Being a blessing

A guilt free blog post! All courses are now complete for school. I submitted my next draft of my Major Research Paper on Friday night and am awaiting comments and more editing.

Mark and I spent all day yesterday outside doing some major clean up. We didn’t do as much fall clean up as we should have, and we’re paying for it now. Since we moved in the fall, I am not sure what spring perennials to expect. I don’t have much gardening experience with flowers, so I am having a difficult time identifying the new buds and sprouting I’ve seen. I do see some tulips growing though, my favourite flower!

Before working outside, Mark and I headed to Home Depot with coffees in hand. This is the closest thing to a “date” that we’ve had in a while, and it was so nice to walk the aisles dreaming of and planning all the things we’d like to do with our house over time.

The key part of the previous sentence = “over time.”

We have such big plans! It’s a challenge to watch our favourite HGTV shows (where renovations seem to happen fairly quickly, easily and with little concern for money) or browse Pinterest where pictures of remodels are beautiful and grand, and then look at our house and see what needs to be done, what we want to do, and the finances we have (or don’t have) to work with. And it’s definitely not fun re-prioritizing as other things come up – like plumbing. Plumbing is definitely not at the top of my “fun priorities” list! Or replacing a deck that we weren’t planning on touching for at least a couple of years.

At the end of the day, it’s not about having a beautiful house. It’s about having shelter to protect us from the elements. It’s about the family you spend time with inside and outside. And it’s about welcoming loved ones and strangers, being able to use your home as a place of blessing and hospitality.

I saw this printable on Pinterest, and it completely resonated with me. My house is a place of refuge for me. But I also want it to be a place of refuge for others – for A.J. and future kids, for extended family, for friends, for others who will come into our lives and are looking for a place of rejuvenation.

A crappy celebration

My beloved husband turned 30 two weeks ago! The big 3-0! I think I’ve mentioned before that we had been planning on going on a “big vacation” this year to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary and Mark’s 30th birthday. January (the month I usually get the most stir crazy and want to escape the cold!) 2013 I was thinking of where we should go. And then I got pregnant! We were overjoyed, but we knew realistically the big vacation wouldn’t happen. Instead, we had a child and bought a house this year – two huge accomplishments Mark wanted to achieve before turning 30, and he did it!

I wanted to throw him a small party to celebrate his big birthday and show some friends the new house. We invited a small group of people, and I planned a “Toronto Maple Leafs” themed party. Now – for those of you who know me – you must realize that I love my husband very much to take the time and effort to throw him a Leafs party when I am a die-hard Habs fan. But I love my husband more than my Habs (I hesitated only slightly typing that…) and had some fun thinking of how to cook and decorate for the get-together. I’m also busy with work, in the process of trying to finish up my first draft for my Major Research Paper, and taking care of a child who has finally learned to crawl (beyond army crawling) in the last month (she loves exploring!) so I didn’t want party planning to take too much of my time (when, in fact, that’s all I wanted to do to escape writing!).

I’ve really been enjoying playing around with Photoshop lately (working on our Christmas cards right now! And had a blast designing A.J.’s first birthday invitations). FYI, Kabel Pro Black font is the closest (free) font you can get to the font used for the Toronto Maple Leafs!

For me, one of the highlights of any party is food. I love me some good food… Being a hockey-themed party, I wanted food that you would typically eat during a sporting event (think Super Bowl!). I made some homemade pizza (using my favourite pizza dough recipe) and decided I wanted to make chicken wings for the first time. Seriously, what took me so long to cook my own chicken wings??? I think because they tend to be a little expensive to buy them boxed and premade in stores, I figured that meant they were hard to make. FYI: they’re easy! And soooooo good! I used this recipe as a base and tweaked with some different measurements and brown sugar.  I didn’t get a picture of the final product because I was too busy eating them.

Let’s back up a little… The week prior to the party, we noticed that we were having a couple plumbing issues… We weren’t impressed – we had just moved in about 6 weeks prior and already dealing with a couple of unexpected surprises (to be expected I guess with moving….). Mark took the day of his 30th birthday (the day before the party) off work to deal with the plumbing issue – a portion of blocked pipe in our basement running to the septic system. Spending the afternoon of his birthday dealing with crap (litterally), he was happy to have “fixed” the problem so he could spend his time the next day (Saturday) with other odds and ends around the house while my dad came over to deal with some electrical issues. Saturday morning comes, and we realize the plumbing is not fixed… My dad and Mark spend the entire day fixing more portions of pipe and finally “fix” the issue(s). My dad goes home, I’m busy prepping the house for the evening’s get-together with friends and we realize….. none of the toilets work. The problem still isn’t fixed. There are more blockages throughout the pipes in the basement. We start to panic thinking “how can we have people over if our toilets don’t work!” And – more importantly – we need the toilets to work! Mark called a plumber that he has worked with in the past to ask if he’ll come over to snake all the pipes right away, but the plumber was busy and told us that if we get any plumber over on a Saturday night, we’ll be spending a small fortune and that renting a snake from Home Depot is much cheaper.

Can I just say: I am so lucky to be married to a carpenter! Along with having an electrician as a father (and a mom who loves to paint… new renovation post coming soon!), I am one lucky girl (living in one fixer upper of a house…). So Mark runs to Home Depot at 5:30 PM. We are expecting people to starting coming at 6:30. And those who have dealt with plumbing issues in the country before…… you’ll understand when I say our house stank. So while Mark took off for Home Depot, I threw A.J. up on my back (thank you again, Ergo, for saving me!) and finished cooking, cleaning and lighting candles/spraying essential oil throughout the house.

Mark was busy for most of the night snaking the drains. During his own party. Love that man… He didn’t even get any of his birthday pizza because I cooked half of it for the rest of us (we were starving!) and then once he was done I cooked up the rest for him. Except I forgot to turn down the oven’s temperature from cooking the chicken wings…… So I burned the pizza. I felt so bad, but I’m so lucky to have a husband who sees the best in everything and just laughed at the humour of it all. He was finally done “working” by the third period and got to spend some time relaxing.

I wanted to take the time to make a cake in the shape of a maple leaf, but instead I just used sprinkles…

I found a Canadian knock off of Hostess Ding Dongs to look like hockey pucks and Dare leaf cookies to go with the TML theme.

And I used this recipe to make an awesome cream cheese/peanut butter dip! I loved it… I was going for the look of a hockey puck… But after dealing with plumbing issues for days, something else only came to mind…

In all, it was a nice night with friends! I am so thankful for my husband, and maybe for my 30th birthday, we’ll go on that vacation (and not be dealing with plumbing issues instead…)!

And just because – an A.J. picture! I think she thought all the people were there for her… But her birthday is less than a month away! I’ve been having a blast planning her party!

Crazy things only my husband would say to his pregnant wife

I almost started another blog while I was pregnant. My husband said some pretty crazy (funny) things while I was pregnant…. But I figured 1) CrazyThingsOnlyMyHusbandWouldSayToHisPregnantWife.wordpress.com was too lengthy of a URL and 2) I refuse to start yet another blog only to have it fall off my radar (I’m a little notorious for that…).

So instead, here’s a post with some of the crazy things he said (or at least the few that I remembered and/or wrote down). He’s lucky I have a great sense of humour…!

“It’s like a third nipple”

This was made in reference to my protruding belly button. It never fully turned into an “outie,” but as I got bigger towards the end of my pregnancy, apparently Mark noticed it protrude more…

“You look like you’re 33 months pregnant!”
My husband plays on a recreational ball hockey team (this was how he was injured in November…). All the girls whose husbands/boyfriends/partners played on “The Night’s Watch” got our own t-shirts with the logo of the team and our partner’s number on the back. I asked for one of the largest sizes possible (not knowing how my body would look after pregnancy) and even though I got an XL, it was a tiny, women’s XL. It was tight. We received the shirts towards the end of my second trimester. Showing Mark the shirt, he too thought it look tight – tight enough that it made me look 33 months pregnant apparently! Even elephants only have a gestation period of 22 months…

“It looks like Nero’s face”
I’m prone to stretch marks. I always have been, it doesn’t matter what moisturizer I use or trick I try. It bugs me when I read/hear people say “I used [insert cream name here] while I was pregnant and didn’t get ANY stretch marks! It really works!” I’m sorry…. It’s not the cream. Some people are just more prone to stretch marks than others.

Mark and I are big Star Trek fans. We really love the new installment, and after showing Mark some of my newest stretch marks on my belly he made a Star Trek comparison. To Nero’s face… I choose to think he was comparing my good looks to those of Eric Bana…

“You’re front heavy”

I think this one is pretty self explanatory.

I love you too, hunny!

In all honesty, I laughed every time he said one of these things. While my pregnancy was a harder journey than I anticipated, Mark was with me every step of the way! Along with all the comments listed above, he also said many times things along the lines of “I can’t wait to be a daddy,” “I’m so excited to meet the baby,” and “You’re going to be an amazing mommy.”

Next post – finally, the birth story!