A spring day through Starla's eyes....

I let Starla run around the yard taking pictures with the camera this afternoon, here's what she did.....

Clean rooms

So the boys now have clean rooms. Of course, they no longer have much of anything in there..... but that's what happens when your momma has to clean your room!

Medieval fair

Alan & I checked the boys out of school early friday and we all went to the Medieval fair in Norman. We knew it was supposed to rain sat. and sun. so we decided to take advantage of Friday being sunny!

I love the medieval fair! All the fairies wings and wands and swords, all the costumes and fun stuff to buy! The boys were heartbroken that they couldnt buy anything though, but that's what you get when you don't clean your rooms and your momma has to do it for you and you lose all of your stuff. You don't get to buy new stuff. Tough lesson to learn.

But we had lots of fun!













































Somehow we managed to actually get a picture of me, and yet not one single one of Alan in his kilt..... lol

Spring has sprung....

and we are trying to enjoy as much time outside as we can.......































other than that, it has been a pretty uneventful week.

I am down a little over 14 lbs, over 20 inches and down 2 pants sizes thus far on the diet though! Woo hoo! I pushed up my workout today and did 1 hr on the eliptical instead of 45 mins. And I added more weights, more reps, and a few different machines today. My muscles are letting me know all about it tonight too..... :) No pain, no gain, right?!

Alan & Roman's trip to Amarillo

Alan & Roman were supposed to go camping over the weekend, but then that freak snowstorm hit, so they decided to head to Amarillo instead. Here are some pics from their little adventure......










































Alan says next time he's gonna try to eat the 72 oz steak. If you eat it and all the fixins in an hour or less, it's free......



Everythings bigger in Texas......

Kristal's amazing decorating powers

So this blog is really for Kristal, whom I asked to help me with decorating tips for my house. She is awesome at it! But since I couldn't figure out how to put it together with the pics in an e-mail, I just decided I would make a blog post to simplify things!

Most all of our stuff in our house was given to us, by family members or what have you. Not much in out house flows with a theme, or really has much of our personality in it. So I just decided I really want to redecorate and make this house more about my tastes and my personality! Bit by bit, room by room, little by little I am going to redecorate. I'm excited.

These are the ideas I have so far.


Dining Room:

I want a medieval/romantic/gothic theme in the dining room. Mostly based around this gianormous (seriously, it's like 4 ft by 3 ft if not bigger!) painting that Alan's family gave us of Romeo & Juliet. He has fond memories of it hanging in his grandparents home growing up as a child, and really wants it in our house, so I am going to adapt the dining room around it.



I like the wrought iron look of things in here too, like this candle holder (although I may replace the candles, lol, they are leaning a bit)




I have 2 tealight candelabras that sit on my dining room table too that really go with the decor.


There's a bunch of local artists displayed at The Artzplace where my kids take their music lessons, and there is this one Artist, Lainey G. that I LOVE the 2 things she has up there. Her e-mail is next to her pics, so after admiring them each week for like the last month, I decided to e-mail her yesterday and ask if she would make me one kind of like this one, but smaller. So far she offered to make me a 18x20 for $350, but I countered with how big of one could she make me for like $150, lol. SO we shall see, but I think it would go well in the dining room. But I love stuff like this:



It's all dark and gothic, with black tulle and wire swirlies (I love swirls!)

I love this one she has displayed too, but it's $1700, a BIT out of my price range.....



So that's all I got for the dining room so far.

Living room:

In the livingroom I am going to get one of Debbie Curtis' barbie paintings, but I'm not sure which one,I like to many of them!

(for some reason I can't get the link to work, so here is the website http://debbiecurtisart.com/home.html )

But I want the living room to be a retro/funky/colorful theme

With bold colors and just fun stuff, like this sign:



Maybe multi colored glass bottles in different sizes and shapes. Other than that, I don't know.

Bedroom:

I want the bedroom to be a romantic escape, based on this painting Midsummer's Dream:



It's a lady surrounded by fairies. :) We have the canopy bed that I want to drape in sheer and pretty fabric. I love fairies and mushrooms and gnomes and elves and things likes that. I want to work them in somehow and make it a little escape from reality. :)

And really thats' it so far. I think I'm going to redo our little bathroom in sunflowers and green ivy, and I haven't decided what we are going to do with the blue bathroom yet.

So Kristal (and anyone else for that matter!) if you come across any ideas to redo these rooms, let me know!!!!

