impromptu friday night photoshoot.

Taylor is really the only one who gets dressed in this house regularly, because he has to go out in the world to work everyday. But Emer and I, it's rare. He lives in footie pajamas and I am the sloppy housewife cliche and wear sweats. Although sometimes we like to get him dressed up to go out since we do have some real cute clothes for him. We decided to do that tonight. And then of course, we had to take a million pictures. Here are the highlights and when I say highlights I mean like, every single one:

sweatpants and frozen lakes.

On Friday night we headed over to Bear Lake to visit my Grandma for the weekend. If you don't know anything about Bear Lake, you should get to know it, because it's probably the only beautiful thing in southeast Idaho, and the most beautiful thing in Utah. (the two states share the lake). ANYWAY in spite of being beautiful, the towns surrounding the lake are tiny and in the winter, there is next to nothing. So sometimes when we go visit her, she'll have me stop and pick up a few things for her before we leave civilization. On this particular visit, she asked if I could stop and pick up cat AND dog food for her.

It was very convenient because when Roscoe barfed in the car (like I knew he eventually would) we were driving through Soda Springs so we stopped to clean it up in the parking lot of a grocery store, and I decided to run in and grab cat and dog food. Now, mind you, when we left Idaho Falls, I decided to put on sweats because who wants to wear real clothes while riding in the car for 3 hours? NOT ME. So I go into the store and as I'm lugging the box of cat food and the giant bag of dog food I think to myself, "WOW I look like a loser right now. Wearing sweats in public, in a small Idaho town, buying pet food on a Friday night. And this is my life." When I get up to  the cash register the first thing the cashier girl says to me, [very enthusiastically in an Idaho accent] is, "DOIN ANYTHNG FUN TONIGHT!?!" and I was so caught off guard for several reasons. So I just said, "no." But what I wanted to say was, "I'M IN SODA SPRINGS BUYING CAT FOOD IN MY SWEAT PANTS, WHILE MY HUSBAND CLEANS DOG BARF OUT OF THE CAR, WHAT DO YOU THINK IS GOING ON IN MY LIFE RIGHT NOW?!"

Idahoans are so dumb. They say things like supposably. And I'm not saying this because I'm bias, I really saw on the news (which wow, you should see the local news here, it is comedy gold, it's like it's produced by elementary school kids from 1996) that Idaho is ranked SECOND TO LAST in Education and also, only 1 in 10 Idaho students will get a degree. Now yes, I am a college dropout, but if you pulled me and 10 of my friends from high school I would be like only one of two that didn't get a degree.

But that's just a side rant. So our weekend with Grandma went well. We helped her drive her 20 year old dog (that she inherited from her twin brother when he died in 2006) to the vet to get put to sleep. Nobody was really sad about it because it was a really big relief, dealing with a dog that old is no bueno.

Then as we always do when someone dies in our family, we went and bought pie.

my cute grandma

Then Taylor gave my Grandma's OTHER dog a hair cut, and then decided to give Roscoe a haircut too.

"all that remains of my old life" -Roscoe Dash

And the lake up there was still frozen so Tayl took a thousand trillion billion photos because snow is still more a novelty than a nuisance to him. But I wasn't as annoyed cause it's Bear Lake.

Then we went home:

Also this:

Happy THANKSGIVING Pilgrims!

Phew! What a fun crazy week we had.

We've been in Georgia all week for Thanksgiving/one of our best friend Kyle's wedding (congrats ya'll!). It's been nice and warm and relaxing. I'm not quite ready to get back to the Idaho winter that awaits me.

If I had to pick one picture to sum up our week here it would be this one:

That's Paisley. (and my Kristen Stewart buck teeth. I own them) She's our niece and the daughter of my sis-in-lawbff, Jamie. and I'm just kind of obsessed with her. Like, if you saw my cell camera pictures (my instagram photos are just the tip of the iceberg) right now you would think that she was MY child because I have so many pictures of that girl. but I can't help it, she is just too beautiful and sweet. and also really advanced for a four month old, she can already do math, probably.

I could tell you about every single detail of our vacation, but I'm not gonna. I just really wanted to brag about how precious Paisley is. Just know that we've been talking real southern up in here (can't help it) and that we ate waaaaaay too much (all week, not just on Thanksgiving) and lost all our eating inhibitions. back to dieting on Monday... until Christmas of course.

Also, I just realized that all my best friends have beautiful babies, see evidence here. 

I guess I just know how to pick em. 

GET IN MY MOUTH: Low Country Boil

So lately, I've been missing Georgia. Sometimes it literally makes my heart hurt because I miss it so bad. Which luckily, is not because I am totally miserable in Idaho, because I'm surprisingly not (yet). But, ANYWAY, I decided that there was one thing that could help curb my Georgia yearning; some good old southern food.

