HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Hi Loves! Hope you're having the best week! We are truckin' along over here. Yesterday there was a big Trick or Treat event on Palafox street in downtown Pensacola that we took H to. We decided to do our "Halloween" then because its supposed to rain tonight - and we wanted to see other kids and be around a lot of other people. Well it ended up being a HUUUUGE crowd wich was just to much for Coach and I so we lasted about 20 minutes and left. H didn't nap yesterday either so he was really tired but a good sport the whole time. 

Years ago I found a picture of a baby dressed up as the old man from "UP?" and I just had had had to do that for H now that he was walking this Halloween. He was a baby owl last year, another picture I found before I was even married and saved until I had kids. Both costumes were a lot of work to last only about 30 minutes but SO worth it. 

My mom used to make all my costumes when I was little and thats always been something I've wanted to do for my kids. I definitely don't have the sewing chops she has but I am creative enough that I can come up with stuff.

H already had all his clothing items needed, so I just had to buy balloons, foam board, and those glasses. all of which were from the dollar tree. I drew the UP house on the foam board and attached it to a little music-walker H has (with the music turned off). 

He actually kept the glasses on the whole time- surprisingly! I attached some elastic to the sides to hold them on. He LOVES my glasses and always says "GASSES!" when he sees me wearing them. so cute. 

I could not get a single picture of him pushing his house and balloons because he is fast as lighting and all over the place. He loved the balloons too! He calls them "moons!" because he is also obsessed with the moon and I guess "balloon" sounds like "moon" to him. He actually says it like "Moonaa" 

Happy Halloween y'all! I'd love to hear what everyone is/does for halloween and what everyone's babies dress up as too! 
xoxo
Em 

ENCOURAGEMENT

Hey lovelies. I hope everyone's tuesday is going well. I'm feeling a little under the weather between catching a cold from H and pulling a muscle pretttttyyyy good the other day while working out. BUT its gorgeous outside and I'm determined today is going to be awesome! 

I'm getting ready to head out the door to take H to a new patient appointment at his new Pediatrician but I wanted to just send some love and encouragement out there today. 

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Have a great day, friends!

 xoxo

em

DATE NIGHT + A RECIPE

Saturday Night the Navy Daycare hosted a "date night" which we took advantage of. You can drop your child off and they watch them from 5pm-12am for only $4.00/ hour!  We have not found a babysitter here yet, and I'm a little intense about who I let babysit Henry, so I haven't felt comfortable just finding some random person to do it. And even though R keeps suggesting something like Care.com, I have not warmed to that idea yet. This is perfect though because we know the daycare adheres to very strict standards, has cameras, and lots of fun things for Henry to do.

 We could have gone out to eat or something but I have really wanted to just stay home lately and be a homebody. Maybe its the cooler weather? Rather than just staying at home ( in which case we could just save the moolah and have a date night for free after H went to bed) I decided I wanted us to go for a romantic picnic on the beach.

Normally R plans our dates and surprises me, which is always super fun. He comes up with the best stuff! I asked if I could plan this date night and got to work. Even though R knows what we were doing, he didn't know the menu. Saturday morning, R went to the gym and to study and H and I hung out. As soon as H went down for a nap (without a fight!) I got to work. I really wanted everything to be done before R got home. I decided I wanted to do something simple, low fuss and easy to eat/pack up. I also decided I wanted to do a bunch of our favorite foods. I even typed up a cute little menu card. Here is what I planned:

Menu 

To start

Sparkling Wine

Francis Copola Winery, California

Shrimp Cocktail

Wild-Caught Gulf Shrimp with home-made cocktail sauce

Smoky Sweet Potato Soup

With Smoked sea salt and paprika

Main

Chicken Caesar Salad

All natural lemon-pepper chicken breast on a bed of romaine lettuce

 topped with vegan almond-tahini caesar dressing

Desert

Chocolate Covered Strawberries

Hand dipped in semi-sweet chocolate

When we were on our honeymoon cruise, I had shrimp cocktail every single night as my appetizer, and it was sooo good. It's the best appetizer to me,  and can be a great simple meal as well. It is easy to whip up, doesn't call for a ton of prep (as long as you get deveined/peeled shrimp), and is elegant. It's also super healthy (always get wild caught shrimp- if it does not say that on the package or at the grocery butcher, then most likely it is from a farm in Thailand). We are lucky that we have a fantastic fish market nearby and its cheaper to get seafood than any other kind of meat there. 



One of Coach's favorite salads is caesar salad, and one of his fave meals is chicken caesar salad. His all time fave fruit is Strawberries. He likes my home made caesar dressing and loves when I make chocolate covered strawberries. 

I originally decided on that particular sparkling wine because it was in these dainty little cans, and because we were going to a beach, we are not supposed to bring glass containers. I then realized after purchasing this wine, that the only food containers we have are glass, so we are going to be rule breakers! Ha! 

