Sitting Pretty

Posted in House and Home by teamtradermom

I finally did it! I can now cross another item off my Resolutions List for 2012. Namely, create a sitting room within the master bedroom.

And the best part, I didn’t have to spend a dime!

Here’s how the side of our room looked before:

Pretty empty…

Here’s a view of it from the other side of the room, looking across the bed.

(Let’s all play “Pretend” and imagine the bed being perfectly made, with no toys on it shall we?)

I’ve been spending the better part of the year looking around for the perfect chair and table to fill up that space. I wanted it to be a reading corner so the chair had to be comfortable for reading (either a rocker or big armchair) and the table had to be functional yet cute. Every time I wen to a thrift store, I looked at their furniture but never found anything I liked.

Then one day this happened.

CJ’s dad brought over this rocking chair that he no longer needed. It’s in really good shape and needs no work. There are a few scratches on the seat, which the pillows I tossed on there cover up nicely. So we put it in the living room, in place of the old rocker.

I like the contrast in color that it adds to the room. It feel cleaner and more grown up too.

So now I had an extra rocking chair that would be perfect for the bedroom!

Check!

Then, while in the basement today with Isabella, I gazed upon an end table that was tucked back in the corner and realized it could work great for the bedroom! Just needed some touching up. So I dragged it, along with a few decorative items and a tablecloth upstairs.

Here’s how it all came together.

The chair works well as is and tucks in to the corner perfectly. I covered the table up with the tablecloth and put the bowl and candle on it. Then I tucked the little plant in to the corner for some greenery.

I’m really happy with how it turned out. And so is Isabella, obviously.

We also added in an area rug that had also been collecting dust in the basement.

(Remember, we’re still in Pretend World where the bed is made!!)

It adds just the extra something that the room needed.

Here’s how the 2 new additions look together.

The room looks that much more finished and cozy.

Is it done? No. I’d like to maybe change out the cushions on the chair, and probably the pillow too, and add balls or something to fill up the red bowl. Will probably add a little figurine to the table too. Oh and the bulb in the lamp needs to be changed to something brighter so that we can see better.

But overall, it’s a definite improvement and am super excited to cross this off my to do list. I’m particularly pleased that we were able to reuse items we already had! Bonus!

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14Aug2012

New Additions

Posted in Family, House and Home by teamtradermom

I know I haven’t posted in a while. We’ve been busy. That’s no excuse really but it’s the truth.

I mean, hello, the OLYMPICS were on! I could not tear myself away from the TV – even when the boring sports were on (*cough* the marathon *cough*)!

But now that’s behind us and life can resume its normalcy, if there is such a thing.

We were busy during the last few weeks creating various art projects. All of them (eventually) got hung up on the Gallery Wall too.

The first project was one I did after seeing creations like this. I figured, how hard could it be?

So I grabbed some supplies from Michael’s and got to work. First I spray painted a basic wooden plaque.

Then I printed an outline of Nebraska, drew a heart in the center (most people put the heart wherever their city is on the state but since Omaha is all the way on the right, it wouldn’t have worked) and lightly secured it to the plaque with tape. Then I took my brads and hammered them in around the outside, trying to get them evenly spaced.

Then it was time to thread it! I tied the thread (I chose green) in a knot around the top left-hand most brad and then started wrapping it around each brad from one to the next. I measured that there were 4 outside nails to every 1 inside nail so each inside nail got threaded 4 times – 1 per outside nail.

Once that was done. I took another string and wrapped it from nail to nail around just the heart, to give it an outline and finish it off.

Ta da!

If I had it to do over, I would have put the brads closer together, especially on the left side. But all in all, I’m happy with how it turned out. It’s something unique and colorful to represent where we live!

And here it is on the wall!

The other project I did involved some stenciling letters I found in the Clearance bin at Michael’s. They just happened to have a “T”, “C”, “S”, and “I”, for $1 a piece, so I bought all 4, and a canvas, and went to work!

Here is what the final product turned out to be!

I started with yellow because I’ve decided the Gallery Wall will be a rainbow of colors. I want every color represented. Yellow felt right to me. I wanted the “T” to stand out as it’s the first letter of our last name and therefore the common shared letter amongst all of us. So I made it black. Then I made the other ones blue because I like blue and yellow together, plus it echoes the color scheme of the playroom and dining room.

Here it is on the wall!

