My Own Adventures in Babysitting

I got a chance to spend the day with our adorable niece, Cailyn, yesterday. Here's a picture story of our day together:

Trying to get her to eat some lunch before I got her high chair out. She kept touching it to her tongue and going "EEW!" Such a silly girl.

The mess I got to clean up today. This was only at our "half-way" point of the day too. Clearly Lion King didn't distract her as well as I had planned.

The pretty drawing she did for me with some markers. I wrote her name for her.

I never stopped following her when she had this blue juice and was on the carpet.

Whenever Cailyn sees something shiny she always says "oh pretty!" but when she had this she would NOT let me take it from her. It was her ultimate "pretty" and here she is showing it to me.

She LOVES Elmo and so I decided to distract her with Netflix :)

I was trying to get her to sleep since she seemed tired, but all I got was a weird game that mixed peek-a-boo and "lets push our face against the mesh to make funny faces". She cracks me up!

I had to hold her like this for over an hour to get her to sleep. My collarbone and arms were SO weak after this. What was funny is when she would twitch in this position.

 

Overall it was a really fun day that showed me I'm definitely not ready for babies RIGHT now ha ha. I love Cailyn and hanging out with her, but I'm not ready for a messy house just yet haha. But you can't deny she's the cutest little girl ever!

Just another reason I love this guy

I have to share a moment from yesterday that, everytime I think of it, just melts my heart. Larry and I took a trip to Wendover and on our way back we were having a talk about what I wanted to do with the house and how I wanted to decorate each room. Right now we have two extra rooms, one is supposed to be a guest room and the other an office. Well when I was talking about the colors I wanted to do each room I seemed to turn to how the colors I'd chosen would work for when we had kids and I mentioned something about how any sons we had would go into the office room and then daughters would go into the guest room (I kind of felt that's just always how it would've been since we moved in). Well then we started talking more about how many kids we wanted and how many girls vs boys and I mentioned how I would like a girl after all our boys so that she'd have a bunch of older brothers to take care of her and then the following happened:

Larry: "Yeah, but I kind of don't want to think about that."
Me: "Think about what?"
Larry: "Having any daughters."
(I kind of suspected he was talking about not wanting to deal with them when they're teenagers because I joke teen girls in my family are evil)
Me: "Why not?"
Larry: "Because then I think about when they start dating and I know I'm going to have a hard time dealing with my little girl growing up and wanting to be with other boys."

I mean is that not the most adorable thing ever? When he told me that I swear my heart just grew twice as big for him. I think I just loved it more because I didn't have that growing up and I like knowing my daughters will. I love him so much, he's such a great guy and will be a great husband and father!

Is there such a thing as premarital nesting?

Hello blogging world! I have no idea why this come on all of a sudden, but I have hit some sort of premarital nesting craze lately! It's like some creative bug has bit me or something. Lets go back a little to explain it a bit more.

So when Larry and I had talked wedding plans we were, obviously, talking about costs, I'm usually super good at budgeting so when I want something that is a year away I always find out how much I need to save from each paycheck or each month to make that a possibility and we were getting some help with the wedding so I figured we'd be good with what we made, but just in case I figured our taxes would help go towards some. Because I thought that way I knew I wanted to have the tropical honeymoon I always envisioned and, long story short, Hawaii was what we decided on. Well Saturday I go to file my taxes online and, if you remember, I mentioned I tried filing already but I didn't like the number I got so I wanted to wait until I had all my forms to see if it changed anything, it didn't. I was getting about 3% of what I was thinking I might get back (um HUGE difference!), which definitely wasn't going to pay for the honeymoon by itself.

Let me tell you something about me: I'm willing to make sacrifices if I know I have to, but there have been a few things about this wedding I was not willing to go cheap on-the photography and the honeymoon. Everything else I didn't care if I found the cheapest thing in the world for, those were the two most important parts to me. I wasn't giving up my Hawaiian dream honeymoon. I mean how can you give up a place like this:

photo courtesy of TripAdvisor

AH!!!! I really can't wait to be there!

So anyways, I go check my budget and try and find ways to cut costs a bit (I'm really okay with how much I have saved up, but it literally would have been every penny and I don't like knowing I'd have no savings when we got back, nothing to start a new life on) and after looking around and messing with numbers I found out a lot of some cutesy extra things I had planned I could totally DIY them for, basically, free and so I started to and I ended up LOVING how they came out. I'm not sharing what I did or what they look like or anything, but I have to say I'm really excited about them and I've NEVER been that sort of creative person. Granted a lot of my ideas I just got templates from online and changed things a bit to match with our wedding, but hey, I think I should still get the points!

