bounty.

five purchases shown.
plus three honey sticks.
one Saturday ago.
ten dollars spent.
turned into kebobs.
kale chips.
roasted potatoes.
plenty of cereal and berry breakfasts.

mmmm.

instagram // easter sunday.

I can't think of a better way to start using Instagram than by using it on Easter Sunday. Pastels, sparkles, candy, flowers -- these are all in the arsenal of things-Amanda-likes-taking-pictures-of. And luckily, Instagram heard my plea of letting Android users make use of their app by letting us download it last week! Thanks Instagram! Girlfriend is digging on all the filters. :)

Above you see snippets of my Easter Sunday: 
01. My sparkly sparkle flats that I will try to wear on every holiday. If you can't wear sparkle flats on Easter (the greatest day for our reassurance of God's power)...when can you wear them?
02.Blossoms from my apple tree in the backyard.
03. My Easter basket from my in-laws....I mean, the Easter bunny. I think it'll always been know in our family that Easter 2012 was the year that I accidentally told a kid about how the Easter Bunny is fake (kids, avert your eyes). Luckily, I recovered quickly and his mom told me that there was no harm done on Sunday (he still told her the Easter bunny came by the house) but I still felt a little bit like a dream-crusher.
04. Dyeing eggs on Saturday while watching the Ten Commandments. Every year I think I'll be really creative and incorporate fabrics, yarn, ribbon, a la Martha Stewart, but then when it comes down to it, nothing beats the original.

If you are interested you can find my Instagram profile @projectsimplelife.  
Any veteran Instagram users have any tips for your novice friend?

spring breaking.

So ... spring break came at the perfect time in my semester.

For reals. Now I know why college kids don't blog.

Last week it was the perfect storm of future assignments, night classes, papers, lesson plans, and on, and on, and on. My breaking point was almost reached and I was thisclose to snapping (or melting into an emotional wreck).

Then God gave me spring break. God soothed my soul and gave me the week off. A week to re-energize for the next two months of long nights in front of the computer while some Real Housewives franchise is shouting at each other in the background. But I am taking these days of just working, working out, and being. Being with my husband and dog and enjoying life. Being me again. Not the me that is spread in seven different directions in one day.

Spring break is my blessing. And I'm taking it.

P.S. God also decided to give us late spring/early summer weather this week and we've been spending every night outside. The pictures above were taken by Chad on Sunday afternoon in between playing catch and water breaks. :)

the state fair.

Not our state's state fair. The Minnesota State Fair. You know, the second-largest one in the country. Chad + I have never been to the state fair before, so two Sundays ago, we went with my sisters, brother-in-law, and baby Z. I have never had a state fair experience quite like this, and I don't think I ever will. We said farewell to summer the best way: eating + laughing with our families. It was pure, late summer magic.

labor day, i loved you.

i loved that I have no idea why you exist.
i loved that you make my first week of school a four day week instead of a five.
i loved that I didn't have to work  + that you gave the daycare an extra "stay-at-home" day.
i loved that you made it possible for me to spend the whole day with my family at the park.

Yep, labor day. i loved you.

productivity + preparedness

There is nothing like having the weekend to yourself to make you feel super productive -- to make you feel like you made the most out of every day. That is exactly what I needed; just two days to myself to get the house ready for autumn and myself ready for school.

This time of year, this transition into hectic school days from lazy and carefree summer days always throws me off and makes me a little spastic. But the organizing and getting my house (almost) completely under control helps me feel more ready to face the school year head on -- my school supplies waiting in my backpack by the door, and my planner waiting for my scribbles. 

While my living room and dining nook underwent a total face-lift on Saturday night, I'll wait for its own separate post to show you pictures. Instead, I'll leave you with my sunny sunflowers that I picked up from the farmer's market on Saturday morning. Hopefully they brighten up your morning. :)

canon 2.0 pictures (part two)

Part two shows that we pretty much didn't do much of anything two weekends ago. (We did go to a childhood friend's wedding but didn't want to take baby Rebel out of the house so early on).

Breakfast smoothie (strawberry + mango to be exact).
Samantha Brown's Passport to Europe. Bonus Points to whoever can figure out what country she is in.
Saying good-bye to my dear friend of four years. We've been everywhere together, but now she'll sit on a shelf. (Sad how much that last sentence reminds me of Toy Story 2 + 3 somehow).
Sleepy girl.
Snapping a quick self-portrait on our way to church.
My favorite view of Chad via the passenger seat.
Stoic Karma hanging out with me on Sunday night.

