Photo A Day Challenge - May

Apparently, I stink at this.

I start off the month strong, only to start to fall behind after a week and a half.  By the beginning of the third week, I sort of give up/forget about it, only to pick up again a few days before the month ends.  At that point, no amount of playing catch up will save me, so I end up short.

Still, I keep trying.  I ain't no quitter!  LOL!

Here are the photos I did get this month:

1. Peace

2.  Skyline. The skyline around these parts isn't very interesting.  I did learn that the awful messy tree in our front yard is called a Jacaranda.  It's good to know the names of your enemies...

3.  Something I wore today.  These terry track pants are hands down the best maternity clothing purchase I made when I was pregnant with Bubba, and they aren't even maternity pants!  The rise is low and hits me perfectly under my belly.  So comfy.

4.  Fun.  Bubba has graduated from Duplos to regular Legos in the past year and he's HOOKED.

5.  Me.  33 weeks!

6.  Bird.

7.  Someone who inspires you.  I couldn't think of just one person.  There are so many things and people who provide inspiration!  I went with Pinterest.  This is my "Things I did because of Pinterest" board.  I know people like to make jokes about how nothing pinned ever gets made, but I'm thinking I have a decent track record so far!  See the board here.

8.  A smell I adore.  Anything baking, really.

Note to self - clean oven.  Yikes.

9.  Something I do every day.  Vitamins! 2 cinnamon pills for high triglycerides (dude - I'm OLD), prenatal vitamin, vitamin d, iron pill because the wee punk in mah belly is making me anemic.

10.  A favorite word.  Seriously.  It amuses me how it riles people up, even though it's just letters and sounds like every other word in the language.  I admire how versatile it is - it's a noun, a verb, and adverb, an adjective...it covers most parts of speech.

Honestly though?  A few days later I realized that my REAL favorite word is Defenestrate.  Such a fancy word for such a silly action.

11.  Kitchen.

12.  Something that makes me happy.  NOODLES!  Specifically, bun.  Oh my goodness this is one of my very favorite things on Earth to eat.

13.  Mum.  Specifically, my mom's mom.

14.  Grass.  The landscapers came and removed all the grass and weeds from the flower beds, replacing them with these little shrubby plants and gravel.  They also fixed the sprinkler heads so the lawn will get watered now.  YAY!

15.  Love.  We got a good start painting the kitchen.  LOVE the new colors, and how the aqua chalkboard pops against the green.

16.  What I'm reading.  My friend Suzy found this copy at Goodwill for $1.50.  Kick butt!  I loved it - read it in under five hours.

17.  Snack.  Terrible.  I know better too.  Still, there's something about that fake bacon flavored cheese that makes me happy.  I think it's because I ate it as a kid.

18.  Something I made.  Button flowers for one of my pothos!

19.  A favorite place - HOME.  I firmly believe that as a homemaker, if you don't like to be at home, you're not doing your job properly.

20.  Something you can't live without.  Ice water!  I drink between 6-8 of these 24 oz glasses each day.  Did I mention the high here today is supposed to hit ONE HUNDRED FREAKING FIFTEEN DEGREES today?

Yeah.

And that's as far as I got this month.  Will I try again for June?  Pfft.  Of course!  Like I said, I ain't no quitter.  ;)

Photo A Day Challenge - April

Hooray!  Instagram photo dump day!  Unfortunately, like many other things that happened in April, this ended up being a fail.  Here are the photos I did get.

1.  Reflection.  Our car is REALLY dirty.

2.  Color.  My son was playing with some cars on my bed that morning, so I went with the monochromatic color scheme he had created.  My husband is on a kick of buying him cars that he played with as a child.  This week he's all about the General Lee.

 3.  Mail.  The shirt for my Fresh Produce review (read it here) arrived via UPS.

4.  Someone who makes you happy.  Two someones, actually.

 5.  Tiny.  This little guy had excellent timing.  They stopped hanging out there a few days later.  I took this from inside the house.  Impressed with the clarity of the zoom on the iPhone.

