Valentine's Day 2015

We're not big extravagant Valentine's Day celebraters, but we do alway exchange cards and usually some sort of little gift. It's also my dad's birthday, so we usually celebrate with him too. This year was a little more fun than normal because we have Connor! When I was growing up, my parents always surprised my sisters and me with little gifts on Valentine's Day morning, so I wanted to do the same for him.

His first Valentine's Day gift was this cute little book:

I wanted a book about St. Valentine, but I couldn't seem to find a good one... any recommendations? Connor obviously didn't particularly care about his book, but he did look super cute in his "My First Valentine's Day" outfit!

Jeff took Connor for a couple hours in the morning so I could sleep in (best. gift. ever.), and they secretly went to the store while I was asleep! When I woke up, there were two vases of flowers and two cards in the kitchen (one from each of them), along with an assortment of British candy and tea that Jeff picked up earlier in the week at one of our favorite little shops in Houston.

I got Jeff the latest Disney classics Blu-Ray release (101 Dalmatians). He's been collecting the Disney classics as they're released from the Disney "vault" so that we'll have a complete collection for our kids. This was the first one he's received since Connor was born, so it was kind of special. :)

We drove to my parents' lakehouse in the afternoon and met my parents and sister for a fondue dinner to celebrate my dad's birthday. So fun! I hope you all had a wonderful Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day 2014

I'm only oh... over a month behind on blogging about Valentine's Day. Haha. But I have to document it anyway, right? We were never big Valentine's Day celebraters before we got married (mostly because we were long-distance dating and not ever in the same place, I think), but over the past few years we've really enjoyed doing something special for the 14th of February. We don't do really expensive gifts or meals or anything, but we try to just do something sweet and use it as an excuse to spend some quality time together.

First of all, a few little house decorations:

I ended up stuck at work late on Valentine's Day, but when I finally got home Jeff surprised me with a really sweet card, tulips (my favorite!), and chocolate covered sunflower seeds (another favorite).

The tulips were still attached to the bulbs and in a special vase that keeps the bulbs and roots growing, so they bloomed beautiful red flowers for weeks! Jeff also gave me a little gift - a heated blanket! It sounds like a silly gift, but it was actually really sweet. I had been complaining about how I get so cold at night when he's out of town for work, so he bought me the blanket to solve the problem and make me miss him a little less when he's on business trips. I gave Jeff Little Mermaid on Blu-Ray (he's collecting all the Disney classics as they come out on Blu-Ray).

We went out to dinner a couple days after Valentine's Day (once the deal I'd been working on day-and-night on finally closed) at our favorite little Mexican restaurant. Mmm, enchiladas! :)

I look pretty tired, huh? You can tell I'd been working really long hours for a few days.

So that was Valentine's Day 2014! Nothing spectacular, but lovely nonetheless. :)

Last Year's Fall Decor

I never got around to blogging about my fall house decor last fall (it was a busy semester!), but I did take photos, so I figured I'd kick off this year's fall with last year's photos!

The dining room is always one of my favorite places to decorate for fall. The combination of dark wood furniture and natural light in there just makes it perfect for fall decorating!

I created a centerpiece out of some candleholders, a wooden "FALL" decoration, and some things I purchased at the pumpkin patch!

Our everyday dishes, some clearance napkins from Bed Bath & Beyond, and some old Pier 1 napkin rings finished it off!

The wine unit got some fall flair as well...

I filled the Crate & Barrel tealight holders with fake fall leaves: 

The console table wasn't left out either:

I filled the piano room vase with mini gourds from Dollar Tree, and I switched the ivory candles over the piano for light orange ones:

The antique table in our entryway got a little fall arrangement as well...

A little pumpkin candy jar got put in the kitchen...

The living room got a few little fall touches on the entertainment center...

And on the powder room door...

Of course, I put my fall wreath on the front door:

I made a small little arrangement with leftover flowers from the wreath, and it ended up in the powder room:

I tend to change up my holiday decorations every year, so it'll be interesting to see where all these things end up this time around!

Singapore: Part I

So we went to Alaska. And Seattle. And then South Padre Island. And you thought we were done taking trips. But surprise – we’ve also been in Singapore!

A few things you should know about Singapore... Our dear friends Kristen and Dan (our DC-and-Virginia trip buddies) moved there in January, which is why we went. We had to wait until after my graduation and the Bar exam, and I can’t take enough vacation to get there once I’m working, so just like our graduation trip (the Alaskan cruise) and our annual South Padre trip, our visit to Singapore got scheduled for August/September 2013!

