courtney rebecca

I love Tumblr. I have one, but I never post on it. I just use it to look at other tumblrs. Mainly ones involving small or baby animals. One of my absolute favourite ones is Animals with Stuffed Animals . It makes me squeal  every time! Go look at it and try not to smile. It won't work. I finally have my own animal with a stuffed animal thanks to my friend Dawn, who gave Kingsley his mini me. I couldn't resist a little photo shoot yesterday. He snuggled it so sweetly! His mini me is a Beanie Baby. And then he tried to eat it. I love how the stuffed animal looks shocked that he's being licked. I tell him "No" and he gives me this look. And then Jason comes down and we get this. I think Kingsley loves Jason the most.

We've lived in our townhouse for over a year now, and we'd always been a little dissatisfied with the way the living room was set up. I have absolutely no ability to visualize the way something would look if it was moved around, so I always thought there wasn't another way to move the furniture around. Luckily, Jason is much better at that than me, and he had an idea. We moved everything around last weekend, and we were shocked. It's SO MUCH BETTER. Why didn't we do this sooner?! Here are some updated pictures. I don't think I have old ones to compare, but the couch and recliner switched places. That's basically it, but it opens the room up so much!

I've been falling a bit behind on my goal of making something new once a month this year. Jason is in Texas this week to attend Summit at ACU, so as soon as he left, I got busy sewing! I pinned this tutorial a reeeeally long time ago (26 weeks ago to be exact, thank you Pinterest for knowing that) and I finally decided to try it. I picked out the fabric for the skirt a long time ago too... June, I think? Whenever I took that quilting class, I picked it up. And I've had this tank top for YEARS (probably since high school) and it's always been too short. Perfect project for it! This tutorial would have been really easy if I had a sewing machine that worked well with elastic thread. Alas, I have a Brother, which has a drop-in bobbin, which makes it a nightmare to work with elastic thread. Awesome. I decided to attempt it anyway, and gave up on my Brother after about 30 minutes of frustration. Luckily! I still have the Kenmore that my cousin gave me. It has some bobbin i...

I have been wanting to learn how to make pizza at home for a long time, but I was intimidated by making the dough and I had no idea what would go into the sauce. I finally just went for it last Friday, and it turned out great! I shouldn't have been so apprehensive, it was really pretty easy once I found a couple of recipes that had good reviews. I had great intentions of taking pictures when I made the pizza again last night... And then it finished baking and we ate over half of it before I remembered. Ooops! I promise... it was delicious. I made whole wheat crust  and exquisite pizza sauce , then topped it with two cups of mozzarella and two links of italian sausage, crumbled. I also did one quarter of it with turkey pepperoni, just for some variety. I think we have a new Friday evening tradition! Anyone have great ideas for pizza toppings??

You probably already know this if you know me at all: I love to bake! Lately I haven't been baking very much because Jason and I are trying to eat healthier and exercise more. When I have to suffer through half of a Jillian Michaels video for one cookie, it just doesn't seem worth it as much anymore. But last night we went to a game night with friends, so I could bake a bunch of things to share! I started with Whole Wheat Dark Chocolate Brownies . I'm trying to bake with only whole wheat flour these days, and I really love King Arthur's White Whole Wheat flour. I can hardly tell the difference between it and regular unbleached. These brownies turned out to be SUPER rich and not very sweet, even though I threw in some chocolate chips at the last minute. They are pretty healthy, only 90 calories per brownie, but it kinda defeats the purpose when they are so rich they can't be eaten alone. They ended up being perfect with a little Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream...

To celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, Jason and I took a little weekend getaway down to Colorado Springs at the beginning of August. Neither of us had been, so it was fun to get to be tourists together! On Thursday night we dropped Kingsley off with his friend Charlie and drove down to the Springs. We had a bit of trouble getting checked in, but once we had the right room, it was great! We went to dinner at a little French place that I saw on Yelp and it was amazing! It couldn't have been a better start to our weekend away. We also got some Black Forest cake from a bakery there, since that was the flavor of Jason's groom's cake. Friday morning we got up and drove to Manitou Springs to get on the cog railway for Pikes Peak! We rode the railway up the mountain and it was so cool. We could watch out the window the whole way. It took about an hour and a half to get up there. We got to stay at the top and take pictures for about 45 minutes, then we rode back down. ...

I am so proud. After over a month of working on it (off and on), I finally finished my first quilt! For some reason I was having anxiety about quilting and especially binding it, but it ended up being totally fine. I don't know why I was so worried. It turned out great! Mission accomplished... he likes it!