Welcome to our home! This week I am going to show you our bedroom. I am going back to showing you a before and after pic. Also, since I've had a lot of requests for the colors in my house, the walls are painted Sherwin Williams Stream and the trey ceiling is brevity brown (and to accommodate the other requests, living room: tansy green, kitchen and dining room: nuthatch, and both bathrooms and guest rooms are brevity brown).
Before the fire...
And after the fire...
Our bedroom
I love our ceiling! This was Michael's idea and it turned out great!
A lot of people have mentioned wanting brown and blue accents in their bedroom. This was the inspiration for our walls. I had these curtains from before and I knew that brown on brown would be too much and that if we went with green in the living room that we had to do blue in the bedroom. I LOVE the way the curtains brought it all together!!!
My dad made me this trunk when I graduated college and we use it to store some keepsakes. It means a lot to me and matches my furniture so well to not have planned it that way!
Thanks so much for stopping by again this week! Come back next week to see our yard and garage (which we cleaned out today and my car has FINALLY moved back in!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
What is your favorite Michael Jackson song and what is your first MJ song memory?
As crazy as he was (at least in my opinion) you have to give him credit as a musical genius. For the past twenty-four hours since I first heard he had been rushed to the hospital I tried to decide what my VERY most favorite MJ song is. I had a hard time deciding between Billie Jean, Beat It, and Thriller, but in the end, I have to say, Billie Jean. Not sure why, but it is one of the few songs that I can actually listen to all the way through without getting bored (I wanted to put the official video on here, but couldn't find it on youtube that was good quality and able to be embedded). The first song I vividly remember actually coming out and being a hit is Man In The Mirror (I was only 2 when Thriller came out).
So, now it's your turn to play along. Here are the two questions; 1. What is your favorite MJ song and 2. What was the first MJ song you remember hearing?
Oh, and I think I found the next great dancer. This video makes me laugh SO HARD! I just love this kid!
I have always laughed that Michael is more of a night person than a morning person (he would rather stay up late and although he gets up early every day, he just isn't always 100% awake for a couple of hours). However, this morning he must have REALLY not been awake yet when he left! This is what happens when you are on day three of working six, twelve hour days trying to reorganize an internet department, waking up an hour earlier than your used to, and not a morning person...
You put the peanut butter in the refrigerator!
Lord help us by Saturday! He may put Spencer in the dryer instead of his crate!
Tonight when we were making sandwiches for tomorrow and I was looking EVERYWHERE for the peanut butter and my stressed out and tired husband said he just KNEW he put it up this morning. Well, he did, just not in the pantry! Ha!
After all that I have been through over the past year and a half, there are many times I just have had to sit down and laugh. I have some good friends that have helped me through and they always know when I need to laugh. I know a lot of you girls out there need a good laugh, so here you go! 999 Reasons To Laugh At Infertility.
****I know that IF is NOT a funny matter or something to make fun of, but, again, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying and that is what that blog is about. It is to keep you going when things just get too hard. So, here is to my IF girls, we WILL overcome this struggle together!
First, I want to say Happy Father's Day to my Dad, the best dad in the world! He sacrificed so much for me to always have what I wanted and for me to be able to go to college. I would not be where I am today without him. I love you Dad!
We had a BUSY weekend! Friday night we went out to celebrate Michael's new job and our latest new beginning (we are getting good at celebrating that! ha!). We got up and went to Knoxville early yesterday morning to spend time with Michael's dad for Father's Day. We went out to the lake with his dad and stepmom and had a great time! Here are some pictures.
Enjoying actually having a Saturday off! I'm sure it will be the last for a while!
Michael enjoying his day off!
Michael and Jeff having fun for Father's Day together
(this is Jeff holding up the windshield after Michael broke it! Long story!)
Joy and I floating in the lake. Fun times!
Neyland Stadium from the Tennessee River. We can't wait to go there this fall!!!!!
It won't be long now!!!!!!
