Crazy Eyes!

Was looking through our pictures tonight and came across this little gem. Check out those CRAZY EYES!

Dang Gina!

Check out these sweet giveaways for headbands and earrings at Dang Gina! They're super fun and I hope I win them! Enter and you can maybe win them too! Wait.....don't enter cuz that'll lower my chances of winning! Just Kidding! Go and enter anyway....I won't hate on you if you win. I'll just expect that you send me at least one of them for my birthday! ; )

First Concert Recap

Chad, in his gift giving awesomeness (seriously....he is waaay better than me at giving the perfect gift!) gave me tickets to a Safety Suit concert for Christmas. I was sooo excited. Ever since I discovered them this last summer, I have loved pretty much every one of their songs. And the fact that they began as just this group of friends who in college decided last minute to sign up for a Battle of the Bands and ended up winning to having their song "Stay" hit number one on the VH1 top 20 list this last summer is pretty awesome to me. Needless to say, I like the bunch:)

Sadly enough though, I'd never even been to a concert besides once at our county fair. Oh and there was that other time when us hopeless romantics traveled like groupies cross country (well to Utah) to over excitedly catch up with Colors when they played at the Farmington County Fair. Goooood times, but not necessarily true blue concert attendance. So I was even extra excited that my first real concert would be to someone like Safety Suit.

Regardless of my butterflies....which came from a mixture of rushing to get down to Utah, worrying that Brinley might cry for Chad's mom the entire time we were gone, and all the anticipation of my first concert, we had so much fun.

It was actually a pretty small concert which I loved. And we found the best spot, this raised metal countertop thingymajig that we hopped up on to sit and watch. There wasn't seating, and we realized after standing through the first opening band that we, or our backs, weren't going to last through the next four hours, so Chad scoped out the spot and we took it. I kept waiting for someone to come tell us we had to get down, but it never happened. In fact a little girl about 8 or 9 who was super excited about one of the local bands ended up sitting by us through their performance so she could actually see.

In my concert newbness I figured they wouldn't let us bring cameras in. Sheesh was I wrong, even the band members were whipping out their Flips and filming the crowd. So no pictures. Totally regretting that, but it is what it is: )

We even found a new band that tickled our fancies....they were the opening band that Safety Suit brought with them on tour called "The Rouge". Honestly, I probably wouldn't have liked their music as much had I not seen them perform it, but they were soo entertaining and soo talented. Two thumbs up for "The Rouge".

We returned home, well to Chad's mom's house, to two sleeping girls who had done amazingly well without us. Who needs parents anyway, right: )

And I fell asleep to the sound of ringing in my ears....and didn't even mind. First concert. Victory.

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

I always do this...I get a little behind on my blogging and then things I want to write about start piling up and I get overwhelmed with the thought of writing them all out and so I end up writing nothing! Calm down, vandi. Babysteps, child: )

But first and foremost I wanted to express a big Thank You! to everyone who helped with our Christmas Box House Project! Seriously....so many people were willing to give something and it was amazing to see. People are so awesome: ) I knew that before, but this just reiterated it for us.

We got around $850 worth of donations, maybe even more. There were shampoo and conditioners, board games, soaps, hand sanitizers, headphones, toys, mp3 players, dvd players, printer paper, diapers, wii games, books, clothes, lot's of craft stuff, a $300 craft basket (via Chad's mom with Stamp in Up!), food, toothbrush sanitizers, lotions, a nice winter coat, and more. I said I'd get lots of pictures, but due to the battery life span of our camera equaling about 30 seconds! and other interfering events I was only able to snap a couple pictures.

*Man looking at those pictures it doesn't do it justice! Seriously guys there was a lot of stuff. Literally the entire back half of our van was chuck full: )

The other bummer deal was that we weren't able to get a tour like I initially thought we would. In my emails with the volunteer staff they mentioned being able to have a tour, but I should have followed through with it. We never ended up being able to go in or see the kids which would have been really neat. So learn from my mistake and ask about a tour if you ever volunteer for these guys. I'm sure it would be awesome!

This was kind of a neat little thing that happened. My good friend Rochelle sent me $15.00 for us to buy some donations with. I decided that I'd try to buy some clothes with it since there weren't very many donated. I ran into Target and was looking around for some warm winter clothes. I really wanted to be able to get the most for my money and found some cute sweat shirts and sweat pants that were $3 each. I picked out two sweaters for a girl and a pair of sweat pants and ventured over to the boys section to see if they had anything that cheap too. The boys sweats and sweat shirts were closer to $5 (weird) so I'd only be able to get one sweater or one pair of pants. Now you might be asking yourself, "Vandi, why didn't you just buy more than $15.00?" I would have loved to. I would have loved to buy all the kids new clothes if I could, but at that moment, I literally had no extra money to spend, so I was mixing and matching and sorting through the clothes trying to get as close to $15 as I could I came across a little boys sweat shirt that had a small red clearance sticker on it that read $.99. What?! I looked through all the other boys sweaters, even ones that were exactly the same as that one and found no clearance sticker on them. "Hmm...this is probably not an accurate price, but if it is I can get an entire outfit shirt and pants for a boy." So I excitedly grabbed a pair of sweats to go with it and carried all of the clothes up to the front. I honestly was expecting them to say the clearance price was wrong. Especially when as the cashier had trouble ringing up the sweater. He hesitated after the first ring up, looked things over, punched in some number or code, and looked up at me and said, "Nice deal." I enthusiastically replied, "I know!" as he rang the remaining clothes. And upon the last beep of the register I anxiously awaited the total......$15.33! Sweet!

Who knows, maybe some little boy at the Christmas Box House really needed new pants and a sweat shirt this year. I'd like to think that little red price tag was God's simple way of making sure that happened: ) Thanks for the $15 Roch! You're awesome: )

Also, I'm sorry for anyone that I was never able to meet up with. You're awesome and you know who you are and thanks for the thought anyway.

I hope we were able to make a difference for those kids this year: ) Thanks again everyone!

Mothering Style....did you know you had one?

I'm sorry....I have been so technologically out of touch since the holiday break, so sorry for the long pause in posting. I have a lot to share about the whole Christmas Box experience which I totally plan on posting tomorrow, but just to throw this out real quick, my friend Mel posted this the other day and I thought it was pretty interesting, so I wanted to share it.

Which Mothering Style are you?

On the sweet-n-condensed version of the test I was an ENFJ (Extravert, Intuitive, Feeling Judging). But I think the most interesting thing would be to see how that affects my "mothering style."

So, I'm going to find the book Mother Styles at the library and see if I can't better understand my mother self: ) I almost wish there were some kind of personality test out there for our kids so we could better understand them and their perspectives and needs. There probably is something like that out there. Anybody know? Heck, maybe I'll Google it and let you know: )