What I've learned from Pinterest

First of all, if you're not on Pinterest, you're missing out. There a million and one things on there that catch my eyes every day. Follow me if you're there, so I can stalk love all the things you love, too.

1. If you aren't the world's best cook, you can be! Well, maybe YOU can be, but I cannot because I despise spending more than about 10 minutes making food. But apparently if you're super handy in the kitchen, you can make things like this:

 

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2. If your hair sucks, you can make it amazing! I can assure you my hair sucks. It's super thin, very fine, straight, doesn't hold a curl without a bottle of hairspray, and even then it only lasts for about an hour. But don't worry! You're not me, so these MUST work:

The Infamous Sock Bun

 

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3. If your style sucks, you're in luck! That old ratty t-shirt of yours is now popular and if you just make these small little tweaks, you'll love it again! Let's just ignore that fact that we aren't all a size 0 with no boobs, and we can act like our big ol' titties won't fall out of these.

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Let it be known that I have tried this style many times, and it never turns out as pretty.

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4. If your house lacks decorations, you can just make them! I know everyone must have all of these simple things laying around their house. Amiright? Or if you don't, just go to that garage sale down the road and you'll be sure to find something amazing that you can fix up all on your own.

Note: This is awesome and I want one. 

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5. And last but not least, you most definitely can have a perfectly toned body with these simple exercises!

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Now if you're still alive after trying those last ones, congratulations! You're better than I am. As I have been "planning" on doing those exercises for weeks now. 

Instead I am here. Go figure.

Nursery deco: Name in frames

I've been scouring the internet for months now looking for the perfect decorations to add to the nursery. I decided sometime during those months that I wanted to add Pea Baby's name on the wall above his bed. I looked for ideas on Google and Pinterest at lot.

I finally decided that I needed to find the perfect picture frame that was long and skinny. Unfortunately whenever I found one that I liked, it cost way more than I wanted to spend! I ended up deciding on getting 7 frames that were the perfect size for each letter. (I even showed a "sneak preview" on my FB page sometime last week!) And SCORE! They were only 1€ each!

 

 That's 7 well spent euros! 

The next piece of this craft: Finding the perfect letters to go inside. I used a website that I've used for about 8 years now. (I used to make my own Myspace layouts! haha.) That website was: DaFont.com. They have a HUGE variety of fonts - for free! - that you can download and use for personal use. 

I went through probably 20 different fonts before finally deciding on 7 different ones that I thought would look good. I made each letter the size that I wanted it, and printed it off in high-quality ink on a thicker picture paper. 

 

As for the picture frames, I went to a small store right around the corner from my house and checked out what they had for wrapping paper. I found some striped green wrapping paper for 0.49€. Sweet! I wrapped the back of the picture frames with the wrapping paper and taped it on the back side. 

For the letters, I just used some trusty double-stick tape, and voila! Magic happens. 

And here's what they looked like when I finished:

Hanging them on the wall was Husband's job. He's a Carpenter so that is just his thing. He's also a perfectionist, so I knew that they'd be perfectly spaced out on the wall. 

What do you think?! 

Nursery - furniture

I'm very happy to announce that the furniture for Pea Baby arrived today!

Husband invited his friend over to help with setting it up, and they had a blast. Normally you'd think that people wouldn't want to help set up other people's shit, but these two seem to have a blast no matter what they are doing. I'm sure they could've gotten it done in half the time they did it in if they weren't fucking around, but whatever. I don't care either way. They had a good time, and I'm beyond happy with the room.

I think it looks FABULOUS against the green walls that we painted. We had actually mixed the two green colors ourselves, but the "matte" color of the darker green on the bottom half of the walls looks awesome next to the brownish-gray color furniture.

Now, I actually snapped this photo of the guys hard at work about halfway through the process, but that's besides the point. They were actually reading directions and shit. Imagine that! Men read directions!

Now, imagine you are standing in the doorway of the room. This is what you'd be seeing. Whenever you enter any bedroom, you should be looking at the bed first. It's pleasant on the eyes. I'm also happy that when I'm sitting at my kitchen table and Pea Baby's bedroom door is open, I'll be able to watch him in bed. (Future plans are to add his name over the bed on the wall.) The bed is also able to change into a toddler size bed.

Look to the left a little bit and you'll see the closet . It might not look very big, but there is a ton of space. Left of the closet are the windows/doors to the balcony. (We have doors to the big ass balcony in four different spots in our house.)

Standing in the corner by the bed, you see the changing table with storage underneath. (The changing table can be taken off when Pea Baby is big enough and we don't need it anymore.) I've got a nice wall shelf above it to put diaper changing necessities OR cute decorations on. haha. Also, there is another shelving unit on the right side, which I can add pictures, decorations, or other things that may or may not be necessary.