Anyway, Singapore! It’s super hot and humid (and this is coming from us, residents of the hot-and-humid capital of the U.S. aka Houston). It does really weird things to my hair (so if you could do me a favor and disregard how crazy I look in most of the photos we took there, that would be great). People there really like Taylor Swift and 90’s pop (we once heard “Wasn’t Me,” "Waterfalls," and "Teenage Dirtbag" at dinner in a fancy restaurant). Sometimes you have to use toilets that look like this. The food is sometimes weird, but almost always delicious (exceptions = chicken flossy and durian fruit). Also the architecture there is amazing. Oh, and we had an absolute blast visiting!

Reunited!!

Squinty-eyed boys! 

Five Things

It's been a while since I did a Five Things post, huh? I guess I was just saving up my "things" until I had five good ones! So here we go... 
1. I Love Free Flowers! Spring is so great. Everything in our yard is blooming, so I have plenty of fresh flowers, and they're all free! 
Irises from our backyard!
Knock-out roses from the front yard!
Lantana from the front yard!
I'll be so sad when it gets hotter and everything stops making beautiful flowers! 
2. Summer Recipe Features Some of my recipes have been featured recently by a couple wonderful bloggers, and I just wanted to give them a shout-out here! Sober Julie just did a feature on frozen desserts (sorbet, gelato, ice cream) and included my lemon ice cream!

And The Saturday Evening Pot just did a feature all about lemons, including my lemon pound cake, lemon berry trifle, lemon tarts, and lemon cake with lemon buttercream (along with lots of other lemony recipes I can't wait to try!).

That lemon & eggplant risotto is calling my name. I love risotto!
3. Simple Produce Wash I'm horrible. I usually just rinse my fruits and veggies with water and call it a day. And I don't like to pay extra for the organic stuff, so my fruits and veggies are probably covered in pesticide and scary stuff. We haven't died yet, so I guess it's not that big of a deal, but I decided I ought to be doing a better job with the produce cleaning.
So now this is my method (based on this website): Plug the drain in the sink. Put a cup of vinegar in the sink. Fill the sink halfway with lukewarm water. Mix it up. Put the fruits & veggies in the sink. Let it sit for 10 minutes. Rinse and dry everything.


I do it whenever I go to the grocery store and everything gets washed all at once and it's super easy. For stuff like green beans and berries it's helpful to stick a big colander in the sink so you have something to scoop 'em up with. :) 
4. A Visit from Blog/Real-life Friends! We got to see our friends Caitlin and Adam when they visited Humble a couple weeks ago! 

Caitlin is an example for me of how blogging can be so wonderful. I actually met her on our Engaged Encounter retreat (they got married on the same day as us), and we talked a bit but I never would've ever seen her again if we hadn't found each other through blogging a few weeks later and realized we had so much in common! And here we are, three years later, about to celebrate our third anniversaries. :) 
5. Moving my Sister's Stuff  I love my family for lots of reasons. One reason is that we're always there for each other and willing to help make each other's lives easier. That's why my parents moved my sister's stuff home from college and we unpacked it (heavy furniture and all) entirely without my sister because she was still in Fort Worth finishing up a summer semester (but not in her unfurnished apartment anymore).
This is the outfit I wear when I come over on a Sunday after church and don't know we're about to move a bunch of furniture.
I also love my family because they're just so funny and they make me laugh. And that's why we took a picture of just how exhausted we were after hauling all of my sisters stuff out of the U-Haul to send to her while she was in Fort Worth not helping.

Haha! Love you, Kristen! 
And that's it! Is anyone else guilty of just rinsing the produce with water and calling it done? What about painting an entire room with two coats before realizing you bought the wrong paint? Here's hoping I'm not the only one... :)

This Weekend

This weekend. It was very full and yet it also kind of feels like we did nothing. So strange.   One of my dearest friends got engaged on Thursday, so I've had a happy heart all weekend. I have a short little list of single girls (mostly good friends from college) that I pray for daily... I pray for them to find some perfect wonderful husbands who love them and appreciate all of their delightful qualities and and give them a real-life version of happily ever after. And now one of them has actually done it and there's a ring on her finger and hello, prayers answered! and that's just kind of awesome. I love it and I wish she was more of the obsess-over-wedding-plans type because I seriously need to live vicariously through someone else's wedding planning. But she's, you know, normal and rational and not obsessive, which is why she's a very, very good friend for me to have. Haha!