Then on top of that I started thinking about what we're going to do with the home once we get back from the wedding. I figured I'd wait till September to really start re-vamping the place up so that gives us time to save up some and get a lot of ideas and paint samples and pricing done, but today I was checking out pinterest and I got some really fun ideas of what I want to do with our home. I used to be all about "oh I wonder when we'll get to start our family after getting married" but now I'm really all about "oh man that would be such a cute accent wall color" or "I so have to have those frames for this room!" I just absolutely can't wait till we can finally do what I'm picturing in my head to this place. Other than the hallway I think I have things figured out for every room!

So now that I'm on some creative roll, excuse me while I go update our registries and get some more fun wedding crafts out of the way :) Just wanted to share I'm officially loving this next step in our lives more than I was before ha ha.

Oh and side note: March 16 we get to go pick out all our reception stuff (menu, invitations, flowers, cake, etc. etc.) so I'm REALLY stoked about that date! It'll also be a little (TINY) bit under 3 months at that point as well! So many fun things to look forward to I might just burst haha.

Work News

So I have a bunch of stuff to catch this blog up concerning some work stuff:

To start, my good friend and fellow co-worker, Jhordan, got married on the 2nd (like I posted about last time). I was super excited for her, but knew I was going to miss working with her for the week and a half that she was taking off to set everything up and then for her honeymoon. I knew it would be rough, but figured I could manage it just fine without her. Yeah, that was a big fat chance! I did handle it, but I won't say I handled it the best way. I was so stressed that by the Wednesday after her wedding I had broken down at work because I felt so overwhelmed with all our tasks. Everyday I was falling a little bit more behind and I hate that feeling of not being able to get things done. So I ended up staying really late those last three days to try and get caught up on as much work as possible so she didn't come back to the piles of stuff that needed to be done.
By Friday I had gotten mostly caught up on the stuff I was behind on so I was feeling pretty good, but there was NO way I was going to just let it go. I wanted to really show her how much fun being on your own can be (and when I say fun, I mean frustrating and semi annoying). "How was I going to show her?" You might ask. Simple:

I rigged up the most annoying and frustrating desk contraption, ahem, decoration for her to come back to! I seriously used a whole role of streamer paper and about 6 or 7 things of star-shaped, multicolored confetti ALL over that desk! (But I also left a nice card and caricature drawing-left wall in the pic-for her too-so I'm not the WORST person to work with)
Needless to say, on Monday (the 11th) when I saw her I almost tackled her! I was SO happy to have my partner in crime back with me. She enjoyed the desk and the drawing so it paid off. We all still find little star pieces all around our desks, but it was totally worth it! She had a good honeymoon and is enjoying married life and that's what's important. Right?

My second piece of work news: I got my first, real promotion! I'm so excited! I interviewed for it around the end of January and I've known that I got it for about a week now, but it was just announced this week so I'm really happy to finally be able to talk about it. The new position is a specialist/processor on the same team/department I was already in. So right now I get mail, open and sort it, log it and then hand it off to the processors to apply it to the correct accounts-now I'll be processing it instead of opening it. Bonus: No more trips to go get lunch! Don't get me wrong, I liked the lunch runs-it was nice to get out of the office and I got paid to do it so it wasn't all bad. But it was using up my gas more than I was used to and with how high gas prices were going I was getting a little nervous about it. But, now with the new position I won't need to use up that gas and work is so close I'll be saving quite a bit on it. So two thumbs up:

 

That's all my work news. I am aware it's Valentine's Day today, but I really don't like this holiday so I don't celebrate it so it won't really get any other mention in the blog. Happy Thursday though!

Today is...

A day I've been so excited for since we picked Millennial Falls as our reception venue! There are really two great things about today:

1. We get to go to Millennial Falls' Open House. This means we get to try their food (and I think cakes) and see their centerpieces, I think there'll be cake and invitation samples, there will be cake toppers, guest books, just so many things we get to look at and try and it gives us a good idea of what we'll want for our big day! The best part is after this I get to make our appointment to go pick everything out: the linens, the invitations and cake design, we get to go over our timing with everything. I think that's when it'll all feel really real for me and it's been the day I've been looking forward to the most.
2. Today is also a great day because one of my good friends gets married today. We get to go to the reception after the Open House and I can't wait to see Jhordan all dressed up and happy and married. I've gotten to see her plan a lot of her wedding and I went to her bridal shower last weekend and met a lot of her family (who are just so loud and awesome) so I can't wait to see how it all came together and then to hear about her honeymoon when she gets back.

Today is going to be a GREAT day :)