My "New" Bed

I bought this bed off of Craigslist for $40. I really wanted a black bed, but it was such a good deal and we didn't have a bed, just mattresses on the floor, so we got this bed. I tried once to just put black paint over it, but it wouldn't soak in. It has a kind of lacquer or varnish on it. So, I kind of forgot about it for a while.Then, I was talking to Dan about it and he suggested I put primer on it, then paint over the primer. I did a little test run on the bottom inside part of the leg and it looked really nice! So, I decided to paint the whole thing black!

Before.

During.

After

It turned out really nice, I was very pleased. It looks like it was always black. However, getting it black was kind of a pain. It took 5 cans of spray primer to cover it all. I thought my hand was going to fall off. I was just holding the bottle down, trying to get the bed covered. It takes a lot of hand muscle to go through 5 cans! I sprayed it outside, then took each piece in and painted it on our kitchen floor. I started Thursday, but ran out of primer. Finished priming Friday, painted Saturday and Sunday it was all put back together! The best thing about this is the paint I used, I got it for free! So to get a nice "new" bed only cost me $55. Not a bad deal, if I say so myself. And this bed is nice, solid wood and very heavy, as I found out lugging each piece in to paint (Dan was gone, so I had to do it myself).

GOOD MORNING on the "Y" Mountain!

So I was thinking about the "Y" mountain in Provo last night and it reminded me of a funny story.

First of all, I love climbing the Y. I've probably climbed it about a 100 times. One summer I climbed it 3 days a week for the entire summer. I enjoy hiking in general and hiking the Y is a really good workout. So, after my mission, I resumed hiking it as much as I could. I started to see this kind of crazy guy I call the GOOD MORNING guy. You'll understand why I'm putting that in all caps in a second. This guy, for some reason, feels a need to greet everyone with a LOUD, in your face yell of GOOD MORNING followed by a high five. It's like he's deaf, and he thinks everyone else can't hear either, so he yells at the top of his lungs to be heard. He kind of scared me at first, especially because I would usually hike alone. However, after a while, I was used to him.

I started dating Dan and we would hike the Y together, and we would see this guy and just kind of laugh. So, about a month ago, we went to Utah and decided to hike the Y (It had been about 2 years since we last hiked it). We joked about seeing this guy. Well, it would just so happen that on the way down, guess who we saw? Yep, Mr. GOOD MORNING himself. Still up to his usual shenanigans. We were greet with his usual GOOD MORNING and a high five.

I really wonder why he does this and if he has some mental problems, but at least it makes for a good story. :)

I love being a cheapskate!

I love a good bargain. Who doesn't? Well, I guess there are some people in this world, who make enough money that they don't care too much about price. However, since I've never been one of those people and never will be, I like to get things for cheap or free!

My family makes fun of me for being cheap. I term myself as being frugal. This stems from my childhood where we never had any money. Since I was 12 I babysat and bought all my own clothes, paid for my own entertainment (I even bought my own contact solution), paid my way through college, etc. I knew my mom didn't have any money, so it wasn't any good to ask her for any. Due to this upbringing, I learned to save my money so I would have it when I really needed it. I generally didn't like to spend money on things I didn't really need or thought were frivolous, hence my family thinking I was cheap.

I have loosened up a lot over the past couple of years (although my family doesn't believe it, or my husband). However, I still love getting a bargain on just about anything and still have a hard time paying full price for some things, like furniture or clothing. I just can't justify spending $30 on a shirt. I think it's ridiculous. I shop the sales and clearance items and usually find really good deals. I just bought a pair of really nice jeans for $8. And it just so happened that that day the store was doing a no sales tax day, so I got it for a straight $8!

I like to look at craigslist and have gotten a lot of good deals from there. We got our bed for $40, just bought a coffee table and end table for $20. They're sturdy, solid wood. They need to be sanded and painted, but that's a small price to pay for a $10 coffee table. I have gotten Anna toys for $17, that would have cost me well over $50.

