I just noticed that we matched.

Happy 17th Birthday Cristina!

Does anyone else find it odd that Madonna tends to speak in a British accent more often than not? Maybe we should all start speaking in random accents throughout the day, just to see how it would go.

Graciela’s stroller frame + lots of groceries = instant grocery cart

What is a valiversary? Valentines Day + Anniversary… Duh! Luis and I decided to combine our Valentines Day and 6-month anniversary celebrations and simply have one special day just for us :)

As always, Valiversary comes around 1 week before Valentine’s Day. February 6th to be exact. Which makes it nice because we can still go out to eat and do something fun without having to worry about any crowds. This year we hit one of Luis’ old hometown favorites: On the Boarder. Although we have an On the Boarder here in Las Vegas, we had never gone there before.

We had a special guest join us for dinner:

(She had a lovely dinner of chewing on toys)

After dinner, Luis pulled an envelope out of his pocket with our special Valiversary activity. And we know you are all going to be jealous when we tell you what we did…. (drum roll, please)…. we went to try to find the Sister Wives!!! As you may remember from this post, we are a little obsessed with the Sister Wives (Natalia more so than Luis). So we went out to try to figure out where they live,  found a park they visited on the show, and even swung on the very swings Meri, Kody, and Mariah swung on!

This was Graciela’s first time on a real swing. What a lucky girl!

If I had a better camera, you would be able to tell that I filled a ziplock bag with sweedish fish, that the label is a really cute pink and purple, and that the border of the label Luis made has a cute little goldfish design both on the top and bottom.

The same idea is repeated in the back, except for Luis substituted the goldfish border with a heart border. I know Graciela is very excited to give these away :)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Apparently I can only handle eating 3.5 rolls.

My brother, Felipe, on the other hand, can polish off 6.5.

Which is a good thing because we did not want to be charged extra for not finishing the rolls we ordered… even if the last one really was the.most.disgusting.thing.ever! We almost ordered one more after that just to get the taste out of mouths, but we just couldn’t handle it anymore.

(Note: Neither of these are my car)

Do you ever run into your car’s twin? Do you have a “popular” enough of a car to run into your twin pretty often? Neither of the cars we own are in the category of “super popular” so it is rare for us to run into our cars’ twins. But we do see some twinners every now and again, and it always makes me a little excited. Like the cars knew each other in a previous life and are long-lost twins. I always feel like I should wave to the driver of the other car. I know, kind of weird, huh?

Day 30 → A letter to yourself, tell yourself EVERYTHING you love about yourself
Instead of a letter, how about a list of the top 5 things?
- I love my smile
- I love my sense of humor
- I love that I accomplished my academic and career goals before the age of 30
- I love that I can follow a recipe really well
- I love that I am willing to try new things

30 Sundays of Truth = FINISHED!

• Natalia’s brother came to town
• My parents came to town
• My brother, sister-in-law, and their two kiddos came to town
• My sister-in-law’s mom and sister came to town
• My sister came to town
• Natalia’s other brother, sister-in-law, and their three girls came to town

Our Christmas was loud and crazy… and it was awesome. I loved seeing Abel loving on little Gracie. I loved being able to hang out with my brother and sister. I loved being together.

]]> http://mertinso.com/2012/01/holy-christmas/feed/ 3 http://mertinso.com/2012/01/where-is-your-mother/ http://mertinso.com/2012/01/where-is-your-mother/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:27:13 +0000 Natalia http://mertinso.com/?p=7043 I was stopped at a red light earlier this week, looked up and saw one of many billboards. My first thought was, “Oh, the Porn Expo is in town again.” (I don’t think that is the official title of their expo, but they do have one here every year.) I then looked closer, to my horror. It is a sign for a Quinceañera!

How on earth is that child supposed to be 15? And would a mom really let her 15 year old set foot outside of the house looking like that?

 Make no mistake about it. The Back to the Future films are my favorite of all-time. I don’t know what it is about them that makes it to where I can enjoy them over and over and over. This week I’ve been re-watching them and it hurts me when I have to stop it so I can continue it after class, or after changing the baby, or after I wake up the next day….

Yeah, there are major continuity errors (it’s time travel, cut ‘em some slack), yeah it reeks of eighties cheese… I know. That doesn’t change the fact that I loves me some Delorean, Flux Capacitor, and HOVER BOARD!

In honor of this, my favorite movie, I present you with the kick-A theme music!!

I started my 30 Sundays of truth back on February 20, 2011. Here we are 11 months later, and I still haven’t finished them. Why? Partly because it takes advanced thinking to get these out. Partly because free time is virtually non-existent in my life anymore. But mostly because I have had a hard time thinking of what to write for the last 2 topics. But I figured I needed to get it wrapped up before the one year mark so here it goes.

Day 29 → Something you hope to change about yourself. And why.
There are so many things I’d like to change. How do I even begin to choose? And as much as I want to change certain things about myself, I also wish they could just be changed overnight. I mean, really, who wants to do all the hard work to really change a bad habit? If it were easy to change bad habits, none of us would have them, now would we? Having said that, this year I am making an effort to finish my to-do lists every single week. I am a big list maker. I love making lists for almost everything I do and then getting to cross things off of my lists. Sadly, I make list after list and usually spend more time making my lists than actually doing the things on my lists. So one thing I’d like to change about myself is that I want to start actually following through with the things I aspire to do. And I guess I also need to be more realistic about the things I put on my to-do lists. After all, it does me no good to put on my list that I’d like to mop all the floors on a Wednesday night, when I know I won’t get home until 6:00, have to throw something together for dinner, run to church for an activity with the youth, come home, spend time with my baby, and get to bed at a decent hour.