Standing in the corner between the closet and the windows, you see the same stuff, and can actually see where the door is. (This gives you a better idea of the bedroom size. Lots of space for Pea Baby.)

And, while standing in the room, I realized that we need a nice floor rug! Look at all this EMPTY FLOOR! I'm thinking a green shaggy-ish rug that is soft on your toes that Pea Baby can roll around on. :)

Now that we've got the furniture in the room, I've taken all the baby clothes that have been boxed up in our storage out and they are in the wash. I'll be folding and putting them away in the appropriate places soon, and THAT feels great. :)

Nursery sneak peak

I managed to paint the ugly orange wall (which is from the people who lived here before us) earlier this week. It was quite the work out! Of course I had to have a little fun with it first:

Yeah, I was just painting it white, because of course white has to be done before any other colors. Today, however, husband (AKA Mr. Awesome) & I got to painting the nursery our desired colors. GREEN! I'm also pretty sure we were the only ones painting the day before Christmas.. haha.

Here is a sneak peak of what is to come:

 

Oh Christmas Tree

So we got a Christmas Tree stand! Funny story behind that..

I decided that I wasn't too lazy wanted to walk to the store yesterday, Sami in tow. (It's perfectly normal to walk to the store in Germany, and leave the dog outside where the bike racks are. And, nope, nobody tries to steal your dog. I always bring snacks or buy snacks for her so that once I come outside, she has something, too.)

Anyways.. I went to the little discount store "Netto" near my house. It is the closest to my house, so of course I'm going to look there first. They have a small little rack of Christmas shit, and buried beneath all of it, were 2 or 3 boxes of Christmas Tree stands. Sweet! I thought, thinking I saved myself from walking anywhere else. And it was on sale. Sweet! So I buy the stand, get Sami (first she got her snack), and head on home. It's less than a 5 minute walk from my house, but still, being pregnant, some days it's quite the accomplishment.

I get home and, very excited to get my Christmas Tree up and decorated, started trying to put the stand up. There were even directions in the box on how to set the damn thing up. Now, I can read the instructions (which are in German, of course), but there were also pictures. So I just followed the picture directions.

After 10 minutes of trying to open the damn stand, I decided to try and read the directions.

OK, I read the directions. OK, I think I got it.

Try again.. Nothin'. GETTING PISSED OFF HERE!

This should not be such a difficult fucking task. I'm pretty sure I was fiddling with this damn thing for 30 minutes or so before I decided "Okay, belleh' is grumbling. Let's feed the belleh' and then try again after.." So I made some food, ate, and then my sister back in California popped online, and we Skyped for a while. I even showed her the stupid thing on camera and showed her how frustrated I was with it. I thought the damn thing was broken, and figured my options were to either:

A) Take it back to the store. (Which means putting my jeans back on so that I don't look like a hobo in my sweat pants, and I wasn't really feelin' it.)
or B) Wait for husband to get home from work and see if he can fix it. (AKA use his strong man hands to force it into the position it's supposed to go in. If he can't do that, he'll break it and then buy me a new one. hahaha.)

Soooo, two and a half hours later, husband gets home. This is pretty much what went down:

Him: Hi babe. *kiss* How are you? Oooohhh! *He see's the box for the stand on the table.* You got a stand?
Me: Hi babe. I did. Do you see the Christmas Tree up and decorated...? There's a reason it's not up..
Him: Why? What's wrong?
Me: The damn thing won't work. I don't know if it's broken or if I'm a fucking idiot, but there are PICTURE directions. It shouldn't be that hard..
*He grabs the stand and tries to open it. Doesn't work*
Me: Here are the instructions if you want them..
*He reads them for two seconds. Looks at stand and with one finger, like a fucking magician, CLICK! The damn thing opens up and VIOLA! Done.*
Me: WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?!
Him: Pushed here.
Me: I did that a million fucking times!
Him: You did it wrong.

Long story short, the Christmas Tree stand works! hahaha. Husband brought the tree in and put it up for me. Then he left to go to the gym and I finally got to decorate.

This is also when I found out that the lights we bought for the tree were only about a third as long as they need to be. Super! Gotta buy more.. It's okay though. I just decorated with what I had. Balls. Lots of balls. At one point, I was making fun of my Christmas Tree full of balls. Hell, I still am. But I had ribbon as well.

My plan was to make one big ass bow, and a bunch of little bows all around the tree, but I didn't like the way that the big ass bow ended up looking with both ribbons together. So I used Pinterest and Google for about 5 minutes to find pretty ideas on how to make this giant bow that I had in my head and found some good leads.

I used a few ideas from random things I read here and there and VIOLA! Big ugly bow done. Okay, it's not so ugly, I kind of like it. I just wish I could make it look better. But this is my first attempt at something like this, so I'll take what I can get.