That's my dear newly-engaged friend next to me (second from the right) as a bridesmaid at our wedding. And now she's having a wedding of her own! And the one on the far left just had a baby! Where does time go?

On Friday we did bluebonnet photos (this is a thing in Texas). Our friend Thomas (who is new to Texas) is working on completing my Five Texas Musts list (Mexican food, cowboy boots, rodeo, bluebonnet photos, Alamo), and spring has brought the bluebonnets, so of course we all had to don our denim + white + boots and find a nice patch on the side of the highway and bring my fancy camera and the travel tripod and have some fun. 
Jeff looks like such a giant here! I should've stood on the higher-up part of the hill! 
Look at this, friends! Three years of marriage and we're still so in love that we end up with pictures that look like engagement photos. I wasn't even trying to show off the wedding ring! Haha.
Of course we got plenty photos of Thomas being a "real" Texan!
Hehe. 
Silly friends. :)
Grass stains were had and the pretty flowers didn't do any good for my allergies (which I've never had before but for some reason do this year?), but it was oh so worth it for the pretty photos.
This is one of my favorite ever photos of Jeff and me. 
Thanks again, bluebonnets. See you next year!

On Saturday and Sunday I spent about 26 hours reading 2L casenotes and comments, and I'm happy to report that I have finished them all, which means I am officially DONE with Law Review. Forever. For. Ev. Er. This is a big, big deal, and I am so relieved. Now on to writing my Estate Planning paper and studying for finals and, you know, graduating (!!!).
While I was reading and editing and evaluating, Jeff was mulching the yard and fixing once-and-for-all a couple of the chairs in the craft room (sometimes when you buy things for $3.00 at furniture auctions they lack pieces of wood where pieces of wood should be). Oh, and he cleaned my car up real nice because we're kinda sorta toying with the idea of selling it and buying a new one and we're gonna take it to Carmax for a quote. And of course, because I'm absolutely insane, I stood in the garage and cried at the thought of disposing of the dear car that's been so faithful to me for the last seven years (because clearly if we sell it he'll end up being driven by a 16-year old irresponsible boy or a creeper who smokes and leaves trash in him, and how is that fair to my dear loyal Mazda?) and I had to leave the garage and go inside to pull myself together while Jeff shined him all up. I'm ridiculous.
While Jeff was cleaning out my car, he found my stash of HomeGoods purchases in my trunk. Let me explain. Last week, I bought some clothes and house decor stuff, but I told myself I wasn't allowed to get it out of my trunk until I had (1) finished reading the Law Review papers, (2) caught up on my Corporate Tax reading, and (3) started my Estate Planning paper. So there it sat. But Jeff found it and brought it all inside, which means now I'm not at all motivated to write that stupid Estate Planning paper, but there's a pretty new mirror in our bedroom. Home decor is way more important than good grades, right? 
One of my HomeGoods purchases was a gravy boat (because I realized we don't have one when I needed one for the dijon marsala sauce for Easter dinner, and it was only $7). As I was pulling all of my many HomeGoods purchases out of shopping bags, I was apologizing to Jeff that it sure seemed like I bought a bunch of stuff and was trying to hide it from him by keeping it all in the trunk of my car, and I was saying something like "you know, this is why you work so hard, so your silly wife can go purchase hundreds of dollars of stuff at HomeGoods and leave it in her car," and I looked up at him and he wasn't even listening to me. Instead, he had grabbed the gravy boat and was holding it over my head in a pouring motion making "glop swish glop" sounds as if he were pouring some sort of goo out of the gravy boat and onto my head. I laughed. A lot.
A few hours later I made some comment about how he tried to douse me in invisible gravy, and he informed me that he didn't try to douse me, he succeeded, and that I was still drenched in invisible goo and I better go take an invisible shower. Oh, how I love that man. He just makes me laugh. All the time. 
During some between-reading-papers breaks I somehow managed to click one link that led to another and so forth and then I accidentally discovered the world of Catholic mommy blogs. I'm not sure how I've been missing out on gems like this one and this one and this one and this one, but oh dear. They're hilarious and honest and wonderful, and now of course my uterus is screaming at me to hurry up and have some littles already because then I can be a Catholic mommy blogger too. But you know, there's the little issue of law school and the Bar exam and the job. Patience. 
This is the most random post ever. New cars, gravy boats, bluebonnets, engaged friends, and uteruses (uteri?). So sorry, but I'm just all over the place today! I hope you're all having a lovely Monday (if there is such a thing... don't we all just wish it was the weekend still?).