A Little More about Jonathan

I know its been over a week since Missy, Matt and Jonathan were here but I just found some pictures my sister took that I wanted to share.

 

 

 

 

 

I know I’m his Aunt, and that I’m kinda partial…

But isn’t he CUTE!?!?!?

DIY - Flower Girl Basket

I am by no means an expert on DIYing but its a lot of fun and it has saved me some serious $$$ for our wedding (70 days away!) which is definitely a bonus! I recently made the necklaces for the bridesmaids and flower girl which you can read about here.

Now on to the main event! My sister made her own Flower Basket and after pricing them ($30 - $90) I decided to do the same!

Items needed:

• Wicker basket, spray painted white.    $ .25 at a yard sale
• Ribbon                                                $2.97 at Wal-Mart
• Black satin fabric                                 $1.65 at Wal-Mart
• Scissors
• Fabric measuring tape
• Straight pins
• Hot glue gun.

 

 I started out by measuring the inside of the basket ‘height x width x height’ I came up with 13 1/2” x 12” so when I cut my fabric I added  1 1/2 inches to both sides.

 

 

 

 

The next step was to role the edge of the fabric under and hot glue just a small section of each “flat side” to the basket.

I have other plans to make the rounded corners look nice :)

 I decided to pleat the corners using straight pins to get everything “just right” then I cut out the extra fabric off the back, hot glued it in place and removed the pins.

 

The next step was to make the bows for the sides (can you tell I LOVE polka-dots?) I cut 1 foot of ribbon, folded it and sewed it together… I’m kind of speeding through this part because I really didn’t know what I was doing, I claim the trial and error rule for my ribbons!

 

 

 Lastly I took a 1 1/2 of another ribbon to be the middle part of the bow. I sewed one end onto the bow then wrapped the ribbon around the bow, hot glued it in place and then hot glued it to the basket.

 

I went ahead, while I was making bows, and made one as a hair bow for the flower girl! (just hot glue it to a plain barrette or clip) Now just picture this with red petals inside and Valla!

This is something you can do to dress up a plain basket for everyday use too. I hope you got some tips and/or ideas for your next project and if you have any suggestions or comments (maybe some tips to help for the next time I do something like this) I’d love to hear them!

Thankful Thursday - Music

Music has always been a great comfort to me and I’m always amazed how God brings to mind verses and songs that convict, encourage and heal my soul right when they are needed most. I’ve had a couple different songs that have been taking turns being stuck in my head but one of them in particular went almost hand in hand with Kenny’s message to the teenagers last night.

Kenny did a a two part message about serving the Lord. This week he asked, "Who are we?" In 1 Cor. 4:1 – It says we are ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. The basic idea here was that since Christ purchased my freedom from the slave market of sin I now have the choice to continue in sin, which would displease my Savior, or to follow and serve Christ with my life. Also, as a Christian I am to be a "steward of the mysteries of God," meaning that once I learn something in scripture(the mysteries of God) I am responsible for it, I’m to obey it and I’m supposed to share it with others.

Now for the song, its actually a little chorus in the Wild’s  book called: All I Ever Want To Be. Here is how it goes:

All I ever want to be is what You want of me, Lord;

I give my life to You.

And all my hopes and dreams and plans I place with-in Your hands, Lord,

and give my life to You.

Here am I, Lord, use me;

take my life and mold me.

All I ever want to be is what You want of me, Lord;

I give my life to You.

And all my hopes and dreams and plans I place with-in Your hands, Lord,

and give my life to You.

I learned this song from a girl I went to Africa with and it has really stuck with me ever since. It reminds me a lot of a professor I had at Ambassador, Dr. Childs, he always said live life with your hands open, palms up, for God to take away what you don’t need and fill with something better. How much happier would I be if I place my "hopes and dreams and plans" into the hands of the One "who holds tomorrow."

…sorry about all the song lyrics throughout this post, its the music in me :)

Random Thoughts about: Decorating and Organizing

Here recently I’ve been gathering idea’s from decorating and organizing websites and blogs for our future home. However, most of the people who have such sites own their home so they can paint, wallpaper, nail, caulk, etc. without the worry of “damaging” someone else’s house.

Just the other day I ran across a website that specializes in helping renters with decorating and organizing a rented home, working with what you’ve got and giving tips for making the most out of your space without damage to the home.

Sounds perfect right?

Unfortunately, the woman who writes the blog uses so much slang language I felt like I was digging through a pile of mud to get the small gems at the bottom. This has happened with several blogs and websites I’ve found under this topic and I just think a person should be able to get the help they’re looking for without extra, unnecessary, foul language, innuendoes' and unrelated comments added.

So I’ve decided, I’m going to…

Wing it, and blog as I go, hopefully to be a help to others in the same position… hopefully :)

Here’s some thoughts and questions I have about this:

• Should I create a separate blog for this and keep Life in the Big City as my personal blog?
• or Should I leave it as is and create a separate tab for decorating?
• If I create a tab how do I go about it?
• If I do a separate blog what should I name it?
• Those of you who have more than one blog, how hard is it to keep up with?
• Do you face any major problems having two blogs instead of just one?
• Is this idea of mine something that my current readers would be interested in if I added it to this blog instead of creating a separate one?

