Let's get this thing going again...

All right, I guess Zach has sufficiently paid for his blog destruction. Let's get some pictures back on this thing.

Baby Girl S The mom and dad came for these pictures and I LOVE the look of a daddy holding his baby.

I have a couple more baby shoots to post, but be warned, the pictures are really similar. I think I've exhausted the black sheet and camera set up, I need to branch out and mix things up a bit.

7 easy steps to upset your spouse

As evidenced by the numerous comments of the previous post, I Zach, the eraser of blogs, decided to let everyone know what not to do (in other words, what not to let your husbands do).

1. When signing up for blogger, you had to sign up for kind of a partial account with google to use blogger and google reader.  If you signed up for this account with any email account other than a gmail account- you made the same mistake that we did- read the next steps carefully or you may have the same problems we did.  Plus a few finger-wags from the person you married.

2. At some point, probably after a few years of personal posts that represent at least a few thousand hours of blogging time and picture taking/editing, someone decides to sign up for a gmail account on a computer that is used for said blogging.

3. When this person signs up for a gmail account, the gmail account automatically (yes automatically Melanie, no options) becomes the primary email address with the account. Result: google reader starts to have problems; others' readers don't update with new posts from our blog, and our reader doesn't update with some other bloggers' blogs.  

3a.  This may not seem like a big deal..... Oh wait, I forgot that if you're reading this, it's probably a huge deal, which it was to Mel.  So I decided to try and fix the problem, the google reader problem- I had no intention to change anything with the actual blog... Or so I thought.

4.  Before reading the rest...DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS UNLESS YOU WANT SOME RIPPLES IN YOUR MARRIAGE!!!!! Beware!!! Scared yet?  You should be. 

Moving on, I thought that if I could delete my gmail account, Melanie's original email address and "partial google account" would be reinstated.  WRONG.  For some reason, when I deleted my gmail account, Mel's blogger/reader account was wiped clean.  I'm not sure if somewhere along the way I could have avoided it, but I didn't and now I have empty posts to bring back memories.

My final advice: if your blog is blogging without any problems, don't mess with it.  If you signed up for a blogger account with an email address other than gmail, don't sign up for a gmail account.  Also, if google reader starts acting up, it may be better to deal with a bad google reader than an erased blog.  Most importantly, back up your blogs if you really do want to keep those memories.

I hope that you all have learned from my painful mistakes.  I am soooooo sorry Mel.

P.S. Mel, the new header is cute, I wonder how you got Aubrey to hold still for that picture.

my blog is ruined

You might notice that all my pictures are gone, all of them. Hundreds of them. Since my blog has always been more about the pictures then the writing, that's a huge loss to me. My husband accidentally deleted my google account, which in turn made all the pictures on any post done under my account disappear (that would be 72 of the 108 posts). I've filled out all sorts of forms contacting google and blogger regarding this and I think I have to accept that the pictures aren't coming back unless I slowly and tediously re-do EVERY SINGLE POST! For some odd reason the writing is still there for each post, so at least I'll have an outline to go by if I do go that route. But I would have much rather lost the writing then the pictures. Anyways, don't delete your google accounts! It's bad news! Had our blog not been linked to Zach's google account as well, I think the whole thing might have been lost, I'm not sure. And don't let your husbands mess around with your blogs, because bad things happen. I've heard there's a way to back up your blog and I think I'll look into that once it has anything worth saving on here (seeing as now it doesn't).

Also, my google reader account is gone as well, so until I get everyone entered back in there, I'm a bit lost on everyone else's blogs as well. Also, I cannot access any private blogs I had permission to anymore, so if you're private, I'll be bugging you to re-invite me.

I have forgiven Zach, barely :) Actually I was extremely upset with him, but life has a way of putting things in perspective and I realize that my blog being ruined is extremely insignificant. Emphasis on the extremely. But that's the story of why my blog is empty and how it got to be that way (his name is Zach).

And at 1 am the next night?

I was sewing....with these girls.....until 1 am. A couple months ago, our friend Amy wowed us with a diaper bag she had made. Determined to follow in her footsteps, we finally finished our bags (and for some, their blankets) after a long night of sewing, eating, and telling some not so pc jokes (that was me, I'm sorry, my internal censorship weakens the later it gets and next thing you know....word vomit). I love how each bag perfectly reflects the personality and style of each girl. Lovely girls who I'm going to miss :( More then I like the bag, I enjoyed the fun we had making it!

what do you look like at 3 am?

Because this is how I looked, 3 am, last night. And this is how Aubrey looked.
And how Mickey looked.Aubrey has been waking up in the middle of the night the past two nights not crying, but screaming. I'm more then okay with letting her cry it out, but after 45 LOUD minutes, I gave up. I knew what she wanted, her favorite blanket and Mickey, which she always throws out of her crib during tantrums and then panics when she can't get them back, and she wanted to play. So I gave her a bag of hair clips and let her go to town, on Mickey first, then herself, and then me. We did this for a full hour, from about 2 am to 3 am.

Don't tell Aubrey this, or Zach for the matter, but a small part of me has enjoyed our middle of the night playdates these past 2 days. It's calm and quiet, I have no other responsibilities to attend to but to just play with her. When she was not sleeping through the night yet as an infant, I sometimes felt this same way, it was nice just being me and her in our own little world. Of course, that was only because I had no other children to deal with during the day. I know that this is a special time that won't happen again. So to any of my future children, I will not be feeling warm and fuzzy about middle of the night play dates, be warned!f

Finally, sleepy eyes. Mickey, favorite blanket, life is good. I'll keep my camera handy for tomorrow night's party! Just kidding, Aubs, I'm kidding, please sleep tonight.

