goodbye, 2010.

for the first time since we've been married, hubby and i have new year's eve plans that involve leaving the house. thus, the hot pink polish was busted out.

  

feeling pretty fancy pants. excited to ring in the new year with our good friends. resolutions start tomorrow!

new year.

for the first time in a long time, i'm looking forward to the new year. i've set some great resolutions for myself and hubby and i have a joint resolution to buy a new car by the end of the year.

i'll share my resolutions on new years day ( i feel like it's a little jinxy to tell people early. i have no idea where i got that notion) but suffice to say i will be letting the real me shine through even more, and with some positive outcomes, i predict.

have you started thinking about your resolutions?

i'm a linus now.

christmas this year was great! hubby got me the cutest sunglasses and a bunch of little things i wanted (including a stocking full of coffee). my best gift, hands down, was the new pentax digital camera he got me. it's designed to look like a vintage camera, and has all kinds of filters and effects that let me make the pictures look like they are from a toy camera, but no more pesky film. and yes, i do love my holga. but she let me down at my birthday when she decided not to take a single picture. now i can be positive every special moment will be documented.

 here's me pretending to take a picture, and here are some pictures i actually took messing with the new settings:

i love charlie brown christmas. a lot. my mom got me this clock as an early gift. every hour, it chimes by playing a song from the special :)

this year, however, i felt christmas was a tad anticlimactic, which made me a little sad. all my life, christmas has been the greatest day of the year. usually this meant i got a little sad at the end of christmas night, but i had never felt indifferent before.

so hubby and i got to talking, and i realized this was a good thing. christmas didn't seem as magical because i no longer need one holiday season to be the highlight of my year. for the first time in my life i am completely and utterly happy. and what's one day of cheer compared to a whole life? i mean, i'm married to an amazing man, we have the world's cutest kittens and now a great apartment. i'm on my last leg of school before i start my real career and we have real income which leads to owning a home and having a baby. i'm going through the hiring process of a new job i'm really excited for. and in the last six months, i feel like i've really grown comfortable with who i am as a person and i've been letting that show through. and surprisingly, people still seem to like me. hubby is in love with his career, and we're finally working on the fun financial goals like buying a car and saving for a house.christmas is now just the cherry on top of the sundae, not the whole enchilada. or as hubby put it, i'm no longer a charlie brown. i'm a linus now.

merry christmas.

...and a happy new year!

bible stories as told to very little children.

this weekend, i went home to san diego for a couple days. while i was there, i spent time with my beautifully glowing cousin who is in the family way and we decided to hit up a few thrift stores. which is where i found this:

 it's from 1937 so the fact that we're still years away from children didn't matter a bit. had to have it.

the pictures are sweet and the stories really are written in a good way for children, but are almost laughable to adults...

"Now, I'm going to tell you another funny name, which belonged to a king who lived in Bible days. This is a great long name, but I think you are big enough to say it, just as your big brothers and sisters say it. This is the king's name, Nebuchadnezzar. Did you ever hear such a funny name?"

and "When the Little Baby Moses grew up to be a big man, like our daddies, he saw that wrong thoughts were coming to King Pharaoh again, and telling him to make the Children of Israel work hard all the time and not to let them play at all. Never, never could they play."

probably the best dollar i've ever spent.

also, found this guy on the "vintage ornaments" table for a buck fifty and instantly fell in love. pretty sure he's my new favorite on the tree and possibly our first family heirloom ornament.

merry christmas!

study buddy.

studying for finals can be really lame. but at least i have the world's cutest study buddy.

lerning to sew.

i desperately want to learn how to sew. i was on the costume team for a few places in high school, but i pretty much just chose the outfits and learned to hem and sew on buttons by hand. my mom has a sewing machine she's not using so when we head home for the holidays, i can have it.

anybody know any good books or websites to start? basically, i eventually want to be able to make this in a million different colors.

this dress is from my favorite online store, ModCloth, but it's $112 bucks, which is about a hundred more than i can afford.

wish me luck.

ornaments.

when i was a wee lass, my family always made a big deal of decorating our christmas tree. we would put on holiday tunes, drink hot chocolate, and put all the ornaments on the tree, one by one. my mom always had a story for every ornament. and yes, while i heard the same story every year, i wouldn't put an ornament on the tree until i had heard about where it came from or where it represented. what fun is it to just hang sparkly balls on a tree in your living room? that sounds nuts. the fun is in reminiscing and celebrating the life you've lived so far and where you will go. or so says i.

this past weekend, we decorated our christmas tree, so i'll share with you some of my favorite ornaments:

this bow is one of a set of ten that go around the christmas tree. they remind me of 'whoville' from the original 'grinch' cartoon, which is like my favorite (one of the many) christmas tradition.

between high school and college, i took a year off to save money and worked close to full time at starbucks. i blame my current coffee addiction on all those free lattes. this was one of the last things i bought with my employee discount before i left. it reminds me of where i started and how far i've come since then.

duh. 'our first christmas' was from our first christmas as a married couple. when we were decorating the tree, hubby was super cute. he kept moving all the ornaments i put in the front of the tree to clear space to 'properly display this in all of its glory.' because, according to him, without this ornament, there would be no family here, and thus no family christmas tree to decorate.

this ornament means a lot. my last year of undergrad, i volunteered with a stroke rehab group. this was my gift at the christmas party the last month i was there before graduate school started. school got so crazy, i wasn't sure i wanted to stick with my major. volunteering there helped me fall in love with the field i'm going into and made me so sure of the choices i've made. i'm glad to have a reminder of that on my tree each year.

this is our seahorse from hawaii. i love it because a.) it's a seahorse, my second most favorite animal. and 2.) it's from hawaii which was the first vacation (besides the honeymoon) we went on together. also, hawaii is fab.

vintage rudolph is awesome. love him. also, my mom has the same ornament on her tree so even though we live two hours away, we can look at the same ornament. awwww.

in college, i worked as an aide for a little girl with a development disability. she was the cutest little thing. her family was amazing and her mom is such an inspiration to how i want to be as a wife, mother, and Christian woman in this world. before i left for grad school, her family gave me this. i love seeing it and being reminded there are decent people in this world worth looking up to. i hope that i was an inspiration for their little girl as much as they were for me.

what stories does your tree tell?

christmas carol.

this is my most favorite rendition of my favorite christmas song ever, particularly a minute and four seconds in when the kids start to sing.

enjoy.

happy christmas.

we've started decorating our house for christmas, which is a nice distraction from the mountain of schoolwork i have to complete in the next two weeks. plenty of pictures to come after we finish, but for here's a taste for now. (also, the first christmas photo was the last photo on a roll of film i developed yesterday).

happy christmas!

a love song.

hubby and i were married almost three years ago. i loved our wedding. it was almost perfect. if we were to do it all over again, the only thing i would change would be the song we danced to. we never really had 'a song' so we danced to a van morrison song that we both like.

but for our next wedding, this will be the song we dance to. i love it, and what it says:
(here's where i was going to post a video, but youtube hates me so instead, i will post the lyrics and a picture of us dancing to, what i will now pretend, is this song)

the way i am- ingrid michaelson

if you were falling, then i would catch you
you need a light, i'd find a match

cuz i love the way you say good morning
and you take me the way i am

if you are chilly, here take my sweater
your head is aching; i'll make it better

cuz i love the way you call me baby
and you take me the way i am

i'd buy you rogaine when you start losing all your hair
sew on patches to all you tear

cuz i love you more than i could ever promise
and you take me the way i am
you take me the way i am
you take me the way i am