 6.  Lunch.  We had Easter dinner at Ikea because we're slackers.  It was GOOD too.

7.  Shadow.  I let the boy go skinny dipping in the back yard. Words cannot express how much I love this picture.  It captures his personality (and skinny butt cheeks - ha!) so well.

8.  Inside your wallet.  I used to be a big wallet girl, then I realized a big wallet just meant I was carrying around more crap I didn't need.  I switched to this small Prada one years ago (serious proof that you get the quality you pay for!) so I could carry just the necessities.  Even so, I was surprised to see just how much junk I actually had in there!

9.  Younger you.  When I was about 22, I had this genius idea that I wanted to go from my dark brown, almost black hair to a pretty caramel light brown color.  I knew I couldn't just buy a box of hair dye and be successful, and I was too broke to go to a hairdresser.  My solution was to buy a box of drugstore hair bleach, because LOGICALLY light brown is halfway between dark brown and blonde, right?  I'll spare you the gory details, but after seeing the blotchy neon orange mess, I ended up having to pay for color correction anyway and had dark red hair for a while.

Oh, and this was also the second to last time I tried contact lenses.  My mom has green eyes and I always thought they were pretty, so that's what I got.  They freaked her out, haha.

10.  Cold.  I've consumed so much fresh squeezed grapefruit juice lately!  Always over ice.  YUM.

11. Where you ate breakfast.  I finally got around to cleaning off the patio furniture, so we had pancakes out there.

12.  Stairs.  This is where I started to fall behind.  There are no stairs in my house, and nothing with stairs in my neighborhood.  I had to actually wait until I went to visit a friend whose house is two stories.

13.  Something I found.  I found all of this vintage Pyrex and milk glass at various thirft shops and antique stores, with the exception of the lovely Fenton ruffled cake pedestal.  That was a gift.

14.  How I feel today.  Exactly how I look - TIRED.  Tired from being pregnant, tired of people's crap.

15.  Sunset.  This one got me behind too because I kept forgetting to go outside at the right time to get the photo!  The sky looks like a painting.

16.  Flower.  I cannot for the life of me figure out where the Instagram of this went!  Maybe because when I posted it to my feed I didn't use a filter, so it didn't save it to my phone?  This photo makes me way impressed with the new iPhone's camera.  Look at that detail and depth of field.  FROM A PHONE.  Whoa.

17.  Something I don't like.  Overripe bananas.  OH THE STENCH!!!  They got peeled, mashed, measured then stashed in the freezer.

18.  Hair.  This kid had some crazy bed head this morning.

19.  Orange.  I had dinner with a friend and the only soda in the fountain that did not contain caffeine was orange soda.  I usually just drink water, but tap is gross and I wasn't about to pay for a bottle of Aqcua Panna because I'm cheap, so I went with the soda.  It was actually pretty good.

20.  Something you drew.  Back before I scrapbooked, or made jam, or learned to knit, I used to draw.  I'm not so good at drawing things from my own imagination, but I can copy from a book like a champ.

21.  Bottle.  My mom gave me this bottle of vanilla extract from Mexico, and it was the best vanilla extract I've ever tasted.  It made my precious Nielsen Massey look like something from the dollar store.  This bottle is the size of a wine bottle and lasted for years.  I wanted to cry when it finally ran out because I knew there was no way to get more.

22.  The last thing I bought.  The doctor says I'm anemic, so I had to buy some iron pills.

23.  Vegetable.  I done grew me a carrot.  Bubba ate it and then asked for more.  WHOA.

...AND that's as far as I got this month.  Most of those were late too.  I'm not gonna sugar coat it; April, with the exception of a few highlights, pretty much sucked.  I'm sure my two and a half week absence was noticed.  I've not accomplished much.  I haven't worn makeup or properly styled my hair in almost three weeks.  At my doctor's appointment yesterday I was told I'm down three lbs (in two weeks!  in my 3rd trimester!) in spite of having a root beer float every night... sometimes two.

