Hidden Talents!

My husband is a very, very talented man, but he has some hidden talents that he has yet to express to me (for the past 4 1/2 years) since we've been together. On Christmas I was able to experience his wonderful talent as a 'yo-yo' artist! Yup, the yo-yo...it took him a few tries to get the swing going again, but eventually he was putting it to 'sleep' and 'rockin the cradle'! He wanted so badly to go 'around the world' with it, but there just wasnt enough room for him to do it without hurting someone! If only you knew how funny it was to see him light up when he could still do the tricks! It was like a toddler in a candy store..I love him for his hidden talents! I give him lots of credit because I tried hard to make the yo-yo go down and up and struggled...what a talent! Yo-yos take talent...are you good at the yo-yo?

I'd rather be blogging...

Lately I've been slacking on my workout program, but I need to get on the ball seriously! 130 days til the mini & I'm so far from my goal of completing it-running/jogging the entire thing its not funny. But to be honest I'd rather be house hunting, TV watching, reading my new book, or blogging!

I've officially become obsessed with finding new gadgets, and figuring out how to do something new lately. The other day I found an awesome website to help me build and create my new blog header-which I love! It took me a while, but in the end it was worth the time. Another new thing I did was make a 'button' for YOU to grab & place on your blog or website so that you can get back to our blog quickly & in style....basically it takes the place of a link. I hardly think anyone really cares about the button, but it was a 'hard' task for bloggers & I was able to do it in a short amount of time which gave me a sense of accomplishment. Because I'm so obsessed with creating things, I made Jackie/Alex a blog header to match their current background (they were the only ones without a Christmas themed background & they had professional pics which always make things look better!)...They are 'Sweet Home Chicago' on my blog roll.

If you would like me to make one for you I would love to in my spare time! Just let me know-I've got the hang of it now & I really enjoy it. I would just need to see the background you have picked out & have the picture/pictures you want on it as well as the title! I might just make one for you and surprise you though...if in my spare time I'm bored & don't feel like exercising! At this point I'm sure my husband thinks I'm crazy for as much time as I spend on the blog!

Christmas with mom's side

Today we traveled up north in alot more snow than we have down here to see my family and my mom's side for Christmas! Here are some pictures:

Jake, my brother, Beth (my brothers girlfried), and my cousins playing the hottest game in our families...Ticket to Ride!

Heather & Mario...Celina & Ricky!

Kate, Casey, Carly, Maggie & Danielle posing after opening some gifts!

Kicking back after dinner

My sister (8 mos pregnant!) , mom, brother, me & Jake! The first 'family' photo in a long time :) p.s. check out my new hair cut! WAyyyy better than my messed up butched out hair cut the last stylist did to me!

Let's Review 2009 Standeford Style

This past year has been filled with tons and tons of blessings! Roller coaster ride it has been, but I wasn't expecting a merry-go-round so I guess I can't complain. After all, that's what life is all about!

In January:

• We made our first trip to Phoenix, AZ to visit the Aunt Donna & Uncle Jim and the southwest. We had a great time and experienced fresh picked oranges...which are almost ripe for 2010-too bad we won't be returning that soon.
• I began my last semester of school (internship)...time being 'unpaid' for working!

In February:

• My mom turned 50! I was planning on planning a party for her, but she clearly stated that she would be mad or upset if we threw her a party. So, no party for her-she was excited she would be getting a senior citizen discount @ many stores! I can't wait for that 10% discount (lol)

In March:

• The only thing I can remember is we celebrated St. Patty's day....I was too busy working on case studies from the hospital to remember much!

In April:

• I celebrated my 24th birthday, attended the IDA conference with the other dietetic interns, took a short weekend trip to Chi-town to visit Jackie & Alex, and I started job hunting.

In May:

• We took our first trip to Cancun, Mexico with Ginny/Dustin for a nice relaxing time between my 3rd and final rotations. Jake began job hunting in Texas & Indy....he was offered a job in Conroe, TX but we declined (maybe that was June?). We celebrated the triplets graduation from high school!

In June:

• We celebrated our ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY! I continued to work my way through the last rotation of my internship while Jake held steady at Sam's Club in Lafayette.

In July:

• I GRADUATED FROM THE CPD PROGRAM and began studying for the RD exam!! After 11 months of traveling, learning, and working for free! I continued to search for jobs. We made our first trip down to Austin, TX to visit Brad/Rach in 100 degree weather in hopes of possibly moving south and to catch up with them-it had been too long!

In August:

• We were apart of the Butera/Burch wedding and celebrated with my cousin Matt and his, now wife, Lyndsi! We started looking for apartments near Indy, but still kept the option of moving to TX in mind...at that time our lease was up Aug 30th.

