Great Results

I decided to make today my project day.
And I only spent 7 dollars on it! Whooo!
Out of all the rooms in our apartment our bedroom needs some TLC (besides the bathroom, but we can't do much about that one). No one ever sees it though, so it's always put on the bottom of the list. Anywho, I've been wanting to make a headboard for our bed, but just haven't gotten around to it. My friend Marilyn used an old door as a headboard, it looks great. We looked for an old door for a long time and no luck. Long story short, this is what I came up with!

You take a cheap board, the size you want (we just happened to have left overs from a different project).
Next I stapled card board on top.
Then I did another one, but I taped this one on, because the staples wouldn't go all the way through, plus no one would see it anyway.

Next, I used an old egg carton foam pad we had lying around, you could buy some padding or use batting. I had to cut mine up just right so it would fit and I had to add some "extensions" so it would wrap around correctly.

If you need to you can staple the front onto the board, wrap it around the back and staple it on. After you staple the foam on you can go back and pull the front staples out, so it doesn't show the dents.

Next you wrap and staple the fabric of your choice around it.
I found dark, brown, micro fiber fabric on clearance at JoAnn's, with an additional 50% off=$3.50 a yard! I needed two yards for this project. My board was 2 feet tall and about 5 1/2 feet wide.

Lastly, I screwed some legs on it, just using old scraps of wood.
They look flimsy, which they are, but most of the weight is on the bed and we will attach it to the wall. I used heavey duty velcro strips on the top of the board and attached them to the wall.

This was before:
(taken on a much more beautiful warm day than today)
And Ta-Da!!!!
The pictures do not do justice!
We love it and it is so comfortable to lean up against.
I love how it turned out!!!! Now I just need to add some other things to our room and it will all come together. By the time we leave probably! (Hopefully sooner!)

Here is a close up of the material.

It was super easy and cheap!
And best of all now we have a headboard!!

A busy weekend

For some weird reason every time I post, it doesn't let me type above the top picture...kinda annoying but oh well!

Anyway, we had a heck of a busy, but fun weekend! Friday day we found this awesome hotel liquidation sale, where they were selling all this older stuff from hotels for way cheap! They had everything from couches, armoirs, mirrors, lamps, t.v's, beds, anything you'd find in a hotel room. I know some would probably be pretty gross to buy like comforters. We bought this big mirror I'm going to repaint the frame and we'll hang it in our dinning room. And we also bought a padded bench, not sure what we're doing with it just yet, but it was in good shape and only 5 bucks.

Later we had a Halloween Party at church. It was loads of fun. It was supposed to be outside, but since it was raining we had it in doors. They had chili and cider, a parade for the kids, awards and we decorated the classroom doors and had trick-or-treaters (it was supposed to be trunk-or-treat). About 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave we decided how we were going to decorate our trunk (or the back of the chalk board). I had tons of this ugly orange fabric and some black pieces. We just cut out the black pieces and pinned them on. It was Matt's idea, we made this ugly pumpkin that looked so lame, but ended up being a hit.

As you can see there is a hole in it's mouth. Matt hid behind the board and connected a tube through it's mouth and dumped candy down it and it would fly out into the kid's bags or all over the floor. They loved it!
Luke was Mr. Baby Incredible and Matt a paratrooper or something and I was dressed waaay too warm (because I thought it would be outside) so I was just dying.

Well in the end we won the prize for the BEST door.
We got a yummy candy bar and a Halloween cd. Wahoo!

Then on Saturday we woke up early and tried cleaning up our house in preparation for Meg and Dave's arrival!!! Matt has been trying to get back in the mode of studying so he did a lot of that. About a block away from us there is this big Baptist church that had an Arts and Craft fair going on and I really really wanted to go (I miss going to all the good ones in Utah so much!!!).
Well...it didn't end up being anything like the one's I'm used to. It was pretty lame, but interesting I guess. It was mainly over priced junk. Like freaky hand made bears this old man was trying to sell us, bamboo plants, clothing from other countires, this freaky lady trying to get us to buy a "personalized" cd for Luke (all she did was burn a disc and slap a sticker on it with his name) for $20...yeah right! There was a lot of pretty jewlery I would have loved but way out of my price range. Every one selling things were trying so hard to pressure us into buying everything, "Will you buy some lovely cards with pictures of these beautiful windows on them? It would make a great thank you card." NO THANKS! It was a bit strange.

After that adventure we headed over to a friends birthday party that was so darn cute! She was turning two and her mom did such an awesome job. It was a Pixar Party and she had so many good ideas. She had little stations set up with different things to do from Pixar movies. All the food had labels like she had Oreo's that were labeled "Luigi Wheels" Off of the movie Cars. It was a lot of fun for all the kids.

Then JoAnn's was having an awesome sale so we ran over there to buy some fabric and things and we got such a great deal!

It was Stake Conference weekend and so we quickly headed out to Kirtland (about 20 minutes) to attend the adult session. Whew what a day.

Sunday, however, was a wonderful day. It was chilly but a beautiful day. We had Stake Conference at 10am, but Matt is in the YM Presidency and they told him he had to be there at 8:30am to practice with the youth who would be singing. We got there an hour and a half early, walked in and saw that there were not any leaders singing. Lucky us. We did get a good, soft seat and a close parking spot though. The talks were great, I love living in the Kirtland area. Each Conference and every time our Stake President speaks he talks about the Saints and I have grown to love the early Kirtland Saints and members of the church. I have learned so many awesome stories and visited the sites here many, many times. I love walking where the Saints walked and feeling the spirit in all of the sacred places. I truly will miss living so close to Kirtland and being a part of the Kirtland Stake.

A member of the Seventy (Elder Archebald) spoke at our Conference meeting and told a funny story.

He said,
"President Monson recently visited a nursing home in Salt Lake City. He approached an older lady and kneeled down in front of her. He came close to her, face to face and said, 'Do you know who I am?' She replied, 'No, but if you go to the front desk they will tell you."

It was a great day, I love our Stake Conferences.

This week is yet another busy week. Meg and Dave (Matt's bro and wife) are moving out to Maryland this week and are staying with us for a few days, we are very excited! We love having visitors. We have not seen them since March and Meg is about 7 months pregnant (I think). They will be about a 5 hour drive south, so we are so excited to have family living close by (haha). This is also Matt's last week on research block :( A sad week indeed. Next week he starts his rotations at Metro in Internal Medicine, he will be very, very busy and I will not see him very much. We've had such a great break, being able to spend so much time together!!
Thanks for being an awesome, hard working, amazing husband and father Matt.
We love you!!!

2 little projects and 1 big one

Last weekend our ward had "Fun Friday" or what others usually call it is "Super Saturday" (we have ours late on Friday nights so the hubbys can stay home with the kids that are usually just sleeping). We made a few fun crafts that were SUPER easy and cheap, because the majority of our ward are poor graduate students.

Above are two different sized cake plates, which actually are two candle sticks glued with Epoxy to two glass plates. Simple! And super cute! And behind, we just bought cheap plastic frames and modge podged scrapbook paper over it, you can do cute embellishments like buttons, ribbons or whatever to spice it up.

I love the holidays, but I'm not a huge decorator and the truth is I don't have a lot to decorate. I like it clean and simple. So in our multi-living room we have our big desk and on top of it I did this (above). I got four little pumpkins and bought that big, wooden candle stick at Goodwill for like $3 and repainted it. I painted one pumpkin white and stuffed some mossy stuff underneath it. I shreaded a black piece of paper and scrunched it up and Matt thought these nearly dead leaves looked good mixed with it...I'm not so sure? But I left it anyway.


On to the BIG project..dundundunnn...
First you take this.....
(all these balls)
Luke looks like he's never seen a ball before..oh wait he hadn't.

Next you take this stuff and a few more things....

And you get....well it's a surprise and you'll just have to wait and see.
It's a big project that has been taking up a lot of our spare time,
but it sure has been fun working on together and will be totally AWESOME
when it is finished. Hopefully soon!!!!

Attempting to take cute pictures of Luke....

Here is a little sneak peak of our little Baby Incredible.
Obviously, this is Luke's Halloween costume.
After I got the mask on I had to hold his arms down and run in front of the mirror so he could see or else he'd pull it off. Matt wasn't home, so these were the best pictures I could get on my own, while he would keep it on.

A week or so ago we had the most beautiful weather for a few days. The leaves were changing and were so beautiful!! So we headed over to these nearby lakes to see if we could get Luke to cooperate and get some cute fall pictures. Here are some of the results.
(We went two nights in a row to try and get the pictures before the sun went down).

The pictures below were fun to take... In this picture Luke has his arm behind him, as you can see, he was pulling leaves off of the vine behind him and he'd stick them in his mouth over and over. Meanwhile, we were trying to get a picture and not let him fall off the ledge.
Tricky tricky.

Matt pulling the leaves out of his mouth over and over...
Luckily, we were able to get a few decent ones.

