Extreme front room makeover and life in general

When we got home from Taiwan I was very excited to be home, but I was surprised to find that our apartment was not quite the same as we had left it. While we were gone Karen Ware had re-decorated our living room. It is super cute and it is very nice to have a room where things match and it is all decorated and stuff.

This is the table Jonathan made in his wood working class at BYU. He worked really hard on it and did a really good job. The three cactus on top of the table are our practice children. So far they have been thriving and survived being transplanted from their original pots into these slightly bigger pots. Despite my best parenting efforts the one on the right still refuses to grow straight. I haven't given up on it yet.
This hardly recognizable piece of furniture is the shoe cabinet that I got from someone that my mom works with. Karen repainted and put new handles on it and it looks so much better. The "e" on top of shoe cabinet doesn't really stand for anything, but that doesn't matter because I like it anyway. It came from a Deseret Book store sign from a store that moved or something. From the makeover we also inherited a new child: the little ivy plant in the mug. This child is much more needy than the cactus. I will often find it looking sad and wilty and realize it has been a while since I watered it. After I water it it usually perks back up pretty quick.
This is the new couch we picked out with Jon's parents before we left for Taiwan. Oh, that reminds me that Jon was in on this whole redecorating thing from the get go. I guess he helped pick out some of the pillows and okayed teal as the accent color. I think the teal looks good with all the browns and blacks.
Opposite the couch are the bookshelves and the tv. I love the bookshelves because all of our non-cute crap (dvds, games, books, magazines, etc) is hiding in sleek black boxes with little teal labels saying what is inside them.
Here is the view of the whole wall with the bookshelves and tv. I like all the cool stuff that is on the shelves like the picture frame full of little silver ball-bearings. I also love all of the old cream with teal trim suitcases that are in the room. Lets just sum up by saying I love the way the living room looks and it is nice to have a room in your house that you absolutely love.

So here is me looking happy next to my cute new bookshelf, but there might be a little fear in my eyes in this picture because we took this the morning I was being sustained as Relief Society president. This was crazy. The Sunday I got back from Taiwan the Bishop gave me the calling, by the next sunday I gave him my counselors, and the next Sunday I was sustained, set apart, and taught the Relief Society lesson. Today was my third week as Relief Society president and I still feel like I have no idea what is going on and no body tells me anything that is going on in the ward. I found out that a girl in the ward had her baby earlier this week when the Bishop announced it in Sacrament meeting and looked at me for confirmation that the baby was a girl. I knew the girl was really pregnant and looked ready to have that baby at any moment, but it was news to me that she already had it. Hopefully once I have figured out more how to do my calling people will feel like they can tell me what is going on.

Another thing that we have done since being home is we planted a few more things in our garden.

The two little plants in this picture are the melons we planted. the one on the right is a watermelon and the one on the left is a crenshaw. I have never had too much success with melons in my parents garden, but we're trying it out.
This is our cucumber plant. We picked one that looked pretty lively and thick, so hopefully it will do well because i love cucumbers.
These three are tomatoes. The first one is an early girl, the second is a better boy (or a big boy I can't remember now), and the last one is a yellow pear tomato plant. It will be interesting to see what grows in our garden because the soil is really rocky and I don't know how good it is.

This weekend was Shop Hop, so I went to a bunch of quilt stores with the Ware women and started making a Christmas tree skirt from a pattern the Kent Ware helped me design (and by helped me design I mean that I told him kind of what I wanted and we sketched out a drawing and then he figured out the measurements and did all the hard stuff). I would have been able to do more on this but I was trying to make tags for the father's day gift that I was in charge of for the men in the ward. Jennifer brought her cricut and everyone helped me cut, tape and glue the little things together.
This was the finished product. All the men in the ward thought they were great. Jon told me after church that he saw a member of another ward with a can of Dad's root beer and he felt far superior because they only got a can and each brother in our ward got a bottle. I thought that was pretty funny (my root beer could beat up your root beer was one thing that came to mind). Life is feeling a bit crazy, but I'm figuring it out.