Thanks of the Week: Facebook and Fireworks

I have been totally slacking on my Thanks of the Week post.  No sense of commitment. Bad Danielle, bad!  It's been a bumpy couple weeks, but things are finally starting to sort out for me, so without further ado, my thanks:

1. Social Media: I know that seems like a weird thing to say you're thankful for, but with all this stress of needing more employment, social media has been a great way to reach out to friends and family for help.  Because of my social media pleas I was able to obtain a part time position working in sales for our local magazine: Lewiston Auburn Magazine.  I am so excited the people behind this project are just a hoot to work with, and so inspiring and motivating.  I love the project and the spirit of community behind it, I'm very excited to be involved. 

Yoga 

2. Yoga, and my yoga instructor, Alice.  I swear she should be my therapist.  She always lets me rant and complain and whine and cry and get all my frustrations out.  Then she very calmly reminds me everything is going to be ok, gives me a nice little nugget of advice or wisdom and then we're onto to yoga.  Besides a nice little workout, setting just one hour a week aside to just spend time with myself and center has been really nice.  My last class was last Monday, and will probably be my last class until the wedding is over and my finances are in order, but I need to try and force myself to make that time for myself at home.

Keep Calm

3. My Wedding! OMG, can it just be here already!?!  I'm so excited for our wedding to get here.  We still have so much planning to do, and I'm so over it.  I think I must seem cynical and un-girly to my friends and family.  But seriously - I just don't care about all the little details anymore.  I want to have a fun day.  I don't want to stress over it, because the centerpieces aren't what matters.  Becoming Mrs. Eaton is what matters.  The starting of the rest of our lives together is what matters.  I'm ready to move onto the next things in life.

Sparkler

4. The 4th of July Weekend: Praise God for the 4th of July Weekend!  Camp on the Lake. Lobster. Relaxing. Family.  Long Weekend.  I. Love. It.

Holiday Catch Up

Ok, wow am I a blog slacker! Finally I can breathe again! The holidays totally snuck up on me this year, so Nate and I had yet again a "up until 1am Christmas Eve finishing making and wrapping presents" kind of night. (I have the best intentions to stay on top of it, but never do...oh well) I'm warning you now, this post is picture hee-aa-vy!

This year, the weekend before Christmas, the best and I took our moms to Boston for a little girls' getaway shopping weekend. On our way in, we stopped by the Square One Mall on Rt. 1. I was totally impressed by Kate's Mass-hole driving, she could fit right in! We shopped a little and had dinner at a restaurant called Twitters. It seemed really cool, and the food was pretty good, although the service was awful. Our waitress took forever to get back to us, and never brought me a water, though I asked three times. I could have forgiven her, but as I was on the last couple bites of my Chicken Marsala I found a bug in my food! Talk about grossed out! The best part is, our waitress said she would take it off the bill after Kate shot her dagger looks, but then came back to the table offering us a free dessert instead. Kate lost it, went and found the manager, and gave him an earful in front of a bunch of busy tables. That's why I love her. :)

We went shopping in Faneuil Hall, which was decorated so pretty for Christmas. Kate was pretty impressed by this ginormous tree....

We had lunch at the Purple Shamrock, which was soooo good! I'd only ever been in there when it's a bar, but the Irish food...yumm-o! There were carolers in Quincy Market, and we sang with them. Kate and I decided this is going on our 24 before 25 list. (More to follow on that.)

We shopped and shopped and dropped into the Cheers store. They didn't know our name...

We stopped by my old stomping grounds, the North End, to get some lobster tails/dove tails/elephant tails (I never know which place calls them what, so I just stand there rattling off animal tails until someone understands what I'm asking for) from Mike's pastry. I never actually got anything from Mike's before, because man is it busy in there. Line is out the door. I used to just get my goodies from the little bakeries that are open 24/7, which is great for late night drinking snacks. Did I say that out loud? Anyways, Mike's Lobster Tails were delicious and HUGE!

As part of the trip and our Christmas gift to our mommies, we took them to see the Nutcracker!

The inside of the Opera House is so incredibly beautiful. I wish we had dressed up more, but we were shopping all day in our sneakers and jeans, lol. Makes you feel out of place when you're in such a beautiful old building. ....Maybe once CLT gets control of the Great Falls Building we can renovate it to look like this! Now that's dreaming!

Me, my mama and Aunt Kara going in to see the Nutcracker! Soo excited! My mom had never seen it before. Aunt Kara took me to see it while I was still living in Boston and we sat like three rows back. It was nuts, you could hear every brush of their step and the squeak of their toe shoes. We sat much farther back and up high this time, but could still hear that squeak! :)

The best and her momma, they were so pumped to see the Nutcracker!! I love watching Ballet. I get so mesmerized and lost in the beauty of it all. I'm so excited to go see Black Swan now too! It makes me a little sad and miss dancing, though. I've vowed to start taking yoga or dance again. I've realized the reason I loved ballet so much is because I'm controlling and compulsive. The fact that I can't control the world around me makes me absolutely nuts, but when I was dancing I had control over my body and got so much satisfaction from the precision and control ballet offered me. While dancing I could tune everything out and just be inside my own head, it was kinda nice, and I need to find time to do that again.

All in all we had an awesome weekend. We stopped into Kittery for even MORE shopping. Yes I am in the car! "Help! Get me outa here!!"

I don't know how we fit all our stuff! Next year we're totally going to do it again, but we'll be taking a bigger car and the Lydon and Pouzol women will only be allowed ONE suitcase! haha!

Ok, now fast forward to Christmas Eve Day. The best and I baked ALL DAY LONG. Morning to night, didn't sit down once! We pre-made 4 batches of dough, and as usually the case had the best intentions of making more ahead of time, but....we didn't. So we made most of the doughs that day.

Platters waiting and ready to be filled. We made 14 platters with 11 different kinds of cookies. We had grander plans that that, as usual again, but decided to bite of only what we could chew. (get it? he he)

Snickerdoodles baking in the oven....mmmmm.....

Eggnog cookies, while not my favorite, were so pretty cooling...

Worst part of peanut butter kiss cookies...unwrapping all the kisses!!

And the Thumbprint cookies defeat us once again! Ahhhg! That's Thumbprint cookies 2 - Kate & Danielle 0. What the heck?! We ended up using a pre-made sugar cookie mix to make the thumbprints.

And there you have it! So pretty :) So what kinds of cookies did we make? I will tell you:

• Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies


• Thumbprint Cookies with Strawberry and Blackberry Jam


• Chocolate Crinkles


• Eggnog Cookies


• Snickerdoodles


• Red Sugar Cookies with Frosting


• Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies


• Double Chocolate Chunk Cookies


• Chocolate Molasses Cookies


• Brownie covered Mint Oreos


• Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Phew! Well there you have it. After all the craziness preparing for Christmas Nate and I had a wonderful weekend spending time with our families, relaxing, eating delicious food and just enjoying each other. It was very nice. :)

Ok, time to start preparing for next year!!....

8 days till Christmas, just can't be

So the best and I have been super busy getting ready for the holidays. I got to swing by a new place downtown to try their bubble tea. It wasn't as good as the bubble tea I used to get in Boston, but it was still yummy...
Ok, so one of the first projects we've completed was making coasters. We took a strip of industrial rubber wall base and cut the lip off. Then we cut it into sqares. We printed off pictures of our friends and modge podged them on. I love making modge podge a verb.

We put a couple layers on top of the pictures. This is the stage where I was freaking out, being a modge podge newbie, I panicked that it goes on so foggy. But no fear, it dries nice and clear!

Oh, how we heart modge podge!!

Nate and I FINALLY got our tree. I was crying about it so much, Nate brought home a tree for me, and we spent an evening decorating it. Ain't it puurrrdy?


Lastly, our vanilla was ready to be bottled! We strained it through coffee filters to get any vanilla chunks out.
This ended up taking for-ev-er, so we strained it through a tea steaper.

Then we poured the strained vanilla extract into the little bottles we got. Kate got this funnel at Home Depot on sale for like a dollar....oil...vanilla extract....close enough...

Kate made these cute little bottle labels, you can't tell but they have pink ribbons on them.

In a moment of boredom I decided to make Harley a sticker head...she clearly wasn't happy with me...So I called her more names. "Hey, don't call me a sticker head!"

Oh the simple pleasures...

peace out,

Holiday Woes

...and the frantic list making has commenced. I used to wonder, as a child, at how adults could be stressed over the holidays. Christmas means hot chocolate, decorating the tree, baking cookies, snow days, candy canes and a big Christmas feast. Now all those things just feel like work. The aweful part is I really do enjoy them, but when you don't have the time to sit back and do them laxadaisily, I begin to feel like I'm doing them because I have to.



I am reminding myself I still have 11 days until Christmas, to finish my shopping, crafts, get (some) decorations up. I know this Christmas will be somewhat of a washout. I should try to take pleasure in that I've done very well past Christmases, hosting parties and making a large percentage of my gifts.






It just stinks always feeling like "oh well, I'll do that next year." You can't go through life waiting for tomorrow to do what you wanted to do today. It's just a sad reality of adulthood, that you won't have the time to do everything you want to.




So I'm going to frantically keep working on my lists, fight off this cold, and hope for the best!

Crafty Christmas, well under way!

Ok, I'm so behind on blogging this, but the best and I have gotten well under way with our Crafty Christmas! Firstly, we are baking up a storm. Every week we are each baking a huge batch of cookie dough then throwing it in my big chest freezer. Then the week of Christmas, we're going to spend a day baking and making Christmas cookie platters for friends, neighbors, and parties.

We didn't take pictures last week, but we made Eggnog Cookies and Chocolate Crinkles. The Crinkles were to die for. period. end of story, so freaking good. The Eggnog cookies were a little weird. Kate and I both liked them, but my hunnie Nate who's reaping the benefits of our cooking sprees, didn't like it all it. It kind of has that weird spiciness to it. The recipe calls to sprinkle them with nutmeg, but it was a little too much. When we make the big batch we're going to sprinkle with cinnamon instead.

This week we cooked up Pumpkin Chocolate Chunk Cookies and All-in-One Cookies, since honestly I lost my recipes and forgot to pick up any ingredients, and I already had everything needed for this recipe. Well it's been going really well...

We mix up huge batches of cookie dough...

Put them in the freezer to harden before putting them in gallon size zip lock bags.

There's a little bit of bowl licking...

And of course we have to test our creations....we decided to try the All-in-One dough as a thumbprint cookie with jam.....putting the jam on the cookie before cooking it...bad idea....

This is the face of failure. It's looking at you.


Spoiler Alert: if you are related to me, stop reading this.




Ok, so on to some of the gifts were making. Kate found a "recipe" for vanilla extract, basically vodka and vanilla beans, and found a site for these cute little bottles:

It's going to take right up until Christmas for this stuff to be ready. In the meantime I'll be designing and label for the bottles.

We've also made ornaments. Here's mine:


Kind of dark and hard to see, but we found some glittery floral stuff and pretty ribbons with glittered monogram letter stickers. Kate's are much more funky:

You can't really tell but that red ribbon is zebra print, and it's awesome! She also made these fun fish crayons! Cool huh?


Until next time,