At Home Drive In

Here's a super old post for you.  I am a huge college basketball fan.  Always have been always will be.  My team of choice is of course the Kansas Jayhawks.  If you ask my dad, he will probably tell you that my first words were Danny Manning.  This past spring, Coach Self took a group of boys who weren't supposed to amount to much of anything and took them to New Orleans.  Not everyday your team makes it that far, so we had to do something to celebrate.  We have an extraordinarily large tv but unfortunately not an extraordinarily large living room.  So in order to accommodate the number of people we wanted to accommodate, we moved the party outside.    

We borrowed a projector from my parents (they have the coolest stuff at their house).  It wasn't the prettiest, but we were able to finagle everything so that we could hook the projector to a cable box (which is luckily plugged in right by a window at the back of the house).  In case you were wondering, the white fabric is a scrap I found to hang on the cord so no one would trip over it after it got dark.

Here is my sweet set up.  Yes that is an arm chair in my backyard.  It is from college and I keep it in the garage for backyard gatherings.  I tried to give it away for free on Craigslist but no one came to pick it up so I figure I will keep it for outdoor furniture as long as I can convince people to move it for me.

In case you were wondering, they won in the Final Four (the game we watched in these pictures) then lost to Kentucky in the championship game.  Broke my heart, but they break my heart every time they lose.  ROCK CHALK!

Wine Rack From Pallet

I can't take credit for this project--it was a Christmas gift from my aunt who lives in Nebraska.  But I love love love it and I just had to show it to you all.  I wish that there was a good place in my house now to display it where everyone could see it, but this house is just a bit too small.  However, when I live in a house that isn't a rental, its totally going on the wall somewhere.

Look how much wine it holds.  Alex and I realized recently that we had become wine hoarders--we kept buying it but never drinking it.  Such a bad problem to have.  But we are working on remedying the situation.  I do think we are going to stay mostly beer people though.

Bridal Shower Games

Like I mentioned in my last post, I was on Team Decorations/Games for my friend's shower.  I wasn't really going to plan any games at first becasue I fall into the category of people who don't like shower games.  Activities I am okay with most of the time.  But I think that most of the time shower games are awkward/boring/unnecessary or a combination of all three.  Then a few weeks before the shower, I was having dinenr with the Bride and she happened to mention how she had been at a bridal shower for someone else the weekend before and it was so boring because they didn't have any games.   Whelp, there goes my plan.  Games it is.

I'm pretty sure we only planned the shower to be 2 hours long but it may have been three.  (Alex would finish that last sentence with "I've drank since then" which apprently is a good excuse for not remembering things).  Factoring in socializing and opening presents I knew that we weren't going to have a ton of time to do much else.  But I get super parnoid and like to over plan, so I planned to games and one activity.  And then the Bride was almost an hour late so we pretty much only did one game.

The game we didn't do is the one where you are on teams and dress one people up in a toilet paper wedding dress.  Then the Bride was going to pick her favorite.  But we didn't have enough time so we didn't do this one.  That was okay though because I'm not sure people really like this game.  Plus its not like I wasted any supplies because I planned ahead and did not buy the super cheap toilet paper.  Now I'm stocked fora  few months.

The game we did do was a how well do you know the bride/how well does the bride know the groom game.  This game went well other than two small issues, only one of which was my fault.  You can find free printables for this type of game all over the internet but because I like to reinvent the wheel, I made my own list.  Basically the questions are things like 'what are the names of the Bride's cats' and 'how many kids does the Bride want' and 'what elementary school did the Bride go to.'

Once I had my list, I modified it a little and printed a copy for the Groom to fill out.  Then at the shower, the Bride had to guess what the Groom had answered.  Small issue number 1.  I may or may not have waited until the night before the shower and handed the Groom the list of questions at a tailgate for the Royals-Cardinals game.  So by the end of the night when he got home and started answering the questions, he may have had one or two drinks.  Which may have put the Bride at a slight disadvantage because she was guessing what Sober Groom would have said.  Whoops.

