I'm Lazy

I don't know why it's been so long since I've blogged...........there are really no good excuses besides laziness. In the last 4 months since I blogged there has been a lot going on with us. Here's a list of the highlights:
-School has been going good for me. I'm having a great year NOT being the Student Council advisor. While I enjoyed doing it for 3 years, I'm loving having more time to do other things.
-Moose started a new job working for a specialized foster care company. He is working in a group home for kids who have a dual-diagnosis of mental retardation and another social or behavioral disorder. It is a very challenging job, both physically and emotionally and has definitely been a big adjustment for our family. He has to work most nights from 2-10 so we really don't see each other very much besides on Sundays :-(
-We moved WAY across town. We are loving our new place, but it has definitely added to our commute times. It has been fun for us to explore our new area, get to know new stores to shop at, and living next door to our good friends, the Pullins'.
-As most of you already know, we are expecting a baby GIRL in April. I'm about 21 weeks along and feeling great. I have had a very easy pregnancy so far (knock on wood) and my belly has really started to grow in the last couple of weeks. I know that lots of people are really into posting the belly pictures on their blogs, but that is SO not me. Sorry.
-We are going on a cruise for Christmas this year!!!! We're going to the Carribbean and are VERY excited about it. It will be a much needed break for both of us. It will be a great last hurrah vacation before the baby is born and will be fun to spend some time with Moose's family. We LOVE to cruise, but have never cruised over the holidays, so it should be fun. I will definitely post some pictures when we get back - you might even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the belly from those.

One more thing - we're getting ready to register for our baby shower and are a little bit overwhelmed by all of the "gadgets" out there for babies today. Experienced moms and dads, please comment and tell us what your "must haves" were when you had infants. What were the basics that you just couldn't live without that we should definitely get? I don't want to waste our money on things that are just not worth it. Thanks for your help!!!

New Look

Do you like the new look of our blog? I'm assuming that your answer is yes :-) I MADE it! And not just the header - the whole background and everything. Some of you may already know how to do this, but it was a big feat for me. I have been getting into digital scrapbooking this summer and have learned A LOT about my computer, photo editing, graphic design, etc. It has been really fun.
Other than that, we haven't really been doing anything blog-worthy. Just working, teaching piano, watching TV, and relaxing. My sister Lisa came to town and I don't have one picture to show for it. She was so much fun to have here because she likes lounging around as much as we do! She also helped me clean out my kitchen, try a few new recipes, and make a few crafts.
We're going on our last vacation of the summer tomorrow and then it's back to work/school on Monday. Where did the summer go?

Christmas in July

There are a lot of things that I should be blogging about right now (like our AWESOME trip to Arizona, the latest crafts, our camping trip, etc) but it seems like too much work for right now.

What I'm really interested in is CHRISTMAS. Yes. I know that it's only July - stay with me. I read online about some women who did a Christmas craft exchange and I want to start one!

The rules are simple:
1. Post a comment, email, or call me to tell me that you want to participate ASAP!
2. Make a Christmas-y craft that you would be willing to give away between now and November 1st. Yes, you must make it. It can be any kind of craft that you want - sewing, scrapbooking, painting, graphic design, etc.. Nothing perishable, please.
3. Do not spend more than $30 on your craft (but feel free to spend less if you're a good bargain-hunter!)
4. Shortly before the November 1st deadline, I will give you the name and address of someone else in the group and you will send them your craft.
5. By the second week of November you will receive a Christmas-y craft from someone else in the group. Think of it as opening a present early!
6. WHATEVER YOU DO: DO NOT put your new craft up for display in your house until AFTER Thanksgiving - that's just wrong :-)

So, what do you say? Are you in?

Latest projects...

Here are a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last few days....

I got the pattern for this skirt for $0.99!!!! It was normally 16.95, but all McCall's patterns were on sale for 99 cents - what a steal! I already had the green fabric and just had to get the brown for the trim, so this is my $2 skirt. I'll be honest - this is probably the most detailed pattern that I've ever followed - complicated pleats, a zipper, lined waistband, pockets, etc. but it was worth it - I'm so excited to wear it......now I just need a shirt to go with it :-)

I know - it feels like you've seen this quilt before. This is the second one, and for the most part, I like it better. I think that the blocks on the quilt are a little bit more randomly spaced and I love the silky pink binding. I got much better at my machine quilting, but unfortunately I didn't check my bobbin first and the bottom looks a little bit crazy. Overall it turned out fairly well, but I think I'll give this one to Project Linus and the first one to Courtney for her baby shower.

I even figured out how to miter the corners pretty well!


Here's what the quilting looks like on the front:

And here's what it looks like on an acceptable piece of the back:

So I've seen these cute baby wipes cases all over the internet and have been dying to make one. Alas, I have no use for a baby wipes case, but I made one that matches the quilt for Courtney and another one just for fun. I'm sure I'll find someone to give it to soon being that I have TONS of friends who are pregnant right now.

Next on the crafting agenda: Covers for our dutch ovens, basket liners for some decorative baskets in our laundry room, that cute apron from the last post, the list goes on and on!

Happy crafting!!!

I REALLY WANT TO MAKE THIS!!!!

It is the CUTEST reversable apron that there ever was! If you want to buy the pattern for me, you can get it here. I have to go to a conference all next week, so you have plenty of time to order it and have it shipped to me in time for me to start on it next weekend :-). If you are feeling really generous, you could also buy me some cute fabric for it here. Thanks in advance - you're the best!

If you're also of the crafty inclination - check out the whole new section of links that I added on the right-hand side of the blog titled "Fun Blogs". There are TONS of crafty and fun blogs that have totally consumed my weekend and given me SO many ideas to fill my summer with. Enjoy!

Another post.....so soon???

I think the best motivation for me to post is when I have something to post!!!! Now that I'm off of school I've been feeling very crafty (as you could probably tell from the last post).

I have a good friend who is having a baby soon and I wanted to make her a baby quilt. I went to the store and picked out the fabric (actually Moose picked out the fabric - strangely enough he has a great eye for fabric) and when I got home and pieced it together, I realized that I had enough to make 2 crib-sized quilts. I was really excited about this because my stake is doing "Project Linus". They have challenged every woman and young woman in the stake to make a blanket (any kind of blanket) to donate to a foundation that gives the blankets to really sick kids. The extra blanket that I'm making will not only go to Project Linus, but it will serve as my practice for the one I'm making for my friend. YEAH!!
Although I have done lots of sewing in my day, there were a few things that I did on this blanket that I've never done before, so I was a little bit nervous. The first was the binding. I've made a few other blankets, but my super-crafty mom has always done the binding for me because I was so intimidated by it. Sadly, I live way to far from my mom to get her to do the binding for me, so I was on my own. While the corners aren't perfect, I think they turned out pretty good.
The next thing was actually quilting it. I have always wanted to machine quilt instead of just tying the quilt. My new sewing machine has a free-motion quilting function that I tried out. It was really fun, but I learned a few lessons. The first is that it takes a lot of patience. The second is that I need to draw the pattern before I start. Randomly creating a pattern was fun, but doesn't look quite as professional as it could. Here's the finished product for Project Linus. I'll let you know how the quilt for Courtney looks when I finish it.

This is the back

This is the front.

I know that you can't really see the machine quilting, but that's probably better since it's not perfect. When I do Courtney's I'll take a close-up of the quilting.

What we've been up to....

It's been a long time since I posted! I'm out of school now, so I've had much more time to lounge around and scheme up projects for myself. Moose has started a new job, but the training aspect of it hasn't been full time so we've enjoyed spending a lot of time together this week. We're on a mission to go through all of our stuff and de-junk our house. How did 2 people wind up with so much stuff? Anyway, we've already taken one trip to DI and plan to take a few more. We spent a leisurely morning at the pool on Friday and both wound up with sunburns - looks like we're not made for sunbathing. We've also been trying our hand at some new things around the house. Here are a few pictures:
Homemade bagels. They're not the prettiest bagels I've even seen, but they were fun to make and even more fun to eat!

I made some new pillows for our living room couches. We love curling up on the couch and watching our favorite shows, so our pillows get quite a workout. These are cute, eh?

I used some of the old scrapbooking paper that I had on hand to cover this old box to help organize some of my craft supplies. I'm so excited to have time to be crafty this summer! I already have about 10 projects on my list. I'll post them as they are finished.
This wasn't a very exciting post, but at least it was a post. I'll try to be better now that I'm not so busy with school.

YAY!!!

Avoiding Posting

I've been avoiding posting on the blog because I feel too overwhelmed by everything I need to catch up on. I'm still working on getting the photos from our cruise uploaded and edited and ready to share, so those will have to come later. In short - our cruise was fabulous! We had a great time, relaxed a lot, and ate WAY too much good food :-) Right now, life is super busy for both of us. The last crazy week of student council is coming up next week: dress up days, lunchtime activities, prom royalty voting, a pep assembly, and the prom. Moose is trying to finish up the last of his classes before he graduates on May 9th. That's the quick update for now - I promise I'll post cruise pictures when things slow down in a couple of weeks. For now, here's the graduation announcement that I just finished working on.

Busy and fun weekend

Wow! This was a great and busy weekend. Here's what we did:

Friday:

We celebrated our anniversary (which was actually on Sunday). We celebrated by going to dinner at the Melting Pot - delish!!!!! Here's a picture of us at the restaraunt.

We also opened a fun present from my mother-in-law. About 2 weeks ago she gave us a huge, heavy box wrapped in newspaper comics and told us that we couldn't open it until our anniversary. If you know me at all, you know that this drove me crazy! I was pretty famous as a child for finding all of the hidden presents and even occasionally opening and re-wrapping presents :-) Because she's really nice, Shelie let us open our present on Friday, since we were celebrating that day. We were pretty confused when we opened it: a paper box filled with 2 reams of paper, 2 rolls of toilet paper, 2 rolls of paper towels, and some paper napkins. Turns out that the first anniversary is traditionally the "paper" anniversary - hence all of the paper products - very cute!

Saturday:

It was the big day for my piano students: piano recital! They all did pretty well - some kids are just never going to practice as much as they need to. It was really fun for Moose to get to put faces with the names that I tell him about all of the time - kids and their parents!

Then we went to Travis and Rochelle's house to help them with their backyard. They are doing a overhaul of their backyard - building planters, planting gardens, etc. We helped to dig trenches and build and install sprinkler lines, cover it all up, and lay sod. It was really nice to spend time with them and also to be outside in the gorgeous weather. This is the best time of year in Las Vegas!

Sunday:

Sunday was pretty relaxing - the perfect end to a fun weekend.

Monday:

Okay, I realize that Monday is not technically part of the weekend, but I just thought I'd share that we had a fantastic shopping trip on Monday. On our receipt it says that we saved $63.86! That was 38% off of our total bill! I love getting deals. It is almost like a sport - there is strategy, competition, and the feeling of winning is spectacular!

Rachel Ray: You Stink

Dear Rachel,
I was given your cookbook, 365 days: No Repeats, as a gift about a year and a half ago. Every recipe I have tried has failed miserably. Don't even try to blame me for being a bad cook. I will fully admit that I am not a great chef, but I know how to follow instructions. In fact, I have made recipes from other cookbooks and even other Food Network personalities (i.e. Alton Brown, Guy Fieri) and they have all turned out deliciously. Additionally, my husband, who is an EXCELLENT cook, has had zero luck using your recipes. My major complaints are as follows:
1. The recipes call for WAY too many ingredients, many of which are very unusual and hard to come by.
2. The recipes take a long time to make. Case in point: I made the tex-mex macaroni and cheese. It took about 2 hours to prepare because of all of the strange ingredients and mile-long list of directions, plus cook time.
3. Everything tastes BLAH! With so many ingredients, you would think the food would have a little bit of flavor - not the case. The tex-mex macaroni? Yeah, it tasted pretty much like hamburger helper with less flavor (and it cost more money because of the strange ingredients - see complaint #1).
4. You don't have any pictures in your cookbook. I think that this is because you really can't cook either. You had a book deadline, made up a bunch of crap and then threw it into a book. That could also be the reason for the conveniently timed commercial breaks on your television show.......hmmm.
If you have any rebuttal to these complaints, please post a comment to this blog.
Thank you,
Katie Jensen

It's getting close!!!!!

Apr 04 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES
Apr 05 AT SEA
Apr 06 AT SEA
Apr 07 PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO
Apr 08 MAZATLAN, MEXICO
Apr 09 CABO SAN LUCAS, MEXICO
Apr 10 AT SEA
Apr 11 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MOOSE!

I LOVE YOU!!! You are the best husband in the whole world and I am so lucky to have you! Hope you have a great birthday - you deserve it!

One more pic of the beautiful birthday girl

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!

A birthday shout-out (okay, okay, it's a few hours early...) to the most beautiful, smart, funny, charming, talented, wonderful, inspiring seventeen-year-old that I know. I can't believe that my baby sister is 17! I love you so much and am SO proud of you for everything that you've made of your life. You are special - and I don't mean "special" :-) I know that you are much more talented with photo editing than I am, but here are a few of my favorite pictures that I took of you over Christmas break.

We love you Lisi-Lu! Hope you have a wonderful birthday!!!!!!

Finally, a Valentine's Post

Look at this delicious gift that my sweet husband got me for V-Day. It was SO delicious. I was very surprised and enjoyed it a lot.

We actually spent Valentines Day golfing with my brother-in-law Kaden and his wife Heather, my in-laws Jeff and Shelie, my sister-in-law Kami, and Moose's grandparents Hal and Beverly. Then we went and stuffed ourselves at the South Point Buffet. Romantic, eh? Just kidding - it was a very fun weekend. Unfortunately, my camera battery died right after the edible arrangement pictures, so I had to leave the picture taking to Heather. I know that she took a ton - now I just need to get them from her!

Getting Crafty Again

Recently several of our friends have bought new homes, which has made us VERY jealous. Since we're not in a position to buy a place of our own right now, I've committed to try to make our apartment feel more like a grown-up house and less like a college dorm. My project today: window treatments. They're not all that fancy, but they were cheap! We got the fabric on sale and I built the cornice boards out of foam board from the dollar store. I'm pretty proud of my dirt-cheap creations.The other project may not actually be crafty, but it makes our living room feel more homey. We have this HUGE alcove in our living room. It's a great place for the TV, but poses some awkward decorating dilemas. Until now it has mostly been filled with random crap, but I finally got around to making it look more presentable - what do you think?

Because we needed to post....

1.YOUR REAL NAME:Katie Jensen/Kyle Jensen
2.WITNESS PROTECTION NAME (mother and fathers middle names)Marie Jack/Christensen Brooks
3.NASCAR NAME (first name of your mother's dad, father's dad)Richard Dick (No, I'm not kidding)/David Hal
4.STAR WARS NAME (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)Jenka/Jenky
5.DETECTIVE NAME (favorite color, favorite animal)Red Robin (Yummmm)/Blue Gorilla
6.SOAP OPERA NAME (middle name, town where you were born)Leorene Sacramento/Jeffrey Logan
7.SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav drink, add "THE" to the beginning)The yellow diet coke/The black cherry coke
8.FLY NAME (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name)Kaen/Kyen
9.STREET NAME (fav ice cream flavor, fav cookie)Cookies 'n' Cream Chocolate Chip/Cookie Dough Oreo
10.ROCK STAR NAME (current pets name, current street name)Moose Silverado Ranch/Tron Silverado Ranch
11. PORN NAME: (1st pet, street you grew up on)Spike Turquoise/Mitzi Cooper.
12.YOUR GANGSTA NAME (first 3 letters of real name plus izzle)Katizzle/Kylizzle
13.YOUR IRAQI.. NAME (2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, first two letters of your middle name, last two letters of your first name then last three letters of your last name)Anleiesen/Ynjelesen
14.YOUR GOTH NAME (black, and the name of one of your pets)Black Moose/Black Minx
15. STRIPPER NAME: (name of your fav perfume/cologne, fav candy)Happy Reeses/Black Toffee

Ewww.....Gross

Moose ordered most of his books for school this semester online. Over the past week or so they have been trickling in one by one. Today he got his last book and found this inside of it:

Seriously - this is creepy. Pray that we don't get any wierd diseases from the book :-)

I'm so proud!

For those of you who knew me in college, you know that I was a big fan of the BYU newspaper, The Daily Universe. Today my brother, Doug, had his first two articles published in the paper! Check it out!
http://www.newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/70699
http://www.newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/70697
Great job, Doug!!!

Thankful

I know that this probably won't be the most exciting post in the world, but it's been a long time since I posted so I figured I just need to put SOMETHING up.

Today I found out about a terrible situation that one of my co-workers has found herself in. She is a very sweet, young teacher who just had a baby in September with her long-term boyfriend. They got engaged when they found out they were pregnant and were planning on getting married sometime soon. He had been pretty sick lately, but wasn't going to the doctor because he was recently laid off and didn't have health insurance (and since they weren't married he wasn't on her plan). Over the holidays he went to the emergency room where they said that they needed to take out his gallbladder (is that how you spell it) immediately. Once they opened him up they realized that there was much more wrong. His heart was inflamed and all of the valves were leaking and most of his major organs had begun to shut down. He passed away shortly after the surgery in the hospital. Now my co-worker is left with no claim to any of his life-insurance or property because they were not married. Luckily, his name is on the birth certificate, so the baby will be entitled to some of this.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this all day. I can't imagine suddenly losing Moose like that. I'm sitting here crying just thinking about it. I don't usually get this emotional in blogging, but I'm so overwhelmed with gratitude today for all that I have, and especially for Moose. We have only been married for almost a year, but I absolutely cannot imagine my life without him. He is so good to me and I love him so much. I am so glad that we are sealed in the temple and that we can be together forever.





On a lighter note, we had the wonderful opportunity to visit my family in California for Christmas this year. It was great to be able to spend almost 2 weeks there and for Moose to get to know them all (except for Scott on his mission) a little bit better. Moose and Scott have actually never met, so it will be kind of wierd when he gets home from his mission - we will have been married for a year and a half when he gets home! We had a great time over the holidays, got some great gifts, had a lot of fun, and didn't want to go back to work when we got home!
Since I don't talk about him very much, here are some pictures of Scott on his mission in Iowa.






Have a good weekend!