In September:

• We celebrated Jakes 1/4 century birthday :), I passed the RD exam, we moved to Plainfield, and I obtained my first full-time job as a RD!

In October:

• Jake transfered to Sam's Club in Greenwood-switched to overnight manager, we started attending Bethesda Baptist in Brownsburg, met a lot of cool new friends, we watched Boilermaker football slip down deeper in a slump, went to our first comedy club with Jackie & Alex, surprised Jason for his birthday and visited John & Rach in Detroit on Halloween.

In November:

• We gave thanks to the many blessings that have come into our lives in the past year...looking back at how things had come about. Jake started going to a Bible study (the ladies study starts in Jan '10!) with the guys he met at church & started playing flag football. After all, things do happen for a reason & there are many great reasons why we ended up in Plainfield...I now know that-well you know hindsight is 20/20 but foresight might as well be 'blindsight'!

In December:

• Enjoyed our new apartment and the lack of snow in Indy, began the long search of house hunting, celebrated an awesome Christmas and are all ready to bring in the new year with close friends at a cabin in Southern Indiana! Welcome 2010...the Standeford's are ready for you!

***There are many other things that happened this past year! If we forgot anything...feel free to comment so we can reminisce too :) *** Thank you family/friends for an awesome 2009!

What do we do now....

Jake and I just got our credit reports from annualcreditreport.com (Thanks to Al)! But, now that we have them we really dont know what they mean!! Everything was green-assuming as in good, or that we've been on time with any payment we've ever had. It shows the money we still owe on our car, and student loans (ie debt) but what do we take from all this? Basically, it didnt show us anything new that we didnt already know.

It offered to give us our credit score for only $5.95, but we opted for just the report for FREE! Should we have gotten the credit score or not...Jake thought we could get that for free at a bank we we try to qualify for a loan?!

Pictures!

Saturday we spent Christmas with Jakes family since Jason & Tabatha arent going to be coming back in town next weekend. We played Ticket to Ride, ate smoked turkey breast, and enjoyed each others company! Here are some pictures:

Bella opening her presents with help from Ann & Nellie...

Grandma & her grandbabies :)

Joe, John, & Darlene

Rach, Jordan, Zane & Jessica watching the girls open presents!

Oh my shoe...oh no another picture...you pick the caption!

This is as good as it gets! 1 more year-and they'll be pros at photos :)

Grandma helping get the girls situated!

Ann & Nellie in a cookie coma!

Friday night we had a Christmas party with some of the couples from our small group! We wore our festive ugly sweaters...even though we knew it wasnt an ugly sweater party & that we would be the only ones wearing them. That's just how we do things :)

Jake & his sweet sweater!

Jake playing with Riley...we need a dog!

'Rent a dog'...Riley! Heather & Evan's dog. We rented her for a picture by the tree!

We couldnt stop laughing at how goofy we looked!

Hillary, Heather, Christina, Me!

Christina...my co-worker! She is such a blessing!

Trying to get my point across in Taboo...it didnt work, the word was 'clobber' started out good, then used cobbler-finally got buzzed before getting my team to say the right word. Oh well, it was a hard word to describe!

Wendy & Kevin, Heather & Evan, Hillary & Dustin, Christina & Brett- Our small group...minus a few (Katie & Garrett we missed you guys)! Good times :)

Indiana's First Snow!

Here's for all you Southerners/Texans who may not see a lot of snow! & Rach...it snowed on your birthday so I had to take a picture and share! Just enough to lightly cover the ground here in Indy, Lafayette probably has a lot more than we do but I'm OK with a little snow!

Our official 'ugly sweaters' and a santa hat to put it over the top! My turtle neck and vest as soo big I had to pin it with 4 safety pins in the back just so it wouldnt look so frumpy-but I guess thats what ugly sweaters are all about. But, Jakes comes straight from the 90's-you know you had one of these when you were younger! More pictures to come from our get together with our friends in our Sunday school class...The best is yet to come!

O Christmas Tree...O Christmas Cookies!

I love Christmas decorations..they make the apartment seem so much more homey-er (if thats a word) than usual. I like just sitting with the lights off and Christmas tree lights and decorations on-I usually dont want to take them all down! So here's our Christmas tree...and our stockings are hung on the window ledge! Hopefully we'll eventually have fireplace, but for now our $5 fireplace on DVD works great!