Food options

I never realized there were so many other options for getting groceries other than the grocery store. My wonderful friend Nicolette let me in on a little thing called CSA, which is Community Supported Agriculture. Basically you buy a share into a farm, and then for the whole growing season each week you get a basket of whatever that farm produces. Amazing! I love the idea of having fresh, organically grown food from a local farm! That and I love the idea of helping support a local farmer! You can check it out in your area here. We found a farm in Norman through that local harvest site, and I called them and we got signed up. The woman who owns the farm said she has dairy goats too, and that there are a ton of baby ones right now and the kids can come play with them whenever we want! She is not only growing all the regular veggies that a farm would, but she also has fig trees, a strawberry field, and she puts eggs from her chickens in the basket along with fresh herbs and cut flowers! And later in the season she will also have honey from her beehives! How exciting is that?! She was the cheapest one in our area, and she is also new at it, so I am excited about it. We start picking up our weekly basket the first friday in April, and it will go through November. Yeah!

We are also joing the Oklahoma Food co-op in April. They are a group of local farmers and producers that offer organic food including hormone-free meat, which I am super excited about. They offer SOOO many different types of foods, from fresh made cheeses, butter and yogurts, to fresh baked breads and even tamales and prepared dishes! They have just about anything and everything you could buy (food-wise) at a grocery store, just locally made! You order once a month. I can't wait to try it out and see what it's like!

We are hoping both of these things will help us to not only eat healthier but to also curb our grocery spending, which is getting ridiculous in our attempt to eat better. Plus again, I LOVE the idea of helping the little mom & pops businesses, local hard working people. I love knowing we are helping to support their business!

And I can't wait to take the kids to go play on the farm with the goats! Maybe she'll let us collect eggs and other fun stuff like that for her too! Yeah!

All in my head.....

So my diet was getting to me, and I was at the point where I wanted to eat everything and anything that I wasn't allowed to. So I decided St. Patty's day would be an off day from my diet and I could eat whatever I wanted, and then I would get back on my diet the next day and maybe that would help me to stick to it. I think I am going to have a cheat day once a week just so when the cravings pop up, I can think only X amount of days and you can have that, and it will be easier to walk away from it. Well in theory anyway!

So I wake up yesterday and I make our green breakfast and I eat just a bit of it, one egg and one pancake, but I'm so used to not eating breakfst that I just wasn't hungry. So lunch rolls around and Alan offers to let me pick whatever I want to eat for lunch since I'm eating, but nothing sounded good, and I wasn't even hungry. So I let him pick and we went to eat fried chicken, which I don't even really like, so I ate one piece and some fries and okra. But the thing is, on the days I am on my diet, I want EVERYTHING! And then I say ok, have a day you can eat everything, and I want nothing! What's up with that?! Why is it all in my head like that, I want what I can't have?! lol. I didn't even want to make dinner last night, so we had quick fix stuff and I made a little healthy individual pizza thing (the flatout wraps are 9 grams of fiber and make excellent pizza crust!) and ate half of it. I did have a cupcake and some cookies, so maybe that will tide me over in the sweet tooth department. So I gained 2.2 lbs between yesterday and today (the HCG makes you gain weight even if you only take a few bites of anything with sugar or fat in it) and really it seems silly and not worth it. But maybe, just maybe it will help me realize that I don't need that food and that it's not that big of a deal to not have it. We shall see. Now I am going to try to stick to my diet for the next week, until next friday which is my friend Kristi's birthday celebration dinner. Well, tonight is girls night out too, so I might just have a drink, but I'm sticking to the diet as far as food goes today. :)

purging.....

So we hauled all of Starla's baby gear out of storage......



And pulled out all the tubs of baby clothes from infant to the ones she just has grown out of.....



I've listed the baby gear on craigslist and have sold a few items so far, and then next week is the Just Between Friends consignment sale at the fairgrounds. I spent a few hours today washing, hanging and tagging all of the baby clothes to sell. It's kinda sad, all those cute baby clothes,....sigh.

But all the money we are earning from it is going into an envelope with "Vacation fund" written on it! :) What doesn't sell on craigslist or JBF will get put into a yard sale in a few weeks. We are going to purge tons of stuff from the house in the process.

Sigh, I've just about given up my dream of disneyworld & universal though. Alan just isn't buying it. Ok, so I dream big. It's who I am. I'm just that person that thinks anything can happen, whatever you can dream, you can achieve. I gotta be able to dream big, it's what keeps me going!! :)

But maybe we can go somewhere else, we shall see how much money we can raise getting rid of stuff, and we will go from there! Wish us luck getting rid of all this stuff!! :)

Happy St. Patty's day!

First things first! Breakfast! And it's gotta be green for St. Patty's day! Starla even had green oatmeal.....



And I made green eggs in ham cups, and green pancakes!




We like to be festive!








We went to bricktown, where they always have a parade and block party each year. Bt much to our suprise, there wasn't a parade, and the block party wasn't starting until 2pm this year (they always have it in the morning and serve green eggs and ham each year! Not this year.....) oh well. We played around bricktown for a couple of hours anyway






We went to Roosters for lunch.....















And what is a holiday without cupcakes?! :)









It was a fun family day!