wednesday words: stuff

the first in hopefully many wednesday posts about life lessons.

i'm sure if you're reading this blog, you probably know that since ben and i became mr. and mrs., we've moved. A LOT. (some of you are laughing, agreeing that this is an understatement!) we've moved more than most couples we know probably ever will).

we've lived in 3 different countries, 5 different homes, and 4 different places. we now consider ourselves pros at packing. :) while that definitely can be fun, it can also be pretty challenging, and sometimes hard to put down roots, never knowing how long we're going to be in one place.

one of the lessons i've definitely learned over the all our moves during the last 6 years is:

STUFF IS JUST STUFF

as you can imagine, we've gone through our share of "stuff" during all our moves. when we very first moved to japan, we could only bring about half of our stuff. wedding presents that we had just received stayed in boxes in my parents basement, knowing that we wouldn't have a very big place there, and we didn't want to bring too much.
as i packed for our first overseas move, i really had to ask myself "is this important to me? can i live without this for 3 years?"
stuff takes on a different feel when you have to look at it that way. there are many things that remained in storage for those 3 years that i didn't miss one little bit and that didn't make the next move with us. something that's been SO helpful is to remind myself that "stuff is just stuff". our stuff does not (and should not!) define who we are.

yes - we all have stuff that we love, stuff we hold onto, stuff we think we can't do without, but you'd be surprised what you really can do without. this last year in the bahamas, we packed the littlest amount of our stuff in all our moves to date, and our place was absolutely the smallest of any place we've had. it was basically the size of a hotel room. we did without most of our things, and whatever we brought with us was what could fit in a car. while that was certainly a challenge, it was also kind of freeing to not be tied to too much "stuff". something i've discovered is that friends that have lived in one place or who haven't left america don't always understand this mentality because i have observed that america is all about STUFF. how much or how big or how fancy your stuff is.

ever since i've met my husband, he has not been attached to stuff. when we moved him from maryland to my parents house for the month before our wedding, all the things he had to his name fit in the backseat of my car. i've always had more stuff than him (he would certainly agree, i'm sure) :) and he has taught me so much in regards to this issue too, and his perspective has helped me adopt the "stuff is just stuff" mentality.

basically, the lesson is this: stuff doesn't matter. it's just stuff. don't let it tie you down and don't let your worth be caught up in your stuff. it's not going to last past this life anyways. do your best to let go of things that you're holding on to a little too tightly and use your stuff to bless others as much as you can. (that's a whole other lesson for a different day).

i think that if we can adopt this mentality and focus more on the people around us rather than things, we'll all be a little better off. :)

making a plan...

while i'm currently unemployed, i have more time on my hands (in case you couldn't tell from the baking and crafting i've been busy doing!) :)
i really want to get more consistent with blogging, and think i will try the following blog schedule:

MAKE IT MONDAYS:
i'll post a craft or project i'm working on

TUESDAY TREATS:
i'll post a recipe that i enjoy or want to try

WEDNESDAY WORDS:
i'll post a lesson that i've learned from all our moves and travels and experiences

THANKFUL THURSDAYS:
i'll post something i'm thankful for -- this is something i really want to get in the habit of doing way more often!

i'm not sure i'll be able to stay on top of posting so often, but i figured i can at least give it a try!
stay tuned!

and i just want to say THANK YOU to my sweet supportive husband who encourages me to try new things and to blog and just loves me in spite of me :)

rainbow goodness

yesterday i had a craving to bake cupcakes. normally i use a box mix since that's what i've used so many times for my cakepops, but i didn't have any box mixes, and have been thinking more about all the preservatives and not-good-for-you things that are in processed foods, so i decided to do some searching online and find a recipe to make my own! funfetti is for sure my favorite type of cake, so when i stumbled upon this recipe, i knew i had to try it :) (SOURCE)



CUPCAKES

2 2/3 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
4 egg whites

1 cup whole milk
1 Tbsp vanilla
2/3 cup salted butter, softened
1/3 cup rainbow sprinkles

FROSTING

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 tsp vanilla

4 cups powdered sugar
4 teaspoons milk
extra powdered sugar for dusting

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line cupcake tin with baking cups.
2. Sift flour, sugar and baking powder into a large mixing bowl and then mix together on low.
3. In another bowl, stir egg whites, milk and vanilla together.
4. Add butter to the flour mixture and mix together. As it starts to combine, slowly pour the milk mixture in and mix until completely combined. Stir in rainbow sprinkles.
5. Fill baking cups a little more than halfway. Bake for about 16 minutes or until done. Remove and cool. Makes about 24 cupcakes.
6. For frosting, beat butter and vanilla together. Add sugar slowly and beat until combined. Scrape down the sides and add milk. Mix until smooth and creamy. Note: Double the recipe if you will be frosting all 24 cupcakes like the pictures above, because you probably won't have enough unless you are lightly frosting them.





