom (who helped me host the shower) and I randomly decided to call it a "culinary shower" so we could do the recipe card thing for Kelsi. More on that later.

Fonts used on invite: BP Script and Quicksand. Both of them modern and fresh and clean.

Decorations came next. I had recently seen the awesome vellum mobiles that Jordan had made and posted about on Oh, Happy Day. I looked for vellum a few places but it was not cost-effective in our local stores and I didn't have time to order it online at this point. I decided to go with 12x12 sheets of cardstock from the scrapbook section at Hobby Lobby. We used 6 shades of green and yellow to match our invites and my mom used her paper cutter to cut them in 1 inch strips. It ended up working great!

My sweet cousin Valerie came over one afternoon to help me sew them all together. It was an easy project but very helpful to have another person to hand me the paper strips so I didn't have to move my hands from the sewing machine. That made it go really fast. I put a piece of Japanese masking tape on my sewing machine as a guide to where I should lay the strip to have it sew right down the middle, and then sewed a continuous strand, leaving about 1/8th to a 1/4 inch between each strip. We had accidentally made two really long ones, too long to go over the table, so we hung them up in my front entryway where people would see them as soon as they walked in, to get a feel for the party. The other 6 we made went over the table.

For the other decorations we just kept buying things in either yellow or green - because we knew that they'd all match each other well enough. The cute striped square plates are from IKEA. Yellow forks and knives from the dollar store. Green napkins from the party store. I bought the lemonheads in the awesome bulk section of Winco. The white hydrangeas are from my moms back yard. All the serving dishes and platters are mine (yeah, I apparently have an abundance of yellow and green) except for the white square ones which were borrowed from my friend.

I also just bought a ton of lemons and limes in bulk from both the grocery store and Costco. I had regular limes, tiny key limes, regular lemons, and some super huge lemons on steroids that Costco had. I knew I'd be using them for both decoration and cooking. I put most of them in clear vases for the table and then you can see the huge lemons on some of the serving plates, and also used to hold down the plates and napkins from blowing away in the breeze (my sliding glass door to the backyard is right next to the table.)

I had seen and bought this super cute lemon fabric with the idea of making a table runner to go underneath the serving dishes on the table. I could never decide on how to make it (plain, pieced, quilted, etc) and once I got the table set I thought a table runner underneath would just be too cluttery. So I made this bunting instead. I used the yellow fabric to make a long binding strip and then freehanded a triangle pattern out of cardboard for the flags. I traced the triangle template onto stacks of fabric and then cut them out with my pinking shears so I didn't have to finish the edges and they wouldn't fray.

I cut out 8 flags from the yellow and 8 flags from the lemons and then just sandwiched them between the binding strip as I fed it through the sewing machine to sew the binding closed. I left a trail of about 20" of binding on both sides in case I ever want to tie it up somewhere (in the picture it's just pinned up to my mantle). It was very quick and easy to make, I did it in about 20 minutes.

The other thing Valerie and I made together was the homemade sugar hand scrub to pass out as favors. We bought the 4 oz jelly jars and I designed labels to fit on the top of them. I printed them 12 to a page on sticker paper and we cut them out in circles. For the sugar scrub we made a huge bowl of it by starting with 8 cups of white sugar and then adding olive oil to the sugar and mixing with a whisk until we had a gritty, but still slightly goopy, texture. We added the zest and juice of about 3 fresh lemons, and then also added a few squirts of lemon juice from the fridge. I filled the jelly jars and then shredded more zest on top .... it ended up taking a lot of lemon scent to cover up the distinct olive oil smell. There's a bunch of tutorials online (Google: sugar hand scrub tutorial) but we just kind of winged it because we wanted it to be lemon-y and also we couldn't find any recipes in the amounts we needed. Read: a lot!

The one thing we learned was to NOT use a mixture of white and brown sugar for the sugar scrub. Just something about the brown sugar wasn't soaking up the olive oil creating a nasty, congealed mess. Plus it was a gross brownish gray color and not the pretty light yellow that worked better with our theme. :)

Another simple thing I did was make custom water bottle labels. Using the same pattern and fonts from the invite and sugar scrub labels, I figured out how many I could fit onto an 8.5x11 piece of paper and created them again in Photoshop. They were about 2 inches tall and the width of the paper. I printed them on regular printer paper and then cut them out using a paper cutter. I had Mason pull off the labels on the bottles - he was sooo excited to have a "job" to help get ready for the party. I attached them by taking a piece of packing tape a little longer than the label and first sticking the label to the tape, then centering the label on the bottle and wrapping it around, sticking the tape down in the process.

They were super simple, cheap and quick to make, and everyone loved them. I definitely will always be making custom water bottle labels for any future party. Little work for a lot of impact! We also had lemonade to serve.

Next up: food! We were having the shower later in the evening so we didn't have a need to serve anything of too much substance. Of course I was going to continue the lemon + lime theme into the food so that made it easy to decide on the menu. I made lemon bars, lemon poppyseed muffins and lime cheesecake. My mom made the yummy lemon bundt cake and then bought a lemon meringue and key lime pie to round out the food.

I recruited my friend and neighbor Annie to make a few things for me in exchange for some handmade throw pillows so I'd have a few less things to bake the day of. I have had her baked goods many times and she always makes delicious things, but she really went over the top with the things for the shower. She made tart lemon and key lime cupcakes and also delicious cookie dough bites dipped in melted green and yellow chocolate. Everything was amazing.

She dropped things off the morning of the shower and it was all I could do to keep Mason away from the cupcakes all day - he was drooling over them when they were on the table and then trying to scale to the top of the pantry shelves when I put them up. The little discs on top of the cupcakes are the chocolate melty things you can buy in the baking supply section of most craft stores.

On the invitations we had asked everyone to bring a family recipe to share with Kelsi. I had wanted to design and print up recipe cards that matched our invitations, but eventually just ran out of time. Lucky for me Melissa from the blog ISLY had done the work on these darling cards that perfectly matched our theme, so I just printed them out on cardstock. All the guests had fun filling out favorite family recipes to share with Kelsi and she ended up with a great collection. (Including the one card from some mystery person that said: pizzahut.com - they deliver!)

Thanks for letting me snag your pictures of your cards, Melissa. Apparently I was having too much fun at the party to remember to snap a pic of the ones I made! :)

The shower turned out to be a great success and really fun time - everyone was impressed by all the little details - some of which were just the small things (uniting everything with a color theme and making custom touches). I was going for a fresh, spring-y, clean look that wasn't too cluttery or overdone.  A lot of people will call that too simple but that's exactly what my decorating style is.  Can't wait for the wedding later this month!

More pictures of the shower in my Flickr set here.

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Update:  I decided to offer a few free downloads of the invitation, water bottle labels, and sugar scrub jar labels I made for the party.  To learn more and download them, visit this post.