I’m looking for any kind of feed back, if you have comments, suggestions, answers to any or all of my questions, Please leave me a comment or shoot me an email!

A Week in Review

My sister’s family came down from Canada last week for Missy’s Spring Break. Here is a quick review of the fun we had!

Friday: Matt and Missy and Jonathan arrive! YAY!!!!

Saturday evening: Everyone came over for supper and then we went to my Grandma’s for cards. Everyone includes:

Robbie, Jessica, Austin and Mikaela;

Stephen and Christina;

Matt, Missy and Jonathan;

Dad, Mom and I.

Sunday Morning: Everyone (listed above) came to Emmanuel with me for church. It was really neat to have my whole family together and for them to see where Kenny and I are going to live and work!

Monday: Matt, Missy and Jonathan came to the Barbershop for haircuts :) After work Lisa, the boss of me :) was having a Celebrating Home Party, formerly known as Home Interiors, The girls from the shop surprised me with some money they collected for me to “shop” with for the evening! I bought some nice things I had my eye on in the preview catalog, I’ll blog about that later, and some candles that were on clearance sale to give as gifts at the wedding. Another exciting thing that happened Monday night was that my car sold! Praise the Lord, now begins the serious search for a new vehicle.

Tuesday evening: Jonathan’s Birthday Party!!!!!

This picture is proof that grandkids get away with EVERYTHING! I was never allowed to put my foot on the table! – not jealous.

It took a little while to figure out how to blowout the candles but he made it!

He didn’t have any problems with unwrapping his presents though.

Tuesday and Wednesday: One of the reasons Missy came down over her spring break was so we could find a dress for her to wear for the wedding… we went through at least 6 stores before finding the right dress at David’s Bridal. *sigh* Glad that’s over.

Friday: Shannon was in town for a visit(she got in Thursday afternoon) and Kenny came down from the mountains. We took Missy and Matt’s car to the car wash and then loaded Jonathan into Shannon’s convertible mustang and took off to the duck pond. I thought Jonathan might be scared but he chased all the ducks around and enjoyed watching them eat the bread. – All these pictures are on my Mom’s camera, I’ll have to upload some of those later.

Saturday Morning: We said all of our goodbye’s to Matt, Missy and Jonathan before they left for Canada.

I’d like to say life is back to normal at the Shahan house but I just don’t want to put Jonathan’s toys away yet… sniff, sniff :’( As soon as I get everything put away they’ll be back to stay again. Can’t wait!

Cuteness

My nephew, Jonathan :)

Thankful Thursday - Spring

This is my favorite time of year! I think I said that about fall and winter too… anyhoo, I love all of the seasons but in different ways. Spring is so nice because all the trees are budding and the flowers are popping out of the ground to say hello! :)

My future Mom-in-law posted some thoughts about spring, flowers and a Christian's spiritual life. I thought they were very good you can read about it at Apple Slices of our Life and see a picture of her budding Crocus as well, they are such friendly flowers.

Anyways I hope your enjoying spring where your at and if it hasn’t come quite yet for you don’t worry its just around the corner!

Happy Birthday Stephy!

Stephany is my one of Bestest Friends from College and today is her 23rd Birthday.

Happy Birthday Stephy, I hope you have a wonderful day!

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.  ~Donna Roberts

(can’t touch this, nah nah nah naaaaah!)

Random Information, Invitations and Recipes

I feel like everything I say right now is “Oh yeah, by the way…” I already had a post set up to go out this morning and then last night I found/did a couple of things I wanted to share so here’s for post #2 today :)

Last night Mom and I ordered our wedding Invitations! YAY!!!!! I wanted to share this because not only do I really like the ones I got but I got a pretty good deal on them too.

If anyone is reading this that needs to order invites of any kind in the near future check out Invitations by Dawn right now thru March 11, 2011 they are offering 15% off your entire order with the promotion code: semimar

I saved $26.00 on my order which more than paid for the shipping (you can get free shipping if your order is $175. or more, which mine wasn’t)

The other thing I wanted to share was a website I found. $5 Dinners – If your like me, constantly looking for a new, good, in-expensive recipe’, this just might be a sight you should check out. I’ll be honest and say its not my favorite layout for a recipe’ website. However, I do like the fact that they list the cost of each item(and give you coupons for different items) in the recipe’.

Probably my favorite recipe’ website is allrecipes.com I have this one on my iPod, you can say what your looking for, give them what ingredient you have on hand and want to use and choose your cooking time. For instance, Last night I wanted something quick and easy but different. I put in “Main Coarse” for the dish, “Chicken” for my ingredient and “20 minutes or less” cooktime. It came up with Romano Chicken! We all loved it, it was very good and with prep and cook time it took about 30 minutes from start to finish.

