From Humble Beginnings - Easter 2012

This year my family strayed from our Easter tradition and spent the day with my husbands family. Some of you might be gasping - the in-laws? all together in one place?! uh oh! - but no, our families are not like that.

My husband and I have been together for almost nine years now, and our families have grown together. My parents and his parents, my grandparents and his grandparents, my cousins and his cousins...in fact, I've never really thought of it as "his" family and "my family" but it's very much always been "our" family. And yes, I absolutely know how lucky I am to be able to say that I love my in-laws, and that my husband loves his in-laws as well!

We took a family portrait (good call, Emily!) and I'm glad we did! It captured the day, the crowd, the family I cannot wait to see what our family looks like next year (and the year after, and after, and after, and after).

After dinner my husbands grandparents and my grandparents shared stories of "the old country" (Italy and Argentina) and talked about where they grew up, where they came from. They came from humble beginnings, and I think they got a little sentimental talking about where the family is now.

"From Humble Beginnings Come Great Things" - I found this quote and think it's perfect. If you want to  purchase a print, head on over to Help Ink, who donates the proceeds to a fabulous cause. They have absolutely studding prints & are worth the small cost.

Happy Easter!

Pantone Easter Eggs via How About Orange

I hope everybody has a nice Easter! This year we are breaking from tradition and my entire side of the family is heading over to my in-laws house for Easter dinner. My parents usually have Easter dinner at their house, but lately it's become more of a chore than anything else. This will be a nice break for everybody (except my in-laws, who have an army of guests coming over!). While I'm sad to be missing some of my own family traditions (Bunny cake, thin sliced ham, Dad's amazing gravy), I am super excited to have the ENTIRE family in one place at one time.

And for those of you celebrating Passover - I hope you are enjoying it at well :)

DIY Kitchen Update

Sorry for leaving you all hanging with our kitchen renovation! I was really hoping that the next time I shared photo's would be when the kitchen was 100% finished. Well, it's 99% finished right now, so I thought I would share some progress.

Here's a post with the before & during construction pictures.

And here are a few iPhone pics of the assembly process, as well as a few behind the scene shots. Amazingly, the kitchen went in incredibly quickly (like, in ONE day) with no hiccups at all - everything fit perfectly! It took a few weeks for our quartz counters to be measured and installed before we could put in the tile backsplash. Now all we have left to do is a few paint touch ups and the toe kick.

Eventually I'll take some real photos (sans iPhone) and post them full size. But for now, I thought I'd share these little tid bits. I am madly in love with my new kitchen - it's so amazing how such a tiny tiny space can be so darn functional and spacious feeling. Nothing beats a brand spankin' new kitchen. Nothing.

A Moment With Believe Notes : Rocky Pea Soup

Do any of you other bloggers sometimes just feel the need to blog about something that may, or may not, have anything to do with the ultimate purpose of your blog? Well, I'm having one of those moments right now. Remember when I promised that all of my posts would have an underlying learning or benefit to them? Well, luckily for me, I've been able to find a way to blog about the particular topic that's on my mind and still make it a learning lesson for anybody reading. 

I make pea soup - and I make a damn good pea soup. When I used to work at the dog grooming shop people would pay me to make it for them. It's that good. Every winter I look forward to making a giant batch of my pea soup and eating every day for lunch for weeks and weeks. I don't get sick of my pea soup. 

But this year, my pea soup betrayed me. 

Everything was fine in the beginning - I decided that instead of putting the peas in a bowl of water to clean them, I would put them in a colander and rinse them. No big deal, right? Wrong! Apparently, which it even says on the bag of peas, when cooking with dry peas you must put them in a bowl of water and go through them to remove any "products of the earth" that you wouldn't want to get cooked with your peas. 

I skipped that step. I never knew why I did it in the first place, so I figured I could skip it. 

Bad idea. There was a rock in my bag of peas. And since I didn't check the peas beforehand, there was a rock in my pea soup. 

I chipped a tooth on the rock in the pea soup. 

Now I never want pea soup again. 

See, I'm one of those people where once I have a bad experience with a food, I never want it again. Does that ever happen to you? What food did it happen to you with? 

Anyway, my lesson for all of you is to make sure you ALWAYS check your dry peas before you cook with them. I wouldn't want anybody else to chip their tooth on some rocky pea soup.  

A Moment With Believe Notes...

Right now it's about 7:30am on a Saturday morning. That's a sin, I should be sleeping at this time on a day off! But no, I'm not sleeping, I'm working hard to get a few last holiday orders out the door and in the mail by noon.

