Triumphant Return After a Long Hiatus

I cannot believe we haven't blogged since APRIL 30. I feel ashamed and repentant. BUT not toooo repentant to offer a long list of excuses for why we were toooooo busy, as follows:

We became Charity Race Enthusiasts and walked in three: including the River Run, the Flying Pig, and the Hyde Park Blast. Maybe someday I'll run! Maybe....

 I helped run Girl Scout Camp!

I got a hair cut!

We went to Jamaica to celebrate the anniversary of our being hitched!

And I worked on a quilt for me! (Finished photos coming soon!)

Some pretty good excuses if I do say so myself! But now we're BACK! And we have lots of fun stuff coming up this fall, including new hats, a craft room makeover, a quilt tutorial, craft swaps, and the next steps in our parenthood quest. Its good to be back. :)

Reading List

Check out my new read....it was recommended to me by Randy - he's already read it. We're getting excited. :)

World Traveler

My passport came! It came! I mailed it a mere 13 days ago and it has already arrived in my mailbox. Jamaica, here I come!

Visions of 5ks Danced...

One of my goals for 2012 is to walk a 5k. Geesh - when see it in black and white it looks so pitiful to me. I wish I could say that my goal is to RUN a 5k but at this point, walking one is enough of a challenge. Not only did I let myself get preeeety out of shape over the past few months, I have also been suffering from a nasty case of shin splints that have never bothered me so much as they do now. Its so frustrating to feel like I could push myself WAY harder cardiovascularly but have to stop because my shins are screaming at me. Its gotten to the point where I was worried about my ability to finish a 5k. So Randy and I decided to try a test "run" of the course for the 5k version of The Flying Pig Marathon - Cincinnati's signature running event - before I register for it.

And guess what- I did it! Without too much shin pain! And I got a lot of fun photos along the way and afterwards at our date-night dinner at Senate restaurant in Over the Rhine, which was deeelish. Photos below:

Hitched and Stitched: World Travelers

Wanna know a secret? We here at Hitched and Stitched have been officially hitched for almost TEN years. TEN YEARS! Our marriage is almost a fifth grader. To celebrate, we've decided to go to Jamaica over our anniversary. I've been out of the country once - to Grenada - back in the 90s when you didn't need a passport to travel to such places. So I recently applied for my first ever passport! I hope my stamp for Jamaica will be the first of many over the next few years. I'll probably need to take a quick trip to Canada sometime soon to give it a proper work-out! :)

Black and White: Day 29/31 Day Photo Challenge

Eternal Green Onions

Mind-blow Alert!

Word on the streets (Pinterest) is that after you use green onions you can stick the bottom white part into a glass of water and the green tops will grow again.

WHAT.

You heard me. Green onions...forever.

Challenge accepted.

Green onions, about to become immortal.

I'll report back with the results. I still can't 100% believe that this magic is true, but the prospects are too tantalizing.

Birthday Adventure Time

Feeling kinda lazy lately + lots of other things to do = photo heavy blog posts here at Hitched and Stitched. Randy and I are currently in the process of taking back our lives (we'll let you know when this has happened) and hope to get into some kind of regular posting routine soon. Until then, we hope you enjoy looking at lots of pictures. Actually the pictures are probably better because, as you know - each one is worth 1000 words - so this post is technically something like 14,000 words long. Sweet - now I don't feel like a slacker at all. I'm actually an overachiever!

Anyway, please (try to) enjoy a photo tour of the official 2011 Hitched and Stitched Birthdays. (For those of you who don't know, Randy and I were born exactly 7 days apart in the same year, so June includes a LOT of combined celebrating.) We've moved passed getting each other many traditional gifts on birthdays/anniversaries/Christmas in favor of a fun big purchase for both of us to enjoy or special trips/activities. We MUCH prefer this system. This year we decided to each plan a surprise day of fun for each other and we both ended up centering our activities around a theme all day. Without further ado, our birthday outings in 2 parts:

Part One: Randy

For Randy's birthday we were sent on a scavenger hunt by Doc Brown who was inexplicably trapped without a flux capacitor in a year he couldn't identify. He needed Randy to follow the clues he sent to deduce his whereabouts in time. Spoiler Alert: the year was 1979 (which coincidentally is the year Randy and I were born). The day included stops all over the tri-state accompanied by a soundtrack of Billboard Top 100 hits from 1979. Here's a peek from the day:

















Part Two: Kimmie

The overall theme for my birthday was "A Very Pinteresting Birthday" because I am supremely addicted to the website Pinterest - a kind of online bullitin board where you can "pin" and organizes images you like from anywhere online onto different boards you create. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Also, it allows you to browse pinboards created by other friends and even other random people. Basically, its an internet black hole that sucks up WAY too much of my time (and even more now that I have the iPhone app). Randy realized it is also an excellent tool for figuring out what someone is interested in without having to ask them and spoil surprises. He created a pinboard on Pinterest just for my birthday that gave me clues as to what would be happening throughout the day.



The theme of our outing for the day was PIZZA CRAWL! Randy realizes that my first true love was pizza - and he knows how to use it to get straight to my heart. We sampled pizza from three different restaurants around the area and made local touristy stops between each to let the previous pizza digest a bit. Our favorite pizza was the Barbecue Chicken White Pizza from Mt. Adams Pizza and Deli, and our favorite stop was the Cincinnati Art Museum to see the Circus Poster exhibit.















We have declared our birthday adventures raging successes and we loved the Pizza crawl idea so much that we want to plan all kinds of crawls. Ideas so far include: ice cream crawl, park crawl, museum crawl, Chinese food crawl. Stay tuned for more!

Changes

There's nothing quite like life's door slamming in your face to motivate you to make sweeping changes where you can. I'm sure its a control thing - trying to exert control over the details of life that I am still (to some extent) in charge of. So in that vein, I'm announcing some big changes for The Spotted Elephant - the blog and the business.

Well, kind of. There are big changes coming, and I am announcing that....but that's all I'm saying for now. We aren't quite ready to reveal everything yet - but we are super excited about them and wanted to give a couple hints. Hint: a name change is coming!  Another Hint: an Etsy shop is in the works! (BTW: I thought the cat was pretty well out of the bag about Etsy - what it is, etc., but I recently found out that my own sister had never heard of it. SO - if you are currently thinking "what's an Etsy?" please click the link and check it out - amazing online handmade marketplace!)

*Picture above taken with my new Cannon Rebel T3i at Girl Scouts during our water experimentation day. Its a picture of change. Get it? :)