When life is made of little and big challenges, sometimes ya just gotta rejoice in the little victories. Some of these victories are to-do list victories, or frugal living victories (this is what happy-homemakers do to keep their hard-working husbands happy--- keep the budget low!), or baby prep victories, or just Life-Is-Good victories. Enjoy!

~ A friend sent me a coupon code for another FREE Shutterfly 8x8 photobook! Now our New Orleans babymoon / third anniversary trip book is complete and on its way to my happy hands… for just the cost of shipping!

~ One dollar Amish butternut squash + a slow-cooker soup recipe waiting to be made. Nothing says wonderful autumn like squash!

~ A newly painted baby nursery / guest room. Transformed from an aqua-bluish (old roommate’s room!) color to a more neutral tan color called “Imperial Sands.” (Note: I love reading the descriptive terms on paint colors!). The nursery is painted and nothing else done, but I’m holding onto that paint victory! :)

~ Portraits done for a wiggly-squiggly three-month-old nephew and his smiles are worth their weight in gold. *sigh* Babies are so great. (note: retired from professional photography, but I make exceptions for blood relatives. Mostly because they don’t laugh too much when I fall over because I’m 7 1/2 months pregnant and my balance right now is waaay crazy!).

~ Two pairs of maternity skinny jeans (oxymoron, anyone?) in the mail to me for a grand total of $2.48. This is amazing, because I actually cried over the weekend because my ankles were cold. Maybe pregnancy hormones… buuuut it’s fall and I have capris and skirts, but no jeans that fit this pregnant body. So today, I ordered jeans… using a gift card, a coupon code + a standard free shipping offer. Now we just get to see if I ordered the correct size. #firstworldpregnancyproblems

~ Childbirth class homework this week includes practicing “labor comfort measures.” Brandon gets to give me a massage every day! Yay! I LOVE THIS HOMEWORK!

~ I organized the silverware drawer, because I’m slowing making my way through organizing the whole kitchen. Now I smile whenever I open the silverware drawer. Yes, I am happy because of the little things.

~ Also organized the baking supplies, spices and cookbooks cabinets in my kitchen... which is approximately 1/3 of my cupboard space... In the process, I climbed up on a chair (is that a bad thing?) and threw away nearly three trash bags of old cooking magazines, garage sale cookbooks and food that was waaaaaaaay past its expiration date. #dontmesswiththedeclutteringpregnantwoman

And that’s the end for now.
What are your little victories?  #Rejoicewiththemthatrejoice

Life always seems to settle into a bit of monotony during the semester. So when I talk to people and they ask how things are going, I’m like, “gooood. Not much happening.” I mean, life is happening and it’s always a bit of twists and turns, but generally our days look about the same. I like these times of quiet work, but I also like planning our next adventure (did you read about Arkansas?).

Thinking about future adventures has got me thinking about past adventures… and that I never really blog-shared about our wonderful Maine adventure in August 2013. That, my friends, is truly a pity, because it was a graaaaand adventure. It was the first real let’s-go-away-for-a-week vacation that we’ve had since our honeymoon and we were super-excited about it. I intentionally left my iPhone at home and stayed off-the-grid so that we could just focus on spending time with each other, resting and relaxing. We thought hard about where to go, what to do, where to stay and…. yes, it’s true… what to eat. Hehe. The end result was pure enjoyment.

Let’s talk specifics:
Where: Mount Desert Island & Acadia National Park, Maine
For most of my growing-up years, my family travelled a lot---at least once a year. Because my dad worked in the swimming pool industry, his not-so-busy season was in the fall-ish/early winter time and we always tagged along on his business trips to the annual pool show. That’s one of the perks of homeschooling---flexibility! Our travels mostly took us south (Florida! Texas!), southwest (Arizona!), and all the way west (Oregon! California!), and always our middle-stops in Tennessee and Missouri. As you can see, we had a serious lack of northeastern USA travel. That situation was remedied around 2008 when my parents, little brother and I visited Maine for one of my favorite vacations ever. So Maine was on Brandon & I’s married-bucket-list (would you believe that we made one of those on one of our three ‘first-dates?”’ Yes, three. It was complicated.). Basically, Maine was a dream come true.