For me, the past two weeks have been a little head-spinningly busy. Hence the lack of blog posts. I've been teaching classes at the day job, and the end-of-semester rush at grad school has included 2 in-depth research papers, a few group projects, and two finals. I'm almost done though...just one final left! (wish me luck, please!)

Christmas is in full swing here at the casa de Mangiolino. Our tree is up (and hasn't fallen, not even a once!), Trader Joe's has their Dark Chocolate Peppermint Joe-Joe's on the shelf, Juliet has on her red velvet color (thanks Mom!), and tonight we make cookies, cookies and more cookies.

I thought I would share a few iPhone shots from the past few weeks:

Hope everybody else is enjoying their holiday, whichever one it is they celebrate!

A Moment With Believe Notes...

Right now it's 9:13am and a brisk 40 degrees on this sunny Saturday morning. My husband picked up some flowers and bagels on his way home from work this morning - I think that's my favorite part about the weekends, having breakfast with my husband. Sometimes he brings me the paper, although I never really touch it, unless it's the Sunday paper, and then I tear into it with a pair of scissors, clipping out coupons I'll probably never use.

We've already had our coffee & breakfast, so now I'm working on another holiday card design - there will probably be a few more cards added to the shop in the next few days. I'm also hoping to revamp the selection of stationery I have for sale in time for the holidays - some lovely stationery would make a pretty good gift, right? I thought so, too!

My dog just brought me her rope toy to play with. Doesn't this dog ever relax?

I feel old. I know I'm not, but I feel like I am. Next weekend is my best friends wedding and I cannot believe it. I almost don't want it to come, because then it'll be over! It's silly to wish for life to slow down, because it's a wish that I know won't come true. Oh well.

My dog is toy obsessed. They say she would have made a great K-9 because of her intense focus. She cannot greet somebody unless she has a toy in her mouth. She will not eat unless there is a toy near her food bowl. When it thunders, she takes her toys in the bathroom with her as she hides. She will not go to bed unless she has a toy to cuddle with. I love her a ton, but maybe not as much as she loves her toys.

As you can tell, my mind is all over the place this morning. Coffee, I need you right now!

Juliet napping with her favorite ball

Derailed by Home Ownership

I took a five day weekend and am preparing to go back to work tomorrow, which I'd love not to do, but hey, girls gotta make money. Any time I take a few days off, I always have these grand plans for how much I'll get accomplished, and then all of a sudden the time is gone, I'm back to work, and nothing really got done.

This weekend, however, I got most things done. Except for two major things, oops. Mostly, they didn't get done because I left those two things for today, and today got majorly derailed. How? Because of home ownership.

You may remember our carbon monoxide scare immediately following the honeymoon, and while that's been fixed, we're now on to the next issue. Water. Damage. From where? We don't really know.

A few months ago we noticed our new hardwood floors buckling. Within two months a three foot section of the floor totally bucked on itself and came up entirely. When we lifted the wood planks we noticed our subfloors were molded. Mold comes from water, we know that, but where is the water coming from? We don't know. Enter insurance companies. Yes, plural, since we own a condo we also have to include the insurance company for the building (since the subfloor technically belongs to the building and not us).

Here are a few pictures of the floors, which need to be replaced entirely:

Molded subflooring

part of where the floor raised completely & more mold hiding out underneath

can you see the rippling & buckling down the entire hallway?

 So on top of all the other lovely things we've got going on, we're also waiting for an engineer to come search for the leak, and once we find that bad boy - it's new floors for us! Hopefully our home won't look like a disaster for the holidays.

A Moment With Believe Notes...

At this very moment, on September 17, 2011, I am printing a custom project for a friend, working on sending out a few digital proofs of other custom orders, and sipping on pumpkin pie spice coffee. While I am in my office, feeling pretty zen, my husband is on the other side of our home in the living room. He's playing some sort of video game while yelling at our dog who keeps crying to be played with. Poor thing wants to go outside and enjoy this beautiful day - and my poor husband seems to never be able to get away from nagging (as he says).

As I'm here, working away, I'll hear a little bark from the other room, followed by a "Shutup!", followed by a long groan (my dog groans as communication) followed by a "Darn! Stop yelling at me!". HA - I love the total role reversal of my husband telling the dog to stop yelling at him.

It's an amazingly beautiful autumn day here in NYC. I've got all the windows open and a sweatshirt on.

Oh, and now my dog has come to beg me to play. Ohh, Juliet, I love your little face!

Juliet brought me her toy!

And now she tries the puppy-dog-eyes to get me to play with her!