Grown ups???

You know you're a grown-up when....

How do you know when you have reached that stage in life, where you're like, oh crap, you mean I'm not a kid anymore, I have to make big-girl decisions? Well, I can tell you it did not come when I graduated from college, taught kindergarten, raised a prissy little girl (who was not my own), or even when I got married. Nope. The moment I finally realized that I was a grown-up was on Black Friday. I know, strange right?!? So it goes like this--Mark and I have been in the house-hunting process for a while now and we finally found us the perfect home! Eeeeeek! So exciting. Anyway, this home needed appliances, so when is the best time to buy those things? Black Friday...duh! So, keep in mind we didn't know for sure whether or not we were getting the house. Buttttt my super frugal husband couldn't pass up these appliance deals (I am sure it had nothing to do with me...ahem........begging and nagging him to go ahead and do it) ! Who was I to argue? So, we scope out the best deals, we even went to the store to make sure the particular ones we picked out were the ones we wanted. We stood in line at 8 pm and rushed in with a crowd of people trying to make our way to the appliance section. On a side note-- people wanting tvs on black Friday are crazyyyyy!! Anyway, we somehow managed to stumble upon a cash register in the very back of the store with no one around! Ahhhh. Praise the Lord is all I could say. My husband is not the most patient when it comes to spending money, so I was soooo thankful there was not the added stress of a mob of people. We had our little sales paper and we began pointing out everything we wanted. So fun! Needless to say, we got all our kitchen appliances annnnnd a washer and dryer in like 10 minutes. Wow. Wow. Wow. Quite possibly the largest purchase we have everrrrrr made in one setting. "wayyyyy to go boo" was my chant! Ahhhh, so we made our way to a refrigerator aisle where no one was around and we took a deep breathe and high-fived each other! It was in that moment that I realized I was a grown-up (minus the childish high-five)! I mean, I was genuinely excited! I don't know how I got from being excited about scoring deals on clothes, boots, and makeup to being just as, if not more excited about refrigerators and stoves. I never dreamed this day would come, but I'm okay with it!

I guess the next stage in our lives is having four little dark-headed babies;) yep! 

Does this thing still work?!

Helllloooo again! This blog is slowly, but surely getting a makeover. I mean, I always thought I was technologically savvy, but blogging has humbled me. It has taken me forever to figure out how to design my own stuff, add links, comment, etc. geeeez! So those few that follow, bear with me!

a how-to vintage bouquet

i'm going to go out on a limb here and switch things up. i have this creative mind that the Lord has blessed me with, but i hardly ever do anything with it. i'm lazy and a slacker. i pin things on pinterest, yet i never actually do any of those things. but, for my wedding I was determined to make my own brooch bouquet.
my inspiration was Miranda Lambert's lovely brooch bouquet. i bought that people magazine with her wedding on the front cover, and i fell in love with her wedding. everything about it was what i envisioned for my own. very laid back with vintage touches. but i mostly fell in love with her bouquet. Isn't it just beautiful?!?

soooo...my creative juices began flowing. i began asking everyone i could think of if they had any brooches that i could use. I bought a few at a yard sale and hobby lobby, but most of them came from my aunt jan, my mamaws, my friends, and my great-grandmother (whom i never had the privilege of meeting) i had about 80 some brooches to work with. shew! 

I am going to attempt to give a how-to description, even though this is out of my blogging comfort zone. 

First things first...grab your mother and your best friends and your best friends' mothers, order a pizza and a mtn. dew and get ready to chill for a few hours! 

Okay, here's what ya need to make a brooch bouquet:

              1. 3 hydrangea stems 

              2. wire sticks 

              3. floral tape

              

1. Take the 3 stems of hydrangeas and cut them to your preferred length. 

2. Put the hydrangea stems together and wrap floral tape around the stems 

3. With each brooch, take one wire stick and wrap around the place where the pin is. (Some brooches are easier than others when it comes to wrapping the wire around...it won't look perfect, just as long as it stays!)