//On a sidenote, I miss you ladies (and the few fellas). It's not that I am apologizing for my absence from here because I am not. Teaching preschool and falling in love with this job is more fulfilling than blogging could ever be. It's in the real world -- where I truly am. With that being said, I feel like you are all girlfriends that I know are busy and I see once in a while, but I want to text you so that we can meet up for a coffee date. soon dears.

canon 2.0 pictures (part one)

It's official. Last Friday, we upgraded to the wide & wonderful world of D SLR. With one trip to Walmart and one trip to Best Buy (we got a price match!) we ended the night exploring our living room with our Canon Rebel T3. I love the Rebel -- the name is so bold; even the packaging was a little flashy. We spend the whole night relaxing on the couch and taking random pictures (see the picture of Ron Swanson and us being goofy outside). This camera will be traveling all the way to Europe with us, so we are spending the next few weeks perusing our camera manual literature and learning all about exposure, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc.

Tune in tomorrow for more of our baby Rebel in action!

P.S. Yes, my first picture I took with this new camera was of Ron Swanson. Seriously. I love that guy....

snow day.

With the snow coming down outside, today seems like a perfect day to mend this sore throat (thanks, husband.) and drink some tea.

Also on today's agenda (if I can pull myself off the couch & away from The Office reruns on Netflix): fold laundry. put away dishes. bake bread in my dutch oven. put more music on my iPod. put away Christmas decorations. organize refrigerator. update calendar (one of my favorite things to do right away in the new year).

Happy Wednesday!

Oh, one more thing...have you checked out Etsy Taste Test yet? It's all sorts of wonderful! I think I spend an hour browsing it last night. :)

ms. z turns 1.

Today marks one whole year in this little lady's life. She is my friend, Dani's, daughter and she is completely adorable. Every single month I get photo updates tracking her life and the 2nd photo is from month 11.

Zoey's grandparents left bright and early today for Nebraska {where Z + parents live} for an all out birthday bash for the one-year-old. She is without a doubt, one of the most beautiful babies on earth: those big, blue saucer eyes and that adorable expression she makes when someone is taking her picture--precious girl!

flexible.

Above is a photo of Karma. Acting like a shrimp. I swear, this little one will be in the most odd positions all day. One minute she's sleeping soundly on the chair and the next she's got her feet above her head and she's biting her tail.

On the agenda...

I'm this close to finishing the Time Traveler's Wife. Up next is Water for Elephants per a recommendation from 3 of my co-workers.

I bought a little birthday present for myself on Saturday: these jeans. Say what you will about Lauren Conrad, but she knows how to make a great pair of jeans. They are perfect roll-up-into-capri jeans.

Check this out: our local celebrity, Justin Vernon is collaborating with Kanye West. We are ecstatic {and by we, I mean me and Chad...there was a discussion between us last night of the possibility of getting an autograph. In our dreams.}

P.S. The countdown has begun: Only 23 days until the start of big-girl-going-to-college. Yikes. :)

on my plate.

I love watching the cream/coffee mingle. One little pleasure of mine.

The above picture is my breakfast for today. Toast with butter + honey and peanut butter + strawberry jam. I'm always trying to find new combos to put on my multi-grain to make it even more delicious. The classic pb + j is one that I'll always love.

In the glass is our homemade iced coffee. We've been making it daily and can't. get. enough. In our opinion, it's better than McDonald's {and about 1.50 cheaper per cup}.

Steps:
We brew a pot the night before,
pour it in a pitcher,
add a little sugar for sweetness {while it's still hot so that it dissolves completely},
let it cool overnight,
pour it into a thermos the next morning right before work {adding ice cubes to the cup},
adding creamer if desired {I desire, C doesn't desire. Sometimes he does add a little chocolate sauce, but he's more of a straight-out-of-the-coffee-pot kind of drinker}.

My figurative plate is full today too. I'll be busy with household to-dos {laundry, dishes, vacuuming, putting everything in the right place}, a lunch date with a friend {so excited to show her wedding pictures}, dinner, and then C's softball game. 

Finally, I'm lovin' my readers as of late. You guys are so charming and you are just like real-live girlfriends. I am thankful that all of your voices are telling me that you liked Inception too, you have new school fears too, you love gg just as much as I, you are a list-maker, and you hunger for God's Word. If you feel like talking, I'll be so appreciative. Anything on here that sparks a thought: I'll listen. Blogging is the best. Truly--I enjoy every single comment so so much. 

p.s. It's my birthday tomorrow. Hip hip hooray. Tune in to view my list of 22 things I want to accomplish in my 22nd year.

photo edit.

Let me just start out by saying that I am not a professional photographer. At all. I like taking pictures and I like making them look good.

A reader of mine recently posted a question:
What program do you use to edit your photos, make collages and most importantly, how do you "round the edges" of your photos?

So, Johanna, here's my secret--I use picnik.com. I stumbled on this website 5 months ago or so, took a browse around it, and bought a membership. I can't remember how much I spent on it, but you can get a year membership for $24.95. With that, you can use all the Premium features of the website.   I like it because it's easy to manage and I like how simple it is to add a personal touch to it.

Here's some of my picnik work using the premium setting {again, I am by no means a professional-why else do you think I edit all my pictures?}

01. Here is a straight out of the camera shot of my sister, Laura, and I in 2007 in Seattle. 

02. Picnik has a feature that allows you to 'auto-fix' every shot.

03.Did you see that Laura has her camera in the bottom of the shot? That got cropped right out of the shot--now the picture is 4x6 which would make it easy to put in a frame {which I also love to do}.

04. Our faces are really shiny, so I used the "shine-be-gone" to dull that down a little.

05. Like I said, it's so easy to personalize your photos, so with this one I added text and rounded the edges {found under Frames}.

Let me show you another photo I edited, focusing mainly on faces this time--

01. The straight from camera shot of Chad and I at my cousin's wedding in 2007.

 

02. I used autofix again, but as you can see, nothing really changed.

03. That's when I had to go in and adjust the contrast and the exposure. I always just play around with these settings until I'm satisfied.

04. My next step is to use the 'shine-be-gone' setting {seriously Amanda, meet a powder brush} and I do a little airbrushing just to smooth our faces {not too much because I don't want it to look unnatural.}

05. The final step that I do is whiten our teeth {again, not too much since I want a natural look} and round those edges again.

Picnik is a perfect editing tool for me--it's easy to navigate, which I love. There is a lot of unnecessary things on the website {like Pixelate and making the shot into a Puzzle}, but I've never had any problems with it. You don't have to round every single corner of your pictures like I do, but I just like the old-school look of rounded edges. It's something that you can use if you're into editing but don't want {or have the funds} to invest in Photoshop.

Anyone else use Picnik out there? What are your thoughts on it?


P.S. Thanks Johanna for the question! If anyone else has any questions about editing or anything in general, please ask---I like it!

recently...

Here's what I've been up to the last couple weeks...
{l-r starting at top left}

01. Drank a gingerbread latte with my friend Claire.  We were at Starbucks for over 3 hours catching up.
02. and 03. UJ playing with us....my little buddy is so close to crawling {hopefully when they're here for Christmas he'll premiere all his hard work}.  P.S. Being an aunt is so amazing.
04. Chad and I had an adventure at IKEA the day after Thanksgiving. My very first IKEA experience! {Are you proud of me, Beth?!} We roamed the showroom with our tape measure discussing our living room, whether or not we should buy end tables, invisioning what we'd put in the cubbies of the table we bought {am full of ideas that I'll share soon}. 
05. Speaking of IKEA, while we were eating our inexpensive buffalo chicken wraps in the IKEA lunchroom, we could've swore we were 20 ft. away from Joe Mauer {so convinced that we took a picture of him.} Even though it was completely ludicrous, it was fun giggling about our "celebrity sighting".
06. Shared hot chocolate and snuggled in a booth watching our friend, Matt, play at a local cafe.
07. Last week Thursday marked the beginning of the Great Christmas Tree Weekend of '09.  My dad, mom, sister and I went to a tree farm until we found the perfect one for our living room (08) and one that could fit in our "fancy" living room (09). {Ever since we moved, we've gotten two trees: the "mom" tree-with all the fancy trimmings, and the "kids" tree-with all our popsicle stick and hand made ornaments.

miss you.

A couple weeks ago, my best friend came into the Cities to visit her dad. It was on a weekend that I was already busy, and I wasn't able to see her since she was in town for less than 72 hours. I bummed around pretty much the whole week until Friday when my friend Dani was in town and I thought that I'd be able to see her too. Turns out that didn't happen so I have been in a girlfriend slump ever since then.

I absolutely love my friends that I see on a regular basis. I think that after graduating high school (been four years for me) the relationships with your friends change dramatically. Not only do you have to be in class with each other anymore, in my case, I wasn't able to be in the same town (or time zone) as them. I went to school that provided room and board and I made friends with people who lived in totally different parts of the country. This makes meeting back up awkward since it's often a year or two and you have different priorities and ideals since the last time you saw them. It's also hard to have phone conversations with people since you usually have to have majorly epic talks since it's been so long.

I know that this post is all over the place and hard to follow which I do apologize for. I think that it's hard for me to organize it since I don't know how to organize these thoughts. Simply put-I miss my friends both far away and close. That is all. Does this happen to anyone else out there?

image credit:
1.absolutely beautiful things
2.k is for katie via lovely little tihngs
3. personal photo (best friend and I-2008)