What have I been up to, Part 2

 Whoops, it's 2017. Happy New Year!

I want to do my annual yearly review, but I feel like I should tell you how the rest of my year went first. So here we go...

September: I did the Big Bang Mud Run again! This year's went a lot better than last year. The run was organized way better and this time I didn't make the mistake of doing the 12k. I did the 7k with my SIL and we finished in 88 minutes!

The whole gang at the mud run

We love our visits to the farm. 

Astrid and her cousins at the cornmaze! 

October: My birthday was pretty quiet this year. I debated inviting a bunch of girls out to brunch or something, but instead I just watched Conference at home and had a friend come over to watch with me. Oh, I also made an impromptu trip back home for Thanksgiving. It was quick, but fun. And Halloween was great! For my friend's Halloween party I dressed up as a witch and did green-face and everything. I love dressing up. And then Astrid dressed up as Cookie Monster and we had so much fun trick-or-treating at the mall, and then doing trunk-or-treat and then doing a quick trip down our block with dad in the evening. It was a very busy day.

On the road to Lethbridge

Cookie Monster! She was so cute! 

November: I got so many nosebleeds this month, it was stupid! I was even paranoid that I would get one at work and start bleeding all over a patient. Thank goodness that never happened. Me and some girls did an art date and it was so fun. It was good to get the creative juices going again, even though it was just recreating something someone else has already done. Ooh, MOANA also came out this month and Joe and I actually went out to the theatre to see it on the second night it was out (we don't go out to the movies anymore because we hate Cineplex so this was a big deal).

Nosebleeds. Blech. 

Arting! 

December: December could have gone so much better. It was still good, don't get me wrong, but with my calling at church and making preparations for Christmas down south, I was so done. Astrid's birthday was a quiet affair. We had originally wanted to do the sleigh rides they had going on just outside of town, but we were in the middle of a particularly cold snap that week, so the sleigh rides had been cancelled due to -40 weather. Yeah. Ridiculous. So instead we had some friends of ours with a little girl Astrid's age come over for cake and we let the girls play afterwards. And then of course we spent Christmas with my family and it was such a good visit. Astrid went ice fishing for the first time, we got to see a bunch of family we haven't seen in a long while, and we alllllmost got to see our new nephew - except we left a week too soon. Bummer. I guess we'll just have to make another trip to see him!

We went sledding just before the cold snap, thank goodness!

Astrid and her birthday presents.

Our family Nativity Pageant. All the second cousins!

Grampa was so proud to have Astrid ice fishing with him. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if we'd caught any fish! 

Following through

I almost forgot!

In my last post I promised to post a picture of my Halloween costume that I wore for the party this past weekend. So here it is:

I went as Buddha. 

I knew I wanted to incorporate my pregnant belly into my costume seeing as I may not have it for another Halloween depending on when I get pregnant with my future babies. So I thought of a lot of different round things before I settled on this one. 

Here's the breakdown of my costume:

- red chinese silk robe (already had this, found at Catholic Charities years ago)

- flowy brown maternity capris (inherited from sister-in-law)

- nude coloured t-shirt (this was the only thing I had to buy! Value Village for 5$)

- gold silky sash (bought at Catholic Charities a while ago as a scarf)

- beady necklace (from Reitmans)

- big wooden hoopy earrrings (gift from a friend so I have no idea where they're from)

A few of my other ideas were a disco ball, the death star from star wars, and an M&M. I think I made the right decision. What do you think??

Brace yourselves...

Valentine's Day is fast approaching.


Are you ready for it?

I've been single for many a V Day and more recently, I've also been with Joe for 3 (this year will be our fourth). Either way, I've never been much of a fan of Valentine's day, so I always choose to celebrate my best friend's birthday instead.

But this year is different. This year I'm actually looking forward to V Day. Well, sort of.

Joe is going to be away working on the 14th, so I will still hate the actual day itself. But when he comes home, I'm excited to celebrate. (No! Not that! Get your minds out of the gutter.)

This year I went out and bought Joe an awesome gift which I will have to tell you about later because I don't want him to read this and ruin the surprise. And I can't wait to give it to him. (okay now everything I write I keep thinking of it as a double entendre, gahhhh)

Moving on.

Joe says that I've never bought him a Valentine's gift before, which at first I protested, but after thinking about it I realized that this really is the first year I've gotten him a gift. In my defence, I just honestly had no idea what to get him. The man hates chocolate and that's about all the stores are pushing in your face for Valentine's day. Either that or jewellery and Joe's not a huge fan of that either. And then there's the cheesy stuffed animals with the lame hearts all over them and there is no way I'm getting one of those for him.

Ugh. See what I mean? Barf. 

Ooh! He might like this though. Gah, stop it. 

