Beauty

I don't know how many of you read the Denton Sanitorium. Jen's a sweet LDS mom of 7 (I think! I might have missed one when I was counting, since I space things like numbers all the time now!). It's fun to read her blog. It's just as fun to read her son's blog. He's a freshman at BYU and hilarious, so I always enjoy when she shares links to his blog (which is why I don't have a link...I always just follow hers!).

Anyway, tomorrow she's having a linky party and I liked it so I'm going to try to remember to participate.  Whether I link up or not, I wanted this little reminder to me. So here's what she asked us to do. I'm posting it today so that anyone who actually still reads this is able to think about it and link up tomorrow too if you want.
    "Here's the challenge:
Straight after a shower or after you've washed your face, take some time to really look at that woman in the mirror.  What do you see that's beautiful? Ignore or re-evaluate those things that have always bugged or challenged you. What is your singular, personal element of beauty? Is it skin, ears, hair? Is it wisdom or humor or understanding in your eyes?  We all have one thing that not only makes us individuals.  That one thing makes us beautiful.  What is yours and why?"

I loved that!  We have things on all sides of us telling us that we're not pretty enough or not good enough and Jen's actually asking us to find those things that we love about ourselves! 

Here's mine (and maybe if you're all seriously unlucky I'll take a picture of myself straight out of the shower so you can see what I'm talking about): I love my eyes.  I always have.  They're a very pretty blue-ish color that changes all the time. My daughter has my eyes (which is funny since they started out looking like her daddy's) and she's always asking me if her eyes are blue or green.  The answer is yes. It depends on the day and the moment you're looking and what we're wearing. Along with my eyes, I love my eyebrows.  I've tweezed my eyebrows once, because I had one stray hair.  Coming from parents who have to tweeze a lot, I consider myself extraordinarily lucky.

I like the look of my dimple. Practically speaking, it's not fantastic since my dimple's insanely deep and I've been known to bite it when I smile.  But it's really cute to look at, so I'm okay with it. And if we go beyond face, I like my hair.  Now, don't get me wrong, I don't always love how it looks when I'm done with it and it can be frustrating, but I love that I have a lot of hair and that I've got a pretty nice hairline. My forehead's not too big or too small because of it.

Now I should probably let you all know that I used to have quite a problem with how I looked. I looked in the mirror and I just couldn't see what my husband saw in me. (Quite frankly, you look lower than my shoulders and I still don't get it!) I've been lucky this pregnancy...sort of. I got really sick at the beginning and lost 10 lbs, which is fairly normal for my pregnancies.  After that ended, apparently I had gestational diabetes kick in, which normally makes you gain weight, but then I had my thyroid freak out (which is also normal for my pregnancies) which makes you lose weight.  So I'll be 8 months along on Thursday and weighed myself yesterday and I weigh half a pound less than my pre-pregnancy weight.  I also recently had my hair cut and dyed by my cousin who's fantastic!  I love how it turned out. A few weeks ago, I realized while I was looking in the mirror that I actually think I'm pretty.  I'm not sure how long that feeling will last or if it'll stick around, but for right now I'm actually fairly happy with myself.  I can still look at myself and see all of those yucky little flaws that we women see, but I choose to see the positive things. I'm a firm believer that 99% of the time, positivity is a choice and I choose to think that I'm beautiful right now. It helps me get through the day.

Love Notes

Well, I'm not the world's greatest at letter writing.  That said I've got a husband who's away a lot, so sometimes we have to get creative about things.  A letter over and over can start to get a little boring. (I normally solve this problem by chatting and emailing online and forgetting to send real letters!  Oops! Can I blame that on my pregnant brain?)  I'll share a few of the things I did last time and that I've done for holidays. 

One of my favorite things that I've done was a puzzle letter.  I think it was a Super Mario puzzle (which is funny considering since we got a Wii, my husband has rediscovered and become re-obsessed with Mario!) and I put it together. Then I carefully turned it over and wrote a quick letter in Sharpie on the back.  You have to write fairly big for the words to be read-able.  It was probably something like "Dear Hubs, I love you and hope you're enjoying yourself. I miss you!" That's really all there was room for, since it's easiest to do it with on of those 25 piece kids puzzles.  Unless you REALLY like puzzles and so does the person you're sending it to.  Then go all out! Once you've got your letter written, take the puzzle apart, put it back in the box, and send it to whoever it is you're sending it to.  You could send it to a child or grandchild for Valentine's Day with their favorite character on the front. 

I also love notes made out out of edible items. (Okay, my husband likes them because he LOVES candy.) There's the ever-popular poster out of candy bars.  For Valentine's last year, I made one out of conversation hearts.  You have to use glue on the candies for that one, so be sure to give the recipient a little box of their own conversation hearts to actually eat.

Well, maybe with this post, I'll be able to start looking forward to Valentine's Day and being able to send my hubby something new and unique.

Yeah, I'm not great at this!

Sorry for the hiatus from here.  With only 4 followers, I'm betting not many people noticed. (But I love my 4 followers!  Thanks for sticking with me!) I know I've taken super long breaks before and I'm sorry about that.  The last big break was actually a break for morning sickness!  I'm due in March with Baby #4, so we've been dealing with that, not to mention that the Hubs has been away. (We'll say he's been gone for 7 months already, will be home for the baby to come and then gone again and leave it at that.  Draw your own conclusions! He will be coming back in a little while though and we're getting excited!) So for a long time it was me, Bubs, Chubs and Baldy all by ourselves.  We finally got a room finished in the basement that my sister moved into, so things are a bit better.  In fact, she was a sweetheart and let me take a nap while Baldy took a nap and Bubs was at school.  It helped that she only had Chubs to help out, but since he's potty training (which takes pretty much forever with boys, I've decided!) he's not the easiest.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain what's been going on here and let you all know that hopefully I'll be back a little more often, at least in the next 7 weeks! I'm currently pre-washing fabrics to make a cute sports quilt for the baby. Hopefully I'll get it done quickly!  I just found a quilting shop that can do the machine quilting for me, I just have to get all of the other stuff done first!  I'm going to cross my fingers this goes well, since I've never done a real quilt.  I am a "put two pieces of fabric together with a piece of batting in between and tie" kinda gal. I just couldn't pass up this pattern though.  Also, I got a Silhouette for Christmass, so I'll show you some of the things I'm working on with that.  You'll probably see some Subway Art, since I haven't jumped on that bandwagon yet. (I'm always about a step behind the trends.  Hopefully you all understand!) I'll probably try putting my blog on a few linky parties too, so hopefully you'll see me around more!  Thanks!