I had my bucket o’ crab legs all to myself :)

Luis had a surf ‘n turf burger

Graciela ruined one of the bows I made her.

And then Luis had to order this delicious dessert because it was taking much, much longer for me to eat my gargantuan bucket o’ crab than it was for him to eat his burger. He shared half of the cake with me, and let me just tell you, it was delicious!

We decided to use Google Plus’ hang out service (which is awesome by the way). Even though there wasn’t much to talk about, we sure did have a good time:

I can’t wait until a week from today, when the three of us will be reunited once more!

As you may already know, I’ve become somewhat of a fan of the Biggest Loser. I’ve posted before about my little addiction to this show, and how watching it makes me want to eat a big ol’ slice of chocolate cake. Well, last night I watched the season finale. To celebrate, I made a quadruple batch of cookies.

Ok, so the cookies weren’t all for me, they’re mostly for a cookie exchange. Graciela enjoyed “helping” by keeping herself busy in her exercauser. She is getting very good at reaching out to grab things so these days I don’t put her in the carrier anymore when I’m near the stove.

Dear Walmart Couponer:

I understand where you’re coming from. Really, I do. Once upon a time, I used to coupon too. I completely understand the thrill of saving oodles of money on your shopping. However, I must profusely object when you bring ads for 5 different stores, and go through each of the 50 items in your shopping cart, one by one to get 3 cents off of each item. Then, once everything is price-matched, you pull out all of your coupons and hand them to the cashier, one by one, and have to haggle over the fact that one of the items, which had been scanned 46 items ago, isn’t the right size.

Meanwhile, the guy behind you takes his 10 items off of the conveyor belt because he realizes that you will be monopolizing this cashier for at least another 10 minutes, and by then he could be home already.  Again, I have no problem with couponers whatsoever. I just think that if you want a deal for a particular store, you should have to go to that store to purchase it. Or, better yet, each store should designate a couponer register. Anyone with more than 5 coupons to scan would be required to stand in that particular line, behind one another so they can understand what it is really like.

Sincerely,

Annoyed customer standing 3 people behind you with a crying baby just trying to pay for my diapers and get home… and yes, when I realized what the hold up was, I went to another line.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

For the last month or so, I’ve been obsessed with pumpkin. Right after Halloween, when there were rumors of a possible pumpkin shortage, I bought 6 cans of pumpkin puree. Since that time, I’ve been making something with the pumpkin every couple of weeks. I’ve tried a couple of different pumpkin bars. I still haven’t found a recipe that I’m in love with. Now I’ve decided that I want pumpkin soup. Has anyone ever had pumpkin soup? Does that even exist? I just think it might be really good. Sort of like a tomato soup, but with pumpkin instead. Thoughts?

He didn’t like his food. He took about two bites, and sent it right back. The poor manager came over to offer another meal to him (comped, of course). He flatly refused her offer and complained about the turkey in the jambalaya. She nicely explained to him that there was no turkey in the jambalaya, and listed the other meats in it. This apparently did not help the situation. So he just sat there with his arms folded waiting for his little wife to finish her dinner. I wonder if this is how I’ll be when I get old. Probably.

Now on to our meals. Unlike the old man, we loved our food.

We started with a Brie Artichoke Dip.

Luis then had a salad.

I enjoyed the french onion soup.

For his main course, Luis had the Artichoke Asiago Chicken Spaghettini.

I had the Butternut Squash Ravioli with Shrimp

(And the pic is blurry bc by then Graciela was not too happy and needed to be held)

Dessert came next, and Luis had a Brownie a la mode.

I got my bread pudding to go, and headed out the door.

Luis:  I thought you were going to put her in her red pants?

Natalia:  I did. But she doesn’t have a jacket to match, so I just put this on.

Luis: So she is going out in costume???

Natalia:  Well, it is not a real costume. It is not like she has a whole lion’s mane or something. It is just dalmation print.

Luis: (Speaking to the baby): Don’t worry, baby, no one will recognize you. They’ll think you’re a dog.

Luis: Can we talk about buying a Blu-Ray player?

Natalia: No

Luis: How much would you be willing to pay?

Natalia: $5.00

Luis: Come on, I’m being serious

Natalia: Me too

Luis: Ok, I’m ordering one. It should be here in a week.

You see, I put a load of my work clothes in the washing machine last night before I went to bed. This morning I put them in the dryer to dry while I showered and got ready. And if you’re anything like me, you probably love to wear warm clothes right out of the dryer on cold mornings. Then I had the idea: someone should invent a small capacity, energy efficient dryer. Each morning, you just pop in your outfit for the day, and 5 minutes later it would be nice and warm and ready to wear. That would put a smile on my face every morning.

Sadly, no such thing exists (at least not that I know of). So for now, I’ll just keep using my average-sized, non-energy efficient dryer that came ready to use with our rental.