Springtime!

The weather has been teasing us the last few weeks. It will be sunny and Spring-like and get me all excited and then it will have an identity crisis and rain with snow mixed in and decide to be freezing! I decided I needed to help Spring truly find itself by making this banner to hang on our fireplace. Maybe it will inspire spring to come out once and for all! :) It looks like spring might make a true appearance this week. We will see...

Since it has been somewhat "nice" outside, we have been going on more and more walks. Merrilee loves walks and it is good for me to get out of the house and get some kind of exercise.

Ben and I went to a BYU baseball game this past Saturday.  Ben got free vouchers somewhere and it was a lot of fun! Merrilee loved it. They would play music between innings, or if they were switching out the pitcher and Merrilee would dance and laugh.  Just watching baseball and singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" got me so excited for summer to come! BYU won the game.

Before the game on Saturday, Ben said if we got all our chores done, he would take me to IKEA! That was kind of an unexpected surprise! We got most (not all) of our chores done, but we went anyways! It was fun to dream of having our own house and talk about the kinds of furniture and rooms we will have one day.  Hopefully it is in the near future! We ended up buying just a few items that we needed, like a new dish rack, Tupperware, and a $5 lamp for Merrilee's room.  The lamp came just white and boring, but I spruced it up a little bit with ribbons and hot glue to match Merrilee's girly pink room.

Last night I made a crock-pot dinner and Ben was in love with it! I decided I'd share the love in case any of you have husbands like mine who salivate just thinking about meat! :) Enjoy!

Slow Cooker Italian Beef Sandwiches

(Prep time: 10 minutes, cooking time 8-10 hours on low, 4-5 hours on high)

2-3 pound beef bottom round or eye of round roast

1 (32 ounce) box of beef broth

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon dried basil

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon dried parsley

1 (.70 ounce) package Italian salad dressing mix

Place beef roast in a slow cooker, fat side up. Pour broth into a medium saucepan and add all other ingredients. Stir well and bring to a boil. Pour broth mixture over the roast. Cover and cook on low 8-10 hours, high 4-5 hours. If possible, turn roast over after 5-6 hours. Prior to serving, flip roast over again and scrap off any visible fat. Remove the roast from the slow cooker and using two forks “shred” the roast. (Or just buy a pre-sliced roast like I did and use the slices instead of "shreds"...so much easier than having to shred meat.) Return the beef back to the broth in the slow cooker. Serve on Italian rolls with sautéed green peppers if desired. 

Serves 6-8

(We melted mozzarella cheese on top of the meat and then put on the green peppers and a spoon-full of broth. YUM!) 

Serve with sliced apples and oranges and watch your husband melt! :)

Growing Up

Merrilee is growing up so fast! She is just so cute! I can't help but smother her with loves all day long with her long crazy hair, cute teeth and chubby cheeks!  Her daily routine consists of waking up and playing anywhere from 45 min. to 3 hours. She eats somewhere in there and then goes down for a nap (sometimes). Sometimes she skips her morning nap and plays even longer until afternoon nap time.  Sometimes she skips her afternoon nap if she's already had a morning nap.  She is basically all over the place with her nap schedule.

She loves music! (YEAH!) she loves strumming the guitar, beating drums, and most of all she loves playing the piano. If I ever try to get a few minutes of practice or pleasure playing in, Merrilee is standing right next to me plinking away on the keys.  Sometimes she'll start to cry or whine until I pick her up and let her sit on my lap to play.  When this happens, she immediately removes my hands from the keyboard if they are on it. She wants to do it all by herself.  Of course, as a former public school music teacher and current private piano teacher, this enthusiasm for music from my firstborn makes me extremely happy. :)

Merrilee's 1 year molars are all coming in at once.  She had a few days where she was very irritable. Poor thing. But she is over the worst of it I think.

We hope Merrilee will start to walk before the new baby comes.  I think she is pretty close, but she sure likes to take her time with these milestones! She is a little Speedy Gonzalas when it comes to crawling though.  She likes to chase her daddy and mommy around all day long and likes to have crawling races with her daddy. Daddy will crawl around on the floor and Merrilee laughs and laughs while trying to keep up with him. So cute.

