kayla aimee: only slightly neurotic

Snapshots at home

Adding some Christmas cheer to the foyer with some handmade decorations.
 
Our kitchen...well my Christmas list is full of things needed to complete it. Things like curtains and frames and someone to come sand/paint all 4527 of my kitchen cabinets. Until then, I consider this little vignette above the breakfast table a major accomplishment. Mostly because that shelf hasn't fallen off the wall, unlike the shelf I hung in the living room. This might have something to do with the fact that I was not the one to hang the kitchen shelf. I did, however, buy those teal mugs at a thrift store for 50 cent apiece, which I think completely redeems me. For some reason, Jeff does not agree.
 
And a little November Happiness: yesterday I updated my gallery at Two Peas and then later I noticed this:
 
I love that page so that made me smile, which means I'm down to six Hershey bars today. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
 

Home Before & After: Scrapbook Studio pt 1

There is still a lot to be done in this room, but here is the work in progress so far! This room BEFORE was a baby blue color with massive hot pink stains on the carpet. I was really sad to see those go.
 

This room AFTER is pale pink/beige with new carpet:
  

 

• Thank you to Making Memories, who generously gave me all of the storage for this space, minus the red piece. I picked that up at a thrift store in Tennessee.
• All of the vintage pieces belonged to both of my grandmothers. The old books, the cut class, the penny tins, the vintage lamp. I love having their things in there.
• Still to do: curtains to hang, artwork to put up on the walls, vintage throne chairs from my grandmother to nestle in the corner.

Thanks for looking! I love this space. It has great light and I think it will be really charming once all of the final touches are in. It's also the only room in the house where I could be really girly.

So tell me, what is our ending?

I've noticed that I typically post about infertility once a month. And apparently, I do it when I am PMSing. Funny, that. And I suppose it is for that very reason that my posts about infertility tend to be slightly ranting in nature. I wrote this less ranting post a week ago, but it seemed an odd juxtoposition to post it while I was in the middle of the contest. You know like, "I can't have babies, vote for me!" Awkward, isn't it? Right.

October marked an odd month for me this year. Last year in October, I was pregnant for about a minute. Last year in October, Jeff held me with his hands resting on my stomach. "This is sad" he'd mumbled into my hair.

This October we hadn't even been trying. But I still irrationally expected to be pregnant. Like, maybe there was some sort of magic about October, as though the month itself made babies. I chewed on my nails, waited three minutes, threw the test in the trash and sighed. There was nothing special about October after all.

Then I came across this song and I drove for awhile through our windy country roads, letting the lyrics wash over my heart. Of course there was nothing special about October. It was never October. It's just that I so badly want to know the ending. I want it to be my version of beautiful. I want it to be my arms that someone is resting in.

But when I'm not looking for bits of magic or meaning in months, I know that at the end of it all, I just want to be in His arms. In November I'm not going to try to get pregnant. In November, I'm going to shop for a Christmas tree and teach a class and generally do things that make me happy. That's why I have eaten seven Hershey bars today.

This video is cheesy, by the way, but the song is beautiful.

Overheard: all that glitters...

Jeff sent me an email requesting that I pick up some lotion at the store. I flipped through my coupons and found one for a bottle of Olay for dry skin. I felt really good about that because Jeff has dry skin and so obviously this was going to be the best possible choice of lotion for him.

Later that night Jeff eyed the purple bottle critically.

"That looks like pretty girly lotion" he said

"It's not girly lotion" I replied

"It looks like it smells girly. Did you smell it?" he asked

"No, but it isn't scented or anything so I'm sure it's fine" I told him

5 minutes later he walked into the kitchen glimmering like Edward Cullen.

"You're right, he said, this lotion isn't girly at all. By the way, I have glitter all over me. From the lotion."

Friday Randoms: a) last day to vote! b) last day to enter to win a $20 giftcard and a space to my and Wilna's holiday class!

DIY Holiday Workshop + A $20 Scrapbook.com Giveaway!