For the other half of the game, I handed out lists of questions to everyone at the shower including the Bride.  Then once everyone had written down their answers, the Bride said what she answered and you got a point if you got it right.  SLight issue number two was I think the Mother of the Bride got a little upset that she didn't know all of the answers.  I tried to come up with a good mix of questions since we had guests who were the Bride's family, the Groom's family, friends from college, friends from church and other random people.  The Bride is from St. Louis but lives in KC now so hasn't live at home with her parents for a while.  Nothing I could have done probably to remedy the situation so I didn't stress about it too much.

For prizes for the game, I went to Trader Joe's and bought a lot of chocolate.  It was cheap and almost everyone likes chocolate.  And if you don't like chocolate, you know someone who does.  Plus, I took the extra home for me and Alex to eat.

The last game wasn't really a game, but more like an activity.  We did a Date Night Jar. I got a jar from Hobby Lobby and cut up slips of paper and had people write down ideas for dates.  Some of them were funny and some were serious.  Alex actually asked me to write down all of the ideas for him because he has a hard time planning dates.  We actually held on to this and had it at the bachelorette party too because a lot of the girls at the bachelorette party didn't go to the shower.  I stuck the instructions in a frame so people would know what to do.  This was really great for downtime at both the shower and the bachelorette party.

Wedding Shower

One of my sorority sisters and dear friends got married last month and I was lucky enough to be one of her bridesmaids.  The other bridesmaids were other sorority sisters and the maid of honor was the bride's childhood friend but we liked her so much we tried to convince her to move to Kansas City so we could hang out with her more often.  Anyway, back at the end of June we threw a shower for the lovely bride.  It was lots of fun and I thought I would share some pictures.  I will come back and do specific posts about projects I was in charge of later 

 Food table (with the MOH in the background)

 Drinks and more food

Bride to be playing a game in her seat of honor

Cutting the yummy cake

For anyone wondering about the logistics, I can share a little bit about how we planned everything.  There were four bridesmaids plus the maid of honor.  Like I said before, the bridesmaids (myself included) are all sorority sisters so we know each other well.  The maid of honor lives in St. Louis and is a childhood friend of the bride.  We talked with her about what help she needed and we decided what would work best for us would be for us all to plan the shower.  We split it up so that three ladies were in charge of food and two ladies were in charge of decor/games (we thought that was the best way to split up the financial responsibilities).  I was on team decor/games.  Anyone who is looking for guidance on how to plan a shower, my best advice is just to start talking to the interested parties and figure out what everyone's expectations are.  If you need help connecting with someone in the bridal party, ask the bride for help.  Not that you should ask the bride to plan her own shower, but in our case, since we didn't know the MOH, we asked the bride to talk to her to make sure the MOH knew that we were here to help her with whatever and that we didn't want to step on her toes if she had it covered.  It ended up working really well and the shower was great.  I will be back soon to share some of the decorations and games I was in charge of.

27 Things To Do Before I'm 27

I've kind of been wandering lately.  For the first time in my life, I'm not in a place where I am working on X which will lead me to the next step Y with an ultimate goal of Z.  I am so not used to this much free time.  Once upon a time I made a list of 101 things to do in 1001 days (a Day Zero list if you will).  But my life is way different now than it was then.  Plus 1001 days is a long time.  But I liked the idea, so I came up with 27 things to do before I turn 27.  My birthday is at the end of February, so I have a little over six months to get it done.  So without further ado, here is the list:

1. Learn how to use my camera on manual settings
2. Lose 30 lbs
3. Finish an unfinished project
4. Read A Confident Heart
5. Read 15 books
6. Watch 15 movies
7. Sell something on Etsy
8. Get rid of 100 things
9. Reach 100 blog posts on this blog
10. Write a living will/health care directive
11. Unplug for a weekend
12. Go on 10 special dates with Alex
13. Complete Couch to 5K program
14. Do/make 10 Pinterest pins
15. Make a donation
16. Update/fill all picture frames throughout the house
17. Do something spontaneous
18. Carve pumpkins or make a snowman
19. Make list of 100 things that make me happy
20. Finish captioning my JYA photo albums
21. Get off Facebook for a week
22. Go to the zoo
23. Finish reading/listening to the Bible
24. Don't buy anything online for a month
25. Try something new
26. Hand make 1/2 of our Christmas gifts
27.  Make a list of 28 things to do before I turn 28