Now, I took a photo of the tree in the daytime because the lights are not long enough to reach from top to bottom, and thus, it looks kinda funny right now. Otherwise, I think I'm actually satisfied with the way it turned out. I still need to get a skirt to put underneath it, but that can be added when I find one.

Do you have your Christmas Tree up yet? Comment and link up your blog here!

Christmas has arrived!

Okay, so maybe Christmas itself isn't here, but we got our Christmas Tree today. WOOHOO! I can finally start decorating. Hold up, there's just one little problem..

Background: We moved this past February a state away when my husband received an awesome job offer that he just couldn't pass up. When packing things up, he ordered a big ass trash container and threw so much shit away. Yes, I say shit because there was so much SHIT sitting in the basement and the attic doing nothing but collecting dust. (I was on a vacation visiting my family in California when the move happened, and husband was actually happy that I didn't see all the shit.) Shit that got thrown away was not of sentimental value, and most of it was just things that reminded my husband of his ex-wife. Which, of course, meant they had to go..

Among the things that got thrown away were my Halloween decorations and the Christmas decorations. It should be known that he was NOT supposed to throw away my Halloween decorations, as Halloween is my FAVORITE HOLIDAY EVER and I sort of go all-out. (To which he says "Oh well, buy it again." MEN!) Thus, Halloween was rather sad in my house this year, as I have to start my collection all over again.

Now I currently have this Christmas Tree and nothing to put it in! So you ask, "Why would you buy a Christmas Tree and not a stand?" We didn't buy it. It was gifted to us. Sweet! A free Christmas Tree! AmIRight?

This is currently the sad, sad Christmas Tree, wrapped up in the entrance to my house. And look! There's Sami asking WTF I'm doing. haha

Now, I know exactly where I want to put the tree. I have it all planned out. I'd like to put it here, under the stairs. It's currently dead space, anyways. And if you look closely, you'll see Sami, once again, on the couch, popping up in the picture. She always seems to make her presence known.

Now, please ignore my horrible editing skills but, I imagine it will end up looking something like this:

Oooohhhh yes. That's right. We're going ALL OUT over here!

How have YOU decorated for the holidays? Comment and link up your blog here!

*This post was linked up to Tina's PicStory* 

Craftless

I have had so many ideas running through my head over the past few months of crafts that I would love to make for our house. Problem? No money to fund the crafts. I hope the job that I recently started will help to fund the habit that I really want to do.

I used to be really crafty in high school, and as a child. I love all things colorful and I love being unique. I like to stand out in the crowd, and I hate "cookie cutter" houses and decorations. However, I feel like I've lost my touch. I think I lost a lot of that "touch" when I moved to Germany and became completely dependent on my husband. I lost my independence, which I have slowly been gaining back over the past three years. I really feel like over the past year, I've gained a lot of that independence back, and that creative bug has been biting me in my ass.

Prior to moving to where we live now, I had a few decorations in the house we had. Of course we ended up moving, and since then, our house is pretty bare. I mean, we have great furniture. And the house itself is great. But we seriously lack decorations. My husband says that he doesn't want a shit load of decorations because "Who is going to dust them?" (And then the argument begins.. haha) But seriously. We need decorations. And I have had pictures of my family for about 5 months now that I have NOT gotten frames for! I have a great spot for them in the house, and I've already declared that space my "future picture wall," however, it's still empty.

So these were a couple of the decorations that I put in the kitchen of our old house.

The blues and greens really complemented the color of the cabinets. And the pinkish-red in the middle was just me adding some new colors to the room. I bought them for 2.50 Euros each. Pretty good price! Well, the problem is that we moved and now they don't match anything in my house. And they are just too boring now. (Funny how fast I got tired of them.) So when we moved to the new house I absolutely forbid my husband from throwing them away. They are too cheap to do that.

My plan was to find some fabric to cover them with, as painting would not look good on the material they were made in. Six months later I am still looking for the perfect fabric..

I am also currently looking for some awesome ideas for the upcoming nursery that we will be making. We don't know if the baby is a boy or girl yet, but tomorrow is my 3D scan. I am SO excited to finally find out! We already have a name picked out for a boy, but if it's a girl, we're going to need to do some serious thinking. We have some ideas, but nothing really is set in stone yet.

In any case, I have always been dead set on NOT making the nursery blue or pink. I would like to have a gender-neutral nursery.  I really like the idea of having green and brown in the nursery. Or even yellow with a splash of orange. If you follow me on Pinterest, you will see some of the ideas that I have posted. I don't want to overload my blog with nursery IDEAS, rather, I'd like to post the progress and finished product. I've also found some great ideas through Pinterest to do with baby that will help to show growth, progress, etc.

I'm getting more and more excited for baby every day! And to make things better, I have been feeling a LOT more movement lately. I love it! It reminds me that s/he is there. :)