It's been in the works for a while. Lots of SKYPE chats, sipping coffee and playing with glitter. But it's finally here. A new workshop taught by myself and Wilna Furstenberg.

And not just any workshop! A holiday workshop focusing on my favorite season: Christmas. Over 25 holiday projects, printables and more. This year my girlfriends and I committed to exchanging handmade gifts and we're going to show you how! Premade digi albums, babylegs, centerpieces and more! To see sneak peeks of the projects, CLICK HERE to visit the classroom and look around!

To celebrate, I'm kicking off the giving season early! It's been awhile since we did a Q&A over here so leave a question, any question, in the comments and tomorrow at 6pm I'll draw a name to win a $20 gift card to scrapbook.com as well as a space in the class!

And if you don't mind, let us know what you think of our baby new class! We couldn't be more excited about it and we're really hoping you'll join us to kick off this holiday season! 

How do you like my floating head? I think it's quite a flattering portrait of me. Especially since it looks totally identical to nothing like me.

Congrats to Christy on winning the scrapbook.com giftcard and a space to the holiday class! If you didn't win, don't be sad! You can sign up for the class here and there will be lots of fun giveaways for the class participants! Thanks for playing along, I'm looking forward to answering all your questions!

Also: hanging pictures at eye level is no good if you are 5 feet tall

I hung this set of photos in our hallway:

Jeff walked by and commented that he liked them there.

"Yeah, but they keep going crooked" I told him

"Well, did you hang them with two nails?" he asked

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. I mean, everyone knows that you use two nails to hang photo wire. Of course I had done that. I expressed this sentiment to Jeff and he raised an eyebrow and took one of the frames off the wall.
 

So apparently, you are supposed to space out the nails across the length of the wire. And then that keeps the pictures from hanging crooked. And also, the nails are supposed to be at the same height or something. Who knew?

Oh, right. Jeff knew. He looked at me and said "That's okay honey. You're good at other things."

Other things of great importance that are happening:
1) I did not notice that photo had slipped down until I posted this, despite walking past it multiple times during the day. I'm very observant.
2) I promise to stop asking you to vote very soon. But not today. Vote!
3) Tomorrow I'll revealing something that Wilna and I have been working on and doing a giveaway

Wait, does that baby doll have a ...

When I was five years old, my parents had a baby. To prepare me for this baby, some of our neighbors thoughtfully bought me a baby doll. It was supposed to be a realistic baby doll, I suppose to help me with the transition. Except that my parents had a little girl and the baby doll? It was a boy.

Now I know it LOOKS like a girl, what with all that pink lipstick and the fact that I used to dress it in my infant sister's clothing. But it was most definitely a boy, a fact that a quick peek under that fluffy pink dress would verify.

Because that baby doll had a little plastic doodle.

It did! And this was in 1988, before the days that baby dolls talked or tinkled or breastfed (the latter of which, apparently, you can score for only $112 on ebay. Merry Christmas to me!) were the norm.

I took that doll with me everywhere and people were fascinated with it. Mostly because my grandmother showed all of them it's teeny little man parts. And when I say "all of them" I mean every single person we ever  encountered. The lady taking our order at Taco Bell. A person we happened to walk past in the shoe department at Macys. Her pastor. Everyone.

She'd take the baby doll from me and say in a hushed voice "Look at this little doll! Just look at this! It has a little wenis*! A real little wenis!" And whomever she was accosting with the doll would exclaim over it and call over all of their co-workers and they'd all stand around and say things like "Have you ever seen anything like it in all your days?"

21 years later I still have that doll. I've never met anyone else that had one. All of my friends think it is creepy. My husband likes to pretend that it doesn't exist, which is why I like to randomly leave it on his pillow.

I'm really hoping that someone else on the internet has encountered one of these baby dolls. I'm also hoping it wasn't because my grandmother introduced you to it while you were grocery shopping.

(* I know it isn't called a wenis, I just really like that word and I don't want my blog to come up in adult searches. I'm very delicate. Also, we're getting so close to the top 20! Thank you greatly for your votes. I wish I could bestow you all with your own little boy parts baby doll!)

Tis the season'

For us to buy a Christmas tree. We've always had artificial trees because my sister is allergic to real Christmas trees. Wait, I take that back. We've had artificial trees ever since we learned that my sister was allergic, which happened to be the fourth Christmas Eve that we spent in E.R. And let me tell you, they really skimp on the stocking stuffers in that place. I mean, who wants a baggie full of used syringes? And a lollipop? Really? C'mon doc. We know you're making bank.

When we were first married we inherited an old tree and some lights that had been in my grandmother's attic for the better part of a decade. This is because we got married two days before Christmas and we were broke. We're still broke, but that's not the point. The point is, we don't have that tree anymore because IT CAUGHT ON FIRE.

Apparently, if you have exposed wires on your Christmas tree and you are out of electrical tape it is NOT a good idea to use 7 Gypsies gaffer tape instead. Even if you are a scrapbooker and have lots of gaffer tape on hand and it seems like a really good idea at the time, trust me. It's not. Nothing says "Christmas Cheer" like seeing your tree go up in flames. Actually, if I recall correctly the phrase "Christmas Cheer" is not one of the things that Jeff said when the tree was burning.

I am one of those people who puts their tree up on Thanksgiving, so I'm shopping around for the best deal and thinking about going the pre-lit route. Because for some reason, Jeff is all against Christmas trees now. He's got this totally unsubstantiated fear of the tree catching on fire or something, like that ever even happens. 

(EDIT: You can vote! until November 6! We had the dates wrong so please keep voting! THANK YOU for being my own personal form of Christmas Cheer!) 

Reader poll: is this normal, slightly odd, or just altogether weird?

Jeff and I had an odd experience and I wanted to ask the internet if it was as weird as I thought it was.

After a few homes that we looked at fell through, we decided on the house we have now, which was a foreclosure. It took a while for Jeff to convince me to go that route, because (contrary to my killa reputation) I'm very tenderhearted and it was tough for me to buy something that I knew had been a personal loss for someone else, especially after losing my job last spring.

We'd heard that foreclosures are often left in less than desirable conditions and ours was not the exception to that rule. It was trashed. That's why we were in the middle of ripping out the floors when the former owner showed up.

We had the doors open and were tossing out the old carpet when a lady walked right up our back deck and into our house (without knocking) as though she owned the place. I think that is because she thought she did still own the place. I think that because that is what she told us. That she still owned the house. And then she (a total stranger) bombarded us with many personal questions about our finances. Jeff handled the situation very gracefully.

I was pretty shocked over the whole thing. I mean, you don't just walk in someone's back door. You go to the front door and you knock. We live in the south, y'all. If you want to go to someone's house and tell them you still own it, then you do it with manners. 

In all seriousness, I wondered if this is just one of those bizarre things that only seem to happen in my life of awkwardness or if any of you have experienced something similar.

(P.S. One day left! Thank you for your votes, they are greatly appreciated)

They call me killa

No really, that's what they call me. Or, that's what they call me at the Heating and Air service anyhow, according to my invoice. Apparently I've got quite the reputation there and it's not as a charming southern belle. No, they see me as more of the hard, cold, street type. Not streetwalking type, don't start any rumors. And they are right, really. I'm very hardcore. You should see me do dishes. I jack those dishes up, yo. I've seen many misspellings of my name over the years (which is always confusing because phonics people, KAY-LA) but this is BY FAR my favorite:

 

It's currently hanging on my fridge, to remind my husband not to mess with me because I'm so gangsta. Word to your mother.

(Stop, collaborate and listen: please vote for me. Vanilla Ice approves this message. At least, that guy I married that I'm currently referring to as Vanilla Ice does. Never mind that he's refusing to respond that moniker.)