This is how I packaged the chicken caesar salad and dressing:



For my chocolate covered strawberries: I followed the same recipe as my chocolate covered pretzels recipe with a few changes. For the strawberries, I did not put the milk in the chocolate. Also, make sure to allow the strawberries to dry completely after washing, and make sure they are not cold. These two things make the chocolate "clutch" when dipping them and does not taste or look as good. Also, once you've dipped the strawberries let them cool for an hour or two on the counter before putting them into the fridge for another hour or two. If chocolate cools too quickly it becomes dull and grainy. And girl, let me tell you, there's nothing less romantic than a grainy chocolate covered strawberry. 
(I jest). 



Coach took me to a new restaurant the other day, he wrote about it on his blog this past week.  I ordered a cup of this AMAZE-FEST sweet potato soup as an appetizer and just about died. It was so simple but so good- it was spicy and smokey and was topped with pumpkin seeds. I dreamt about it all week and decided I had to make my own version for our appetizer. Its super simple. I didn't have pumpkin seeds lying around, so I did omit that. Also, I totally forgot to take a photo of the soup. But... as I'm sure you can imagine, it looks like sweet potato soup. Shocker, I know. 

1 TBS Olive Oil

1/2 medium onion diced 

2 sweet potatoes, peeled and diced 

3-4 cloves garlic, minced 

2-4 Cups vegetable stock or water

1/2 cup whole milk (or any unsweetened/unflavored milk substitute) 

Smoked Sea Salt

Smoked Paprika

Chili Powder

Salt, Pepper to taste 

Worchestershire sauce

1. Heat olive oil in dutch oven or large sauce pan

2. saute onion for 1 minute

3. add garlic and saute another minute

4. add stock or water and sweet potatoes, bring to a boil

5. lower heat and let simmer for 20 minutes until sweet potatoes are tender

6. Remove from heat and let cool 5 minutes (or longer until cool if you are not using a blender/food processor that can handle hot liquid/food)

7. pour most liquid into a cup, set aside

8. blend sweet potato/onion/garlic mixture until smooth

9. Add milk and some of the broth and blend until it reaches the thickness/consistency you desire 

10. Start with 1 tsp of the sea salt, chili powder, and paprika until seasoned to your liking (smoky flavoring is something that people can be very sensitive to- so do the amount you are comfortable with!)

11. Add a few dashes of Worchestershire sauce to brighten the flavor 

12. test and correct seasoning as desired. 

13. Enjoy! 

Yields 4 appetizer-sized servings

We don't have an official picnic basket but we do have a cute sturdy basket with a handle, which will be perfect for us two.

I wanted to make this as special as possible even though its so simple, so i decided to go with real silverware and cloth napkins.

The above photo has a slightly obscured photo of the ever-elusive sweet potato soup. 

ON MY HEART [A LINK UP]

Hi there! I hope everyone is finishing out a great week, and looking forward to fun stuff this weekend! We are headed to the fair this weekend and Coach and I have a date night on Saturday. So excited. Today I'm linking up with Casey Leigh for ON YOUR HEART.  I had a somewhat unrelated post already written for today, but this is what was on my heart this week. 

This is not an easy thing to talk about for me, so this is me really putting myself out there. As I've said before I'm famously private as an INTJ, but I really want to share certain struggles in my life in hopes that it may encourage someone else. 

As I mentioned before, since Henry was born, I have dealt with some crazy health stuff.

I could not get my mind and body under control for months and months, and spent an inordinate amount of time going to various doctors, and just plain being miserable. 

I kept going on and off various birth control pills and other medications that left me feeling even more miserable and not feeling myself.

And this was all while I was in the middle of grad school, running a research study, writing my thesis, planning to present my research, running a household, and trying to be a wife and mama. I knew that being under the amount of stress that I was under was certainly not helping anything, and life was just so cray for those two years. 

We are both out of school now (well... R is in flight school now) so things are slightly less crazy, but we did just go through a big move as well. Transitions are hard, and thankfully the Hege family has worked hard to handle the (many) transitions in our life in a positive way. AND- they are still hard. I'm currently unemployed- difficult for me in two ways. I'm always a worry wart about money- wanting to earn a gold star from Suze Orman and do things right. And I don't do "not busy" well.  I know this is 100% God's way of forcing me to slow my roll and trust in Him. He and I have had several conversations [ a day ] about this. 


The other day I was having a rough day, and so I decided to take Henry to the beach on base. Can you believe we had not been to a proper beach since moving here? It was so wonderful. I had to stand in the water with him almost the whole time holding hands with him so he wouldn't run into the water at full speed (no swimming on base).  I said on instagram that the beach is Henry's happy place, but who am I kidding, its totally mine too. (yay he did get one or two of my genes!) It did the trick and as we left I was feeling so much better and at peace, and Henry had the best time! He was so sad about leaving. Every time I said "time to go bye bye" he would lay face down on the sand and pretend to be asleep (which was kind of hysterical).
And P.S. It's not cold at all despite how it looks, H was over dressed to begin with haha. 

PUMPKINS!

Hi there! Today I thought I'd share about our outing to get pumpkins over the weekend. Coach has officially started school now, and is in school 8 hours a day 6-7 days a week and the rest of the time, he spends studying. NEVER has he been a study-er  until he went to NSI for the navy in Rhode Island (like officer candidate school) , and again now. He studies non-stop. 

