Painting the Pig

My husband and I love to do projects together. We feel it's a good opportunity to to something constructive,  spend time, communicate, and be creative together. This tradition started when we were dating. We had a two for 1 coupon for Color Me Mine. If you've never been there, go! It's so fun! Make sure you get a coupon cause it's a little pricey. We love hot chocolate and picked mugs to paint. We spent hours working on them! It was fun to see design ideas come out (including joe's amazing taping job to make perfect lines on the mug, while i wanted mine to have a stippled texture), talk about color, chat about the music playing, laugh at mistakes. It was awesome. Here's an old picture of that.  

[Aside: We chose JH as our theme because we had just gotten engaged and were excited we'd soon have the same initials. We now use these cups all the time. Our favorite is after a long day making some hot cocoa and adding a spoonful of Nutella. This is dangerous though because once you have it with Nutella every other cup of cocoa is not as good. ha ha. Our other favorite is hot apple cider with a spoonful of caramel. Also dangerously delicious.]

Another time we were at the dollar store for something and saw this silly pen shaped like a Sea Horse. I don't have a picture of this one but we painted all the lines in the seahorse a different color. It came with 5 colors! We couldn't just paint it yellow and be done! It's hideous, but amazing. I think i may still have it somewhere. 

Now to the present! On our Marathon Date we found ourselves at Dollar Tree again, this time with a goal of buying something we didn't need and a night to fill with fun stuff. We found this ceramic pig. 

We knew this would be an awesome project.

That night our date was fun of other awesomeness so we didn't get to paint it. We saved it for another date night.

 This was us on that date night.

Happy painting! ha ha, we look tired.

Joe gets very focused. 

 We had a night/day theme. 

Joe painted a night sky with constellations,

 I painted a daytime fall scene.

  

Happy little piggy!!

Baby Sleeper

My beautiful sister Emily Allen had a baby September 25th. Reese Avarette Allen joined our family and as tradition, i like to make something for my neices and nephews. Here's how the projects turned out.

This is the first one I made,  it's a sleep sack. Good for new babies cause it has no feet and makes changing fast and easy.

Then I saw this monster fabric on clearance and loved it! I put the feet on this one cause i realized the weather is turning cold and it might be warmer.

I decided to send him the monster one, and I gave the sleep sack to a friend who is having a baby in December. Doesn't he look adorable? 

Peaches

I love peaches. I could eat them all day. Canning peaches is an important part of my year.
I get seconds from Allred Orchards on University Ave. You can't beat the price, and their fruit is amazing! Buying seconds, i get a mix of whatever peaches are on at the time. This time I got Lemon Elbertas (my favorite), O'Henry, and Angelas. I canned the elbertas since they are so pretty in the jar, and made the others into pie filling.
 

I love when my kitchen looks like this.



I got 10 quarts of pie filling and 4 quarts plus 4 pints of peaches. I have a dozen quarts of peaches leftover from last year so I didn't need to can as many this year. Next year though I'll be canning more.

Marathon Date

Backstory: We'd been drying pears for 3 days. I borrowed food dehydrators from a friend and my aunt and we would fill them, and wait, then empty them, wash them and refill them. Kelly got the pears for free so we were super excited.
Saturday came and Kelly had to go home so Joe helped me dry the last of the pears. After that we really wanted to get out of the house. Joe said "Julie, lets leave and not come back till it's late". So we got out our planners and made a list of fun and random things to do that would keep us out the rest of the day.
Here's our list of things we could do:
Fly a kite
Rent a tandem bike
Disc golf
BYU Swing Dance: 7-8
Spend old wedding gift cards
Bowl or play Pool
International Cinema 5:45 and 7:30
Buy something we don't need
Try on silly hipster clothes we would never wear and take pictures

Here's what we ended up doing

Buying something we don't need: silly huge sunglasses

we also bought a kite here, but when we went to fly it there was no wind. this will remain on the table for further dates.

After Dollar Tree we went to Gen X Clothing. They don't have hipster clothes, but they do have crunk stuff. we decided not to try them on and take silly pictures cause we were afraid a big black bouncer looking guy might come out of the back and kill us. ha ha.

We had some gift cards to spend so we went to Kohls. Unfortunately, neither of us are good shoppers so our gift cards went unspent. 

We wanted to get outside so we played a round of disc golf. Joe is great at getting action shots.

This is the closest i got to an action shot.

I call this one "Joe's broken arm" picture. i have a talent for taking pictures at just the wrong moment.

Me looking cool. ha ha.

Then we needed a snack so we stopped and got some 99 cent tacos!!

We rented a tandem bike. This was an exercise in marital trust. Learning to ride a tandem bike requires a lot of trust! Everyone knows how to balance a bike, but when you get two people on there, there's a new learning curve. It was so fun though!

The path was smooth and mostly flat so it was good for learning.

After biking we went to Chalk the Block. I forgot to get a picture, which is a real shame. It's an event at the Riverwoods to benefit a school for autistic children. they bring in local artists who each get a parking place and they make chalk art in the space. It was amazing!

This is a pic from another Chalk the Block so you can get an idea. 

After that we went to dinner at Happy Sumo. We got sat and then no body talked to us for 20 min so we had to complain. They brought us a free appetizer so we felt a lot better. 

Free food makes us happy.

By the time our food came we were starving so we inhaled it. Here's what was left when i remembered to take a picture. 

From there we went to campus to the international cinema, dancing, or games center. 

By that time the movie we were interested in at the international cinema was already started. Darn.

We walked by the ballroom, no one was holding swing dance that night. Darn.

So we decided to play pool. 

I took more videos than pictures of this. but here we are, and it's dark outside. 

we played two games, then were tired so we thought it was about time to wrap up the date.

Home we went, but we made a quick stop at Smiths for caramels and a redbox.

Joe set up the movie while i melted the caramels and poured them over a delicious honey crisp apple fresh from the orchard.

We rented Sherlock Holmes, Game of Shadows. Blue Ray! we used the computer hooked up to the TV since we don't have a blue ray player. 

Marathon date? Yup. 

Adventures in marriage? Always.