We left Knoxville around 9:00 this morning to have brunch with Michael's Granddad. After that we went to my parents to have dessert and pick up Spencer. We eventually made it home just in time to change clothes and head to the next event. This weekend was graduation for the residents in our surgery program and every year on the Sunday of graduation weekend, Dr. Barker hosts a party to honor the graduating chief residents. It just happened to fall on Father's Day this year. Everyone had a great time as always and we can't wait until next year!!!!! However, it was a BUSY day and we are worn out!!!!
Also one last thing, please keep one of our trauma surgeons and his family in your prayers this week. Dr. Mejia's mother was killed in a car accident in Atlanta yesterday afternoon. They are from Columbia, so I'm sure they will be traveling back there this week.
EDIT NOTE: Michael is still in the car business, just this time he is managing his own department instead of just sales. He will still be working Monday-Saturday :-( but it will be a much better situation.
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For the past month or so we've been praying at our house for Michael to make some decisions regarding work. Some things changed at his job and he was not as happy as he once was and felt that maybe the time had come to try to advance himself in the car business. This week God gave us the answer we had been praying for and on Wednesday Michael left his job for a better opportunity. Until today I could not post about this because we were waiting on some final details to be worked out, but Michael has accomplished his dream of managing his own internet department!!!!!
I am so proud of him!!!!! It took a lot for him to leave his old job. It is where he got his start and he really liked the people he worked with and the product he sold. However, in his heart he has known for a while that the time was coming to move on. He will be starting his new job on Monday and is so excited. It was definitely the best decision for our family and one that he made on his own in the end. Please pray for him that he will enjoy his new job and that everything will continue work out.
So, that was our big news! We have a jam packed weekend lined up which worked out great since Michael doesn't have to work for the first Saturday in almost 2 years!!!!! Tomorrow we are going up to Knoxville to spend the day on the lake and night with his dad for Father's Day. Sunday we will hurry back early so I can spend lunch with my dad. Then, late that afternoon we will go to an annual party at Dr. Barker's house honoring the outgoing chief residents (which freaked me out the the other day when I realized they were interns when I met them 6 years ago!!!!! I have been in nursing longer than I thought!). I'll try to post some pictures of our weekend Sunday night if I am not completely wiped out! Have a great weekend!!!!!
Since I have been up since 4am and you can only stare at the ceiling so long, I thought I would go ahead and do my post for this week's tour. I do not have a playroom or a bonus room, so I did my laundry room. I do not have any before pics of it (because, really, who randomly takes a pic of their laundry room! Ha!), but the only difference between the before and after is the color and the front loaders.
I begged Michael since we moved into this house almost 2 years ago for a set of front loaders. When we had the fire it was one of the few appliances that got fried, so guess what I got! I love, love, love them! They are wonderful!!!!!!
My shelf of cleaning supplies. I am a marketer's dream! I buy any new product I hear about! (You may notice two of a few things, that is because when we moved back in we bought all new cleaning supplies and much to our surprise, the movers saved all of our old stuff, so there is a lot of duplicates in the laundry room. Oops!
This is my favorite thing about my "new" laundry room. I am the proud owner of more shelving and now I am able to hang up my clothes as I pull them out of the dryer!
Thanks for coming to tour my laundry room! It is just so fascinating I almost didn't bother this week! Ha! Hope everyone has a good day and I should be back this afternoon with some news (and no, I am not pregnant, but it is some big news for us!), so come back tonight!
Be honest, I know that at least one of you had to have been watching too. It is like a bad car wreck. You can't help but stop and stare at this fiasco. You've just had to have seen at least one episode! Well, if you have, tell me what you thought about last night's finale?