He took a short study break Saturday afternoon and wanted to take us to get pumpkins! He knows how much I adore the fall, and that doing things like that with the family are extremely important to me. We have always put a lot of effort into making memories and spending more time with each other than with friends (we still love you guys!) because we know that time together as a military family is extremely precious time. We want to build a strong foundation with Henry while he is young and while R does not deploy. That will not make it easier on H by any means, but hopefully it will remind him how much time and effort his father puts into their relationship when he IS home. Even though deployment is way down the line for us we also have already talked a lot about ways that we can stay connected when he is deployed.  

Anyway, we hopped into the car and headed to a local church's pumpkin patch! Although going anywhere with Henry right now is like herding cats,  I am glad I took some photos of our little outing. 

Totally didn't mean to match! 

Hen wanted to bring his "buckeck" with him. 

And it turns out it came into good use. 

Yelling something about "BAY BAW!" per the usual.

Once we convinced him this was not, in fact, a bay baw, and dissuaded him from throwing it, he decided it was an apple and took a bite. He promptly spit it out and said "ucky ucky!" Well we definitely were buying that one! 

With the absolute love of his life. 

A PEEK INTO MY STUDIO

Hey y'all! Hope your day is starting off lovely! A few weeks ago I started a series called "in my dreams" where I am showing my home in bits and pieces as-is and then posting inspiration ideas for what I'd like to do to these spaces in the future. I want to be clear that I think it is extremely important to "bloom where you are planted"- no matter where you move or no matter what you have to work with in your current home. I think it is always important to be thankful for what you do have. That said, I love dreaming up ideas to work with what I have or to sass things up in inexpensive/creative ways.  Today I am going to share what my studio currently looks like. I actually really like this space and find myself looking forward to being able to work in here. When you're the only lady in the house, and a mama in general, I think its nice to have a space that is your own in the home- even if it is just a corner to read in, or a chair that you can go to that is your space.

Now that I am out of school and can make art for fun and not for school - I am really enjoying being in here. I also blog in here and take photos in here because of the natural light. I chose to paint it white because I LOVE the photos of white studios I pinned on Pinterest and it also makes for really bright, pure light for photography. I never turn the overhead light on because its so bright in there.

I always have to have inspiration at hand. All of the watercolors here are done by my insanely talented grandfather who became an artist after retiring from being a neurosurgeon. Being a surgeon believe it or not requires a level of creativity, and definitely requires a lot of fine-motor skill. 

He got into painting in order to maintain both the creativity and his coordination. And he researches other artists constantly- always learning. He's my biggest inspiration and encourager with my art, and is always keeping me on my toes. He also shares his love of art and talent with my Aunt who is a very accomplished artist as well. I look up to both of them a lot. 

Frida is my home girl. She was such a character, and she is not the first person most people think of when asked who their favorite artist is. But she is for sure mine. She recorded her life through her art, and dealt with the horrific things she went through in her life through it. She also made a place for herself as a woman and artist amongst the big Surrealists of her time. Art was still a field widely dominated by men during her time- she and Georgia laid important ground for us women artists. Okay, I'll stop now. I could go on forever. 

Hope you enjoyed it! What is your favorite spot in your home? Do you have a space that is all your own? 

xo

Em

WIWW [ A Link UP] : Calculator Watches and Twinning with a Toddler

Hi there! Hope your week is going well! Today I'm linking up with Lindsay from The Pleated Poppy for WIWW and posting my Uniform of the day for most of my week this past week.  It's finally turning into fall here and I'm loving it, so my week's great!  I also did not have the excuse of potty training this week so I got dressed! I know, i know, thank you, thank you. There may or may not be a moment in which I out myself as the calculator-watch wearing nerd that I am. I also may or may not have accidentally dressed like my toddler son... I don't even know what to say about that one. See below:

Jacket: Old Navy (a few seasons ago)

Neon Tank Top: Target

White Tank: Victorias secret

Jeans : 7 for all mankind

Flips: Rainbow

Bag: Longshamp

      

Necklace: J.Crew Outlet

Top: Old Navy

Corduroy Pants: J.Crew Outlet

Shoes: Target 

Calculator Watch (yes, yes it is): Gift- but I know Target sells 'em 

Top: Actually a dress from the girls section in Old Navy Ha! 

Jeans: 7's 

Flips: Rainbow

Tunic: J.Crew

Leggings: Target

Boots: Hunter

Vest: Old from a tiny boutique in Monteagle TN

Locket Necklace: Gift from great Grandad to Mom

Scarf: J.Crew Outlet

Top: J.Crew Outlet

Jeans: 7's 

Sandals: Birkenstock 

I swear I did not plan this. I took a picture the second I realized what I had done. It was chilly that morning and the hubby's sweater and a pair of leggings were just calling my name. And it was picture day for H-dog and obviously I have to dress him like an 80 year old man for his photos. (Last fall he wore a grandpa sweater with leather elbow patches.) Oh and we are saying "Hi camera!" in this photo- its the only way I could get him to stop moving- hence our silly faces. 

Shawl Neck Sweater: The hubby's from J.Crew
Leggings: Victorias Secret

On Henry:
Shawl Neck sweater: Target