Can you believe that tomorrow our sweet little puppy will turn one year old?

If you haven’t read the story of how we ended up with Hadley, you should go back and read it, because it’s a fun one. She was this tiny little mess of a puppy when we brought her home last September, she she immediately captured our hearts.

I have a hard time believing she was ever that small, though she clearly doesn’t because she still thinks she’s about Cullen’s size. She still won’t jump up on our bed without the assistance of a chair, and she doesn’t think she can climb into our car (which is a PRIUS) by herself. But in reality? She’s officially bigger than Ranger now.

She’s not the brightest dog in the world…but we love her.

Our family has gotten a little bit bigger and a lot more chaotic since we got her, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s the big dog we always wanted who loves to cuddle (Ranger is a fabulous dog, but he is NOT a cuddler), and she can keep up with Cullen’s insane amounts of energy.

I’m so, so glad we got her and I still thank Corey regularly for surprising me with her 9 whole months ago.

Happy birthday, Hadley!

Do you celebrate your pets birthdays?

Related posts:

I have a few project-type posts waiting in the wings for me to write about, but since Friday is the last day of school for me (!), I thought today was the perfect day to write up a quick bucket list (like I did last year) of what I’d like to accomplish this summer.

It can be so tempting to spend my entire two-and-a-half month break doing nothing but watching Mad Men and sleeping, but I’m determined to accomplish at least a few things this summer so I don’t feel like it’s entirely wasted.

So, here are 10 things I’d like to do this summer, in no particular order. Just like last year, several of the items are pulled from our 101 in 1,001 list, and others are just things I’d like to do.

1. Finish head chairs for the dining room.

Ugh. This one is just embarrassing. We started working on these last summer (and have owned them for who knows how long) and it just keeps getting put off. But I am GOING TO FINISH THEM THIS SUMMER.

Yes, the yelling was necessary. It’s going to happen. I swear it.

2. Watch lots of movies.

Corey and I are creating what is going to be an amazing media room in our garage, and I cannot wait to use it. It’s going to be fabulous. Now that it’s almost done (seriously – we’re hoping to start moving furniture in there this weekend!), I’m getting more and more excited to settle in and watch some movies on our giant projector.

3. Make our bed every day for a month.

I love having the bed made, but since Corey and I typically wake up at 5:00 in the morning for work, it just doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I’m hoping we can get in the habit of making it every morning over the summer, and then maybe that will carry over into the school year. There’s just something about a nicely made bed that makes the whole room feel more put together.

4. Start replacing window treatments throughout the house.

We just got our new windows installed last week (more on that later!), and we had to take down all of our window treatments on the windows we were replacing in order for them to install ‘em. Now that we’ve already got half of them down, I’d like to start working on upgrading the blinds and curtains throughout the house. I hate the ugly white blinds that we have on all of the windows, and I’m getting tired of most of our curtains. I’m hoping to start getting some of them replaced and updated this summer so all of our windows aren’t either naked or ugly.

5. Rip up the carpet downstairs (!).

Corey and I have finally made some decisions about what we want to do in terms of flooring throughout our house, and it looks like we’re actually going to be able to get started on it this summer. My goal is for us to get the majority of the downstairs done at least – we’ll see how it goes!

6. Have professional photos taken of us.

Corey and I aren’t great about taking photos of ourselves together, and the last time we really had any done was at our wedding two and a half years ago. I love having professional photos of us, and this summer we plan to get some taken. We’ve only ever had them done for our engagement and our wedding, so it will be nice to have a set of photos that are “just because” photos!

7. Spend lots of time outside.

This was one of my goals last summer and it didn’t really happen. There’s just something about 100+ degree weather that makes you want to hide in your house where there’s plenty of air conditioning. But I’m determined to spend some more time hanging out in the fresh air this summer – at the pool, at our favorite flea market, or just in our backyard. That’s kind of the whole point of summer, right?!

8. Spend at least 3 Saturday mornings garage-sale-ing.

Corey and I haven’t been to many garage sales since we moved back into the Austin area, and that’s just sad. Especially considering there are at least 2 or 3 in our neighborhood every weekend. I’m hoping this summer we’ll make the time to drive around and find a few good sales to check out – there’s just something about garage sales that makes me happy!

9. Eat at a restaurant owned by a celebrity.

This is one of those silly items on our 101 in 1,001 list that I’ve just always wanted to do. There are a couple celebrity-owned restaurants in Austin, so I don’t think it would be too tough for us to check one out for dinner one night!

10. Spend plenty of time relaxing.

I know I said I want to accomplish a lot, but I definitely want to make sure to spend as much time as humanly possible relaxing, too. I’m lucky to have such a huge break from work, and I want to take advantage of it! So, if there’s an entire week where I want to do nothing but lay on the couch and re-watch/analyze every episode of Mad Men and wonder why I love Don Draper so much, then I’m not going to let myself feel guilty about it.

And that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish this summer! The first part of my summer is going to be pretty full with work for grad school, but I’m hoping to finish that up by the end of June and then I’ll have the rest of the summer to relax – let’s see how much I accomplish!

