Love me some Ikea

Don't you love the names of the items at Ikea? Somebody had enough time on their hands to create a Swedish Furniture Name Generator... click here to find out what you would be if you were sold flat in cardboard boxes with a nice assortment of allen wrenches. Here's mine:

I'm a winner!!

Apartment Therapy is one of my favorite design & inspiration websites. They frequently have Thursday Giveaways where they award anything from vacuum cleaners to vases to the latest decor accessories. Well, last Thursday they were offering a free consultation with Designers Call, an interior design service that makes house calls! I thought,"What the heck... I could use some professional advice as we try to put our place together," so I entered the giveaway. Tonight I was about to empty the spam box in my email when the words "Congrats from Apartment Therapy" caught my eye. I won!! I'm so excited to a) win something (who doesn't like that?!) and b) have the opportunity to get feedback and ideas from a real designer about our space! Thank you Apartment Therapy and Designers Call!

Finally!

We finally have color on our walls! I don't know why it took me so long to figure out what I wanted to do but we made some decisions and I'm pretty excited about how it all turned out!

Here's our downstairs living/dining room. That's a bright pink/fuschia on that wall and in the little niche. I was going to do green or orange but Kurt persuaded me to do pink after I bought a little sample paint and put a patch of the pink on the wall. It's fun and different and, as I always say, it's just paint! If we get tired of it, we can change it all in the course of a weekend!

The rest of the walls downstairs are a light gray which is my current favorite neutral. :) You can see the rug we got which ended up being a bit different than I expected it to be. It's growing on me but I'm not completely sold on it yet - it's a lot lighter and softer in color than I anticipated. (I guess that's what I get for buying sight unseen on overstock.com!) We still need to paint the fireplace a dark gray and get some art but it's starting to look a little more put together! Yay!

Here's our room. We did a brown gray on all the walls except the one above our bed which is a very fun green! Love it! We still have projects to do but this is coming together too.

The office is a little more of a yellowy green or pea green. I like it. I think it's soothing yet inspiring. Plus, I love the shot of orange and want to incorporate that here and there throughout the room.


This has nothing to do with paint but I wanted to show our new "yard!" We bought some fake grass to put up on our deck and I think it makes the space way more inviting. Plus, now Liv can crawl around out there which has been so fun! Don't worry, we'll have a party here pretty soon!

Happy Birthday Wallace!

Today Wallace turns 1. Yes, already. I can't believe it. What's more, I can't believe that 6 weeks from now Liv will be 1 as well. Where did this year go? How is it that these two are crawling, standing, "talking" and actually playing with each other? I know every parent says that it goes so fast, but this year I have come to know that first hand.

Sunday was W's birthday party and it was so fun. Liv dressed up... complete with a bow in her hair (for about 5 minutes!)

Wallace wasn't too sure what to do with his cake, but he figured it out and ended up really enjoying it! I think Liv was a little jealous. She crawled over to Meghan who was holding the candle to see if she could sneak a little lick of the frosting! :)

As soon as Wallace was done opening his presents I put Liv down and she made a beeline over toward the mountain of loot. I think she thought W's new toys were the best part of the party!

We may need to get her a truck for her birthday!

Liv has recently started kissing properly (ie, lips puckered, mouth closed) ... sometimes! She gave Auntie Sara a kiss at the party.

I like this shot of W, Liv and Harrison. Harrison is such a sweet boy and is so good with Liv. Here he's showing Liv how to make a baseball character fly. :) I love how W is checking out his new firetruck in the background.

It was a great party. Happy birthday, Wallace! We love you so much!!

Better pic

Kurt's phone did a better job capturing them when they were in our section... cool, huh? :)

Coldplay

Last night Kurt and I headed up to the Forum in Inglewood to see one of our favorite bands, Coldplay! First of all, the Forum is disgusting and should be condemned. It was dirty, parking was a nightmare, it took an hour to get from the freeway to the place (2 miles!!) and it smelled. Other than the venue, it was a great show. We saw Coldplay a few years ago at the Hollywood Bowl and that was such a fun concert we knew we had to go again when they came back to town. Here's a more in depth review if you're interested but I just wanted to show a couple pictures.

We decided to buy the "cheap" seats, which really aren't so cheap but are definitely FAR from the stage and definitely a lot cheaper than the seats on the floor. We were in Colonnade 5 at the very back and very top of the Forum. It was a great vantage point to see all of the crazy lasers and lights during the show but actually seeing the band was a little harder. Here's our view:


Well, towards the end of the show, the band left the stage and ran through the crowd. I had read the review from the night before so I knew they were headed somewhere to sing an acoustic version of "Yellow" with the audience. This of course prompted all sorts of cheering and everyone was thrilled to get a little closer glimpse of the band. They got closer and closer to us and right as they were in front of our little section, they stopped. The section they had arranged to do their little audience sing-along from was Colonnade 5! They were about 8 rows in front of us and it was awesome! I know this picture doesn't do it justice but you can see how close they were! (They were in that swath of light!) So fun for us cheapskates in the back!! Thanks Mom & Dad for watching Liv for us!!

Confession

I broke the law yesterday. Although I've been diligently donning my oh-so-stylish bluetooth earpiece since last Tuesday, yesterday I drove and held my phone while talking. And I didn't even think twice about it until later. Just wanted to come clean.