Part 2: about me

1. I grew up in Washington and I really miss it. It is a beautiful state to live in. If I get the chance there are multiple places I would want to live, or at least travel to. Once I took the amtrack train over Stevens Pass, and it was breath taking, and you go through Leavenworth which is a little Bavarian style tourist towns that looks straight out of the Alps. I would love to live in the Seattle area, there are so many cool places to go and see such as museums, AMAZING resturants, and for nature you have the cascades, ocean, rainforest, lakes, rivers, etc. It is SO beautiful there.

2. I love making home made pies. A home made pie is a beautiful thing. Now I'm hungry....

3. I love making stuff. I was always trying to make stuff as a kid. 2 things I would love to learn how to do is re-upholstering furniture and carpentry/woodworking

4. I would love to write a book someday.

5. My favorite memory with Ryan was when we went on a canoe trip the summer of 04 (we were married in 05) with a group from BYU-I. It was a fun trip and I want to do something like that again only just have it be Ryan and I.

6. I broke my arm 4 times by the age of 18, 1- falling out of the cherry tree 2-lost my balance and fell, on carpet, in my room. 3- repeated #2 exactly a year later 3-rollerblading

7. My favorite memory of my family life as a child was going camping. Dad would come home and say "we are going camping" and we would pack everything up and drive several hours north to the mountains. It was always stressfull packing to go and coming back, but the in-between part was wonderful. We roughed it in sleeping bags and tents, and for meals it was the basic camping style food of hot dogs with smores for desert. We would pick blue berries in the morning to put in the pancakes. I hated breakfast, cause Dad always burnt the pancakes and left the insides gooey. Nasty, I still wiggle thinking about it. I loved camping, the 7 of us kids would go through the forests following Dad and find the creek to go fishing in. I have a lot of good memories of camping, and some pretty wild memories like the time when sarah stepped on a hornets nest, and we had to drag her and levi out of there because they were getting stung so much that they panicked and wouldn't move. Sarah sat down in the middle of it, and I remember Heather grabbed one of their hands and just took off running, over logs and bushes. Sarah went into shock and was given a blessing by Dad and a nearby camper who turned out to be a Bishop or something, and she turned out better off than Levi whose face turned out more swollen than Sarah's. fun stuff.

Versatile Blogger: Part 1 Artists

One of Ryans cousins, Carrie at http://madebybedtimetales.blogspot.com/, was sweet and awarded me the Versatile Blogger Award. I would like to pass the award onto some of my favorite sites. I'm changing the rules of the award a little bit, and I'm just going to put some of my favorite artistic bloggers on here- some of them are pretty up there in the art world so I'm not expecting them to respond, but thats completely fine with me.

1. Lizzy House at http://lizzyhouse.typepad.com/lizzyhouse/

The author of this site is a professional fine art printmaker, and a commercial textile designer. The fabric she has designed is beautiful, and her confidence in herself is an inspiration to me. If you are a quilter, or enjoy sewing, or creating really in any way her site is a good place to go to.

2. Jon Klassen at http://burstofbeaden.com/coraline.html and http://www.jonklassen.blogspot.com/

I LOVE the beautiful animation and artwork that was done for the movie Coraline. I was googling the artwork and found Jon Klassen's site, who had done some artwork for the movie. His style is beautiful and unique, and I found the coraline site helpful just in how to choose colors. I love going to his blog to see new artwork he has made.

3. Sarah Mensinga at http://sarahmensinga.blogspot.com/

Sarah's art is definately my favorite out of all of the art sites I follow. She does mostly illustration from what I can tell, and it is beautiful and inspiring. I think I originally discovered her site through illustrations she had done for Drawer Geeks. Her artwork has such beautiful lines and color combinations. Her artwork is so gorgeous. Some may think that llustration is not sophisticated, but to see the work artists are coming out with you would be amazed at how refined and beautiful illustration can be. I haven't taken a class yet on how to do color in artwork, so I have to learn as I go, so when I see her artwork and how beautiful her color schemes are, I am amazed.

4. Drawer Geeks at http://www.drawergeeks.com/

This is a wonderful site where someone posts a list of words, and artists can choose a word and illustrate it. This site helps build artists creativity, for those times when they can't think of what to draw or paint. I love looking at the wide range of styles in the artwork that is posted, and I find that it helps greatly sometimes with my creativity.

Ethan is talking in sentences, and you can understand him!!! He hit a language burst, and he's been saying words I didn't even know he knew. It has taken us by surprise, because in the last couple weeks he has progressively said new sentences randomly, and Ryan and I will stop what we are doing and look at each other and say, "did he really just say what I think he said?!" It's a relief.

Something calming about going small.

I saw this video clip on Yahoo today, and I found it pretty cool.

www.vitality.yahoo.com/video-second-act-jay-shafer-20910192

There is something really calming for me about the idea of going small when it comes to homes. I guess it makes me feel like that the wasted space is done away with, and also you can't collect as much "stuff" in a small home. It looks liberating. Sometimes your "stuff" can weigh you down.

I wouldn't want to go as small as this man did (I like room to move around, esp. with children), but I like the idea of designing a comfortable home that had places for everything, and do away with wasted space and junk. I've always dreamed of someday having a home where every thing you owned had a space, and you didn't have piles of anything anywhere. Of course being good at organizing and cleaning would make a difference regardless of the size of the home. I'm working at being better at cleaning and organizing so that I will have a beautiful home some day. Going small on your house would also mean that you would have more money for the extra things you want to do or have, for me that is landscaping and beautiful furniture, or traveling, along with the expenses that children bring along.

Happy Days.

Sorry, there won't be any new pictures for a while.... Ethan got a hold of the camera and it will need to be repaired as a result. So instead I posted some old random photo's that I like. I've been having more days lately where I am very happy with life. There are still the unhappy things in life, but there are also a lot of things that are happy right now. I LOVE my house. Doing yardwork makes me love it more, it's an in-expensive way of working towards a goal, so I feel like I'm accomplishing something even though I can't afford to do everything at once. I might have ugly flooring, but the grass in my backyard is growing, my veggie garden is miraculously growing, my flowers are growing, and I've saved my Dogwood tree (it's pretty bare looking, but it's alive).

Today I was mowing the grass/weeds in the backyard and there were about 6 giant dragonflys buzzing around the yard. They stayed for over an hour, and Ethan had fun chasing them around the yard. It's nice to have perfectly content moments in life.

I've decided it's not always about seeing the good in trials, but seeing the good in spite of trials. Saturday Ryan, Ethan and I went jet skiing by ourselves on the snake and it was a nice moment, where I thought how much I love my small imperfect family. My goals have changed over the last 5 years. Origionally I had an agenda of what I thought I needed to do/accomplish/have in order to be be a good person. My new goal is just to be a happy family. I figure if we can accomplish being a happy family we are doing a lot better than most right?

Bell

One of my kitties died on wednesday. I don't know how, I just came home from Ethan's speech therapy appointment and running errands to find her by the back door. It was pretty sad, and it is still bothering me. It was the gray kitty, Bell. The darker kitty, Tinker, has been pretty lonely since, and follows me around the house every where I go, and wants to be held constantly. Before she was a pretty independant kitty and I could never find her. I ended up having to carry her around like a little baby one day just to get some peace and be able to do the laundry. We are going to get another kitty, so she won't be so lonely.