leta joy

I thought I would share a few of the fun purchases I’ve made over the past few months.  Online shopping is so fun, isn’t it?  Etsy is completely addicting.  I need to get some things in my own shop to offset my little shopping habit.  You can find so many wonderful things there, vintage or hand crafted, two of my favorite characteristics.

This is a letterpress piece that I had custom made at 12fifteen.  Her work is lovely and she is very accommodating.  I saw a design on some of her coasters that I really liked and asked her to make a larger size that I could frame.  I plan on hanging this in our new bedroom some day. 

I found just jenn designs via Cool Mom Picks.  I have found a ton of cool things through their site, plus they have a lot of giveaways as well.  I ordered these cute circus themed notepads for the girls and couldn’t resist adding a smaller notepad for myself.  These would make a fabulous gift for a young (or young at heart) person in your life.  I have no idea why a four year old and seven week old need their own stationery (thank you notes?  letters to Grandma?), but I have always been a sucker for personalized items.  I don’t see that particular vice ending anytime soon.

I found this wonderful site via the chicken.  They sell a variety of art supplies, cards and toys, all of them eco-friendly and so cute.  I’m saving these for a particularly rough day or special occasion.  New art supplies always brightens up the day, right?

This last one is a total 80’s throwback.  When I saw the folder on the shelf in the school supplies aisle, I really couldn’t leave the store without it.  I had a purple Trapper Keeper in the fourth grade that I loved.  Why don’t they make Trapper Keepers anymore? On the first day of school that year I wore purple from head to toe.  I wish I still had those purple Nikes.

This past weekend we celebrated my sister and brother-in-law’s 25th wedding anniversary with family and friends. I was very proud of my oldest nephew for organizing the surprise party for his parents and all that went along with it. He must have been scheming for months in order to pull it off.

I was eight years old when my sister married her high school sweetheart.  I was the flower girl in their wedding.  I still had the flower garland that I wore in my hair and the flower petals that I dropped as I walked down the aisle.  I used some of them to construct the gift wrap for the CD of songs from 1983 that I made for them.  The uber-talented Bubby was kind enough to design the CD label for me (Thanks, Bubby!).

My nephew just got engaged (to a very sweet girl) and plans to marry before the end of the year.  If that isn’t enough to make you feel old, then I don’t know what will.  I was twelve years old when he was born and I was so excited that I called my sixth grade teacher at home over Christmas break to tell her about it.  Now he’s 6 feet 4 inches tall and planning a wedding.  Time marches on.

This gal is giving away a loverly hand made quilt.  Go see!

It feels like I am scooting along through this summer in a daze, amazed at how quickly the days are passing me by and how little I am doing other than caring for two small children.  Trying to be present in the moment and not wish these days away but longing for some consecutive hours of sleep and uninterrupted time with my husband.  Kissing their little faces and fingers and toes, realizing how quickly they grow.  Missing my friends.  Feeling like I am keeping a pretty good handle on things most of the time, but knowing it is a precarious ledge I am balancing on, this no-man’s land of motherhood I find myself mired in up to my eyeballs.

I remember all too clearly those early days after Arwyn was born, wanting to be everything to everybody but not quite knowing how.  Stumbling along, hoping we all come out on the other side still intact.  People tell me that I’m strong, that I can do this, that I can handle all of this chaos better than they can.  But I have moments, moments of crying in the kitchen where no one can see, moments of not knowing what the hell I’m doing or how I arrived at this crazy place or where to go from here, the stress that you can’t see manifesting itself in my gut, in my tone of voice, in the eyes that I see staring back at me blearily from the bathroom mirror on the rare ocassion that I take the time to look.

This time is awful and wonderful all at the same time.

Read this.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

We spent the fourth of July pretty much the same way we spent the fifth and sixth of July.  Taking care of two small children, painting our basement, and trying not to fall over from sheer exhaustion.  However, we did make one small concession to the holiday:  we invited some friends over for dinner and we grilled.  Oh, boy did we ever!  The Bubster slaved over the charcoal, cookin’ up hamburglers, hot dogs (cheesey ones, no less), T-bones and ribeyes.  The only reason we grilled so much darn meat is because of the generosity of my parents.  We have a freezer full of home grown beef and we like to share it with our friends. We also like to eat the leftovers all weekend.

I’m not really one for patriotic displays.  However, I wanted to display something festive so I pulled out some of the blue and red items I had around the house and made a little centerpiece for the table.  I was thinking a little more “fun and summery” than “go America”. I used to have a red and white tablecloth somewhere, but I couldn’t find it in the limited time I had between showering and when our guests arrived.  Maybe I don’t even have it anymore, who knows. Our house is in a sad state these days and I am apparently not one of those people that won’t have guests over just because their house isn’t tidy or even clean for that matter. Aunt Banana would be mortified.  Good thing she wasn’t one of the guests.

Before the baby was born I had the ill-timed and completely ridiculous idea to participate in another one of OMSH’s swaps.  It wouldn’t have been so bad, except I always feel like I have to make something for the swaps, since I consider myself to be a crafty gal and all.  And everything I send has to be things I love and would want to receive myself, plus fit all of the other criteria of the swap.  And there is a deadline to meet.  And I have to make a trip to the post office, not to mention shop for all of the goodies.  And all of my craft supplies are in the dirty, dusty, sheet-rocky basement.  I realize I brought this one on myself, so I should probably just shut my big whining mouth, right?  But then, what would I blog about?

The funnest part of doing a swap for me, other than receiving your own swap package in return, is thinking about this person that you don’t know who probably lives thousands of miles away and trying to come up with things you think they might like culled together from a limited list of likes and dislikes.  It reminds me of the pen pal I had in grade school.  She was Catholic, which I thought was so very exotic.  She sent me a picture of her first communion, in her pristine white dress standing in front of the church.  Knowing me, I probably sent her a picture of myself standing on a dirt pile with scabbed up knees. Maybe I am still trying to redeem myself all these years later with my killer swap packages.

All of my pictures can be seen here.  The group photo pool is here.

I don’t think there is a good way to fill you in on all that has been going on around here for the past month, so I’m just going to jump in all willy nilly.  I was able to spend a little time going through some of my pictures yesterday, and came across these chocolate muffins that I made for Bubby.  It all started with a solo trip (rare, these days) I made to the grocery store one evening.  Bubby was at home with both girls, so I was speeding through the aisles grabbing necessities (Ski, cheese puffs) and tossing them into my cart.  I came across this muffin tin in the pancake mix aisle and after contemplating for about .04 seconds, threw it in the buggy with the grapes and soy milk.  I’ve wanted a jumbo muffin tin for awhile, it was cheap, and I knew I had a package of muffin mix waiting at home.

Bubby loves all things chocolate and I bought the chocolate chip muffin mix with him in mind.  I decided to add some chocolately goodness to make them even more yummy.  What’s better than chocolate? More chocolate, of course. I added some semi-sweet chocolate chips to the mix and then sprinkled some mini chocolate chips on top of each muffin before baking it.  The mix only made three jumbo muffins, which I will keep in mind for next time.  I had to bake them a few minutes longer than the directions stated, due to their gigantic status.

I finished them off with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.  One muffin for me, two for Bubby.  I had mine for an afternoon snack, as they were more like chocolate cake in my opionion.

For everyone keeping score at home, we’ve gone from cooking blog to pregnancy blog to baby blog and now back to cooking blog.  But I still have about 400 pictures of the baby to sort through…and I will have some craftiness to throw in as well!  Yipee!!

I’ve seen this meme floating around and thought I would do it since I am too tired to come up with anything clever today.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name? Leta
2. What is your favorite food? chocolate
3. What high school did you go to? Orleans High School
4. What is your favorite color? purple
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Sarah Jessica Parker
6. Favorite drink? Coca-Cola
7. Dream vacation? Hawaii
8. Favorite dessert? pie
9. What you want to be when you grow up?  I wish I knew.
10. What do you love most in life? my children & my hubby
11. One Word to describe you: tired
12. What is your Flickr name? letajoy

Photo credits:
1. Leta, 2. Fancy Florals cupcakes, 3. A man going around taking names…, 4. Soft purple, 5. our_eyes_met.jpg, 6. Refresco, 7. Tropical Sunset, 8. Main Courses, 9. When Waves Collide, 10. Autumn walk, 11. yawn, 12. letajoy

If you’d like to do it too here’s what you do:

Open three windows. One with the list of questions, another open to Flickr and ready to do an image search, and a third to Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker (create a mosaic with 4 columns and 3 rows). Answer the first question, put your answer in the search field on Flickr and choose one of the images from the first page to represent your answer. Click on the photo then copy and paste the url into the #1 spot on the Mosaic Maker. Do that for all 12 questions, then click create and post the results to your blog.

Links via Bella Dia.

In the past two weeks I have:  given birth, taken care of a super sick Bubby, hosted a small birthday party, dealt with ongoing construction on the house, tried to sort out baby’s feeding and pooping issues, had a lot of visitors (some welcome, some…not so much) and had very little sleep.  So if I’m not posting often enough for your liking (IFB, I’m lookin’ at YOU) all I can say is, you have obviously never had a baby.  And also, SUCK IT!  I’ve been a little BUSY.

Tomorrow Miss Arwyn Dae turns four.  She is crazy, loud, funny, outgoing, imaginative, independent, headstrong, loving, sweet, talkative, friendly, energetic, colorful and smart.  Everything a four year old should be.

She has no idea that her party this year was a fraction of the chaos it normally is.  And if anyone decides to fill her in on that little tidbit of information, I will not hesitate to punch you in the face.

All of the birthday party photos can be found here.