my Valentine's Day line

Good morning friends!

I hope everyone had a wonderful, productive weekend. Ben and I sure did. Life is crazy lately, but we're both managing just fine. One important thing I accomplished this weekend was getting my Etsy shop ready for my upcoming favorite holiday: Valentine's Day!

There are eleven new cards in sweet & wild stationery, as well as a few of those heart banners that I posted about last week. Go visit my shop to see all of them and let me know what you think!

For those of you who want something for yourself, but don't quite have the money right now, OR if you just love free stuff [who doesn't?], I decided to do a little giveaway! You can enter to win $10 credit to sweet & wild stationery, which is the equivalent to 5 cards or a heart banner of your very own.

Just enter to win in this Rafflecopter widget below and a random winner will be picked on Friday. The winner will have her prizes by Valentine's Day, I promise.


a Rafflecopter giveaway

oh love

Blogger is being weird, so for some reason, it pushed this old post to the top of my page. I published this post two summers ago, when Ben was deployed and I was getting ready to go to France for two months. We weren't married yet, or even engaged, but I was dreaming of our wedding day, and it's funny, but nearly everything went exactly how I'd hoped it would go. It's funny how life works out, isn't it?

today is a beautiful day.

the sun is shining, it's currently 77 degrees in Rochester, NY, and i feel cute.

also, b called this morning!!!!

i was in the middle of brushing my teeth, foamy mouth and all, and i hear a random ringtone coming from my purse.

it's him, calling all the way from eastfreak nowhere.

we got to talk the whole time i was driving to work :)

on speaker of course

also, we have a skype date tonight.

so i am doing just fine.

butttt

i've had bad dreams about getting married lately.

so to get rid of those, i'm planting images of

 beautiful, happy weddings in my head.

and i've decided that in my dream wedding, here's how it'd go down:

this sweet little lace dress from here

60's hippie hair a la here and a pretty flower crown from here

a gorgeous colorful bouquet, like this one from here

and we would read this, by Pablo Neruda:

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way

because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you,

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,

so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

then we'd say i do, kiss, and live madly in love ever after.

-wildchild

currently: January

Watching The Mindy Project, How I Met Your Mother & The Bachelor. I'm just getting sucked into The Bachelor this season and I know it's trash, but it's hilarious trash. I just can't help it.

Thinking about my Etsy shop. I was sick of it there for a while and just kind of ignored it, but I have a wave of enthusiasm again. I'm brainstorming Valentine's Day ideas and hopefully they'll be in the shop this weekend. Keep your eyes out for a post about them.

Listening to movie soundtracks. Lately the Away We Go, We Bought a Zoo, and Life of Pi ones are on Spotify all day as I do my work.

Excited about being productive. We found a desk for me at Salvation Army the other day and I got it all situated last night. I'm thankful to have a place to do my work besides the couch. It's hard to be productive when you're on a big comfy couch all day.

Reading textbooks and research articles. That's really all I have time for lately, which is not ideal.

Loving our apartment being warm. OH WAIT. Our heaters suck and I feel like a little ice cube every time I'm in there. Getting under our electric blanket for bed is always the highlight of my night.

Looking forward to no more cold winters. Ben and I agreed that whether I get a job down south or not, we're moving. So adios winter 2014! See you never.

I made a few little heart banners to hang around our house and everyone loved them so much on Instagram that I'm considering putting some in the shop for 5 or 6 bucks. What do you guys think? 

also, thanks to sweet Megan and Dani for the inspiration behind these posts!

Friday!

Listening to that new song I just put on my iPod:

 

This is me today, with this song: 

It's Friday, it's sunny, and I finally quit my damn restaurant job that made me miserable. We have a double date tonight consisting of cheeseburgers, bowling, and beer and tomorrow, our kickball team has a double header. Then Sunday will be a day in comfy clothes, doing homework and watching football.

To say I'm in the mood to dance would be an understatement. Happy Friday, friends!

around here lately

There has been:

- lots of homework. Ben is doing a condensed winter session class that's only 2 weeks long, so he's had hours of homework every night and I've had work for my grad classes and my internship that I just started. Keeping it all straight is a job in itself.

- tons of creating. Along with that lyric project I did last week, I'm making a few strings of heart garland to hang around the apartment, and I've been journaling a lot lately too. I just keep getting the itch to make stuff with my hands, which I love, but my to-do list doesn't.

- hours and hours of work. I've picked up hours at my secretary job because my co-worker's mom is sick and she's been out. Plus Ben started an internship at my company as well, so we get to ride together every day and eat lunch together too. It's been sweet. But also very busy.

- a trip to Niagara Falls. It was Ben's Air Force drill weekend and I didn't have to work, so we packed up and headed out Friday night for a weekend of free time [me] and work [him] and drinking beer with his AF friends [both of us]. It was fun, but Ben always comes back tired from working at 7 am each day, so that's no bueno.

- a little friend date last night in which my girl Chelsea came over to watch the Golden Globes, trash talk some of the women's dresses and fangirl over Tina & Amy hosting. And eat brownies.