PS. Remember this hat? The first picture was taken almost a year ago. How time flies by!

Oh Baby!

I helped to host a baby shower this weekend for a dear friend of mine Elise, who, as you can tell from the pictures, is having a girl. Another one of our friends took care of the food for the shower, so I got to focus my energy on the decor and favors, which is my favorite part! Making food for large groups of people is honestly terrifying for me, since I don't really have much practice preparing food for small groups either. Small as in Zach and I. I had a lot of fun with the hot pink, black and white colors.

I can never claim anything I do as an original idea. With the internet and especially blogs, ideas are everywhere for the copying. These little tags were on a blog of a friend of a friend (in this interconnected little blog web, chances are any blog is going to be a friend of a friend, or at least a friend of a friend of a friend!). But the silhouette on the tags is my dear little girl, so there's at least one original part to them!

Thanks Elise for having a baby so we could have a party! Very thoughtful of you!

Blog it baby, 5 years and counting

It's about time that I (Zach) contribute something to this blog. Even though I give her a hard time about all the time she spends posting/blogging/blog-surfing/thinking about new blog ideas/making backgrounds for hers and others' blogs/photographing things for no other reason than to "blog it", I always look forward to seeing Mel's posts. I decided that since it was our 5 year anniversary last Friday, I would write a warm, fuzzy, lovey-dovy post about my Mel (if you know Mel, you know how uncomfortable she'll be knowing that others will also read this, she's a little anti-PDA, but oh well).

So it was 5 years ago that Mel and I sat in a waiting room in the Logan Temple before our sealing ceremony, both of us excited but mostly nervous.  "I think I'm gonna throw up, I'm gonna pass out, this dress it too tight, I can't breath".  Mel was pretty freaked out, can you blame her??

               She looked beautiful, too bad it was about 20 degrees and windy.

The ceremony was awesome, or so I've been told.  Adrenaline and anxiety do funny things to your memory, good thing we had so many family and friends there to remind us what happened.

I thought that to bloggebrate (blog+celebrate) our 5 year anniversary, I'd post some meaningful pics.  I love you Mel.

 

 

That famous Gruwell family half-baked look that only gets caught by cameras. Eating a meal before attempting a summit of Mt. Rainier.

Enjoying a sunset on lion's back in Moab.

We thought that we should see if we could successfully raise a dog (success is pass/fail...  Lulu is still alive so I guess we passed) before trying our hand with an actual child.

Then along came Aubrey....

And now here we are!!!

Thanks for 5 wonderful years of marriage, isn't it great to have someone to share so many memories with?  I get excited thinking about all of the memories we'll make in the future together  Here's to many more love-filled years.

Zach

Giveaway frenzy!

I hear that spring is coming. You wouldn't know it living here (I'm currently typing this wearing a North Face down coat, a hoodie sweatshirt, long sleeved shirt, and flannel pants). But bloggers sure seem to be energized because there are giveaways "springing" up (I'll roll my eyes for you) like weeds!

First of all, a friend of mine from my hometown just started a little business called Kookles. She makes nursing covers, swaddle blankets, and little girl headbands. She's doing a giveaway for one of the headbands. Check it out here.

Next is a giveaway from a friend of my friend. Dandee. Click here to enter her giveaway. Actually, please don't click there so I have a better chance of winning :)

This one I also snagged from a friend's blog. It's called Giveaway Today. They really do have a giveaway each day! I didn't have to share the link to enter, but here it is anyways. You're welcome :)

Have you heard of Grosgrain GiveAways? This lady is an amazing seamstress and has a blog just devoted to giving away her creations. At least one thing a week. I've never entered one of her giveaways because hundreds of people enter, I think I even saw over 1000 entries once! I've also never entered because I'm a little confused on how you're supposed to enter. You have to link back to her post from her blog, which means I think I have to do a post for each item I want to enter for, so there will be several of those coming! See the posts below for some of her creations.

When a sale DOESN'T save you money....

For several weeks now, flannel has been on sale at Joann's, at a good 60% off. I know it's sad that I get excited about something like that, but in my defense, so have MOST of my friends. I lost count a long time ago of the number of trips I've taken. And why are we so jazzed up over flannel? Because a friend of ours makes these adorable baby receiving blankets out of them and showed us how. Unfortunately for her, now we've ruined her go to baby shower gift since we are all making them now. Unfortunately for me, my lack of willpower manifested itself big time. This is my current stack of flannel, and this is AFTER making 5 blankets already. I think I have another 12 or so from this stack. Sales usually cause me to spend MORE money. Which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to me since I'm also the type that will eat BOXES of reduced fat cookies but won't touch a regular oreo. The sad thing is, for months now I've been wanting to buy myself some new jeans. Most of mine are $10 purchases from Plato's Closet (i.e. used clothing store). But I decided that financially it was not in the cards. And then I saw my stack of flannel and darn it all, that stack could have been a cute pair of jeans. At least I can't get too fat to sew a flannel blanket, right?

Did I mention I joined a sewing club? 5 years ago I belonged to the outdoor club, Sierra club, climbing club, etc. Now....sewing clubs....oh my....