Here’s the recipe’ just in case you’d like to give it a try:

• 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - pounded to 1/4 inch thickness
• 1/4 pound Swiss cheese, sliced – I didn’t actually measure this and the ham, I did one slice of cheese and two slices of meat per chicken breast.
• 1/4 pound ham, sliced thin
• 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1/2 teaspoon dried tarragon
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil leaves
• 1 tablespoon butter, melted
• 1/3 cup dry bread crumbs

Directions

1. Place chicken breasts on a pan. Place Swiss cheese and ham slices on top and roll up, securing with toothpicks if necessary.
2. In a small bowl combine the Parmesan cheese, paprika, garlic salt, tarragon, basil and bread crumbs. Mix together and dip rollups in mixture to coat.
3. Drizzle with melted butter and cook on High in microwave for 4 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through and juices run clear. – This took 8 minutes in our microwave.

I didn’t have ham, Swiss cheese or Tarragon. What I did instead was Roast beef slices, Provolone cheese in two of them and Mozzarella cheese in the other three, and left out the Tarragon and it turned out just fine, so its an adaptable recipe’ as well.

I hope you’ll check some of these things out for dinner tonight!

Cleaning & Organizing!

I’ve definitely got the “Spring Cleaning Fever” right now and it is being fueled by the blog I{heart}Organizing! I think Andrea posted something about following this blog and so I had to check it out! She has some really neat idea’s that I might be able to use in time!

On to my project! I told you recently that I was going to be organizing and purging my stuff before Kenny and I get married. I don’t want him to get overwhelmed with my junk, (if you ask my Dad he’d tell you “its not junk its valuable merchandise”) whatever you call it its got to go! Saturday evening I got the bug to clean out something so I decided to start where it was worst… my dresser! I decided to only tackle the top of the dresser and the top 2 drawers.

Before

I’m kind of embarrassed for you to see how bad I let this get :s

Since our house only has one bathroom I try to do as much as I can in my bedroom to get ready each day and the top two drawers of this dresser is my storage space for a lot of my gettin’ ready stuff! So first I took everything off and out of the dresser, dusted and cleaned the mirror.

Now with a clean slate to work with I put everything into categories; Curling Irons, Hot Rollers, Vitamins, Hairbrushes, products, and trash. And put everything (except the trash) back inside. Drum roll please!

After

You can’t see it very well in this picture but the candle and the note pad are both teal! (I{Heart}Organizing – Project Teal)

Isn’t that like a gazillion times better!

I put the products I’m not using right now in a clear, zippered bag at the back of the drawer, a gift box for all the other products, vitamin bottles standing up along the side, and a basket for my hair brushes in one drawer. In the other drawer – its pretty much self explanatory! My project didn’t cost me a dime because I just used things that I had on hand to make this work. I love being organized, especially when I don’t have to buy anything to do it! I think my next project will be… filing my business stuff!

Here is a link to Random Issues, Andrea’s blog, that got me started on I{heart}organizing and my Spring Cleaning spree! Maybe you’ll get inspired to join me.

Ninja Bowling

In our youth group we do “Ninja Points” for the teens. Here is how they earn points:

• Bringing their Bible
• Bringing a Friend
• Saying verses – they are working on 1 Cor. 13
• Passing out Tracts
• Taking sermon notes
• Doing Devotions
• Other – this can be helping at church, winning in Wednesday night Bible quizzing, etc.

We have split up the year into 4, 3 month sections and for each quarter the winner gets to go on an activity, of their choosing, paid for by the youth fund, with Kenny and I. Last quarter’s winner was Emily Haley, she decided she wanted to go bowling and eat pizza and take her friend Elizabeth. So Sunday Night after church here we go bowling!

They had me braid their hair before we left aren’t they cute?

It was so much fun.The girls were a riot! I don’t think Elizabeth had ever been bowling before but she did pretty good. her score for the first game – 66 – not too shabby!

We had some interesting, scary, un-explainable moments! Elizabeth dropped her bowling ball behind her (don’t worry no one was hurt) and Emily tried to do a 360 spin and bowl at the same time… after retrieving the ball from 3 lanes over she was told not to try that again! All in all, we had a great time and I can’t wait to do it again!

Thankful Thursday - Church Family

Last night at church Kenny asked for prayer about my car situation and mentioned that I needed to find a replacement vehicle a.s.a.p. My parents have been taking me to and from work and graciously letting me borrow their car to run errands and go to church.

Well after the service, Adam, one of the men in our church came to me and asked if I wanted to borrow his wife’s car until I found another vehicle. (his wife, Ms. Joy, just had back surgery and won’t be driving for several weeks, pray for her recovery if you think about it, I’m sure she would appreciate that!) I was in shock…. Kenny said he felt like reaching over and closing my mouth when Adam asked if I wanted to borrow their car. :)

If I’m not able to find a car this weekend, I think we’re going to work something out for me to pick up the Tahoe from the Harmon’s on Sunday.

Romans 8:26 – Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us…

This is something I’ve been praying a lot here recently, I didn’t expect the Harmon’s to offer their car for me to use but I am definitely glad for it because it gives me more time to car shop and I am thankful because it was something that God did. I didn’t ask for it or expect it, God laid it on their hearts and that makes it even more special to me!