Follow Along on Twitter (@lifeblessons)

If you want to follow my Twitter account, my username is (not surprisingly) @lifeblessons.

Currently, I have my account set up to automatically tweet out new posts, so that you can get updates directly to your account if you prefer getting them that way.

I'm not sure how much I'll tweet in addition to these new post announcements (I have a hard time thinking in 140-character chunks!), but I guess you never know unless you follow along! I'll try to make it worth your while ;)

This is another way to get in touch with me if you have a question or anything else you'd like to pass my way. Simply a smorgasbord of options, aren't we?

I added an icon in the sidebar that will link directly to my Twitter page, so you can always find it from the blog home page, too.

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Apartment Tour: The Living Room

So this is the first post in what I promised would be some photos of what our new apartment looks like. I mentioned a couple of days ago that I want to showcase our place as it is, "beauties, blemishes and all." So you can see that the photos aren't perfect, some things are still waiting to find a home, and others still waiting to get a good cleaning. But that's life, right? At least, it's my life.

Here's my attempt to provide some more details about what's going on in our humble little living room:


Thanks to my lovely, structured couch cover, you have no idea that underneath hides a pretty gnarly brown-and-orange floral pattern straight out of the Brady Bunch! It’s a vintage one I inherited from a family friend that is quite sturdy and I love the straight lines of it.

Above the couch is a large swath of blank wall that I have yet to determine what to do with. It's begging for something but I just don't know what yet. Isn’t that always the case?


LEFT: The sitting chair that I recovered a few years back (which, just so you know, covers up all our internet cable cords that come in just behind the chair). Also a good shot of a couple of blue rag rugs that I sewed together (with fishing wire, no less) and subsequently have used in every apartment since! I am thinking about getting (or making!) a new area rug for this space, but we’ll see what creativity and time deliver.

MIDDLE: An up-close look at the vintage-inspired pattern of one of our throw pillows. I loved it so much that I bought two of the throw pillows, one with a blue print and the other with a green-and-pink print.

RIGHT: Our media center, where we store all our DVDs and CDs, is tucked into the corner beside the sofa. And you can't see it here (instead, scroll up to the top photo), but just to the left of the shelving is our lonely little record player, sitting on the floor, waiting until we can find a proper place for it!


Remember this? The little vignette I showcased awhile ago, which sits atop the shelving. (For more details on the where’s and what’s of the little spread, read this post.) There's also no overhead lighting in the room, hence the corner lamp. Plus, you can also see the damask-patterned curtains a bit better here, which give the room a sunny glow. I threw them up one day just to cover the view from the street. I don't love that they stop just at the window sill (I'm a sucker for floor-length), but I like the pop of color and the print, so they've stuck.


We have a fireplace! This is how the mantel is decorated for now, though I'm contemplating incorporating more white candlesticks and ceramics. In case you forgot, I made the framed nest artwork last year. (Visit that post for more details.)


LEFT: More of the fireplace itself, which is stained with soot that I need to get around to cleaning, though I'm unsure of how much will actually come off. You can also see the log that sits in the pit that was here when we moved in, which I think makes it feel especially rustic.

RIGHT: I painted the vase to complement the blue in the poster and then spray-painted the dried foliage a stark white. I love how it pulls out the light blue! There are also a couple of candles I have on hand that I needed a place to put, and the mantel seemed as good a place as any.


Up-close of the decor on the right-side of the mantel, including our wedding cake topper that my sister hand-painted of us (and a little “Happily Ever After” banner I pinned overtop), plus a vintage lomo camera that I've only ever used once. (Sad, I know.)

The milk-glass vases were table decorations from my wedding as well. (You’ll soon notice that wedding pieces are sprinkled everywhere throughout our décor, which is a fact I love, since I also loved how our green-and-white, wildflower-themed wedding looked, too!)

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The Process of Turning a House into a Home
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The Process of Turning a House into a Home

A few months ago, I found myself unsubscribing from a bunch of blogs that I was reading. It wasn't because they were completely irrelevant to my life or because they were wasting my time.

It was because they were beautiful. Too beautiful.

They featured homes that were filled to the brim with shopping trips to Anthropologie and West Elm. They redecorated at the drop of a hat, like it was nothing at all.

I found myself thinking, "Oh, I want one like that!" "Oh, I wish I could do / find / buy that!"

And slowly I realized that too much unrealistic eye-candy isn't always a good thing, when it causes your heart to start wishing and wanting and dwelling on what it doesn't have.

It's been a little dilemma for me, regarding this. It's not that I anticipate that my decorating could compete with those sorts of blogs. But sometimes I wonder, when we post what our homes or closets look like (and only the pretty places, of course, never the laundry piles or unfinished corners!), are we actually hoping that people will wish they had this or that?

Instead, I love the blogs where they show what real people can do with real budgets and real results. I love when they plant realistic ideas in my head and help me find answers to some aesthetic problems that have been clunking up my style.

Because life is not all about decorating or design. But when things work and when the mere sight of something—even as small as a homemade chalkboard—brings a smile to your face, that's what the goal of design ought to be about.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to start sharing some of the photos of our new place. Not because it's beautiful or everything is styled and "just right." No, I'm going to share it because it's real. And I'm going to fight the urge to camouflage all the ugly spots or crop out the places that I don't yet like.