*one side note: i used only butter for the frosting, no shortening
i decided to half the recipe for both the cupcakes and the frosting and ended up with 12 delicious cupcakes!!

if you're in the mood for some yummy funfetti cupcakes, you should definitely give this recipe a try!

and we moved, once again...

i think most of you know by now that we spent the last year in the bahamas, and recently moved to Georgia. the first thing people say when they hear we lived in the bahamas is "why on earth did you move?" -- everyone pictures tiki huts, drinks with umbrellas and a beautiful resort. while we had an amazing beach, there were alot of things we didn't have. while things are still fresh in my mind, i wanted to jot down...

a few things i miss about living in the bahamas:

1. the BEACH! (i know, duh) :)

2. the simplicity of life

3. our golf cart -- and no traffic whatsoever!

4. nightly walks around the block with my man

5. letting our puppy go swimming in the ocean


a few things i don't miss about living in the bahamas:

1. our teeny tiny grocery store

2. not having a kitchen!

3. our 400 sq ft room

4. spotty/unreliable internet

5. drama!

it sure was an interesting year. we learned a lot, we swam a lot, we snorkeled a lot, and i got an awesome tan! ;) we enjoyed the simplicity of life, but there were definitely things we missed. now the goal is trying to hang on to some of that simplicity while also enjoying things that we didn't get to have (like more than 1 room) :)

the last 6 years have been full of so many adventures, and i hope to begin posting a few of the lessons we've learned along the way on here. so stay tuned :)

a chair here, a chair there

one of the other DIY projects i was able to do last week was to recover some chairs!

my sweet grandma emailed me last week and told me that her friend was having a garage sale, and she got to have a sneak peek of the goods before the sale :) she found 2 wood dining room chairs, and she knew that i was on the hunt for chairs to go with our newly acquired table, and wanted to know if i was interested in them!

her friend texted me a picture of the chairs, and when she told me we could get both for only $15 i said "yes!" it was so sweet of her to think of me and to find me such a great deal! we found out the chairs belonged to her friends family member who barely ever used them!

the chair: (before)


the only real thing i didn't like about them was the seat cover, but thankfully that's a fairly easy fix. i say fairly because if you know me at all, you know that NOTHING is ever easy for me. i could write another entire post on that, but for now i'll just say even covering the chairs wasn't quite as easy as it should have been ;)

i found fabric that i liked at joann's that had fun teal flowers on them that go with our dishes and the dining room paint color that i picked (teal valspar paint called "gone fishing").
the fabric:


usually you are supposed to be able to just unscrew the legs of the chair, pull off the cushion part and recover it with fabric. well these chairs were not put together in the usual way and there was no easy way to pull the cushion off, so i had to recover it still attached. it took a little figuring out to get it just right, but with a staple gun, some safety goggles and my mom's help, i was able to recover both chairs in a little over an hour! i love how they turned out.

always be safe when you're working with tools: ;)



the finished product!


all in all, the table was $35, the chairs were $15, and the materials to redo them both were about $50. not bad! i always love scoring a good deal and it was fun to make them look the way i wanted them to look. :) i'll be sure to post more pictures of projects as they come along!

getting my DIY on...

anyone who knows me knows that i love to be crafty. after a year of living in a teeny tiny little room with not many chances to be crafty, i was itching to get my hands on a new project when we moved back to the US of A. :)

while we lived in the bahamas and i had downtime, i perused many home improvement, DIY blogs. 2 of my favorites are bower power (katie is actually an acquaintance of mine) and younghouselove (gotta love john and sherry!) i actually got the younghouselove book for christmas and it's great - you should check it out if you haven't already (click HERE)
all that to say, when ben and i moved back, i was itching to DIY something of my own. :)

in our new apartment, we have a dining room, but we had no table and no chairs. we started shopping around but didn't find anything we really loved (or if we did it was way out of our budget). one day we went into habitat for humanity re-store and wandered around, and stumbled upon this round table with 2 leaves for only 35 bucks! i looked up at my hubby and said "please! can this be my DIY project??" :) he reminded me how much work was going to go into it, but agreed and we left the store with the table in pieces in the back of our crv!