But this year I found some inspiration and got him something nice that I think he will like. Now that I have something to give him I'm actually looking forward to celebrating the holiday for once. 

So what are your thoughts? Do you love V Day or hate it? Or are you indifferent?

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had some great New Year's Celebrations and they were safe in whatever they were doing.

Christmas was good too, nice and relaxing! We spent Christmas with my family this year and it was nice to spend a few days at my parent's house. I have to tell you about the gift I got for my mom because I am just so proud of myself. 

I found this software made by Roxio that converts old VHS movies to digital format so you can burn it onto a DVD. It's called Easy VHS to DVD3 Plus. Yeah, a mouthful, I know. So what I've been doing is converting our old family videos and putting them on DVDs for my mom. I just gave her one DVD to begin with, but now that the hubby is gone I've started up the process again so that I'll hopefully have all the videos converted before school starts up next week.

With the New Year I've come to a decision. I've decided that I am going to stop referring to my husband as Johnny on the blog because I've grown tired of it and feel ready to move on. His name is Joseph, and that is what I will call him here from now on. In case you didn't know, I introduced him on the blog by calling him Johnny Lingo because of the pineapples he brought over when we first started going out.  

Speaking of the New Year, have any of you made New Year's resolutions? Or do you even believe in them at all? I've made resolutions on and off before and I am always terrible with keeping them. However, starting this blog was part of a new year's resolution, so I guess I'm still doing alright with that. 

Joe (my husband, remember?) and I haven't made any resolutions this year, but we've decided to try something else instead. We decided to come up with a family theme for us to focus on for the year and maybe we'll throw in some monthly goals to work on later, but for January we're just focusing on the theme. I even got all gung ho and made a little picture using google docs. So here is our theme and goal for the year:

Christmas = Awesome

H'okay, so holidays. Mine was awesome. Naturally, because I am awesome. And Johnny was home for the whole thing so that made it even awesomer.

It was the big dreaded first Christmas with the in-laws, but I've got some pretty good in-laws, so there was really nothing to worry about. We chilled with Johnny's family for Christmas eve and Christmas day. We watched movies, ate good food, had good times, it was great. My favourite present would have to be the booties Johnny got me. They are warm and fuzzy and wonderful. And they have grippies on the bottom! Awesome!

There was only one small downside to my holidays and that would be the part where I got the stomach flu while Johnny and I were visiting our friend on her family ranch. We were supposed to do all these awesome ranchey activities like quadding, riding horses, playing with cows, you know, all the sort of stuff farm kids do for fun. But instead I head to go spewing my brains out and doing you-know-what out the other end - it was not a pretty sight. So we ended up watching most of the first season of Heroes pretty much the whole time while we waited for my disease to pass. Our hosts were so great though. I was babied just like I would have been had I been home with my own parents. Johnny was great through the whole thing too. Every time I barfed he was right there holding my hair back and wiping the remnants off my face when I was done. How romantic.

New Years was pretty rad. We went to the YSA New Year's dance incognito because we weren't technically supposed to be there because we are no longer single. We're real rebels. The dance was pretty fun. We went over to our friend's house after to play some games and drink some radioactive kool-aid and we ended staying up way too late to be functional at church the next day.

All in all, Christmas was awesome, New Years was good, and what really made my holidays great was the fact that Johnny had 19 days off of work to spend with me. Now it's back to the grind stone and I am all ready to go for another semester.

Happy Thanksgiving!

And for you Americans out there, you have to wait cause your thanksgiving isn't til November, ha!

I love October for so many reasons and one of them is because of the many holidays it has: Thanksgiving, Halloween and my birfday. Ooh, and my husband's birfday, too! I have so many reasons to celebrate this month, yay!

What with it being Thanksgiving, I thought I'd share a small list of the things I'm grateful for:

1. My husband (bet you didn't see that one coming) - I couldn't ask to be married to anyone better, he is so good to me. He supports me in all I do and makes me feel like a princess everyday.

2. My family - My parents are so supportive and helpful, my dad always makes me laugh and my mom has been a great role model for me. My siblings are great - even though my brothers can be idiots, I know they're good boys and my sister is turning out to be a pretty cool girl even though she started out as a psycho.

3. My home - Even though the doorways are a little cramped and the upstairs neighbors can be a bit noisy, I am grateful to have a place of my own with Johnny and it really is the perfect place for our needs right now.

4. My team - I know I've mentioned them before on the blog, but I am so grateful to be a part of the Pronghorns. I was glad to be part of them last year, but this year now that I'm living alone most of the time, it really makes a difference to have this great group of girls as friends and teammates.

There are so many other things I could mention here, but then that would turn out to be a pretty long post. So lets just say I have many blessings to be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving!