Technology Fail

In my last post I mentioned that I relied on technology too much, and it got me into trouble when my nephew was born. I figured I'd enlighten you on this little story. My nephew was due to be born on June 6, 2013. I was unable to fly home for this, so obviously my only connection was my phone.

Well, a few days before this, I was carrying around my Samsung Galaxy S2, and I had to use the restroom...yes, it's one of those stories. It was in my jacket pocket and just slipped out before I could grab it. Epic fail. Needless to say, I was frantic. I got it as dry as I possibly could and I stuck it in a bag of rice. I got onto Google and searched for what I needed to do. I used a vacuum to get out any extra water that was in there, and I was freaking out. I called my mom through the home phone and told her to keep in touch with me through Whitney's phone and we would figure things out from there. So there I was, no phone, my nephew about to be born, and I'm 2,600 miles away. I left my phone to sit in the rice for a couple nights and had no results.

Josh, my brother, texted Whitney to let me know that Reagan, my sister-in-law, was going into the hospital the night of June 5. Whitney was great, and made sure that she was near me so I could receive any and all updates.

Early on June 6 Whitney woke me up telling me Josh was on the phone. Instantly awake, I started shoving questions at him. He was freaking out; he was almost a daddy! All I could do was cry and try and calm his nerves for the big day. We hung up, and I went back to sleep for a couple hours--occasionally interrupted by updates on how Reagan was doing. When it became a decent hour I called my mom and we filled each other in on our morning. FYI, my mom is amazing. While I was stressing about everything and my phone she mentioned that I should say a prayer and try to turn on my phone again. I did, and guess what? It turned on! I would have cried if I wasn't already!

Well, Reagan kept dilating, but no baby nephew yet. The day kept moving along and I had to go to work. Well, work is crazy, I was emotionally strung up, and the baby still wasn't born. About a half hour into work I was texted with 6 pounds 8 ounces!

 

Now I'm a proud aunt to Krew Justin Dennis!!

The moral of this story is--never take your phone into the restroom with you. Or near any water at all, just to be safe :) And don't be so reliable on it that it throws off your whole day!

Also--I have a pretty dang cute nephew (:

Tree Skirt!

So this post is a little late in the making, but it is totally worth it!

Every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving my family goes and cuts down a HUGE tree....this year it was 17 1/2 feet tall! We go scout it out, chop it down, and bring it home to decorate for the Christmas season. It's always a lot of fun, and it's a great way to jump into Christmas.

Every year we put up our tree and put a little tree skirt around it, and it does the job. However, we don't exactly love it and mom's been wanting to make a new one. We saw a ruffle tree skirt on Pinterest and decided that we were going to make it for our tree. Now, the appealing thing about this tree skirt is that there is NO sewing! You use a hot glue gun and just glue away until you are done. So this is what I thought we were doing. However, when I came home to help with it I soon realized that we were not using a hot glue gun. Mom wanted this thing to last if she was going to invest the time and money into it...we were going to sew it.

Now my grandma is a fabulous seamstress. She can put anything together...however, my mom and I have yet to fully develop this particular skill, so this very easy glue on project became a little more daunting. However, we kept our chins up and went at it.

First, we got a circular tablecloth to provide the base for our tree skirt. The other tutorial said to use your old tree skirt, which would work fine, but this was better in our case. We folded the tablecloth into a triangular-ish shape and used a plate to measure a circle at the center and then we cut! We also cut a straight line from the edge to the center so we could get it around our tree. At first we didn't sew around the edges of the tablecloth, but we ended up doing it because it frayed so much, so sew the edges!

We then got a yard stick and a writing utensil that would show up on our fabric. We measured five inches up and drew lines so that we could sew along them, however, our strips were five inches so we ended up sewing them about 3 inches apart...or whatever looked the best!

Next, we figured out the fabric that we wanted. The other tutorial only uses two colors, but we added a few more... we picked a main color, the first color, and got 5 yards of it (we do have extra though, so you could get away with a little less). We started with red and then our second color was green; we got 3 yards of that. And then we picked three other fabrics and got 1 1/2 yards of each.

 At first we figured that we wanted the pattern of the tree skirt to be in the order of the above picture with the red in between, however, we quickly realized that would be way to many layers, so we condensed it.

We were worried about edges fraying, so instead of just cutting 5 inches and calling it good, we cut 10 inch strips and called it good. Then we folded each strip in half and sewed down the edge to create 5 inch strips. We did this to every single fabric and then we were ready to move onto the next step!

 

I was almost willing to skip the next step...it's kind of time consuming and very delicate. We needed to gather each strip so that it would be ruffled. So we popped in a chick flick and got to it. Needless to say, we got it done and we were ready to start sewing onto our base! We laid things out so we knew how many strips we needed to complete the circle, and then we sewed that many strips together.

 Then mom just started sewing away! We added a layer at a time, and slowly but surely, the finish line came into sight.

For the finishing touches we added our main first color, the red, to the edges to end the ruffles. We didn't add it to the middle, but it would work there too.

Last, but definitely not least, we put our completed tree skirt around our beautiful tree and admired it for the rest of the season! Now we get to have an AWESOME tree skirt every year!

Pretty much, my mom is a boss for doing so much sewing, and we're pretty proud of ourselves for actually doing it. :)

Twin Falls Finally!!

So, forever and a day ago I said that I needed to go visit my fam in Twin Falls... and I finally did!!

I drove down there and listened to Andrew Allen the WHOLE way. He's pretty much my favorite artists EVER and I love, love, love his music. Particularly Loving You Tonight...and a lot more :)

ANYWAYS! Although Andrew Allen is amazing, that is not the point of this post. I love road trips, especially when I end up at my family's house! I got all the way there and the girls came out and gave me a huge hug! Then I got to see Uncle Jon and Aunt Amy, and we just had fun! We ate some deliscioushness food (haha, Aunt Amy spelled it that way) and watched the new Spiderman movie. The next day was Uncle Jon's birthday so we ate some more delicious food and made cake pops that were SO good! I loved seeing the girls and playing with them! If only they were all closer (hint, hint). ;)

Twin Falls

So I've decided that I need to go to Twin Falls relatively soon.

I miss these guys!!

I miss all my other family too...these guys just live closer... :)

Youcam

So... me and my cousins have a tradition of taking pictures on my youcam every time they come up. And I'm not kidding. EVERY time. We seriously laugh our heads off taking them and we have hundreds of photos. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!!

And guess what? We never ever get tired of it. Seriously. As I was creating a collage my little 7-year old cousin, Madison, was literally snorting as we looked through all of the ones we took. I'm not joking. I told her to get off my lap because I couldn't even hold her anymore!!!

We've had a ton of fun so far, and we plan to take many more; but here is a very tiny selection of all of our photos!