table in the store:


my idea was to stain it a deeper brown color. even though i've never done something quite like this before, i looked up a few tutorials online (including a very helpful one from younghouselove), went to lowes to get my supplies, and started on one of the leaves for a trial run :) as soon as i began sanding, i realized that it was actually veneer! which made things a bit more tricky as you have to be very careful not to sand through the veneer. i sanded as much as i felt comfortable sanding, and did my first layer of stain. after various tries over about a weeks time, the stain just wasn't cutting it.

supplies:


sanding:


wiping off the stain:


a little hard to see, but the stain just didn't soak in right:



i was afraid to sand it further and ruin the veneer, and after hearing from a friend's husband who had looked at the pictures that i probably shouldn't keep trying to stain it, i decided to go the paint route instead.
i headed back to lowes (i think i went 3 times in 4 days!) :) and the very helpful paint department loaded me up with tinted primer and dark brown paint.

2 layers of primer (zinsser bullseye 1-2-3! it's amazing, covered everything so well!), 2 layers of paint (valspar signature primer+paint = low voc and great coverage as well) and then 2 layers of poly on top to protect it (minswax polycrylic).

primed:


painted:


after the poly, i let it cure for 2 full days before moving it to our apartment and setting it up! i did all of this while ben was away on a business trip and had it all ready in our apartment to surprise him! :)

all set up!


even though it didn't turn out quite like i was hoping, i learned a ton and had fun with it! definitely am eager to keep trying DIY things! in fact, my next post will be about another DIY project i tackled while ben was away! stay tuned!

big lights will inspire you.... NEW YORK

as requested, (and for my own memory since it's all fresh!) here is a a little recap of our wonderful new york trip!

first, a little back story -- ben had been to new york before, but i never had. waayyyy back when we were dating, i told him i'd always wanted to go, and he promised me he would take me. a couple months ago, he looked at me and said "i'm taking you to new york." :) LOVE that man. he's such a sweetie.

packing up:

SIDE NOTE about WEDNESDAY - we were originally supposed to go to west palm on thursday morning, but at the last minute, ben thought we should go wednesday afternoon, so we did. as we got to air ops to check in for our flight, the lady checking us in said "good thing you're going out today as you wouldn't have made it tomorrow!" if you're at all familiar with the way things go around here, the flights are all standby, and i am SOOO thankful that we were able to get out wednesday night in order to make our flight thursday! God is so good.

the weather was awesome while we were there!

THURSDAY -
we started out our trip in west palm beach, and we ate at the chili's in the airport. YUM. we love chili's. :) we flew from there to la guardia, where we caught our shuttle bus to the hotel. OH. MY. WORD. talk about CRAZY DRIVERS! we weaved in and out of traffic and i wondered a little bit if we'd make it to the hotel in one piece! haha. thankfully we did, and after getting checked in and cleaned up, we headed out to see times square!! wow. so many lights and so many people! after coming from our island and tiny base with like 250 people or something, it was a bit overwhelming to be surrounded by so many people at once! we stopped to grab a quick slice at sbarro before heading to see WICKED. it was AMAZING. absolutely loved it and what a wonderful way to kick off our time in new york! :)

FRIDAY -
we woke up to some rain, but that didn't damper our spirits. we headed out to walk the city, and started out with some breakfast. i had a big bowl of oatmeal with cranberries and toasted bananas. YUM. from there we headed to the MoMA (museum of modern art) to check out the paintings. it was neat to see works from van gogh, picasso, etc. when we left the MoMA, it was raining even harder, so we broke down and got an umbrella from one of the street vendors, and kept on walking :) we made it to the huge Apple Store, and FAO Schwartz before heading back to the hotel to take a little rest. this became our pattern for the entire trip. sightsee until sometime after lunch, then take a rest before going back out for our evening plans. it worked out great! after our rest, we headed back into the madness and swarms of people, and after walking around we ate some yummy supper at Chevy's Tex Mex and called it a night.

starbucks where i had the yummiest frapp EVER!