That's it really. Life is pretty standard right now, with all of this schoolwork and regular work, but I like it. As I mentioned, yesterday was the six month mark of being married and we still like it. I think I'll keep him for a while. He still always does the dishes for us and we have so much fun together. Husband best friends are the best kind of best friends.

all of my days

Last night, after such a lovely day of getting projects done around our little apartment and getting to some homework I'd been putting off, I decided I needed to take a creative break. 

I'd seen this project by Elise, and then a similar one on A Beautiful Mess a few days ago, and I thought it would be perfect to put up some pretty words on our walls. So, my mom brought me some supplies from home when she came over for lunch, and I had gotten paint at Michael's the night before [yay Christmas gift cards!]. I put on the Spotify playlist of songs that reminded me of our love story, and got down to business.

If you wanna do this yourself, you just need a canvas, black acrylic paint, a brush, and song lyrics that you love. I chose the last verse of "All of My Days" by Alexi Murdoch, the song to which I walked down the aisle.

I wrote down the lyrics ahead of time, but then Ben starting asking all these questions about spacing and the lines and stuff and then he watched me, which totally threw me off. SO I messed up the first line. I just went with it, added an elipses, and then got down to the real verse I wanted to do. It works.

I didn't worry about perfect looking words the first time around; I just wrote to get the words down. Then I went back over it all to make every letter equally as dark and to balance out some of the letters that didn't look right. I took a break part way through to eat dinner and washed my brush, which ended up messing it up a little, so I'd advise against that.

This is how it ended up. I wish the top two lines weren't so much bigger than the rest, but oh well. It's not perfect, nor is anything else in my life, and I like it that way. I'm hanging it up tonight and I think it's the perfect way to celebrate the fact that we've been married for six months on Sunday. What a wonderful six months they've been.

want, need, wear, read

want: I ordered this Q&A a Day 5 Year Journal on New Year's Day and I'm antsy for it to get here so I can get started!

need: for my dang hair to grow grow grow so it's long enough to put in a pretty bun like this.

wear: My uniform lately has been my VS yoga leggings, a chambray shirt, and fuzzy socks. It's put together enough for work, but comfy enough for homework and crafting.

read: I don't have any time to read lately, with how crazy work and school have been, but when I get a spare second, The Fault in Our Stars is next on my list [thanks to Fran & Amy for the suggestion!]

post idea from Allie via James

built-in friends

I'm sorry if you already follow me on Instagram and have seen this, but I spent a few hours with my little sister yesterday, shopping and doing our thing, and man, do we have fun together.

I was talking to Amy about it and we agreed that siblings are the perfect friends- they know you, they love you anyways, and there's no expectations. They understand you.

After time at my mom's on Friday night, when all 3 of us siblings were there with our S.O's, eating take out and playing Disney Scene It with our mom, and then yesterday afternoon with Jessa, I have to agree. Siblings are built-in friends, and for that I'm thankful.

starting slowly

 This New Year's Eve, I wanted to do something special. I try not to play up the "woe is me, my parents are divorced" thing, but in all honesty, sometimes it sucks to have your holidays planned out for you because that's the only way you'll see both your mom and your dad and your weird step-aunt-in-law. Besides the fort, it was hard to find time for just Ben and I over the holidays, to make new traditions in our tiny little baby family, just us two.

So my plan for NYE was to sit on the couch with my husband, drinking whiskey and talking about what a wild year 2012 was while Carson Daly and Ryan Seacrest did their thing in Times Square. Instead, we ended up hanging out at Ben's parents' to spend time with his sister and brother-in-law on their last night in town. There was a fire going and we played Scattergories while we counted down to the new year, and when the ball dropped, we all found our spouses and gave them a giant kiss.

The time alone that I had been hoping for happened the next day instead. January 1 started slowly, continued slowly, and ended in the same way. We had no plans all day, so we slept in a bit and when I was ready to start my day, I rolled out of bed, kissed Ben on the cheek, and started a pot of coffee. I woke up on the couch as I journaled a little bit with our Christmas lights twinkling around me. When Ben was up and we finally felt like being productive, we took down Christmas decorations, cleaned the place, and rearranged the living room. I'm usually one to hold on to Christmas as long as I can, but a fresh start somehow just felt right that day. When all was said and done with that, we got cozy on the couch. It was an evening of Ellen, "We Bought a Zoo" [which obviously meant I cried like a baby], and one of Ben's favorite Christmas presents, "Planet Earth". And when our friends who were supposed to come over texted to say that they weren't gonna make it, we finished the night with another movie.

 Something about starting the new year so slowly and deliberately and together was perfect. Our downstairs neighbors finally put a password on their wifi [damn them!], so we didn't have Internet. We didn't get to our to-do lists, we didn't think about school or work or any responsible things. I'm glad for that. We had each other and a whole day off to do whatever we pleased, so if this is what 2013 is going to be like, then let's do this.