Today, I went to a consignment store for baby clothes and got Anna a pair of shoes, 2 skirts, and large leggo type blocks all for $10 (There was a 50% off sale on certain items and I only bought those items). The clothes are in great condition and are so cute. Had I bought these new, it would have cost me probably $50. I love getting awesome deals like this! It seriously makes my day to know that I got something for so cheap, that otherwise would have cost me so much more. I'm all about spending less money in areas like this, and saving money for the future.

As for free stuff, you can't really control that. For some reason, I have been blessed to have received a lot of stuff in the past 2 years for free. It's been pretty amazing. A lot of furniture and baby stuff. Garage sales are another way to get awesome deals on stuff. I got some baby clothes for 50 cents-$1 a few months ago. They were really cute clothes too. Garage sales are hit and miss, so it just depends on what you can find.

I guess I'm just constantly in the cheap/save money/get a good deal mode all the time. It's pretty amazing what you can get when you keep an eye out for things and don't automatically assume you need to pay full price.

Mommy's little helper and other fun times!

So Anna has just been so helpful lately...like helping me play the piano. :) She's so funny sometimes. I don't get to play very often for a couple of reasons. I have free time when she's napping, but obviously that doesn't work out. The other reason is what you see below. She loves to come over and play, which is normally fine because she's either at the end of the piano and I don't use those keys. But then, she'll want up, so I sit her in my lap. She starts banging on the keys. Here, I decided to keep playing, just an octave higher, so she could use the middle keys. THEN, she tries to pry my fingers off of the keys, while I'm playing. Other times, she'll crawl under the piano and pull my foot off the pedal, so when I play the keys don't resonate and sound really flat. Oh my silly little baby!

The silliness doesn't stop here. Today, I look over at her and this is where I find her. In the shoe basket! She just plopped herself right in there. She loves playing with our shoes.

Another silly thing that she absolutely LOVES, is her dirty clothes basket. She gets giddy when she plays with this. She crawls inside and then I'll come and either pinch her nose or try to scare her or just be silly with her. She squeals with happiness, it's the cutest little thing.

So I know it's a little late, but I scrapbooked pictures from Anna's first Halloween. I figured I should get it done before Halloween this year. ;)

I also added flowers to Anna's name in her room. I think it makes it look more put together and not so empty.

It's done!!!

So after all this time, I have finally finished Anna's blanket. I think it turned out really cute. I've never made a blanket, so I'm very pleased with how it turned out. To finish it all I did was cut the batting to the size of the top, then laid out the back and folded over the side two times to make the border on the front. Thanks to my mom, she gave me some tips on how to put it all together, so it would be nice and flat. I didn't want to tie it with yarn, because that look wouldn't go with the style I was going for. So, I stitched it all together. At every corner where two blocks meet, I made about 8-10 tiny stitches. My mom told me to smooth out the area where I was going to stitch and pin around the area to make sure it wouldn't move while I was sewing. I hadn't thought of that before, I had pinned the whole thing and thought it was flat enough, but after I did what she said, I could see a big difference in flatness. So I'm glad I talked to her before I started. :)

Sewing it together like that took a while, but once I got the hang of it, it went much faster. However, my thumb really started to hurt from pulling the need through so many times. Where's a thimble when you need one? :)

The finished product.

(click to enlarge if you so wish)

Anna likes it already!

8 hours too late and $23 later.

So each month, I have to go to the pharmacy to pick up my birth control. I can only get one at a time, because that's all my insurance will cover for the month. So I kept forgetting to get more, till finally the day that I needed to take it (I take it right before bed), I go and get it. I come home and am sitting at the computer while I open the pharmacy bag. I guess I got distracted with the computer, because I put it behind the keyboard, so Anna wouldn't be able to reach it. My memory gets a little fuzzy here, but I faintly recall her somehow getting it and me telling her that's my birth control. I guess I was distracted because I didn't take it from her. Well, that night before going to bed, I look for it and I can't find it. I then remember she had it. So Dan and I start scouring the house looking for it. We look in all the little places that she likes to put stuff-the garbage, the recycling, under the couch, in the bookshelf, the kitchen drawers, etc. We can't find it anywhere. So, we go to bed. I look again in the morning and still cannot find it. It's 10:30 am by now, so I decide to call the pharmacy to get more. I now have to pay out of pocket, which is $30. In the end, I really lost $23, since I only pay $7 each month for it.