When: Late August
We knew that we’d be hitting Maine at the peak of tourist season and were not thrilled about that --- we love nature, but we don’t love crowds. But being married to a college student has certain restrictions. One of the most important restrictions is that one does not have the freedom to go on vacation during the (always less busy, always less expensive) off-season. But we’d deal. I mean, complaining about vacation challenges is like textbook #firstworldproblems.

How: Road Trip!!
Because road trips are awesome. It’s non-stop talking with my favorite person in the world.

Who: Us. Wonderful, wonderful us.
This also counted as our two-year-anniversary celebration, which is pretty awesome. Two years of marriage down, so many more to live.

 It looks like Brandon is getting his picture taken while driving, but the sunglasses fake you out. He’s actually looking at the road. Oh, the wonders of sunglasses.

If I talked ALL about Maine in one blog post, it would be gigantic. And you probably wouldn’t read it all. So I’ll share bits and pieces of it over the next few days/weeks/I make no promises on timelines where blogs are concerned, but today I will limit myself to talking about the cottage.

One of our concerns with going to Maine was cost, because you know, some of the most common-sense advice I’ve ever gotten was to never, ever, EVER go into debt on things that depreciate in value. Vacation is a prime example. Vacation is gone (besides the fun memories!) by the time you get home. So budget, save and pay in cash. We knew that hotels were too expensive. We wanted to cook some of our own meals to save money, and we also wanted to get away from the crowds that overwhelmed Bar Harbor.


This was the answer. This adorable little sea-view cottage was on the “quiet side” of Mount Desert Island. It was a good thirty minutes away from Bar Harbor, which suited us fine since we spent most of our time in the national park anyway.

This is the view! I was always drawn to the window to watch one little sailboat going back and forth throughout the day.

The inside of the cottage was cute, tiny and comfortable. We LOVED it.


One of the owners (who lived in a big house behind the cottage and always waved to us when we sat on the deck) is a bit of an artist. It’s ocean art!

It was hot August weather for most of our stay, but occasionally we braved the hot noon sunshine to have lunch on the deck. Sandwiches, homemade iced coffee and… yes, Maine blueberry turnovers from a local bakery! (I’ll talk more about the food in a later post!)


That little cottage was one of our favorite parts of the vacation. We loved the location and solitude and the view. If there were any negatives, it would be that the island only has a couple main roads and there seemed to be a lot of trucks passing often, and that we visited during the hottest week of the year and all the windows welcomed the heat and then kept it in the little house, but really, we can’t complain.

After a few days, I began to know the road that we drove “home” on, all its little twists and turns and funny restaurants and national park signs. I would look forward to seeing what level the tide was at during the different times of day. I liked looking at the boats and docks and views. I always looked forward to this one spot where the trees parted suddenly and then there was this lagoon and view of the mountains.


Before we knew it, we were back at our home-sweet-home-for-a-week.

I am a fan of Valentine’s Day. I always have been. I was the single girl that passed out red roses to fellow single ladies on Valentine’s Day so that they would feel loved. Love is amazing. God is love and we love because He first loved us and if Valentine’s Day reminds us of love--- pure, amazing, sacrificial love --- then I’m a fan.

So I am a fan of Valentine’s Day. I am not a fan of doing things just because everybody else does them. I am NOT a fan of the relentless advertising that tells men that their worth and their self-respect and their ego is all tied up in what they’ve done and what they’ve purchased for the lady in their life. Last week, I spent approximately 45 minutes attempting to watch the Olympics (gave up because the only thing on was some random preliminary hockey game that was not the USA and therefore we didn’t care) and was disgusted by the tone of commercials regarding Valentine’s Day. Brandon and I eye-rolled collectively at this and I knew our plans would be much more meaningful and much less expensive, so win-win for us and lose-lose for the corporate giants banking on taking our hard-earned money. So I’m sharing about our Valentine’s Day. Not because you should do anything like us or because it was better than anyone else’s, but because it was us and it was lovely and it was good.