Lately, her favorite toy (besides the musical instruments) is a little train that has lots of buttons and plays music. Her Nana Dunn got it for her for Christmas. That thing will keep her occupied for a good amount of time!

Another one of her favorite things is Bath time! If we leave the bathroom door open while not in use, she will most certainly crawl in and stand up next to the tub and giggle and talk about how much she loves baths. I don't bathe her every day, but I'm starting to be tempted to just because she loves it so much. She only has one bath toy, a pink rubber duck.  I think we will need to invest in some more bath toys! My favorite is doing awesome hair-do's to her hair after bath time, as demonstrated below...

I can't wait to have another sweet little girl to add to the cuteness in our house. Girls are so fun! About 9 more weeks to go! (give or take...still questionable on the due date)

P.S. The above photos are products of experimenting with editing photos at this free website.

Clarification, Crafts, and Cuteness

So I think some clarification is needed...

There has been some confusion about the "Kicking of the Dog"  incident that Ben posted about. The dog was not harmed and it wasn't a WHAMO kick that Ben depicted. Ben merely lifted his leg as the dog was near it and the tip of his foot brushed the nose of the dog.  The dog did no whimpering and no harm was done.

Now that that is clarified, on to other things.

Merrilee was sick again this past weekend. Poor thing. Seems like she gets sick a lot, but she is over it now. My mom was also in town over the weekend and it was fun to see her and spend time with her.

I have been feeling quite crafty lately and I have finished a few projects.

Crochet Project #1--Kylie, my Sis-in-law, was crocheting cute headbands for friends over Christmas and it inspired me.  I got some yarn and crochet needles and tried my hand at it. For the headband, I didn't exactly follow a pattern, but just experimented until something kind of resembled what I was going for. For the flower, I did follow a pattern I found on youtube. It turned out Merrilee size, but it can also stretch to my size.  Both Merrilee and I have worn it. (I'm wearing it in the pics on the last post.) Its a little rough around the edges, but it works!

Crochet Project #2-- Star stitch hat with flower. The pattern for the hat can be found Here. I added a row or two to make it adult size.  The flower is the same pattern I used for the Headband and can be found Here. I think this hat turned out really well and I'm kind of proud of it.

Crochet Project #3-- Slippers.  One of them got weird at the toe and I'm not sure what happened, but overall I think they turned out ok for my first attempt at something like this! I found the pattern on the Red Heart yarn website Here.

My next crochet project will hopefully be something for the new baby...we'll see!

So I threw a Bunco party just before Valentine's Day and for some of the prizes I made some magnets and put together some frames...Of course I couldn't resist making some for myself to keep too!

For the magnets I bought some flat backed clear gems, some magnets, and some clear tacky glue.  I used some scrapbook paper that I had for the designs.  Its as easy as cutting the paper to the size of the gem, and gluing it to the gem, and then to the magnet! So Fun!

I found the design for the print at this site, printed them off at costco, and stuck them in some cute frames.

My latest project has been a cork board. Our desk/office area gets so cluttered sometimes I want a place where we can hang our important things up so we will see them and take care of them right away, or just to have up as a reference. I found the most amazing site that has tutorials on all sorts of amazing crafts! This tutorial covered the frame with fabric, but I used some scrapbook paper again. I still might switch out the ribbon I used for a more brown satin-y type ribbon (like the one on the tutorial) which I think might look a little better with the colors I used. I still need to hang it up.

There you have it folks. I don't take credit for any of these ideas, I just steal good ideas from other people. :)
You can go ahead and steal the ideas too, they were all free online!

In other news, Merrilee has been protesting her afternoon naps...she throws her blanket out of the crib and cries like its the end of the world when I put her in her crib for her afternoon nap.  Even when she is obviously SO tired (bags under eyes, rubbing eyes, crying at everything), she protests! I don't know if this is a phase or if she is deciding to switch to a one nap schedule. I guess we'll see. Here's some more pics of the cutie...

She LOVES books!! :)