I haven’t decided if I want to leave it next to the red piece or move it up under the Nebraska thread project. I think I’ll probably move it, to balance out the big blocks of color and fill in the big space on the right.

I am happy with how it turned out. It’s simple yet makes a bold statement.

Finally, the piece de resistance! Isabella’s ode to the Olympics!

I tried to get her to do something like this but she decided that smearing the paint was more fun. Not what I had in mind but that’s ok – it’s actually something better because Munchkin did it!

So there you have the latest additions to our gallery wall!

I can’t say good-bye though before showing you today’s activity – flying a kite!

A Spiderman kite no less.

CJ showed her how to do it first.

And before long she was a natural!

She had a blast and we’re already looking forward to doing it again!

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5Jul2012

June Bug

Posted in Family, Goals by teamtradermom

The year is half over. We’re in to July and that means summer will be done before we know it. Excuse me for a moment…

*SOB*

Ok, I feel better now.

This also means that I should be halfway done with my goals right? Mmm, maybe. Many of them are ongoing but I do feel pressure to be making more progress on other ones. Let’s take a look-see.

Family and Home:

1. Do at least one family outing a month. We were VERY busy this month.

We went to Sand in the City

(shout out to my friend Jay who designed this one and won an award for it!)

And Taste of Omaha.

We spent a rainy afternoon playing at the indoor kids area in the mall.

And we checked out the Architects of Air Luminaria exhibit.

We also stopped to see the big swimmer dude coming up out of the ground, in honor of the Olympics Swim Trials.

Which leads us to our next family event – last but not least – the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials

Isabella thought it was too noisy…

I’d say we did pretty darn good!!

2. Tackle the following home projects this year:

Buy and hang curtains on all the windows. Nope, didn’t do anything. The only room we have left to do is the living room and I’m not in a huge hurry.

Unpack the remaining boxes in the basement. I actually got rid of 2 more boxes! I found great ways to use a lot of the stuff I found too.

Create a sitting room within the master bedroom. I’ve been on the lookout for stuff but haven’t found exactly what I’m looking for yet.

Add built in shelves to the living room by the end of the year. This will be a big project and we haven’t had the time or money to tackle it yet. Sometime before the end of the year though for sure!

3. Have Isabella potty trained by her 3rd birthday (September 30). We started and she is clearly not ready. She has no interest in sitting on the potty nor does she seem to mind wearing a dirty diaper. We’ll give her some more time, then try again.

4. Research pre-schools and enroll Isabella in one to start in the fall of 2012. I’m thinking more and more that she won’t be ready for pre-school in the fall. Mentally I think she could handle it but in terms of potty training, no (as mentioned above).

Financial and career:

5. Attend one career professional event a month. Yep, I attended one even this month.

6. Spend less money. Well we try. It’s a daily/weekly battle. Some weeks are better than others, depending on what comes up. But overall I think we’re doing quite well.

Physical and health:

7. Adopt one new healthy habit each month. I’ve given up on this one. I don’t seem to have enough discipline to do anything healthy except for exercise. I’ll keep fighting the good fight but I’m going to stop with the monthly habits. I’m tired of disappointing myself.

Social and cultural:

8. Attend at least 4 cultural events this year (e.g. Broadway shows, concerts, museum exhibitions). As you can see from the list above, we did many things, including the Luminaria exhibit and the Fremont Dinner Train.

9. Regularly participate in events put on by the social clubs I belong to (speakers events, parties, happy hours, etc). Again, very busy month. I attended several FACs (Friday Afternoon Club) get togethers through work, a baseball game, Luminaria, the Fremont Dinner Train, and a spontaneous neighborhood beer night

10. Go on a date night with CJ once a month. The Fremont Dinner Train was one of our date nights. The Warrior Dash was another. Ok maybe that doesn’t count? But this does – we went to a wedding, sans the Munchkin. I know this will sound awful and crazy to some people but I prefer to attend weddings without children. They take over the dance floor and many parents use the wedding as their personal baby-sitter. Not cool. So we almost always leave the little one at home when we go to weddings and instead use the time for us!

There you have it, another month in the books. While all the things we did in June were fun, I’m hoping that July is a little more calm. Although it’s not starting off that way. Already this week we’ve gone to 2 movies, a baseball game/fireworks show and a neighborhood block party. What can I say – you gotta grab life by the horns because it’s just too darn short to sit around and let it pass you by!