So, I pulled out Aunt Martha's cookbook (which if you are ever going to buy a cookbook, let that be your next one because Martha is amahzing. She's used to help write Paula Deen's cookbooks. She basically a Savannah celebrity!) and after looking through it, decided to invite some of our peeps over for :

LOW COUNTRY BOIL
Adapted from "Savannah Celebrations" by Martha Nesbit

Thanks to Sassy YGBG for the photo

Here's what you need:

Serves 8

2 pounds kielbasa Polish sausage, sliced into 1 inch pieces.

20 red potatoes, halved or quartered, depending on size.

4 to 6 ears of corn broken into halves or thirds

3 pounds large shrimp 

1/4 cup Old Bay seasoning (this is optional but I HIGHLY recommend using it, and being generous with it!)

Allow 1 hour to heat water in a 20 gallon pot*, filled about one-third full. Add the Old Bay seasoning if using (which you better be). 45 minutes before serving, add sausage. 20 minutes before serving, add red potatoes. 15 minutes before serving, add corn. 5 minutes before serving, add shrimp. When shrimp are pink and cooked through (about 5 minutes or less - you can tell because they curl up like they're prepping for an earthquake drill.). Drain and serve hot.

*Alright so, if you're anything like me, you don't have a 20 gallon pot and when you saw that you were like, Whaaaaaaaaaaat? But don't worry, it's a little bit of work but it's still possible. What I have is just two 5.5 quart pots. So, to make the full recipe (which you can half it, or even quarter it if you're cooking for less people) I had to split it up into 4 different rounds (so two for each pot for me). So I did MATH (which I suck at, but I did it) and split the ingredients up into fours. And then you follow the recipe the same (except that you don't have to wait an hour for the water to heat up). 

The best way to serve this is to just lay out some news paper (or craft paper or a plastic table cloth) on your table and dump it right on to the paper (but if you wanna be civilized you can leave it in a bowl, sometimes that's a good idea too) and serve with: Soft Butter, Sour Cream, Cocktail Sauce, Slices of lemons, and Ice Cold Coca-Cola. 

you can just see the humidity in the air from all that boilin! felt just like the south!

the almost entire month of April, condensed.

I literally just stopped blogging for a minute. Well, longer than a minute. And I know it's not like i have some sort of crazy following where I ruined people's lives from not blogging, but I am kind of sad that I didn't blog very much in April, because we kind of did a lot. Including celebrated our 1 year anniversary! Holla.

Welp, I'll start from where I left off. [and I apologize if you follow us on instagram, you will have seen most of these, cause that's what we've been doing instead of using a real camera. SORRY]

Taylor adjusted back to American life nicely.

He joined a soccer league:

Then, ALL of my sister-in-laws and their children came to visit for spring break and we went to the beach for a couple days:

Tayl put Lux in his shirt:

I got surprised with an early anniversary gift:

We spent easter weekend in Valdosta:

Pregnant karaoke!

Laney girl.

On Sunday we were basically all playing scramble against each other. TECHNOLOGY!

From Valdosta the Tayl and I headed down to Amelia Island, FL to spend a couple of days celebrated our anniversary:

My poorly timed cell phone short of the Florida state line.

Tayl & his driving glasses

 Once we got settled, we went for a walk on the beach:

Random sunglasses I found with barnacles growing on them.

Tay was trying to take this picture of the ocean when this stranger's dog ran by.

Crab shell

Jelly fish

The view from our Hotel.

 Our actual anniversary was actually what I would consider a perfect day:

We got up and went to play tennis.

After tennis we went to the beach.

If you can't tell, this is my face smashed up against the beach chair.

awwwww yeeeeaaah.

After the beach we went back to the hotel and showered and went out for dinner at MOON RIVER PIZZA:

WHEN THE EFF DID WE GET ICE CREAM?

Then we went to play mini-golf (surprisingly, our first mini-golf date together):

After our lovely little vacay, it was back to normal life:

I had to spend forever at the DMV to update my driver's license.

I finally got my georgia plates. Two years later.

I  ALSO FINALLY FOUND CORAL THROW PILLOWS!

We went fishing on the boat with Taylor's cousin Zack:

We went to the Earth Day festival at Forsyth park and learned about composting:

Later in the week we went back to Forsyth park to watch the Goonies:

And on an unfortunate note, my Grandpa Coffin (my dad's dad) passed away last weekend. I was extremely sad that I couldn't go to Utah to be with my family for the funeral. Here's his obituary, I thought it was really sweet, and I recommend it. And even though death is never easy to deal with, it's good to know that he is in a better place and doesn't have to be sick anymore. 

Hopefully I will blog more in May so that I won't have to do this again.