This week I've been a lean, mean, baking machine! I made double batches of M&M cookies, sugar cookies, and snikerdoodles. On my list to complete include buckeyes, one of my personal favorites, and a new treat thanks to my co-worker Christina 'snicker suprises'! Its a mini snicker with peanut butter cookie dough around it..mmmmmm! Anything chocolate & peanut butter is awesome to me :) While I was baking, Jake was catching up on some much needed sleep.

9 more days...I still have some shopping left to do for Jake, but other than that I'm finally finished eventhough I've had a rough year. Returning and exchanging gifts to accomodate the people the gifts were for! Next year we may just donate the money we would spend to a charity, church, or something! It would be much easier and a lot less work! Who knows my mind may change later on in the year!

It is Ugly Sweater Season!

This year we will be attending our FIRST Ugly Sweater Christmas Party! We couldnt be more excited for it...In fact we bought our sweaters back at the end of October from Goodwill-just so we could have the most options available! Jake's, I must admit, is a lot better than mine, but I picked it out for him-I think part of what makes it so good or funny is that it is one too many sizes too small for him!! I'm searching for some bell or santa earrings to wear to match my 'ugly' theme!

This reminds me of when I actually see people wearing sweaters just like ours for real-we just saw someone at Walmart the other day with one on like mine! Too funny! Some of the people at Walmart will crack you up-just by what they are wearing (www.peopleofwalmart.com is a great site for a laugh on a bland, unhappy, feeling low kind of day). I will most definately post pictures later!

Thanks for all the house hunting tips~ we will certainly (lol, certainly is Peyton Mannings fav word-right Rach!) take them into consideration!

Help! We're thinking about looking for homes!

Today I started looking online for houses in the Plainfield area! Could be a good thing, but also a bad thing because our lease isnt up until Sept 2010. Good thing because the first time home buyers credit of $8,000.00 was extended until April 2010 (must close by June).

I've read a few things online about what to do before buying a home such as check your credit & debit-income ratio, etc....But, I'm not even sure if I'm doing it right! We both are really confused & have many questions, but at the same time we dont REALLY want to start looking until March-because I get 'lets buy it now' syndrome. A few things we are wondering: should we put money down? how to start looking (other than online)? if you run a free credit report, does it take points off? There are many more, but thats all I can think of now.

I think a big problem could be that we are so ready to get a house that we havent even decided what things we are looking for in one! Is there a website or something out there to aid our thought process? Really, any assistance would help greatly. And I know we could get a realtor now, but I feel like I would be pressured and un-knowledgeable about the home buying process & I want to know as much as possible so we dont get scammed!

Good thing we still have a while!

Printable Coupons!

For some reason I'm in the mood to find deals, discounts, and printable coupons! Heres a great site I found so you can print some off too!

http://printable-coupons.blogspot.com/

Taste of Home Magazine Discount Price

Taste of Home is offering an entire year subscription (6 issues) for $3.95! Regular price is $18.00. This could make a great Christmas gift for someone who loves to cook or loves new recipes! The link is below:

http://www.magazinedealsnow.com/title.asp?title=TASTE+OF+HOME&SSAID=45997

Finally Fulltime

This week marks my first week as a full time worker! I started at 30 hours per week and have made my way to 40 each week. I'm excited to be making a little extra money that we can now put towards my student loans in January. In addition to getting extra money to pay off debt, I will be working on Thursdays now which will prevent me from going shopping and spending money that I dont need to spend! Win win situation either way you look at it.

We had a great Thanksgiving weekend spending time with family first at my aunts house on Thanksgiving and then at Jakes grandpas on Saturday. We did, however, get a chance to run the drumstick dash Thanksgiving morning which was 4.5 miles in Broadripple. It was cold and it drizzled a little to-very undesirable conditions for running, but needless to say we both finished running, Jake just finished 10 minutes before me. Yeah, yeah, he runs a lot faster than me, but we were both really sore until yesterday! It made me realize that I had better get moving if I'm going to be running the mini in May! The dash was fun- we got dry fit long sleeve Brooks t-shirts for running and after wards we were ready for meal time.

Friday, the Monrovia Bulldogs played at Lucas Oil for the state championship and lost...they had a great run, but couldnt come through in the end. But, my HS team didnt get to state so that was a great accomplishment for them. Earlier that morning we finished our Christmas shopping with some great Black Friday deals-it was Jakes first experience, I'm not sure if he'll want to do that again or not but he was a good help to me by standing in line!

This morning we put up the Christmas tree and tomorrow we will be decorating it-we didnt have time since I had to work at 12:30 and Jake was ready for bed. We also began our project of putting plastic on our humongous windows to try to keep the cold air out. I hope it works because its been cold in here lately. Speaking of cold when I got back to the office my car had frost on it!! I wasnt expecting that at all so I had to dig my scraper out. Gotta love 4 seasons :) Happy December tomorrow!