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30Jun2012

Little Touches

Posted in House and Home by teamtradermom

We have officially lived in our house for 9 months.

9 MONTHS!

I can hardly believe it. Some moments it feels like 9 days; others like 9 years.

We love it. I pinch myself sometimes to think about how perfectly everything came together. This house literally had everything we were looking for (the only house that did) and we got such a good deal on it.

Are we totally settled in? Mostly. I say that because while all the rooms have the essentials in them – furniture and items to live on – there are still some finishing touches to be done.

At this point, I’m not pushing myself to have the house “Better Homes and Gardens” ready by any certain date. I find it goes better if I tackle a little bit here and there. Sometimes I need to have a moment of inspiration before I decide how to fill a space. Also, as I unpack boxes from the basement (yes, there are still quite a few) I find new homes for things (possibly different than where I had those same things in our old house).

All that to say, I’ve made some more progress in the last few weeks that I wanted to share.

Let’s start with the dining room. The last time we saw this tray, that I made using leftover fabric, it looked like this:

Since then, I’ve changed it up a bit by adding a vase of fresh flowers and a candle that my sister gave me for Mother’s Day (it’s actually yellow inside so sometimes I leave the lid off for an added punch of color and extra fragrance).

I like the grouping of 3 MUCH better and love the touch of organic and color added by having the flowers (also ties in nicely with the plant next to it).

Moving on to the kitchen….

So one of the things I found when digging through boxes was a bag full of magnets. See, we have a tradition that we buy a magnet from every new place we visit. However, our refrigerator is stainless steel so the front is not magnetized but the sides are. I decided to make a “wall of magnets” on the side with our travel ones.

I think it looks pretty cool and it’s a fun thing to see when you walk in from the garage! Isabella likes checking out all the different places and finding them on the map we have downstairs.

The kitchen in our old house was done in a coffee theme so I have a lot of wall hangings and decorations related to coffee. The new kitchen doesn’t have much room for that kind of stuff as we have a ton of cabinets and no real ‘free’ wall space.

I was able to find a sliver of wall wide enough for these little guys though.

They add that little extra something that the kitchen needed in that corner.

I also put some stuff up on top of the cabinets (pretend the counters are perfectly clean and that you don’t see the pile of dirty dishes).

Here’s the close-up.

I’d like to keep adding to the top of the cabinets as I think it provides additional interest and color without being too obvious, but I want to be careful not to overcrowd them.

While I was sorting through kitchen boxes, I came across my stack of cookbooks. I don’t use all of them (a couple I’ve never used), but they’re a natural item to display in the kitchen so I put them on the bottom of this accent table.

If you look back here, you’ll notice that originally I had some coffee trinkets on that bottom shelf. Those got put up on top of the cabinets to make room for the books!

Now let’s wander in to the living room, shall we?

So let’s start with my FABULOUS clearance find. I was shopping at Kohl’s and wandered over to the clearance bin in the home goods section. Nothing caught my eye until I glanced down at the bottom shelf and saw a beautiful orange/grey/tan/white rug. I noticed it because those are the colors in our living room, along with turquoise and the occasional splash of green. I picked it up and didn’t see any tags on it so I put it back and walked away. But I didn’t get far. I turned around and looked at it again, unsure. Do we really need a rug in there? What if it was a lot of money?

Then I remembered the Goodwill Incident of last week. See, I had spotted a really nice standalone full length mirror in one of the stores that would have been perfect in our bedroom. I didn’t get it because I didn’t feel like messing with hauling it to the car, blah blah. Well after a few days it was nagging at me so I went back and the mirror was gone.

Lesson learned: trust your gut!

So I took that rug up front and it was marked down 80% to $15!! Plus I had a 20% off coupon! Done and done!

And it looks awesome…

While we’re here, I’ll show you the rest of the living room, which is the one room in the house that is the most done.

By the way, those orange tub chairs were a garage sale find by CJ. He got both for $30. We had them in the basement of the old house, just to stage it, figuring we might get rid of them once we moved. The movers plopped them in the living room and we loved how it looked and ended up building the rest of the room around them!

I really like the unexpectedness of the round ottoman/coffee table. Ties in the curves of the tub chairs with the leather of the couch.

We bought that rocker when Isabella was born, to use for nursing at night and such. Since we’re way past all that, it got placed in here for extra seating. That’s pretty much where you’ll find CJ any night of the week that we’re home.

And of course the fireplace.

By the way, that back wall with the black and white pics is where we want to put built-in shelves. I think it would look awesome to have white built-ins with a space in the middle for a TV and picture. We will hopefully get going on that project soon…

All in all, I love how the room has come together. It’s very eclectic and unique (you won’t really find anything in our house that’s too matchy-matchy).

Couple more little things to point out.

This tray was born out of necessity.

See, I was painting my nails one night and put a polish remover soaked cotton ball on the table without thinking….and it ate away at the finish. Oops. What’s a girl to do but cover it up?

I made this tray using a picture we got in Ireland and a frame with the stand torn off (and some felt ‘feet’ tacked to it so as not to scratch up the table). Works like a charm!

I found this tray at Goodwill for $3.

That little ottoman was getting stained up from CJ putting his drinks on it so now he has a tray to put them in!

Finally, some additions to the gallery wall.

Here’s the before:

And the after:

Can you spot the additoins?

Yep, this collage I did of all the photo booth pics we’ve taken over the years.

We sort of have a thing about photo booths. If we see one while out on a date or traveling or something, we stop and get some pics taken. What can I say, it’s cheap fun!

I also added these 2 little prints that I found in the basement. Both of them are original prints I did in college.

So that’s the latest on the house! I have a lot of fun digging up new stuff and finding “homes” for them all. More updates to come as we continue to progress!

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13Jun2012

I Am A Warrior!

Posted in CJ, Friends and Fun, Health and Weightloss by teamtradermom

CJ and I did the Warrior Dash on Saturday.

I am not kidding when I say that I had the Lita Ford song “The Warrior” stuck in my head the whole time.

I had signed us up for this race months ago – like back in March. A few couples that we know were doing it so I thought, hey, why not? CJ and I are active and in pretty good shape. We can totally do that too.

Then as the months approached I started to have worries and doubts.

For one, I am not a runner. I work out a lot but for some reason do not have a body built for running. I’ve tried and tried over the years and it’s just not my thing. I ran a 5k race a couple years ago and hated every minute of it.

Two, I am not a water person. I can’t swim and get terrified if I’m in any body of water that goes up past my waist. In looking at the course map, 2 of the obstacles involved water.

But I was bound and determined to do the dash and complete all the obstacles. We weren’t focused on the race aspect or doing it superfast. We just wanted to finish.

And finish we did!

It turned out to be super fun, albeit tiring. Ironically enough, the obstacles were the easiest part of the whole thing.

What really got me was the walk/run in between because it was so hilly and the hills were steep. As luck would have it, I came down with a sinus infection 2 days before the race. I tried my hardest to rest and get rid of it before Saturday but no luck. So the fact that I couldn’t breathe real well hampered me a bit. I could definitely feel it in my head and lungs as I was climbing up the hills.

We both finished in about an hour.

I think I could have done it faster if I hadn’t been sick. That’s what I tell myself anyway. Next time I’ll shoot for 45 minutes.

Here’s my advice for anyone interested in doing Warrior Dash or something similar in the future:

1. Try to get as early a time as possible when you register. We were in the 2^nd heat of the day (8:30 am) which was good because a) it was the coolest part of the day and b) the course wasn’t too badly torn up. Also, we were able to get good parking.

2. Hydrate as much as possible the day before. Again, because it was a hot and humid day, you sweat a lot. It doesn’t do you any good to chug water right before either because then you get water logged. Do your drinking the day before and you should be good.

3. Train for endurance. I made the mistake of concentrating most of my training on building upper body strength. I should have put more time in to running/walking up hills and getting my legs ready for that. The upper body training did help though as I didn’t have any problems there and my arms weren’t sore at all afterwards. Next time I’ll make sure to put more time in to training my legs too.

4. If you do it in a group, make sure at least one other person is willing to go the same pace as you or else you’ll do the whole thing alone, which isn’t a bad thing it’s just good to have clear expectations going in. CJ and I agreed ahead of time to stay together which made it all the more fun.

5. Rinse off immediately after you finish, before the mud has a chance to dry. We waited a bit too long and it was hard to get all the mud off later.

Most of all – have fun!!

That about covers it! The most important thing for me was the experience and the fact that I got to share it with my husband. CJ probably could have gone on ahead of me and finished faster since I was hampered by the sinus infection but he didn’t. We stayed together and made it an experience we’ll never forget!