Because I want to share the natural process of turning a house into a home—beauties, blemishes and all.

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What I Did With 6 lbs. of Sweet Potatoes

I should have taken a "Before" photo, but I always manage to forget that part when it comes to blogging.

Instead, here's a glimpse at the aftermath of what happened to the six pounds of sweet potatoes that I picked up at the grocery story the other day:



They were on sale for a great price (evidently in time for Easter), so I decided to stock up and then chop up a bunch, resulting in a big bag full of sweet potato fries to store in the freezer.

Nothing makes a meal better than sweet potato fries, and they freeze really well without having to do any extra prep work aside from slicing and dicing: Cut 'em, put them in a bag and freeze them. That easy.

Then when you're ready to cook them, just throw them on a baking stone, spritz some olive oil over top (I like to use my Misto), sprinkle some sea salt and let them bake in the oven (350 degrees will do) for about an hour. Then enjoy!

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A Little Makeover for the Blog

Notice anything different?

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to give the blog another little makeover, though I feel like it’s more of a “refining” than a complete “revamping.”

I was pretty happy with the overall design scheme, but there were a few quirks that bothered me about the old design. Namely, the fact that there was a lot of wasted space on the sides of the page. If you have a small screen, that works great. But if you have a wide-screen computer like I do, then everything feels crammed.

I also wanted to add a menu bar below my header and clean things up a little.

I finally got around to all that this weekend, and must say that I am quite content with the aftermath.





I also made the blog mobile-friendly, which means that any of you who visit via smartphone, iPad or iPod will now see a much more streamlined layout that I think will make reading on-the-go much easier! (In case you're interested in adding this to your own blog, it's pretty easy to do if you set up a Mobify account. It took me about 5 minutes to do!)

And, because I know that many of you will be curious about the specifics that went into it, here are some details…

• First of all, I switched from the old Simple layout I had been using to another of the standard Blogger templates, “Minima Lefty Stretch.” It is not available in the new “Template Designer,” but you can access it by clicking on the “Design” tab in your Blogger account and selecting “Edit HTML.” Scroll to the bottom of that page and you can “Select Layout Templates,” listed under Old Templates.
  
  
• Once you select this template, you can still go into the “Template Designer” and some of the tweaking options will be available (such as changing the font size and color) that makes personalizing the layout much easier.
  
  
• I like this new template because it fills the entire page and will flex depending on what size screen you have. (Play around with the size of the window and you'll see what I mean!)
  
  
• Since the new layout is "stretchy," I decided to make the static images (those that aren't inside individual blog posts, like the polaroid photo in the sidebar and the menu images below the header) stretchy as well. It's a surprisingly easy little hack to make, by simply including a bit of extra code into the image tag. Just go into the image tag < img > and add width=100% (html code shown in italics). Making the width a percentage means that no matter how big the sidebar is, the image will always fit. That's just an example, though; the percentage can be whatever you want.
  
  
• I added a menu bar under the header by creating a new HTML widget and then uploading various images and linking them to different pages on my blog. (I explained some of this in more detail in a previous post about blog design tips.)
  
  
• To create the buttons for the menu choices (“home,” “about me,” etc.), I downloaded the font Traveling Typewriter.
  
  
• Finally, I decided—at least for now—to do away with some of the more image-heavy content that I had previously, specifically with the sidebar and the special title fonts. I loved being able to have everything show up in pretty fonts, but it took a lot of time to create and then if I wanted to update anything, it ended up being something of a chore. So I’m letting the template do its work, by using the built-in fonts and more straight-forward links (like you can see in the “Browse by Category” widget in the sidebar of the new design).

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A Prayer for Love

"Show me your unfailing love in wonderful ways," David wrote in Psalm 17.

I stopped when I read that the other day. Because while I know God loves me and I've been overwhelmed by it at various times, when things are ordinary and simple and simply fine, it can be difficult to really understand, much less accept and appreciate, the immensity of God's love for me.

I find myself praying, over and over again, "God teach me how to love you more, how to love you better."

And that's part of it, but there's more to the equation than just me learning how to love him. There's another part: Simply letting him love me.

I don't know how to do that other than to ask him to do it, by repeating this verse from the Psalms and asking God to make his love for me not just some head knowledge but something real.

This is part of the premise of Joanna Weaver's latest book Lazarus Awakening, which she illustrates through the story of Lazarus' death and how Jesus raised him from the dead.

The part of the book that really provided the most practical application regarding learning to live in God's love was from an example Weaver provided of two friends: "When she'd asked Joan how she finally became convinced of God's love, Ann had expected a dramatic story—something about how God had spared her friend from tragedy or brought her through a dark time. Instead, Joan described a simple decision to 'set aside one month in which to act as though God loved her.' All that month 'whenever she was tempted to doubt his love, she simply shifted her thoughts and then put the full force of her mind behind believing that God loved her. And that settled it for her—for good.'" (page 94)

It reminds me of the father who so eloquently and desperately said it best: "I believe, help my disbelief!" We believe, and yet we still have to continue asking God to help us remove those bits of doubt that keep us from fully living in the truth.

So for now, I keep whispering, "Show me your unfailing love in wonderful ways. Show me your unfailing love in wonderful ways. Show me your unfailing love in wonderful ways..."

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