Yay, the weekend

It's Thursday & that means Friday is right around the corner! And, today is my day off-so I get to relax a little bit which is a good thing because I think I'm catching a cold. Two days ago I went to bed with a sore throat, yesterday I woke up with a cough, and today I have all that and a huge headache-it's coming if it isnt already here! I just hope I don't pass it along to Jake.

Tomorrow we are going to watch Monrovia in the Semi-State high school football tournement, then Saturday we are going to tailgate & hopefully go to the Purdue/IU game. I will finally get to meet my brothers new girlfriend who is 4 years older than him! Not that it matters, but everyone else in my family has met her so I kind of feel left out.

My sister found out last week that she's having a girl and is due on Valentines day! I've been working on planning her shower and hunting down some good deals in the baby department-which is fun, but I get carried away! I feel for Jake the day I'm preganant and want to buy EVERYTHING in the store! That is if it would be a girl-the little boy stuff doesnt really appeal to me as much. Speaking of being pregnant, my cousin Matt's wife is in the early weeks of her pregnanacy & she just found out the other day. Exciting, but I feel like that 'itch' is coming on a lot lately especially with lots of people around me pregnant or with little kids. I think that means a visit to my mother-in-laws to see her baby sitting kids-that usually does it 6 kids, screaming, etc its good birth control!

Outside of all that I'm extremely excited for Thanksgiving this year. We are doing it at my moms on Thursday and at Jakes grandpas on Saturday-Two times the fun & we should be seeing most of our families which is also good! I've already made a pumpkin ice cream cake to take somewhere, but being ice cream it can not travel very far and both our travels are at least an hour so we might just be eating it at home!

After Thanksgiving I plan on buying a fresh turkey on sale (if they go on sale) from Sam's to make. I never feel like I get enough turkey with all the other yummy foods there are available so one turkey for two people ought to be enough!

Have a great weekend!

Vera Bradley Sale

Into Vera Bradley...or know someone on your Christmas list who is? There's a sale going on now where you can get the Hannah bag (reg $45) for $10.80 with the coupon code: 10offsale Shipping is as low as $8, but you can get more than one to lower the shipping per item! That makes it a $20 gift that would normally be twice as much! I'm debating on buying one for someone, but if you need one too we can go in together and only pay $4 each for shipping! Now thats more enticing.

Copy & paste the link below for a picture-they are really cute:
http://www.verabradley.com/catalog/search.cmd?form_state=searchForm&keyword=10442023&x=41&y=11

Christmas Shopping

So the last few weeks I've been spending part of my days off Christmas shopping all over the place! Its a lot easier to find a deal if you are looking, although Jake would say its a lot easier to spend money if you're in a store... He has a point, but still. We actually have a lot of people crossed off and done! My latest was a gift at Kohl's that was regularly priced at $49.99, but was on sale a week and a half ago for $19.99-but they were out. So, I got a rain check and in the mail that same week I received a $10 off your entire purchase from Kohls. So my once $49.99 gift was only $10.48. Thats the steal of the season!

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I dont seem to have a problem buying things for anyone other than Jake. He never wants anything, never thinks of things he could use, and never shops unless I ask him to come with me! With that being said, you can see where I would have run out of ideas-especially since his birthday was in September. If we had a house I could go off of that and buy him something for that, but there are somethings that work well in a house and not an apartment! If you have any ideas about what things you think would make a great Christmas gift, I could use the help. I try to look at electronics, his hobbies, etc for ideas but I'm blank and it's sad! After all Christmas is only 40 days away!

On to Semi-state!

The Monrovia Bulldogs are now 13-0 & heading to Semi-state. We went to watch the game tonight at Marion College and it was packed! The game was really intense. I felt like I was in high school again watching my team play for the regional champ trophy. For most of the game we were winning, but at times I thought it was over, but an TD, sack, and interception did it all for the team winning over the Ritter Raiders. It was the most exciting high school football game I'd been to in a while!

Who let the dogs out? haha, sorry I had to!

He Doesn't Wear Red!

These pictures are of Jake playing flag football with the guys we met at church. But, they told him he needed to wear pants/shorts with out pockets or tape them, this, that, and a red shirt or red long sleeve! Jake said, "I dont have a red shirt" to one of the guys. LOL we both looked at each other and said at the same time "He doesnt have red because he never wears red! At Purdue you DON'T wear red-so all he has are black/white/gray athletic shirts". So he borrowed this red shirt from one of them! We both laughed bc it's so true, but most people don't think about that! Red is for Hoosier fans!

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