post cards to my long lost friends

Dear Motivation,



Wish you were here,



Xo

Brittany



Dear Exercise,



I miss you so much. Sometimes when I’m driving I see people running and it makes me think of the fond memories I have of our times together. I need your endorphins. I also miss the extra energy that strangely comes from starting your day with expending energy you didn’t know you had to begin with. It’s like a little mystery we can solve together in the future.



I do believe we’ll be together again someday.



Love,

Brittany



Dear Escape,



I keep trying to find you. Then just when I’m headed toward you, reality kicks my backside. I daydream about you. Don’t get me wrong, Escape, I love my reality (sometimes), but when I girl is deprived of you it’s like forcing her to walk through an endless winter with no hope of Spring. It can get a little frightening.



I hope all is well with you,

Brittany

a love letter: this is my version of shouting it from the rooftops

Dear Valentine,

I don’t care what people say about love not lasting. Mine does; it has; it will continue. Don’t give me statistics about the possibility of failure or about how most marriages aren’t happy. I don’t care what they say about chemestry or lust or age.  None of it matters because this is you and me and our love and experience transcends any statistic or history.

I am committed to this. To us. To you. To you and me. You are committed and I know it because I can feel it. I took a leap of faith and threw all my eggs in one basket when I chose to wake up next to you and only you every day for the rest of my life and on into the eternities that we can only imagine. It’s the single best choice I’ve ever made. It has effected every second of every day and will continue to make everything better forever more.



Because of you.



I owe you my happiness. I owe you everything I have, everything I am. All my joy.

If the whole world came crashing down around me tonight, I would never be able to deny the truth that love heals. Love makes us better. Love changes everything. Your love has made me into something more that what I was on my own.

Our love is stronger than all our faults put together. Stronger than any temptations. Our love is stronger than any failure.

When we were about to get married I remember someone talking about how they loved their spouse more after years of marriage than they did on their wedding day. I couldn’t imagine the thought of loving you more; I already loved you more than my soul could contain. But now I think I understand what they meant a little better. Our love has become an old love. Something deep and multifaceted. Something complex and simple all at once. Something that surpasses hormones and disaster or joy and excitement. It is steady and strong and ever-present. 

I. Love. You.

Always,

Your Valentine

So far in the past two hours

...my 2 year old daughter has sprinkled an entire shaker of sugar and cinnamon all over the first story floor, found a wet diaper in the trash and thoroughly inspected it, dumped all the toys out of the baskets, found a baggie of googly eyes (she learned how to get in the junk drawer??) and dumped them out and chewed on half of them, covered the bathroom floor with water, colored over her body and clothes (brand new for her birthday!) and the counter with permanent marker and bit her sister twice.




And that’s just one of them. (The other one is licking the sugar and cinnamon off of the floor and I’m just going to let her do it.)



You may think me neglectful, but I don’t care—I’m too tired to write down all the intercepted attempts of destruction.



Please excuse me—I have to go because she is now attempting to get the permanent marker off the counter with Windex. (fyi: the only thing I’ve found effective is aerosol hairspray. Spray it right onto the marker and wipe off. Truly amazing.) (Do any of you know how to get it off of skin or fabric??)

restyled: a tutorial

I wanted to show you how I made a cute baby bonnet style beanie from an old baby sweater that was stained pretty badly.

Here is the sweater before...kind of.  (I had already used parts of it for another project.)  I like the ruffly edge and thought it would be cute around a sweet little face.



I folded it in half , inside out, with the seams matching up together.  The seams make a good edge: they won't unravel when you cut the sweater.  Since this was a tiny sweater, I went all the way up to the the arm hole seam and sewed a straight line from the seam to the fold of the sweater, making a right angle with the seams in the sweater and my sewing.



Then I cut it out and turned it right-side-out.  I made a pom pom and cut some strands of yarn to make ties.  (If you don't know how to make a pom pom, they are super simple.  Just google "pom pom tutorial" and I'm sure plenty of instruction will be right at your fingertips.)



I just used a crochet hook to grab the yarn and work it through.







I used six strands of yarn; doubled makes four strands in each bunch when you braid it.



I wanted to embroider something simple + happy...



attach the pom pom and voila!



I tried it on one of the smallest heads in my house before sending it to my new niece.  Yes, it's a little too tiny, but it was still satisfying to get the idea of how it will frame that sweet new face...



xo
Britt

color your own valentines

hello, lovebirds.  Don't you just love celebrating LOVE?  It's such a happy thing.

Unless your lovah gives you nasty chocolates instead of nuts and chews.  (hint, hint.  wink, wink.) 

I always like something nice and simple like tulips.  I don't need all the bells and whistles; I feel lucky in love and I have my awesome Mr. Soucy to thank for that.  He is the best and I'll just stop right there because he doesn't like when I talk about him here.  He's a little shy that way.

What do you guys like to get for valentines day?  What do you get for your valentine?  Do you have a tradition you'd be willing to share in the comments??



Here's one more installment of "color your own valentines" for you.  Less tha week left!  Remember you can go here to print any from the whole collection.  (Only for your personal use, please;)

xo
Britt

I wasn’t just whistling Dixie in my post below.

Please forgive my anti social behavior. Let’s not think about that—let’s just move right along as if there were nothing wrong with dropping off the face of the earth. (After all, it may happen again at any moment.)

Today is my sister’s Birthday! Happy Birthday Brooke!!







For one of her birthday presents she came to visit me! I don’t know how I got so lucky as to receive such a great gift when it was HER birthday, but I hope to receive that way again someday. I was worried that she would freeze since she’s accustomed to the hot dry climate of Arizona now, but she seemed fine with our vast amount of snow and ice. When she was talking to her husband (love) on the phone she was telling him that when we were driving to pick up the kids from school all these men were up on the roofs of their houses shoveling off the snow.  It sounded so strange coming from her mouth.  Her youngest daughter (love) was wondering how we get in and out of our house with so much snow. Sometimes it’s entertaining to see scenes of your life through someone else’s eyes.

Jake on the roof:








Here's a few attempts at the timer.  I think I need to focus on the right thing and then push the button.  I also need to learn to make the timer a bit longer than 2 seconds--that's not long enough to run back to the group!






(I think it was a mistake to put the baby in my other arm, because she seems to have disappeared completely!)

Brookie, we loved having you here!!  A weekend simply wasn't enough Brooke time. We miss you already.


Some of the other things that have kept me anti social these past couple weeks:

~My mom came to visit. We had the best time being snowed in with her around. The kids only had one and a half days of school that week. Bonus that their grammie was around.  For some odd reason I didn't take pictures while my mommy was here.

~My babies turned two!



~My two-year-olds are behaving like two-year-olds. They are so much more TWO when there are two of them. Yikes. (In other words, I’ve been a little crazy in the head. It has seemed I’ve had to try harder than normal to feel like my happy self.) (But then in the same breath I feel bad for writing that because I love my life and I feel so incredibly blessed!)

And that's all I have time for today.  The wee ones have awakened...