RON WEASLEY PILLOW

This was my Christmas present to The Beck. My sister is in love with the Ron Weasley character. I thought I would share the idea for any other Harry Potter fans out there. 

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When I saw her pin a similar pillow of him on her Pinterest wish list board, I figured it would be easy enough for me to piece together. 

All the fabric came from Wal-Mart clearance bins, my own scrap collection, and a decorative pillow that doesn't match my house anymore. I made the scarf out of soft fleece to give it texture and help it stand out from the rest of the pillow. 

It took me over an hour to make the one pillow, but I imagine it would be a lot faster for those who actually know their way around a sewing machine. I'm still learning.

OUR CHRISTMAS TREE 2012

We drove to Green Canyon, Idaho, to get our tree this year. That area has the spruce trees we prefer. 

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of us finding, cutting, or dragging the Christmas tree to the truck. Instead, I have fifty-seven pictures of Moose playing in the snow. 

It was his first time seeing any significant accumulation and he kind of freaked out about it. 

Let me fully impress upon you the point that Moose LOVES the snow. 

Dad, look! Snow! Everywhere! I love it! I must run! I must prance! I must feel the wind through my ears!

Mom! Look at me! I love you! And I love the whole world! Pet me! Never mind! I must run speedily through this glorious snow!

So, yeah. His utter joy was highly entertaining.

And that's why our Christmas tree post is all about our very large puppy.

And his beautiful golden eyes. 

But anyway. Back at the ranch...with Moose exhausted in his backyard kennel, we dragged in our thirteen footer and set her up. We felt the need to take advantage of our new vaulted ceilings. 

Good thing for the ginormous ladder, is all I have to say. 

Fully decorated with "The Grinch" playing in the background and 600 drops of sap waiting to be scrubbed off the wood floors. Becca kept saying it looked like a Dr. Seuss tree. I'm cool with that. I think.

Glowing in the dark. It was at this point that I decided to forego the white ribbon next year. It just looked like I toilet papered my Christmas tree.

At the after Christmas sales, I searched for a birch wood-looking ribbon I had seen, but ended up instead with a pale blue burlap ribbon for next year. Pale blue, pale green, and white is the color scheme I have been trying to gather and pull off for years. But my love for red keeps sneaking in and stealing the show. 

A full tour of my Christmas decorations will be coming soon! Until then, here are a few inspirational photos I found to help me with my new color theme next year...

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HOUSE UPDATE {linen closet and kitchen beam}

For the last five months, my linen closet has been open and messy and not very pretty. 

 

So I was very excited when Andrew set out to fix that. He started with a frame. 

Then he attached the cabinet doors built and stained in his nearly nonexistent spare time. 

Add some knobs and my hallway looks a million times better!

This week, Andrew is finishing the rustic beam across the kitchen ceiling. This project is free except for the cost of stain...thanks again, to our lovely collection of old pallet wood. More to come on this later. 

HALLOWEEN COSTUMES {2012}

I didn't get super creative with the costumes this year. I was just too tired to care. We also bought pumpkins that never got carved and planned decorations that never got put up. I use the excuse that I'm conserving energy for Christmas. 

We went to a Halloween party mid-October and I just pulled out last year's bumblebee costume. Our new neighborhood friends never saw the costume last year anyway. Then I tried to think of something for Andrew that would correlate with a bee. 

A beekeeper? Winnie the Pooh? A honeypot? In the end I found it was easiest to turn him into a bird. 

I had a T-shirt made that said: "Tweet. Tweet." I had Andrew tape craft feathers all over himself. And I planned to make him a baseball cap with a beak, but bought him an Angry Birds hat instead. (Feeling lazy, remember?)

In the end, it was this hat that confused people as to what we really were. They kept saying that I was a bee and Andrew was an Angry Bird...missing the entire "Birds and the Bees" concept entirely. Oh well. 

For school, I couldn't be the bee again.  Last year's kids would remember. So I went further back in time and pulled together my student costume for a second time...again spending the entire day clarifying that I was not a gangster, but a backpack wearing, teacher's pet pest.

I'll try again next year. 

PROCLAMATION PRINT {decorating the great room}

This print is based on The Family: A Proclamation to the World. I love the way this document lays out God's laws and purposes for family relationships in a world where things definitely need to be clarified.