We waited to celebrate until Sunday (February 16th), because as Brandon so eloquently told his coworkers, “If the greeting-card companies can create a holiday, then we can celebrate it two days later.” Hehe We know that Valentine’s Day was not exactly created by greeting-card companies, though definitely popularized by them, but you get the picture.

We decided to stay home and eat because a) too many people in the restaurants, b) we both love being home, c) Brandon loves my cooking, d) we could do Valentine’s Day nicer while staying within our budget. PS – I recently started using Mint.com again for money-tracking and I am LOVING it. Yay for fiscal responsibility starting in the home! ;)
My Valentine’s preparation started late Sunday afternoon. Brandon was still blissfully napping (Sundays are for napping), but I was too excited about décor-food-date-night to sleep! I started my little decoration rampage by rummaging through the guest bedroom closet and finding an odd dark red sheet (works for a tablecloth in a pinch!), then over to my room where I found the shiny white-and-silver scarf which became my table runner. Then I’m opening boxes of not-quite-put-away Christmas decorations and am victorious. After opening the fourth box, I find the red beads. They had adorned our Christmas tree not too long ago, but now I’m looping them into a heart-shaped pattern and dotting tea lights around. Added a few white tapers (apparently I stockpile candles!) and the table is set!

*sigh*. It’s so romantic. And let’s talk about the food. Main dish of shrimp linguini and broiled asparagus. I added some red pepper flakes to the tomato sauce for some kick.

I used a Wegmann’s dry bread mix for the no-knead garlic artisan bread on the side (so good for mopping up those tomato juices!). And I added fancy-ness by recreating a look I saw in a magazine: pomegranate seeds topping our sparkling white grape juice for Valentine’s-Day-appropriate color.

The crowning glory? My own creation of Nutella Tiramisu.

I knew that the combination of all our favorite things – Nutella, whipping cream and coffee – would make up the sweetest end of our meal. And I was right. It was so sweet and rich and delicious that we barely made a dent in our dessert dishes! Now the leftovers are at home taunting me as we speak….

The intangibles are my favorite. The things I can’t take photos of. The look of love in my husband’s eyes. The unendingly interesting conversation. Our shared laughter and joy as we look over the scrapbook I just finished. And the identical smirks and laughs that we give at the witticisms in Casablanca. The last part of our fun-and-frugal Valentine’s Day was a movie at home. Because you can rent movies for free at your local library. Oh yes!
Sweet end for a sweet date night. At home.

I have become increasingly familiar with Penn State's academic calendar. When I type "penn state" into google, it automatically pops up with "penn state academic calendar." Our life seems to revolve about the college semester. This is slightly ironic, because I've never been too interested in what was going on at Penn State, despite living a few minutes from campus for most of my life.

The real point here is this: SPRING BREAK. This Week. Starting after work on Friday, we are free from classes for one week!! !! !! While the majority of Penn State students are escaping to tropical climates for untold debauchery, we are spending the week working our regular jobs, getting home in the evening at a "normal" time and catching up with people that we don't see enough. And sleeping. ALOT.

Friday. Brandon was working late, but that's okay because afterwards, we went on a date! Prolly the cheapest date recorded in history (except for when we do 'stay-at-home-snuggle' dates, which are FREE). There's a place where you can get the cheapest pizza in State College. It's a hole-in-the-wall kinda joint, called Canyon Pizza, in the one place you do NOT want to go after Penn State wins a football game (in danger of riots), but on the quiet Friday night... stop in and get a big ol' slice of cheese pizza for $1. BOOYAH.

Then it's onward to Meyer Dairy for some serious ice cream eating. For the last year and half, we have been doing ice cream dates as our mini-celebration for paying off a debt and this was no exception. We are happy because (a) Meyer Dairy ice cream is AMAZING, (b) it is cheap as all get out, i.e. sundae & banana split cost $6.26 altogether, and (c) we're getting outta debt, baby! ;)

If you weren't keeping track, this date cost less than $10. The food was great and the company was even better. *insert mushyness here*