Then, at 6:30 pm, Anna is playing and all of a sudden she is holding my birth control. She has a little Leap Frog Learning table and it has a little hole/pocket thing with a flip lid. She doesn't play with it much anymore and it's kind of in the corner of the living room. It turns out, she put it in there. We looked under the table, but completely forgot about the little pocket there. It was kind of annoying, because we lost that money. I think I would have felt better had we found it like a week later or something, as opposed to only 8 hours later. Oh well, it was my fault, so I can only blame myself.

It was in here the whole time!

On a much happier note, we have been blessed a lot lately. It turns out that Dan is teaching six classes this year instead of five. He doesn't get a prep period. This also means that he gets an increase of 1/6 his salary. It's a pretty nice chunk of money each month. We feel so blessed to be able to have this. It's only for this year, but who knows, maybe it will happen next year. The district had to lay off people, but there are so many students, that rather than hire a new teacher, they just have teachers teach 6 classes instead of five.

We'll be saving the majority of the money. I would like to save for a down payment on a car. The car we have now runs fine, but it is pretty old. It's a '91. However, it was Dan's grandma's before she passed away and she kept it in really good condition and didn't drive it much. When we got it 2 years ago, it had less than 100,000 miles on it. We just barely hit the 100,000 mile mark a month ago. It also has great AC and heat. I figure we'll need a mini van, especially if we're going to have more than 2 kids (which we're planning on). We're very, very grateful for this blessing.

Maybe something like this would be nice.

Anna's new wall decor

So after almost a year of living in our house, I've finally gotten Anna's room pretty much decorated. There are still more things I need to do, but at least now there are actually wall hangings. :)

These frames were wood and I painted them (I posted about these a few months ago. $1 each from Michaels). On the white one, I put on brown vinyl flowers. I was going to put a word on it, but decided not to, since I'll be putting a word on the wall. I don't know yet what word it will be, but it will be cute. :) I'm going to put centers on the bigger flowers as well.

This one is a little out of focus, our camera is weird sometimes and some angles it won't do automatic focus, so you have to do it yourself. I think they look really cute. I used material from Anna's blanket and put it in place of a picture.

Here are some shelves I painted. I'm not particularly crazy about these shelves, but I bought them and it's too late to take them back, so oh well. I'm thinking of painting the smaller one brown, to give some contrast.

This little photo easel, is from IKEA. I've had it since high school and never really used it. Same with the frame. I thought it would look cute in Anna's room. In fact the lamp in Anna's room is from IKEA too. I've had that since high school, all through college and now in my first home.

Here's a shot of all the new stuff together. I still need a white tall stand up lamp (or smaller one to put on the dresser) to replace the hanging one, since it doesn't go at all with anything. I'm on the lookout for that. I still feel like the top of her dresser is kind of blah. I'll see if I can make it look more cute. I'm also thinking of making curtains, we'll see if I can find some cute material.

I was at Toys R Us today and got these little stacking cups for Anna. She LOVES them. She just sat on the floor and played with them for a half hour. I tried to show her how to stack them, but I think that's a little too advanced for her right now. She's just having fun putting them in one another.

I have also been working on Anna's quilt. I'm hoping to get it done by this week. I did a lot on it this morning during her morning nap and was planning on doing more during her afternoon nap, but lately she hasn't been wanting to take an afternoon nap, even though it's obvious she's tired. I guess I'll have to wait till she goes to bed.