4. Once your brooch looks like a flower stem, take the floral tape and wrap around the wire stem. 

      This is how your brooches should look:

5. Okay, now for the hard part--you will begin to take each individual stem and will stick it down in your hydrangeas. While you are sticking them in the hydrangeas, you are also going to be wrapping floral tape around the brooch stems, as well as around the hydrangea stems.  This is the very last thing, but it is the most difficult. Once you place all your brooches where you want them and ALLL of the wrapping is done, the result is AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL! I added ribbon around the base of the bouquet and i tied on some material that was cut off from my wedding dress. 

                                                           ahh...the finished product! 

P.S. if you carry one of these down the aisle, you might wanna lift some weights beforehand! just a warning!! 

for better or worse?

i stink at blogging. let's just go ahead and get that out in the open and out of the way. okay? good!

now...for starters, we FINALLLLYYY got internet! it took mark's physical breakdown for him to realize how bad we needed internet. i mean daytime tv is horrible right? there's only so much sports center, csi, and criminal minds episodes you can watch. before you know it, you are paranoid and crazy. i'm guessing mark got bored being home with me every single day, so he finally suggested getting internet. i was so excited. i got right on the phone and called to have it set up!! so, now maybe i will get better at blogging...especially since i have allll this time!

as most of you know, my wonderful hubby has been down and out for about three weeks now. i must say these first 5 months of marriage has been interesting. i thought going into this marriage (me being the whiny, needy, hypochondriac person that i am) that mark would be the one taking care of me. welllll, little did i know that those roles would be reversed! a little over a month into our marriage, mark came down with some version of the flu/walking pneumonia. he was sick for like 2 weeks and he even had to cancel his surprise birthday trip he had planned for me. i forgave him, thinking that in a few weeks when he recovered that he could make it up to me! geeeeez! i was wrong. he got better, then he got sick again. this sickness lingered and lingered and lingered and lingered. what in the world was going on? just as he was starting to get over the most recent illness, he collapsed--literally, physically, mentally, emotionally. let me give you just a brief explanation of the things that led to this excruciating moment. mark had been having an issue with his lowerback/sciatic nerve on and off for a little over a year. he would have some weeks where he had a lot of pain, but it eventually went away. this time, for whatever reason, it did not. he was complaining about it almost 4 weeks ago. he went into work one morning and called me saying he could not hardly walk and that he was going to the doctor. thinking that they were going to be able to help, i didn't think much about it. by the time i got home from work, he was in so much pain. the next day, he couldn't walk. i had already scheduled a chiropractor appointment 2 weeks prior to this for the next day. i barely got him to the doctor and i was an emotional wreck. this strong man that i had married was in so much pain and i could not do anything about it. i was trying to hold back the tears, but it was so incredibly hard to watch. i was thinking, yeah i've had back pain and yeah at times it's hurt so much that there were tears shed, but dear lord, this was the worst thing i had ever seen. why in the world was this happening to mark? i felt so helpless. he was handling it sooooooo much better that how i would be handling it. i would have been begging for morphine, but he was praying and saying "i'm gonna get better, i'm gonna get better".  must be a man thing!

anyways, needless to say mark has put me through it these last five months. i guess he figures if i will stay with him through this, then i will stay with him through anything..ha! people joke all the time saying "this is what that for better or worse means" and i always respond, "but i didn't put those words in my vows, so that's my way out, right??!!" i'm kidding. while i didn't put those exact words in my vows, i did promise him that i would stand by his side no matter what we may face together in this life. shew, i really should have taken this into account when i was writing my vows! kidding again, while i didn't think about this happening so early into it, i knew that when i married mark, that i was not ever leaving him, no matter what! like a movie i watched recently expressed, "divorce happens because you make it an option." WELL SAID!  buttt, that's another topic for another day!

Peace, Love, and Cupcakes (my boo's favorite phrase!)