I have my opinion of these women. I love Dina, Jacqueline, and Teresa (she is my favorite), and I am on the fence about Caroline. She needs to expand a little beyond "the family". However, I just cannot like Danielle. I decided I didn't care for her long before I knew of "the book". I wish Jacqueline could see that she is just bad news. I mean HELLO, she BROUGHT the book to the dinner and started WWIII right there at Teresa's dinner (which, ok, Teresa was a little over the top and showed ANYTHING but class). And, seriously did we have to talk about Teresa's new "bubbies" for 10 minutes????
Back to "the book" (does it drive anyone else crazy how Danielle always makes air quotes when she refers to "the book"?). I don't believe Caroline and Dina. I do feel that Caroline is just covering for Dina (which I still like BTW). I also think I love Chris (Jacqueline's husband). He knows how to handle his sisters and Lord knows someone needs to!
I CANNOT wait for the "Last Supper" episode tomorrow night and the Reunion next week. I am going to miss these girls until season 2. They have made me laugh so hard over the last 6 weeks! It is like they live in such a different world than I do, it is insane.
Sorry I've been MIA for a few days. Just as I was doing better on my blogging, my kidney stone decided to make its encore performance. We never really knew if I passed it or if it was kind of hiding in a duct somewhere, but we now know...it was in hiding! Starting Wednesday and Thursday, I just didn't feel quite right and my back was bothering me quite a bit. By the time Friday rolled around I was sitting on a heating pad and almost in tears at work. My urologist wouldn't even let me make an appointment to see him this week until Monday (apparently they "configure the schedule" or something crazy on Friday, which I find fascinating considering I have already made an appointment for AUGUST!). Dr. Smith came by to see a patient and when I told him what was going on and that I had been blown off by the urologist, he ordered a IVP (an xray with dye that looks at your urinary track, I've had about 15 of these in the past 10 years, I'm a pro!) and sent me home with pain meds, antibiotic, and to rest.
Now comes the TMI part, sorry, but this is my blog that I use as an online scrapbook, so bear with me. Starting on Saturday afternoon I started seeing a lot of sandlike granules in my strainer when I would pee so I knew that it must be breaking up. By Sunday evening I had passed multiple small black rock looking pieces which looked exactly like the "big one" as I called it. It was about 5mm (almost too big, and would have been too big to pass if it had not broken up) and I finally passed it around 6:00 Sunday night. I will spare you and not post a pic of it. :-)
I still had some pain on Sunday night and Monday morning, so I went ahead and had to IVP, which hurts BTW, and it showed that all was clear!!!! I had actually passed a stone, which has never happened in the 10 years I've been having them. They always have to go get it in surgery, so yay for no surgery!!!!!!
Today was the first day I actually felt myself and I can tell my energy is really starting to come back. It has been a LONG seven weeks since all this started and I am happy to be feeling a little better.
I do have a product RAVE! I am in LOVE! My blog and facebook friends were right, my life changed this morning when I opened this and used it for the first time...
I FINALLY have salon hair everyday! I don't know how I've managed all these years without one!!!! Anyway, if you haven't splurged and bought one and you have crazy curly, frizzy hair like mine, hurry and buy one!!!! My hair is almost flat today!!! I've never said that before!
This week on Where I Live Friday we are showing our bathrooms. I actually didn't do anything too drastic on my bathrooms in the rebuild, so you'll just get the latest pics instead of before, fire pics, and after. :-)
Also, while I am thinking about it, I had a few comments and emails when I posted the pics of the bathrooms during the rebuild about the color. It is Sherwin Williams Brevity Brown, a very true chocolate brown.
Our Master Bathroom
View from our bedroom
Pictures I had framed to hang over my bathtub on the empty wall...one of these days (yes, they are a little different!)! I am also going to replace the bamboo shade with a white roman shade, very soon.
The vanity which is the view from the shower
Our shower. One of the improvements we plan to make one day is to tile the shower to match the travertine backsplash in our kitchen. This is the view from the water closet.
The Guest Bath
The view from the hallway
This is the monogram on the towels in the bathroom. I LOVE my towels!
My shower curtain that I got from Ballard Design. It matched the towels really well!
I just got the single "L" so that one day I could continue to use it for a while when this bathroom converts to a baby's bathroom.
My life changed forever. At 4:30 am on Wednesday, December 10, 2008 we heard a noise that we will never forget. Lightning struck dead center in the front of our house and caught our attic on fire. There are times in your life that you can vividly remember from start to finish and that morning was definitely one of them. I can remember sitting in my car after moving it out of our driveway and thinking I don't think it can get any worse than this. My hope had sunk to a new level. For months since my miscarriage in July, I spent an unbelievable amount of time eating ice cream, crying, and feeling sorry for myself. I was constantly trying to keep from falling into a deep depression or losing hope. However, in that instant, I had a feeling comfort that I had not had in a long time and in the next three months, I never stopped to ask why. I think it is because I knew. God had a purpose for all that I had been through. I just needed to slow down and notice it.
Everyone always jokes around that you'll know when God is trying to tell you something because lightning will strike. God was trying to tell me something that morning, and in the next three months while we waited on our home to be repaired, I learned that I needed to trust Him a little more. After a year of TTC, a miscarriage, and now a fire, God wanted me to finally put all my trust in Him and not spend so much time worrying and crying, but more time praying and trusting.
I immediately felt blessed that we still had most of our belongings, each other, and our dog, however, I knew there were bigger lessons to be learned from this experience. Michael and I came out of this day stronger, both individually and as a couple. We learned to lean on each other more and that we could survive just about anything. (trust me, if you ever take on a major renovation or homebuilding project, you'll understand! ha!)
I feel that I came out of this experience a new person. It showed me the amount of time I spent obsessing about TTC and that it was hurting our relationship (and several other relationships in my life). I realized I had changed, and not for the good. I have always been a happy, upbeat, positive person and I had to make a decision during this time, I could either move on and give my struggle with infertility and depression to God, or I could continue on and continue to alienate myself and live a 24/7 pitty party with myself.
When we got back in our house, I made a decision, I would take a 6 month break from TTC and let whatever happens happen. We are three months into that decision and it was the best decision I've ever made. I've spent so much more time with Michael just having fun and not worrying about what tomorrow will bring and I've spent a lot more time with God and not as much time blogging or watching trashy reality TV (which I LOVE!). I haven't cried when I started yet another cycle (in case you were wondering, no I am not pregnant, but just started cycle 15 last week) and I am ok with not checking my temperature, using ovulations predictor kits, or any of the other crazy OCD things I used to get upset and stress about. I actually can't even remember the last time I cried because I was not pregnant or had a baby.
So, yes, God was trying to tell me something that morning. He was teaching me patience, to be prayerful, and to have a more faith. I am still working on those things, but now I am a believer in the saying, "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Stronger with my faith, marriage, and overall self confidence.
This is poor pitiful Spencer tonight. He isn't feeling too good and is just lying around in his bed. My poor little baby dog had a traumatic day today. For the past few months I've noticed that he had a small knot on his back, but didn't think too much about it because he had one as a puppy and the vet said it would go away on it's own. Well, over the weekend it seemed to get much larger and last night it opened up. I see this sort of thing on adult surgery patients ALL THE TIME, but it is much different when it is your dog! So, I immediately called the vet and they could see him this afternoon.
Michael said he did great, even when they had to open up his abscess and squeeze it to get all the infection out. Poor baby will have to take an antibiotic twice a day for a week and we have to clean it twice a day until it closes up. Here is a picture of the area tonight after they opened it and drained it today.
B - Bed size: Queen (but would LOVE a king size if we had more room)
C - Chore you hate: folding laundry
D - Dog's names: Spencer and Beasley, lives with my parents :-(
E - Essential start your day : COFFEE!
F - Favorite color: Purple or Brown (odd combo, I know!)
G - Gold or Silver: White Gold
H - Height: 5'3 with shoes on, so honestly, 5'2
I - Instruments you play(ed): piano for 6 years
J - Job title: RN for two trauma surgeons
K - Kid(s): Praying daily for God to bless us with a baby.