Rather than hanging all nine paragraphs on the wall and making it hard for me to focus on specifics, this print focuses instead on the nine more important words: 

"Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."

I saw a similar one on the Etsy shop Kiki & Company, but after the owner was listed as "on vacation" for about a year, I got impatient waiting to buy her's and used Photoshop to create my own. This ended up being better because I could choose my own fonts and colors...and it was free.

I printed it as an 11x14 for a buck and displayed it on the mantel in a Wal-mart frame spray painted white. 

Looking for more color, I sewed a bunting from thrift store fabric finds and draped it across the vintage windows.

This other picture frame is filled with photos of important women from my heritage: Mom, Grandma Jennie, and Great Grandma Maggie. 

I have a future project in mind that involves more ancestral photos, barn wood, chicken wire, and clothespins. I'm excited to build and share that later, but in the meantime, it will wait as item number fifty-seven on my to-do list. 

But this reminds me...I am going to eventually need help (pretty please?) from some photo bearing family relatives (Dad? Rhonda? Grandma?) getting scans to represent all the branches of our family tree.

Anyway...this room does not completely satisfy me yet. But it is coming together piece by piece. And I love my homemade Proclamation print!

THE END OF A LOVE AFFAIR WITH SUGAR {part 2}

{Confused? This post is number 2 in a series. You can read post number 1 right here.}

As I researched all sorts of ailments unrelated to my sugar intake at all, I began having tiny suspicions that eventually led me like a trail of breadcrumbs to a site that explained everything.

I was startled to learn that sugar stimulates the same brain pleasure receptors as drugs like heroine and morphine. Stopping my sugar intake was mimicking that of drug withdrawal! If sugar is addictive to that extent, it must've truly been doing awful things to my body! The website went on to list indications of a detox/withdrawal that matched my strange conglomeration of symptoms exactly: cravings, headache, flu-like symptoms, cold sweats, anxiety, irritability, and extreme fatigue. 

Finding this information acted as validation that a sugar detox was the right thing to do. I continued to eat as natural and healthy as possible, took vitamins, and avoided sugars and refined carbohydrates (like white rice, flour, and most cereals) that have the same effect on our body as sugars.

But sugar is so addictive I was apparently relying on it for daily energy and mood boosts. This became especially apparent at the end of the day by powerful cravings for treats to comfort and reward myself for surviving stressful, hard, tiring days at work. Ice cream, cereal, cookies, pastries, a candy bar...these "rewards" have been more frequent than I'm proud of. 

Then there are the awkward social situations. Friends serving pie, neighbors dropping by with treats, Halloween parties, and the teacher's lounge I had to avoid for an entire day because of the pile of soft, frosted sugar cookies on plate in the middle of the table. 

The next Relief Society activity is entirely planned around everyone bringing a favorite holiday treat to share! I guess my stalk of celery and I will be sitting home that night. 

Then the dreams started. Of frenzied binges on cookies. Or of a magical tree with innumerable streamers hanging long and bright from its branches. The tree was the scene of a party. People milled through the streamers, visiting each other, and enjoying the countless sugary desserts tied for the taking to each strip of color. It was beautiful.

A vision of the tree of life, I tell ya.

But in all seriousness, this no-sugar-thing is totally working. Within ONE week, my most serious health issue cleared up completely. Like, after five whole months of bleeding and years of irregularity, I felt my cycle correct itself. Other effects of my new eating habits include: better sleep, clearer skin, a disappearance of some poochy stomach bloating that I thought was normal, and an overall feeling of good health.

So now that I have been off sugar for about a month and I can see it's benefits, the BIG QUESTION is: 

Am I doomed to avoid sugar for the rest of my life? 

I doubt it. Or I should say, I hope not. 

It's not a practical way to live. No one would ever know what to cook for me...the crazy 'health nut'. And what about the fact that every holiday is somehow tied to sugary treats? That would mean no more birthday cake, no more Christmas Eve chocolate fondue, no more conference morning french toast, no more New Year's Martinelli's, and no more Halloween cookies monsters. What else is there to live for?! 

Okay, I'm just kidding. Don't answer that. 

But I have decided to be strong until Thanksgiving. To give my body time to undergo a proper detox. This doesn't mean I'm going to let it all fall apart after that...not now that I am aware of sugar's  powerful hold on me. I'll just be more aware and moderate. Maybe I'll allow myself a slice of pumpkin pie (Or now that I think about it, I believe my aunt makes a sugar free pie every year). It might be helpful to see if my body can handle a little bit, just around holidays, without going haywire again. An experiment. 

Well, there's my sugar shpeel. I appreciate the encouragement from post number 1. Your support helps. It's still a daily fighting battle, and sharing it with all of you kind of forces me to be even more accountable. I'll keep you updated and maybe blog some of the healthier recipes we've been using lately. Please share any ideas you have...especially for snacks! When cravings hit, my go-to snack has been an apple with natural peanut or almond butter, but I fear this will get old real fast.

Also, thank you to Ellen, whose own journey with infertility and a sugar fast was an answer to prayer. This post was the push that initially got this ball rolling. 

THE END OF A LOVE AFFAIR WITH SUGAR {part 1}

Sugar. White flour. Processed Food. 

So apparently, this stuff is bad? Yeah, whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Everyone's doing it...and most importantly, I love it too much. Sugar literally fills my bones with warmth and happiness to the very core. Pathetic, I know, how much I'm NOT exaggerating. But it's true. 

Sugar is my drug of choice.

However, I recently took on the challenge of a healthier lifestyle to correct some health issues I have struggled with for years. The deciding factor being that these issues are impacting our fertility...something we are not so cool with. I have been to doctors in the past only to be deeply dissatisfied. Test after test is conducted before the doc basically tells me he doesn't know what's wrong. Then he slaps me with a huge bill and a prescription that either a) is experimental, or b) makes me so gut-wrenchedly uncomfortable that I don't even end up using it (as if my body/soul/the Lord were literally warning me it wasn't right.) Still, something had to be done.

Not wanting to visit another doctor again unless I had to, I did my own research. I prayed. I fasted. I talked to others and listened to quiet heavenly promptings. The thoughts that kept coming to me always revolved around the combination of sugar and stress. Sugar and stress. And sugar, sugar, SUGAR.

So grudgingly, with many complaints, but with the loving support of my husband, I cut sugar completely out of my diet. I'm talking COLD TURKEY. 

My meals now consist of ingredients from a list of things like: 

• brown rice
• eggs
• wheat tortillas
• fish
• almonds
• cheese
• natural peanut butter
• chicken
• black beans
• garbanzo beans
• sour cream
• fruit
• And lots and lots of vegetables. 

Every week, I make veggie grab bags filled with celery, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, bell peppers, peas, and baby tomatoes. Then I easily take one with me to work or on errands to snack on all day long. 

Eating the healthy food has not been a challenge. Luckily, I've always enjoyed my vegetables and consciously tried to include them into my diet. The challenge lies in the fact that I always combine my health food with LOADS of sugar. 

I don't usually drink soda (except for an occasional root beer with pizza), and I buy raisin bran instead of Captain Crunch...but I adore my cookies. My Moose Tracks ice cream. My brownies. My muffins. My candy. My hot chocolate. My pancakes with syrup. My birthday cake with frosting. My apple juice. My cinnamon rolls. My banana bread. My dessert pizzas. My hostess fudge rolls. And my blessed maple frosted doughnut (Should I even need to remind you of the time I actually wrote poetry in praise of doughnuts). And many items that I never considered to be junk food have a surprising amount of sugar: yogurt, granola, and "healthy" cereals, just to name a few. 

Not having sugar has been a lot harder than I anticipated. 

A living hell, actually. 

After about 3-4 days I thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I had the strangest headache. The cold I thought I had beat hung on with a vengeance. And I felt so devoid of energy by lunch time all I wanted in the whole world was sleep. Being an elementary teacher is exhausting, but the fatigue doesn't usually hit me until my drive home. The busy-ness and adrenaline keeps me motivated and moving until the end. But that day, I sat in my classroom feeling listless and ragged. I stared at my expectant students with zero desire to even stand to address them. 

Later, after collapsing on my couch at home, I continued to wonder what the heck was wrong with me. At the risk of sounding dramatic...was I dying? In genuine fear, I knelt down and prayed with fervor for the knowledge to understand what was wrong and for the tools to correct it. 

I stood up and went straight to the Internet to research. 

What I found shocked me. 



{As this post is getting reeeally long, I though I would break it into two parts. The second one is scheduled to post in a few days. See ya then!}