Gilby Baby

My favorite basketball player is Gilbert Arenas - or Gilby Baby as he affectionately known in our house. He is cute, well-mannered, well-spoken and a darn good basketball player. Plus he is humble. I get really annoyed by the egos and the entourages of some of the sports personalities.

So you can only imagine how mad I was for him, when he didn't make the American Team for the world championship. That was such a dumb move, Gilby is so cute and nice, everyone loves to watch him play. And when he smiles - forget about it.

Frugal Fanny

A friend of mine a couple of years ago said that his wife budgeted $50/week for groceries and she never went over that. At the time I was thoroughly impressed and wondered if that was even possible (though to be honest, they consistently ate much better than we did, she was a SAHM and cooked all of their meals and we were DINKs who ate out quite a bit - $50/meal was not uncommon).

So in an effort to be prove my frugality, I have decided to take up the challenge and try that myself. I have done it for the last two weeks without a problem (except for when we went out to eat on Friday night). However, I have my freezer and pantry pretty well stocked from less frugal days. The real challenge will be to see if I actually will be able to buy my refills from costco within that budget.

In order to accomplish this, I pulled out a separate wallet to keep the grocery money in and I am only going to deal in cash - $50/week. So far, the only trick is to actually plan our meals and make them. When I actually do plan a menu, we eat so much better, so this may actually be better eats for less money.

If anyone else is feeling up for a challenge, try $50/week for food and let me know how it goes.

Old Friends

Ryan and I went over to his best friend's new house last weekend for dinner. It was lovely to see them and three children (all girls). Audrey loved playing with new people and new toys. It was an interesting dynamic, the boys ended up playing with/watching the children while the women got to tour the new house and chat about future decorating plans, etc. - lots of fun. Hopefully I will be able to get together with his wife to do some fun projects soon, especially if the husbands continue this nice trend.

Hobbies

Lately I have been thinking about what sort of hobbies I have and which ones I would like to have and which hobbies I pretend to have.

I pretend I am a scrapbooker because I would really like to be one. I think I could also say that my house is a hobby of mine because I enjoy coming up with little projects to improve/decorate it.

I used to love to go dancing. Maybe I should take that up again. A tap class would be fun. I also used to love outdoors things like camping, but again, I haven't done that for years, and it really seems like more trouble than it is worth to go camping with a one year old.

I love to read, especially good fiction - Jane Austen is a favorite. I used to like to travel, but now I hate flying more than I like to see new places, so until I own a jet, that one is out.

I used to love to crochet, maybe I will take that up again.

Mommy Moment

Last night at 3:30 am, I had what can only be described as a "mommy moment". I had just fed little Audrey and was taking her back to her bed. Usually she is groggy and has her eyes closed and I just hurry as fast as I can so that I can set her down before she falls all the way asleep. Last night however, she was just looking at me. As our eyes met, I looked into her big blues and started to smile and I whispered, "I love you sweet girl" and she just smiled back at me gently (not her usual fill-her-whole-face-up-smile) as if she knew that already. It was just a tender moment. So I did what any first-time sleep deprived parent would do, I savored it. This time instead of putting her right to bed, I walked around with her and rocked her as we just smiled at each other. It was a fabulous moment (and actually fabulous seems a little weak as a descriptor).

Seeing Clearly

While we were out in Utah for Bud's wedding, my glasses were broken by a friend's children. As glasses are a big pain to replace and fairly expensive I was quite bummed. When I told Ryan about the incident I mentioned that I was tired of having to worry about glasses and I was ready to consider surgery. He was so excited. He has been trying to talk me into considering surgery forever and I just have been too afraid to even think about it.

So I started to read up on what actually happens when you get eye surgery. And I started to get nauseated. I am not kidding just reading about the surgery made me queasy. Now I have a new approach, I am just going to read up on the best doctors and then get an exam to see if I am even a candidate. If I am, then I will read up on the surgery.

I must say, it would be really nice to see clearly without glasses, I just don't know if it would be nice enough to get surgery.

Bergdorf Blonds: book review

Sadly I am reviewing chick lit on my blog. Perhaps even more sadly, I am reading chick lit. And saddest of all, I enjoyed this book immensely.

It took me a while (probably 30 pages) to get into the characters and their non-frugal ways (which I found annoying - don't even bother with the shopaholic series if you are frugal like me) but in the end, I thought the characters were well developed and I really liked the twist at the end.

So if you are looking for a light and easy read, dig right in.

Pink Painting Fiasco

While William was in town, she and I did all kinds of fun house projects. And if we are going to be completely honest, William really did the lion's share of most of them.

One of these projects was to paint the entire main living level. We started with the living room. We painted it green - it looked great. So we moved on to the library - which we also painted green. That was another success story. So aimed with new found color picking confidence, I went bold and picked pink for my kitchen/dining room. We painted that (which was by far the hardest of the three rooms because of the sheer volume of trim work) - and it just didn't look right.

The pink looked rather nice in the dining room portion of the room. I have black furniture in there and it was a really nice contrast. However, in the kitchen portion, it made the cherry cabinets look orange. Orange just doesn't go so well with pink and wasn't what I was hoping for at all. The think that made me decide to repaint however, was the effect the pink room had on the other rooms on the floor. The whole floor is open and with the pink in the middle it made the whole floor look like a cute little girl room in lovely pastels. The strange part about that was that the green on its own was a deep and muted green that didn't look pastelly at all.

I will never be a professional painter, but I certainly learned something. One wrong color can change the whole feel of the house.

We just finished repainting the kitchen today. We painted it beige. Which actually turned out quite nice and my green rooms are back to looking elegant and not little kiddish.