SATURDAY -
it was the perfect fall day in new york! cool, but not cold - sun shining and trees all kinds of pretty colors. we headed out to central park. it was so beautiful! we walked the bottom half of it, up to the natural history museum, where we spent the next couple of hours looking at all the neat exhibits they have there! we also got to see a planetarium show, which was included in our CITYPASS (let me take a second to say that if you're going to NYC and want to do sightseeing, the citypass is a great deal! www.citypass.com) after that, we walked down the other side of the park, and made it back to times square in time to eat an early supper/late lunch at bubba gumps. a perfect chance to rest our feet, and we wanted to hit up bubba's as we'd been to the bubba's in maui and hong kong! a fun little tradition to add new york to that list. :) after that it was time for our rest once again :) when we got up, we went out to dave & busters for a little fun, and ended the evening with a late night snack of ice cream sundaes and french fries at good ole mcdonalds.

central park:

history museum:

bubba gumps:

SUNDAY -
with only 2 days left in the city, we got up sunday morning and enjoyed a little starbucks breakfast before we headed down to the empire state building. very fun to go up to the observatory and see the awesome view! after that we went to macy's - the largest department store in the world! one floor was entirely shoes! wow. they had super neat old wooden escalators which were unique and probably part of the original store. on the way to our next destination, we passed a five guys and went right in to get some burgers for lunch :) just the fuel we needed to walk the rest of the way down to the pier where we hopped on our liberty cruise. we cruised down the hudson and saw the city from a different point of view, as well as a much closer view of the statue of liberty. it was neat, except that there were SO many people, and our particular seats unfortunately made us get squished quite a few times from tourists trying to take a million pictures of lady liberty. oh my. it was also pretty chilly in the shade, so although it was neat and i enjoyed the tour, i was not sad when the cruise was over and we had some space again! :P after our rest on sunday, we went to a neat little thai restaurant called Room Service and it was AMAZING. it was more of local, hole in the wall place, and i ordered pad thai with chicken that was SO yummy. we also tried these golden triangles for an appetizer in that delicious sauce. oh man, it's making me hungry just remembering it!

empire state view:

liberty cruise:

MONDAY -
our last day in the city was by far our busiest, and we knew it would be. **a little back story -- i am a HUGE jimmy fallon fan, and had been calling for over a month to try to get us tickets. i had almost given up hope when i finally got through, only to be told that he was going to be on hiatus the first part of our trip! my only option was to get us tickets on monday, so that is exactly what i did** :) we got up that morning and went to grab some breakfast at ellen's stardust diner. it was a fun 50s kind of place where the waitresses sing to you while you eat! (ben put a video of it up on facebook). from there, we headed to rockefeller center for top of the rock. slightly similar to empire state, but a different viewpoint. it was a nice view, and they had this neat room with lights on the ceiling that tracked motion - as soon as you walked into it, it would assign you a color of lights and the lights would follow you around. ben enjoyed that room more than the view, i'm pretty sure :) once we made it back down to the nbc experience store, where we checked in to get our tickets to see JIMMY FALLON!!!! :) we saw gerald butler, madeline stowe (from revenge), felix baumgartner (who jumped from space), and musical guest wu-tang clan. at the end of the show, jimmy ran through the audience and gave high fives, and we were sitting on the edge of our row, so i got one! it was so neat to see him in person, and the show was great! you can even see us in one of the shots. after that was over, we had to boogey over a few streets to the majestic theater where we saw phantom of the opera. those of you who know me, know that phantom is my favorite. i have seen it 4 times! although it was good, i actually liked wicked better! :) all in all, it was the perfect ending to our perfect trip.

top of the rock:

so excited to see fallon!

TUESDAY -
we got up and finished packing, then risked our life in the shuttle back to the airport (haha!) and headed back to fla.

TODAY -
i am sitting on my bed typing this now as the rain is pouring outside, a hurricane is headed our way - we got back just in time ;)

what an amazing time with the love of my life. it was such a blessing to be able to fit so many neat things into our 4 days there, and i had a blast! so thankful to my sweet hubby for all the love he showed me in taking me on that trip. it's one i'll never forget! <3