Do you have a summer bucket list?

Related posts:

Those of you who follow us on Facebook may have seen that a couple of weeks ago, Corey cancelled our DirecTV subscription.

That’s right – we no longer have cable.

It’s been a pretty big movement lately with a lot of bloggers and other people I know online, but I have to say, we don’t know anyone else in “real life” who doesn’t have cable.

How is it so far?

We love it.

We have subscriptions to both Hulu Plus and Netflix, and between those two and iTunes/Amazon Prime Instant Streaming, we haven’t missed out on any of our favorite shows. We’ve still got access to all of the stuff we love watching, and thanks to Hulu we can still watch several mindless hours of stupid shows like Kitchen Nightmares if we want to.

I’m finding that since we cancelled our cable, not only are we saving upwards of $100 a month (!), we’re a lot more mindful and purposeful about watching television. We don’t always have it running in the background anymore, and if we’re watching television it’s because we actually want to, not just because it’s there.

It’s only been about two weeks so far, so I can’t say for sure yet whether or not it’s going to work out for us, but I can say that we’re so glad we did it and we feel like the change is going to be a great one for us.

Has anyone else cut the cord on cable lately? Or can you not live without cable? I’ll admit – it’s a big adjustment!

Related posts:

Have you voted for the Creating With the Stars final round yet? You have until 10:00 tonight to vote, and tomorrow morning the winner will be revealed! The projects are gorgeous, so if you haven’t seen them yet you need to! 

I’m not gonna lie – I find it a bit hard to believe that this past weekend was Easter weekend. Already. Where is 2013 going?

Of course, I’m not complaining – the faster we move right now the faster we get to summer. Then maybe we can figure out a way to slow time down a bit. Deal?

Our weekend was not the relaxing 3-day weekend I had really hoped for – thanks to the final round of Creating With the Stars, we were insanely busy all day on Friday and Saturday. Between setting up the project, photographing, and then cleaning our house (which has been neglected for the past, I don’t know, MONTH), there wasn’t a lot of room for resting. But on Sunday we were finally finished, so we headed out to my grandmother’s house for Easter lunch…

(and a fabulous cake made by my sister)

…some easter egg hunting…

(done inside for the FIRST TIME EVER due to a freak hailstorm that covered my grandmother’s backyard with hail in about 25 seconds)

…and now that I’m an adult I have to help hide the eggs instead of searching for them. Lame, right? Especially because there’s money in some of them now…we never put money in them when I was a kid!

It was a great way to spend the day, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. And, yes, I managed to resist the urge to knock my nieces out of the way and steal the eggs full of money. Just barely.

How did you spend your Easter weekend?

Related posts:

Round 2 of Creating With the Stars is up and open for voting! Go check it out – once again, the projects are fantastic! 

Um, before I get started let me be completely honest and say that I straight-up stole this idea from Young House Love.

I’m not ashamed.

If you’ve been reading a while you know I have quite a thing for photobooks, and Corey and I have a ton of them floating around our house. I love how they display photos in a much more concise (and pretty) way than traditional photo albums, and I’m big on having photo books around the house that I can look through whenever I want.

So, when I read about John and Sherry’s tradition of making a “yearbook” of photos each year, I knew it was something I had to do. I had really already been doing something similar to this for a very long time, because it’s been a long-standing tradition for me to make a photo album or scrapbook for Corey every year on his birthday (we’ve been together seven years, so we’ve got a lot of albums!), but this was a great push for me to shift it from his birthday to just the start of the new year, and now we’re able to include everything from the entire year prior in one nice little package.

I got ours a while ago, but I just realized I never told you about it and I think it’s worth sharing. I absolutely adore going back and looking at these photos, and it’s so fun to see what was important to us last year and see how much things have already changed.

Like, for example, Hadley. Can you believe she was EVER that small?

Making this yearbook was a good reminder to me that I need to be better about taking photos on a daily basis. I take a ton of photos of our house all the time for the blog, and I’m constantly snapping iPhone photos of our dogs, but when it comes to real-life, every day things involving actual humans, I’m not that awesome at remembering to pull out the camera. Here’s hoping I can change that this year.

I also wish I would have added in more text – I really prefer the look of photos only, but I think that in 10 years when we look back it might be hard to remember exactly what this crazy-looking date was. Well, scratch that. I don’t know if we’ll ever forget that date. But you get my point. Luckily this is just the first year of doing this, so hopefully I’ll get a little bit better at it each year! 

One of my favorite features of the book (this one was all my idea!) was that at the very end I included a bunch of photos of what our house looked like in 2012.

We’re constantly changing and updating things (as you probably very well know!) so I thought it would be fun to have a little section each year to update what the house looks like so we can look back and see the progress we’ve made. Hopefully over the next few years we’ll see a lot of changes! 

And that’s our little book! Fingers crossed that this year I can take more photos and maybe our 2013 yearbook will be quite a bit thicker!

How do you organize and display your family photos?

Related posts: