Challenge!

Copyright : barre3, @realfoodwholelife, @becomingannie

Follow up- right after I posted about barre3 some of the barre3 ambassadors on Instagram threw out this AWESOME deal. Since I had some general curiosity questions from people about what barre3 is, I figured I'd share this promo so that if you want to try it out for yourself you can! Just do what the picture says and you should be good. 

28 to Great is a four-week total body program that gives you some fantastic recipes to try, and access to all the amazing online workouts barre3 has. A.K.A it's a totally doable, healthy, kicker of butts everywhere. I'm doing it because I like smoothies, healthier ones now, and want someone else to tell me what-all I should be putting in my gullet. If you want a legit explanation, hop on over to realfoodwholelife where Robyn explains the whole plan in better detail. 

M and I had a whirlwind of a weekend. Between me applying for internships, writing a paper, M preparing to teach his first college class, going to a department party, and hosting a BBQ, I thought I would be worn out. A year ago, I would have been, but not today! Mostly because the grad students in M's program are AMAZING and cleaned up pretty much the entire house so we wouldn't have to, but also because I've been eating better foods and been working out. BONUS: I was able to walk in heels for an entire night, for literally the first time IN MY LIFE.  Which is all barre3. Win. At our wedding I think I had my heels on for a grand totally of two hours before I gave up. 

*Also, I know I've been talking this place up a lot, but I don't work for barre3 or anything like that. Not that I wouldn't absolutely LOVE to. However, my opinions are all my own. Consult a doctor before you start a new workout plan and everything. I think I heard that off a heartburn commercial once, probably applies here. 

Goldfish in the Gym

SO. This blog has definitely evolved over the few years that I've hassled with it. I still love that McDonald's does weddings though.

Now I'm in my SECOND year of law school and even though it has been the most difficult, and honestly sometimes most nerve racking thing I have ever done, I've found that I absolutely love learning about the law and being challenged everyday.  Now that I'm past all the mandatory classes, I get to choose the classes I take which has been some mixing of children and family law. Who'd of guessed that would happen with my love of weddings...POW blew my mind.

The thing they don't tell you about law school is what a marathon of work it is. Now, I've never completed a marathon. I figure the rest of the fam's got that covered. I'm usually head of the "drink eggnog and down candy corn while fit people run past" brigade myself, so I didn't know what was coming.  By the second semester of my first year, I was feeling like a literal carton of eggnog, forgotten in the back of the fridge since last Christmas that someone kicked for good measure. I couldn't find a schedule that worked well for me, so I was up late with readings for classes and legal research and writing work. Which meant I just ate whatever was laying around. Which was usually M's food. #sorrynotsorry. I also didn't work out, because...eggnog.

After I threw my back out, you know, like 90-year-old's often do, I decided that I should probably figure out a plan before I ended up on some spin-off of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Not that I would ever turn that opportunity down. I then realized I was useless as a member of any gym, ever. A goldfish would have a better idea of what to do in that place than I did. I knew I needed a real person to tell me, in small words, what I should do to workout. That's when I went back to barre3, which is a workout class, led by a real person. Win.

The last time I had been to barre3 was 6 months prior, and I literally could not walk down stairs after the workouts, they were so hard. There was a lot of cardboard-butt sliding down the stairs in those days because we lived in a house of stairs.. It seemed. So I was reluctant, you could say, to go back. But I did, because I forced myself to buy the unlimited classes package and the only way to justify that was by actually going. What kept me going was/is my pact app, which I have a real love-hate relationship with, but I haven't lost my workout bet yet and it pays me in real mullah...so I guess it works.

When I went back to barre3 again, and started going 4-5 times a week, I instantly felt like a solid 75-year-old after the first month. Luckily, the barre3 studio in my town has a class that allows me to workout before my day really starts, which meant I was ACTUALLY AWAKE for my 9am classes. Huzzah, I'd found the cure-all, and it wasn't coffee. It wasn't all coffee, I should say. After two months I decided to try eating less like a child in the Willy Wonka Factory, and more like an "actual adult." Which again barre3 had me covered. If you can't tell, I thrive on the "not-having-to-think-about-it-ness." Now, 9 months later I've lost 25 pounds and counting. SUCK IT EGGNOG.

Dreaming of a U-haul

We've started moving.

Not really. I don't hate all of it. I love the house we're moving to and I love the reason we're moving. We wanted to be closer to the university because I'm going to be a law student this year and M's continuing on with his PhD! As I've started boxing things up though, I've come to the conclusion that our possessions break down to 85% Christmas decorations, 7% cat toys, 3% camping gear, and 5% things normal people have in their houses. While we're extremely excited, there are always the inevitable stages of grief that seem to come with packing a house and moving all your cat toys and miscellaneous crap to the new one.

Denial

You naively say to yourself that this move will be soooooo easy. We're moving pros and I have all these great tips from pinterest! Besides, we don't have that much stuff and most of it is already in super awesome storage bins XD. We learned last time we moved that having things already in storage bins streamlines the process so well! But wait! What's all that stuff not in the storage bins? Where'd that kitchen table come from, or the kitty litter box, or worst of all your clothing? That's when you hear the sound of pacman dying off in the distance and you realize how very, very wrong you were.

Anger

"Mother of God, what just fell on me???" "Was it rice? Was it a nest of spiders?" "$#%@ SPIDERS!! IT WAS SPIDERS!!!!".

Bargaining

 "If I can just stuff this Halloween costume I've had for eleven years into this last box I promise I will go to church every day. EVERY. DAY."

Depression

This is the stage where you crawl into a dark and box free corner of the house and start blogging about moving.

 Acceptance

Haphazardly get the rest of it to fit in whatever box it'll squish into and start training your cat to jump in and out of any extra moving boxes. He needs the exercise.

  

 

Hey there, it's been awhile..

If there are any real live people reading this you might notice that it's been an entire year since I've posted anything. You might be thinking I've committed the ultimate blogging sin and should be subjugated to some sort of internet penance; like glueing my eyeballs open for a 24 hour viewing of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo". Not that I'm hating on Honey Boo Boo, that child is seriously on to something with her whole wanting an extra finger to grab more cheese puffs thing.

So why am I risking my eyeballs and getting back in the blogosphere? Is it some sort of New Years resolution? Nostalgia of blogging? A need to address some of the awesome celebrity wedding trends of 2012?? No. Nothing deep or introspective brought me back, it was some 3AM godawful dance exercise  infomercial -_-. Think Richard Simmons Jazzercize but with more yelling and generally less optimism about life. Zumba? It must have been Zumba.

I will never fall asleep with the TV on again, because dazedly waking up to some perky women in missed matched spandex yelling at my sleeping butt to get up an do some sort of dance number, so I can fit into a dress only 14 year old girls should be able to fit into, resulted in the worst nightmares in my life. My real life wedding dress was way too big for me to wear until about a week before our wedding day. You can imagine the hilarious tent-sized-wedding-dress nightmares that ensued from that.  This nightmare was like that but just for kicks added Jillian Michaels yelling "Dance, fatty! DANCE!!". It wasn't all bad though, it reminded me about my neglected blog. It also reminded me how much I really do like cheese puffs.

Speaking of our wedding, As of New Years Eve we've been married now for an entire year! Yay!! The year itself has gone by just about as fast as Ryan Lochte would pass Honey Boo Boo in a race, any race, but it's been one of my favorite years with M so far. If you're thinking "wait, didn't she just say they've only been married a year???" Yes, but we dated for a gabizillion years before we were married. Sorry if that blew your mind.

Anyways, this year we both graduated college, one of us went back for more school, the other entered the  perpetual soup kitchen that seems to be the job market for new college graduates. "Please Sir, may a have another job at any fine fast food establishment?" As frustrating as that's been it's pushed me into applying for grad programs that I've wanted to do for a long, long time. Hopefully when I graduate I won't be the most educated unemployed person to have ever lived :D.

Besides that, it actually has been a pretty amazing year. We moved, met new people, I picked up some photography gigs after putting together a portfolio and applied to grad schools, we got a shiny new sister, learned we were going to be an aunt and uncle again, saw friends and family, took road trips to amazing places when we could, learned to roast a duck, and cooked a legit, adult sized, Christmas dinner. At the end of the year we rang in the new year together in our favorite city watching fireworks go off at the Space Needle. All I can say is that the crazy wedding dress tent nightmares were worth it, being married to your best friend is WAY better than having an extra cheese puff finger. Sorry, Honey Boo Boo. Happy (very belated) New Years everyone!!!

Well... it's officially 40 days until the wedding. and I am officially OMFG EXCITED!!!! The wedding has also sneakily taken over my life..which I'm totally ok with, cause come on, I freaken love weddings.. and eggnog lattes, God those are amazing.

Between my allergicness to exercise, being a college student, and my love of stuffing, the holidays are going to make fitting into my too big dress juuust a little bit easier hahaha. At least I'll save a few pennies from not having to get my dress fitted!

So what's a girl to do? EAT MORE STUFFING!!! wait, no...bad.

Anyways, here're some possibly tolerable, cheap ways to exercise!

Go to a thrift store and buy a 1980's workout video (and probably a VCR)! Or just youtube it...Whatever-Did someone say Jean Simmons?! Hells yeah!! Plus, even if you don't really work out, your tummy will be getting a good workout from laughing at the awesomeness of the outfits ;).

