Nathan, the comedian

At nine months old this kid knows how to make people laugh. He has the craziest, cutest faces, and once he sees that his audience is entertained he will start to make different faces and noises. He has the sweetest most hilaroius little personality, and I just can't get enough of this face.

Balloon Festival

A couple of weeks ago we traveled a couple of cities over to attend the balloon festival.  This was the 5th year they have had it but the first time we have attended.  It was amazing.  In the morning the balloons actually go up into the air and people can take rides but at night they stay on the ground but are illuminated with the fire from the tanks inside of them.  At 8 pm, all of the balloons start to go up at the same time.  The balloons stay tethered to the ground and once they are inflated spectators can walk through and talk to the pilots.  Christopher was amazed from afar, but once we got close, and the pilots started shooting the fire up into the balloons, he got pretty scared.   But not Nathan!  Nathan goes to bed pretty early so I thought that he would be asleep in the stroller before a balloon even went up, but he was too interested.  He just kept screaming with joy, and pointing.  There was no way he was going to miss it!

Santa Cruz, Day 2

I was not as good about taking pictures on day 2, but there were a few.

1: Watching the surfers in Capitola 2:More candy! 3: Us 4: Beautiful lunch spot 5: Capitola 6: Chips, drinks, and laughs 7: Bubs first time bowling 8: Strike Dance! 9: He beat his daddy (but not me)

Santa Cruz, Day 1

1:Candy for breakfast? Why not? 2: Swimming with a view 3: Friends! 4: His first tat 5: Roaring Camp Railroad 6: Look at those trees! 7: Th trees! 8:Haha! Nathan 9:Family 10: Rocking out 11: Canta Cruz Beach Boardwalk 12: We won! 13: Enjoyin the view at dinner :)

Z is for Zoey

We had a shower at my house for the mama and papa to be. It was such a beautiful day spent with wonderful people to celebrate a little girl that I love so much already!

Isn't she the cutest little pregnant lady you have ever seen!

FAD

Hello, my name is Lindsay and I am addicted to facebook.  Although there is not a lot of research on facebook addiction yet, according to an article on socialtimes.com, an American psycologist states that "FAD", or Facebook Addiction Disorder, is a condition that is defined by hours spent on Facebook, so much time in fact that the healthy balance of the individual’s life is affected. It has been said that approximately 350 million people are suffering from the disorder."
 I wouldn't say that the healthy balance of my life was completly affected but I did have a few emotional encounters that caused me to abandon facebook for two weeks (oh my, two weeks!  How did you survive?) and only return with a few rules. 

1. No Facebook on my phone.  The constant buzz on my phone was begining to be too much.  Do I really need to take a break from playing with my kids to check a message.  No!

2. No Facebook everyday.  We are voyuers by nature, but why must I keep updated on the goings on of people lives that I have not seen in years.  I don't!

3. No Facebook stalking.  Okay, so I am not that bad but I have been known to track down some info on facebook.  It all started when I accidentlly caught someone in a lie on facebook.  They told me one thing and then facebook confirmed the contrary.  Ever since then, I have been known to check up on people every now and then.  Am I really admitting this?  I am not sick, I promise.

Well there it is.  My new rules.  If I feel it getting out of control again, I might have to permanatly leave and replace the addiction with another, like Pinterest or something.  Yeah, that sounds healthy :)

Not as easy as it looks- DIY Fabric Letter

I have read countless tutorials about how to make fabulous DIY things for the home.  The creator explains the steps which are accompanied by pictures.  They usually make it sound so simple and cost efficient.  Well this is not one of those posts.  First of all, I do not have the "complete a step and then take a picture of it" mind set yet, and two, this was not easy.  I messed up... a lot.  At one point I threw it across the room.  It took me four tries to get it right.  Now when I say right, I mean you can look at it from far away and it looks pretty good.  So here it goes.

Attempt 1:  The first mistake I made was ignoring all of the tutorials I read.  I thought that I had the fool proof easiest plan in my mind so I started with a wooden letter "Z,"  some fabric that I ordered from babybedding.com, some batting, and a staple gun.  All I would have to do is wrap the fabric around the letter and staple, right?  Wrong!  the staples wouldn't go into the letter, the fabric was a mess, it took me all of two minutes to realize this was not going to work.

Attempt 2: So I decided to take a different approach.  I bought glue.  I went to the glue isle and bought the first glue that said wood and fabric on the back :) I traced the Z on the batting, cut it out and glued that to the top of the Z.

 I then traced the Z on to the back side of the fabric and cut it out about an inch outside of the line i drew.  Unfortunately, the "Z" that I cut out of the fabric was facing the wrong way.  The chevron pattern was on the back of the fabric when it was covering the Z.  UGHHHHH.  Fail 2.

Attempt 3:  Ok, i can do this.  I cut the fabric correctly this time.  Then I started to wrap the fabric over the edge.  I used a foam brush to apply the glue to the wood and then folded the edge of the fabric up.  Most of this was easy except for the curves on the inside of the "Z."  Not fun.  I cut small"v" shapes out of the fabric at the curves to help the fabric to fold up.  The only downfall with that is that the fabric did not cover all of the wood underneath.  Glue, fold, glue, fold.  Eventually I was done...... and it looked like crap! (this is when I threw it)

Attempt 4:  Repeat all of the steps above, a little more carefully.  I then glued some ribbon around the edge to hide some of the icky spots.

 And there you have it.  It took a little longer than the 20 minutes the tutorial boasted about, but I think it will look cute hanging in my niece's nursery.

He loves it.  Can't you tell :)