After taking about 80 pictures (which weren't easy since our camera has quite a delay in between pictures) my boys were getting tired.

And Luke had about had it.

I'm glad we got a couple of good pictures, but next time I think we'll just go with a professional!
(Or buy a better camera).

Going Private

I decided to make my blog private. I know it gets annoying to view but I have been hearing more and more stories of creepo's out there who are copying pictures from blogs of people's children and saving them or posting them to other places on the internet. I have also had a few people who have done google searches for things like 'food storage' or anything like that and just because I have mentioned it in a post I recently made it has brought blog up and random strangers have left comments on my blog (fortunately no weirdos...that I know of). SO PLEASE EMAIL ME YOUR ADDRESS or leave it as a comment, if you are comfortable with that, so I can add you to my list.
You can email it to maryclark87@gmail.com.

Thanks to all who read my blog!

My little copy cat

Recently Luke has been very good at mimicking sounds we make.
It's pretty entertaining. Today I caught a little bit on video.

Again, it is not very good quality because it was taken with my webcam! They will get better some day when we get a video camera or just a better camera (mine doesn't record sound).
And don't mind the bruise on his head...he seems to always have one in that spot. Being top heavy and learning to walk around are not a good combination.

I still think it is fun, especially for the far away families that we miss so much!
This is Luke's way of saying I miss you!

Under Construction

My good friend has been helping me do some things with my blog...so sorry if it is all disorganized or ugly....it'll be pretty again soon!!!

Apple Pickin' Time

Saturday afternoon we headed out to Eddy's Orchard to pick some yummy apples.

It was such a beautiful day to be outside and probably the last one in a long time.
It was so BEAUTIFUL!!!! I love all the trees in Ohio.
I love the picture of Luke (below).

Especially in during the fall, look at the trees in the background.

We ended up picking 21 pounds for us!
It may sound like a lot, but we eat lots of apples.
And they were only 80 cents a pound!

Luke was very helpful and successfully picked a few apples.
He has been developing a little personality lately and doing funny little things like making funny faces and fake crying. I love the picture of his little nose scrunched.

And right before we left he discovered all the fun things underneath his bed...our food storage.
The Mac'n Cheese were especially fun to shake.
(Since then I put a crib bed skirt to hide it all)

I can't wait till next Summer & Fall to go to all the farms around town and pick even MORE!!!
I love it!

A night on the town

The Cleveland Night Life.

I know I always joke about how I don't really like living in Cleveland,
this is not entirely true. I do like living in Cleveland, it just took some major adjustments.
One thing that I have really missed is seeing pretty landscapes from high places like this. There are no mountains in Ohio and the only place you can get a view like the one above is from the 11th floor on the Lerner Tower at Case.

The picture below is another shot from the party, it was really neat that on the left we saw a beautiful sunset behind the city and on our right you could see Lake Erie.
What a site to see!


Last night Matt and I were able to go to a very formal dinner party (I felt a little under dressed). It was mostly with first year medical students and their partners, there were a few second year students and a handful of third years. The party was very nice, I have never been to such a fancy party before. The men were in suits and the women in their sleek black dresses, sipping on wine (we had caffeine free Diet Coke). It was very interesting and very much out of our element.
After the party we all headed over to Severance Hall to attend a concert by the Cleveland Orchestra.

To our surprise, during the middle of the concert Lang Lang came out and played the piano for about an hour of the concert. He was amazing!!! I am not a huge fan of the Orchestra, but this was really awesome. For those of you who don't know who he is, if you watched the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics he was playing in it. He does not have any music in front of him and it just amazes me how he can memorize the entire piece. It was a real treat! The entire night was funded by donors through the Medical School.
Everything was free, it was so nice!

And it was great to have our good friends there.
The Marilyn and Jason are in our ward and Jason is a
second year med student. We always have fun hanging out.

The picture above was at the party. And the two below were
at the Orchestra. The floor we were on had just been completed and it had not been used by any students from Case yet, we were the first. It was beautiful! And it had an AMAZING view!!!

Thanks to our friends the Gowans we were able to go on this fun date while they watched Luke.
Thank You!!!!

Before we left Luke and Matt were rough housing a bit and I took some fun pictures.
I wanted to show off Luke's three little teeth. He has had his two bottom one's for a while and he just got the top one (it's not all the way in just yet). The one little top tooth is so goofy looking!

Oh and Luke's hair got really static-y.
It shows how long his light blond hair really is.
(Where did he get the blonde hair anyway???)