Groupon some dance classes! A) I need to learn how to do more than the "driving the car into the electric slide" thing for the wedding. B) see "A"

Buy a shake weight- cause you know you want to try it ;) hahaha

This one's totally booring but sorta awesome- Use water bottles (with water in them) as weights. If you want to be truly awesome, don't add water. Then see how long it takes for someone to point this out while laughing their behinds off at you ;)

Check out this awesome site- Divine Diva -It's a free site that tells you what workouts you need to do when you choose what you want to work on. Subsequently I found that you are not in fact working your triceps much by lifting the remote to change the channel.

What awesome-cheap-funtastic ways do you workout

Simple Steps to Keeping Your Sanity While Doing DIY Invites

Step One: Make him do it.

Just kidding, but more power to you if he agrees! DIY invites are great, they're reasonably priced and they come in a wide variety. While you may be patting yourself on your back for saving a few hundred bucks, and you totally should be because come on that's awesome, don't celebrate too long. The reason they're so cheap is because the labor of printing, assembling and tying 100 tiny bows is not included. which brings me to...

Step Two: Have a small army of assemblers.

It took me, Mike, his mom and my mom a week straight of doing nothing but printing, assembling, stuffing, un-stuffing, re-stuffing, printing address labels, sticking on said labels, sticking stamps and shipping. The more people you have the faster it (should) go.

Step Three: People don't read the fine print so have backups.

Case in point, when we printed out the response cards we put on them "please initial by your food choice". So far, we've had two cards out of thirty come back with initials and some didn't even come back with names... It helped that we put a number on the back of the card and recorded it on a guest list incase they didn't write their name on the response card. Props to Mike's mom for that idea!

Step Four: Once you have an invite put together, take it to a post office.

This one's an oldy but a goody. Our invites weren't that heavy, but they had a bow on them. When we took them to the post office we found out that because of said bow, our invite couldn't be "machine processed" which meant we got to pay for the 64 cent stamps. You never now what weird rule there might be so check before you put stamps on!!

Step Five: If you're invite doesn't have an inner envelope try to find one (even if it looks like poo).

You may think it's kind of wasteful or stupid to have two envelopes, but they will help keep you sane when you get a few returned invites that aren't beaten to death. We searched five different stores to find some but no dice. We decided to send them without a second envelope and when a few got returned to us they were war torn. Some had survived with only a few bruises but some came back with the ends totally torn and that's with them being "not machine processed".

Step Six: Invest in some good tequila.

Because by the end of this you're going to need it ;)

Pillow Talk: DIY Ring Bearer Pillow

If there's one thing I hate more in this world than my sewing machine it's being board. And last night as Mike had left for Vegas and all of my friends were subsequently out of town, I had two options. One; watch a marathon of Desperate Housewives, or two; do anything else. After I finished downing a few slices  of pizza and 2 buck chuck (which is no longer 2 bucks), I decided to do both. Because hey, everyone loves to watch a little crazy now and then.

So I decided to take out the 'ol sewing machine I had hidden away in the back of the closet and make myself a ring bearer pillow for my wedding. After two minuets I remembered why it was hidden. It's the devil's sewing machine. So instead of continuing to curse at an intimate object, I decided to sew the stupid thing by hand. It was relatively easy, so I decided to share my lazy-girls version of how to make a ring bearer pillow.

First I laid out my fabric and cut it to an inch bigger than the size I wanted the final project to be. It was  was two layers, so I had to sew that together first (gag).

Then I traced around that handy dandy square thing so the pillow wouldn't come out looking like an Ugly Doll and pinned the sides with safety pins. 

Once the layers were sewn together and looked like this I placed them together, the pretty sides facing each other and stitched 3/4 of the pillow together. Leaving room to stuff the stupid thing.

That's how much I left open. At this point I frantically called my grandma, who actually does know how to sew, and asked her how to sew this part together without it looking like a stitch job from a back ally doctor. 

I forgot to take a picture of the post stuffing/stitching but this is generally what it looked like. 

Then I went two work on the flower. Because I wanted a flower. If you don't want a flower on yours don't do this step. So, I cut out a bunch of "petal shapes" and lined them up and sewed a straight line across the bottom. Once I was done, I kind of scrunched them all together by pulling on the end of the stitch where the needle was.

After that I sewed the two ends of the flower together and BAM flower. However the inside sucked so I decided to make a button with fake pearls from an old necklace.

Old necklace+ round piece of paper+ glue gun+ burnt fingers= Button (yay). Seriously though, use some freaking oven mitts. Hot glue hurts. 

Then I stitched the flower to the pillow, glued the button with some ribbon to the flower (which I later cut off because it was ugly) and WAH-BAM ring bearer pillow.