Random Round Up: Can A Girl Get A Nap Around Here?!

As sleep gets harder to come by, my brain feels a little more addled by the day. So! With a grand flourish of absolutely no creativity: Here are some pictures from the weekend.

It's a good day to be a tailgating preggo when a Cinnabon truck pulls up with freebies!

Last able-to-attend home game for us for the season. Sad, but ready for a break too
after three home games in a row.

Early morning aircraft carriers in a base harbor nearby.

Color me basic, but these are delicious!

Tuck summing up how I feel in general today.

Happy Monday - I'm going to go back to my anti-adulting today. ZzzzZZZZzzzZzz......

Ode To A Paint Sprayer

Guys. I can't say enough good things about this paint sprayer business. Buy one now, thank me later, you're welcome in advance.

You may recall, we sprung for this bad boy a couple years ago, thinking it would be just the thing for our kitchen cabinet overhaul and repainting all our interior doors. Well, we ended up going with hand-rolling for the cabinets, and the doors have yet to be tackled. But the perfect opportunity to bust this guy out came with our new sections of replaced siding.

We had a painter lined up, but after he accidentally rolled off someone else's roof, he was out of commission. With the rainy season bearing down, we needed to get our siding covered and ready for the elements. Nate took a chunk of the old siding into Home Depot and had some flat exterior Glidden paint color matched to the piece of old stuff. It turned out perfectly! By far the best match we've ever had mixed, and probably due to the large size of swatch he took in for them to work from. Take note of that if you ever need a paint match: The bigger swatch, the better.

We poured the paint into the sprayer, and got to work. And what fast work it was! Even with Nate allowing me to do some (he couldn't have ALL the fun of trying a new tool!), the entire process took only two hours. If we had used a brush and roller, my guess is that time frame would have doubled.

I was allowed to try 'er out on the no-ladder-required portions.

Even, fast coverage: Wonderful! Lots of folks complain about over-spray with paint sprayers: Because this model has the option of a vertical or horizontal spray, we found it to not really be too much of an issue. Sure we have spots, but nothing major. It was fairly easy to control once we got the hang of it all.

Say hallo to mah leetle friend!

We'll still be having the whole house painted as soon as the weather turns dry again (May-ish?), but in the meantime I'm so glad to have had a stretch of dry weather to get this taken care of ourselves. One less thing to have on our minds in this busy stretch o'life!

We'll be touching up those bare spots on the white garage arches this weekend.

Random Round Up: Sickness & Health

I was 'encouraged' to get my very first flu shot this year due to landing in the high-risk category of being pregnant... They say it's not a live virus and you won't get sick, but my 1.5 days of missed work last week beg to differ. What gives?! No fun!

Luckily the fever faded and I was up and about by the time game day came around on Saturday, and even got to get some much-needed house painting done Sunday. Check 'er out:

Those under eye circles and orange juice kinda sum it up, eh?

My sick day couch buddy.

A much, much cooler game day than last week, thank goodness!

After our scheduled house painter took a tumble off someone's roof, we decided
to get our new siding set for the winter ourselves. LOVE the paint sprayer!!!

Cleaning up while lying down.

More on the painting later this week - I must say a paint sprayer is one of the best tools in our arsenal! Worth every penny! I'll give you the full run-down. 'Bout time we had a DIY post around here, eh? #BabyTakeover

Ding Dong the Ring is Gone

With last week came a sad day: I had to face the fact that I'm too vain for my own health. 

Like every married lady, I love my wedding rings. So much so that I danced around taking and leaving them off until, well, it was way too late.

Five pounds of sausage in a one pound bag on Bourbon Street.

I'd had some swelling, especially in the sweat fiesta that was New Orleans in May, but it had always gone back down. Until it didn't. I tried every lubricant, every method under the sun. I iced. I oiled. I wrapped with string. With tape. With wire. 

Ice bath.

I made it worse.

The string method worked best, and if I hadn't waited as long
to try probably would have solved my problem.

So off I went with a heavy heart to the jeweler where they were purchased, ready to bite the bullet and have them cut off. The employees were so kind, telling me it happens all the time and they would be fixed whenever I was (physically) ready - Aka: healed and no more swelling, so post-babe. Sigh.

The sweetest old Eastern-European jeweler toddled out and ever-so-gently hacked my rings in half. No really, it was moderately painless: They have a special tool that slowly and precisely cuts through the metal. Then with a tweak of some needle-nose pliers, my finger was free. And wow, did it need to be freed. I didn't think it was THAT bad until I saw the damage on my skin underneath.

Luckily, thanks to my Rodan + Fields product love, I used some Soothe 2 (a redness-reduction miracle product, seriously) and within 12 hours the swelling was way down and the redness all but gone. 

In the meantime, I printed out a ring measurement tool and took stock of my finger. Turns out, I'm now about a size 9.5-10 on my ring finger... My wedding set is a 7. What?! But with that knowledge I was able to pop onto Amazon and pick up a simple, low-cost, sterling wedding knot to keep my finger feeling a little less naked these last few weeks. It's actually a little too large, but I have a feeling I'll have days where I fill it out just fine.

It's a weird and wild ride, folks. Can't wait to get my bands repaired and back on.

...Guess my vanity level hasn't resized.

Random Round Up: Recovery Mode

Whew, what a week last week!! Even though I've been with my company for years, last week was one of the busiest I've EVER lived through, work-wise. As energy and brain power aren't exactly my strong suits right now, this weekend called for some recovery... After the first Husky game of the season, of course. Gotta rally for that.

Caught in the act! Cooper hung out at our house for a few days.

A couple late bloomers still hanging on in the backyard!

Trying to stock the freezer a little for baby time - Banana bread baking fiesta.

Setting up our tailgating spot at 6am on Saturday! Nothing like a game day sunrise.

Baby J's first Husky game! Starting him young.

Here's hoping this week is nice and smooth for us all - I've got a jewelry saga for you later in the week, stay tuned!

Random Round Up: Illusions

So the reality of this past long weekend is that we cleaned. We cleaned and organized and cleaned some more. Does anyone want to see photos of that? Nope.

So here's an illusion of the holiday - The prettier moments in an otherwise dusty, chaotic few days.

Drafted and ready - Bring on Fantasy Football 2015!

Since it's September and feeling a little more fall-like outside, up goes the fall wreath.

I have the the best husband of a preggo ever.

Happy, happy 40 (FOUR. OH) years to my lovely parents! What an amazing
example. Cheers to forty happy, zany, love-filled more!

Private school prep already?! Yeesh! (Thank you mother-in-law!)

Have a great (short, woohoo!) week!

Pleasing Poms: Custom Rug Making

Since my search for the perfect living room rug took years, I decided finding a rug to add to the baby's room had to take a different route. We've only got months to work with after all!


Pinterest to the rescue, per usual: I ran across these beautiful instructions on how to make basic yarn pom-poms and how to then turn them into a rug. Perfection. And so simple! Can you move your arms? Can you tie a knot? Do you use toilet paper? Wait, don't answer that last one. I can figure it out myself.

Items Needed:

• Skeins and skeins of yarn (my three GIANTs and two smalls earned me roughly 70 poms)
• Scissors
• Rug pad
• Two empty toilet paper rolls
• A place to corral your poms (I used an empty box)

...No really, that's IT.

You should go to the more formalized instructions for the step-by-step (plus, their idea, not mine!), but in a nutshell, you wind your yarn around your toilet paper rolls, slide them out and make a nice tight knot in the middle, cut through all the loops (a lot of mine looked wonky, so I trimmed them up to make them more nicely domed), and tie them onto the pad.

A rug pad - Larger than needed so you can cut to size.
I ordered this one on Amazon for under $12.

I found it speediest to wind all my little donuts, then trim them all, then tie them onto the rug pad.

"Donuts"

Tying on the poms.

I made a simple knot, then finished any long pieces with a bow.
It'd be totally fine to just cut the extra length off too.

Starting to take shape! Tie them close so you don't have any gapping.

The result is a super plush, machine washable (I used washable acrylic yarn), and custom rug. The only disappointment from the project was I'd actually planned the rug to be much larger. When I ran out of yarn and went to get more... They no longer make the yarn I used. I'd bought it on sale months back, and now even Ebay can't help me. That's what I get for procrastinating on this project!

The originally desired length shown by the rug pad, measured to run the length of the crib.
It ended up about half this length, and more like a square than a rectangle.

I haven't quite decided on where it's going to land in the nursery itself, so I'll have to post an update photo when I actually get it in the room. For now - Puggle tested, puggle approved. And save my yarn-needs miscalculation, a totally easy and successful project!

Finished product! Puggle not included.