EvY at HomE

Well it's that magical time of year that results in... one burned out mother. Now, I've just had a long day and I'm not in the best place so this is coming from a raw place but... pft, whatever. I've been working pretty nonstop and then on top of that I was volunteering at our church with the Christmas decor. PLUS add to that parties, gifts, wrapping, and trying hard to make Christmas magic for the kids. I mean our days have been full To. The. Brim. Just now at 10:30pm I've wrapped my last gift for the kids and am drinking wine, eating cheese, watching The Golden Girls and trying to just... chill and unwind. Why do women do this to ourselves at this time of year. Is it worth it? SO MUCH WORK. SO MUCH MONEY. SO MUCH STRESS. SUCH LITTLE SLEEP. Lemme just tell you, yes and no. No, because we don't HAVE to do any of that but YES because of those moments that justify the nuttiness like last night. We decorated Christmas cookies and I thought it would be fun to ...

The halls are decked. Actually we decked them before Thanksgiving, violating my rule to wait until the day after Thanksgiving because I wanted to come back from my sister's in Arizona to a decorated house.  The office is in it's merry mood.  The rest of the house, since I had all those leftovers from the camping themed baby shower, is "Christmas Cabin" themed with Buffalo Check and Reindeer and Wood and it's adorable. I'll take some pictures and share them here later.

First off, I got a job so whew, praise the Lord. It goes until October 10 about and then I might jump onto something after that. Sounds like town is getting busy so yay. We had a very lean month after vacation since I wasn't working and my unemployment insurance didn't kick in until last week finally. We went on full spending freezes and only spent money on food. Our credit card bill was half what it normally was. And as we stared down the barrel of   having an income again, we assessed what our life had been like this past month. I asked Matt the following question: Do you think our quality of life has diminished in any way? Do you think we have been unhappy? The answer was a resounding: no. Even though we have been living super cheap, we have been enjoying life in Los Angeles with two children to the max. We have traversed this great city and explored it's many free/cheap activities weekly. We went to the beach, we went to parks, we went all over. We di...

The first week of August we officially went on vacation to Northern California. We stayed in a rental condo in Aptos, CA, near Santa Cruz. We could not have chosen a better time to go. Down here it was about 90 degrees and up there, it was a glorious low 70s. We wore pants. We wore sweaters. The mornings by the beach were foggy. GLORIOUS. On the way up we took the 1 which, while it was beautiful, was a bad idea with squirmy Walter. We made a stop to see elephant seals and it was chilly! But we should have just kept driving since Wally had fallen asleep. He never bounced back from that and I had to hand over the amazon fire and many many snacks but it was not enough. Ah Walter. The drive sure was beautiful though. What an idea to make a highway that runs the coastline of California right? Overall, the kids were so-so during the day. We'd have leisurely breakfasts/morning times at our rental and then would head out for the day. It was those times when I knew that renting ...

Well after 11 months of a baby living in our room, our bedroom is finally ours again. Well it became ours again back in February actually but I'm just now posting about it. And sure it's ours, except for the fact that small people still come into our room at 5:30 am and barf all over our bed, ruining our old quilt leaving us blanket-less until I decided to just use the old guest quilt until I decide what I want. This is why I hoard things.  The rest of the room looks like so, I'm not sure what I've posted but I changed out the brass curtain rods to the black ones we had in the living room in my attempts to add black hardware to our room to stay consistent with the rest of the house.  Our room is where I tip more towards Matt's interests. Like King Kong posters... ...and drum sets... ...and framed photos of monsters... To be honest though, I love it all too. Not as much as Matt but I have embraced them. The top of the triplets is m...