I'm stressed, and I'm pretty sure depression is trying to get back in.  My insomnia is out of control.  I'm going to bed at 5:30. 6:30, even as late as 9:00 in the morning.  I know I shouldn't let people get to me, but as soon as I start to get over one situation something else would happen.  It's not just the two situations that got posts here - there have been two more since then that I didn't post about because I didn't want this to become a totally negative space.  The last one really rocked me hard, and I'm still dealing with it.

I really hope May goes better.  Just two months until I get to meet my girl!

February Mish Mash

I know there are probably a lot of blog posts being written today that start with something along the lines of "I can't believe it's February already!!!"  I can.  January seemed really long to me for some reason, and I'm not sure why.  Since it is a new month though, it's time to revisit my goals for January and establish new ones for February.

Goal one - Take better care of myself

I went to Lush and bought myself some pretty smelling soaps.  I also replaced the crappy conditioner I was using with a better one and a conditioning treatment.  I can already see a difference in my hair!  I definitely shaved my legs more than twice and even used a self tanner a few times.  The polish on my nails is all chippy though.  Dang.

Goal two - Floss EVERY DAY.

Big fat FAIL.  I started off strong the first week and a half.  It was pretty cool because this time my gums only bled the first three days, not for a week and a half like last time I tried this.  Then I got sick, and all that flossing went by the wayside.  I never took it up again.  Why must this be so hard for me???

Goal three - Take off eye makeup before bed.

Again, this goal started out strong.  I bought some makeup remover wipes and I'd do it while I was watching television at night.  I missed a few nights, but I think I got it off more nights than I missed.  I need to work harder on this.

Goal four - Get organized!

I did really well on this.  I cleaned  out the bathroom medicine cabinets when I switched the  bathrooms, and I also cleaned out and organized under the bathroom sinks.  The pantry got an overhaul and cleaning out too.  It is no longer scary and I no longer drop crap on my head when I look for stuff.  It's nice!

Goal five - Eat more stuff that's good for me

I've definitely been doing better on this one.  My food aversions seem to have gone away for the most part.  I'm eating more regular food at home and have added in a lot of fruits and veggies that I was missing before. I can't even tell you how many clementines I've had!  I do think I need to start eating bananas (gross) though, 

because I've been waking up with my calves feeling very tight and I think that means my old friend Charley Horse may be ready to start making his visits soon.

Here are my goals for February:

Goal one - Participate in the February Photo A Day Challenge.

All through January I kept seeing this little prompt pop up on Facebook and Twitter, but I ignored it at first.  After a while though, I thought it looked fun how people were putting their own interpretations on the prompts for each day.  I decided I'd try it for February.  At the very least it will help me to have more photos in my Project Life album, right?  Details here.

 Here's my photo for day one.

Don't worry - I don't plan on posting them each day.  I may just do it once a week.  I will be doing them all with Instagram.  You can follow me there - my name is splendidmissm.

Goal two - Work on the before bed routine for myself

This includes the flossing and makeup removal things.

Goal three - Clean out the misc. cupboard in the kitchen and swap it with the pots and pans cupboard.  I think they'll work better this way.  Also, we do NOT need that George Foreman grill anymore.  We haven't used it once since we moved in here!

Goal four - Finish the December Daily.  Really.  Get some printer ink and another package of photo paper and just do it already!

Also I wanted to note ...

I was 19 weeks on Sunday.  I started to feel the little baby flutter movements near the end of week 17.  By the end of last week, the kicks were more definite and would happen in little groups.  Last night, this baby was kicking hard enough that I could see it from the outside.  My husband saw it too.  She's just growing so fast in there!  I checked my blog archives (which is yet another reason why blogging is awesome) and I didn't see Bubba move until 23 weeks.  Crazy!

Last year I posted this photo of a very simple garland I made.  This year, I was too lazy to decorate for Valentine's day.  However, I would like to offer you those vintage Valentine printables again in case you'd like to make one for yourself.  Just "Like" my Facebook page to access the free downloads!