L - Living arrangements: with Michael and Spencer in a single family home
M - Mom's name: Amy
N - Nicknames: Banana, Princess (it is a joke, I am really not this bratty!)
O - Overnight hospital stay other than birth: RSV as a baby, kidney stone at 17
P - Pet Peeve: Hearing someone eat or smack gum.
Q - Quote from a movie: "Soon it will be something really depressing. Like a Baby Gap." -You've Got Mail and "Look, you have a baby, in a bar" - Sweet Home Alabama
R - Right or left handed: right
S- Siblings: none, see nicknames. :-)
T - Time you wake up: as late as possible! 6:30-7 weekdays, 8-9:00 weekends
U- Underwear: I don't think that is any of your business, but I do wear it, everyday!
V - Vegetable you dislike: turnip
W - Ways you run late: traffic, alarm didn't go off. I despise being late and freak out when I am, so I am usually a few minutes early.
X - X-rays you've had: several; teeth, arm, ankle, chest, kidneys, abdomen/pelvis, head/face. The latest one, CT a month ago for a kidney stone
Y - Yummy food you make: spinach dip, desserts
Z - Zoo favorite: Big Cats, which is weird because I am scared to death of cats! I am just fascinated with lions, tigers, and etc!
I tag Anna, Lauren Fletcher, Brittney, and anyone else who wants to play along!
Between email and comments, some of you had questions to yesterday post, so I thought I would post a question and answer post here.
You can grill okra?
YES! and it is awesome!!! It is my new favorite summer veggie! Here is the recipe.
EDIT: It isn't slimmy at all! Actually kind of crunchy!
Where did you get your bona?
I found it at Lowe's awhile back, but finally got the mop system at Kohl's on Friday. I really cannot say enough good things about it!
What is your salsa recipe?
This is a good question because I honestly just made this up as I went along yesterday! Michael LOVES homemade salsa, but I have struggled for 5 years to come up with a good recipe. Well, he ate the whole bowl, so I hope that means it was good! I am posting it here.
Hope everyone has a good day! I am off to pack the bag and cooler and get ready for the lake!
This summer Michael and I decided we were going to concentrate on having fun, relaxing, and not worry so much about TTC or stress about other things going on. Well, that sure was a good plan!
We are having so much fun this summer. I've spent the past two Saturdays cleaning the house, planting flowers and tomatoes, and hanging out with friends. Today, I met Brittney for coffee, a quick tour of her house that is being built down the street from me, and a trip to the farmer's market. I got some yummy tomatoes, peaches, okra, onion, squash, and cucumbers to eat this week. Then I came home and cleaned the house.
I am in LOVE with this floor cleaning system! I have such dark hardwood that it is virtually impossible to keep it clean and everything I have used has shown either a film or water spots on the floor. So, I have now discovered Bona. It is a natural, non-toxic cleaner that made my floors the cleanest and prettiest I've ever seen them!!!! I HIGHLY recommend this product to anyone! The best part is that it is non-toxic and environmentally friendly, so it is safe around dogs, babies, and those with allergies!
I also have a PRAISE! Michael has been struggling at work, as has everyone in car sales. Well, today God gave him a wonderful confidence booster, he sold 2 cars to the same person!!!!!! I am so proud of him and they open their new dealership on Monday, so we hope this is a great sign of things to come!!!!
Now, I am off to make some homemade salsa with the tomatoes I bought and get ready to cookout to celebrate his great day at work with some lemon pepper chicken, grilled okra, and corn on the cob! Oh, and of course, some tasty wine!
And the best part of the summer...LAKE TOMORROW!!!!!!!
"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11
Hi! I'm Amanda and this is the story of our family! I am a thirty-something wife, mommy, daughter, friend, and RN who loves the Lord, my family, friends, good food, wine, and football! Welcome to our blog!
