Keeping in Teutsch

We really haven't done a lot this week other than conduct Potty Training Boot Camp (more on that later), so this is just going to be a blog of random things.
Is this backpack not the absolute cutest thing?? I meant to add this to my blog about Baby Gap and forgot to load the picture on there, but really want to show you how adorable it is. It isn't like Juliette needs any more bags, but it's tempting to buy it because it's just so darn cute!

Look what I've been doing this week and I am SO OVERJOYED that I have gotten these done! Sure this doesn't look like a lot and it's because this isn't all of them. A lady ordered 15 custom made towel wraps as late graduation gifts. Custom made means that not only did I have to monogram them, but I also had to sew ribbon on them, so it took a little time. I thought they turned out really cute, though. (On a side note, who buys graduation gifts for ALL of their daughter's friends? I'm not complaining because it was the biggest order I've ever gotten, but I just think I'd have to draw the line at like only her very best friends or something like that if it was Juliette!)

Wanna know what Juliette has been up to this week other than potty training? Well, she's almost 3, so we thought it was about time she started doing some chores around the house, so we gave her mowing duty. Just kidding! :) This is a bubble mower, that doesn't shoot bubbles like it's suppose to. You can read more on how she got the mower and see a video on Matt's blog.

And now for the BIG news! We "think" Juliette is potty trained!!! (Knock on wood!) Here she is showing off her big girl panties. We started off Monday with just putting her in panties and taking away the Pull-Ups and she has only had two accidents this week and the last two days she's been telling us when she needed to go to the potty. We have been putting her in Pull-Ups still at nap time, night time and when we go out, but she's been doing great at going to the potty in public and not going in her Pull-Up. Now, poopin' in the potty isn't coming as easy and I thought I was about to have a constipated kiddo on my hands until she decided yesterday that her tummy just hurt too much and she broke down and went in the potty, so we are happy about that! I think she's still a little unsure of that part of it, but she definitely got the hang of peein' in the potty. She is almost 3, so it's about time, huh? Of course, I guess we did bribe her quite a bit between an array of Dollar Tree toys and candy that I put in a basket on the back of the potty as a "grab bag" for every time she went, as well as the promise that if she pooped in the potty we'd take her to the movies today to see the guinea pigs (G-FORCE movie), so I guess that might have helped a little!

And, since my other camera still hasn't been fixed, I had to use my video camera to take the above pics and since I'm just down downloading this video, I thought I'd share it with you guys. It's a hoot! It was from this past Christmas (notice how much hair Juliette has grown in just 7 months time) and it is of Matt, Uncle Chad and Juliette playing Rock Band while my niece Madison looks on. Matt is playing drums, Uncle Chad is playing guitar and Juliette, well, she is the singer! I laugh everytime I play this video and this is the way she sings EVERYTIME Matt lets her play Rock Band with him, although recently she's been partial to playing the drums, which is cute, but not nearly as entertaining as her "singing"!

Well, we are back from our Tour of the Families, but my camera is broken right now and I can't get the pictures off of it to do a post. So I thought I'm do a little virtual shopping instead and point out some of the cute fall clothes at some of my favorite shopping spots for Juliette!

You know what is fun about this time of year when you have a small child? You get to buy them a new wardrobe! Because you know...they grow like weeds! Unless, of course, you don't like to shop, and then it's not fun to you, but I love to shop, especially for Juliette!

Matt, Juliette and I took a little excursion to the mall the other day to check it out. It's older than Pecanland Mall in Monroe and the food court wasn't nearly as big (nor did they have a carousel), but the one thing that I was thrilled to find was that they have a Baby Gap. And Baby Gap is sporting some super cute clothes for the fall. Here are some of my favorites:







I love Fall the best and can't wait for this hot summer to get over with!

As I mentioned earlier, late last week my sister, nephew and younger brother came to visit. It rained A LOT, so basically all we did was ride around and point out the highlights of Lafayette and eat out. My sister and nephew left on Saturday morning, but my younger brother is staying until tomorrow since we are going to visit our parents. We love having Uncle Chad around and he is actually looking for a job down here and is going to live with us for a little while when he first gets down here.

Aside from the almost daily rain, we have had some awesome weather temperature wise. We spent two afternoons at one of the parks here in town that is nice. Not only do they have the standard kids' playground equipment, but they've got a duck pond (with a ton of ducks), a pool, tennis courts, baseball backdrop, frisbee golf course and plenty of shade trees. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera with me both times, so I have no pictures of our recent trips to the park.

I'm still job searching and there are no prospects right now. I've applied to a lot of places, but it seems I'm mostly overqualified or not qualified at all for the jobs in this area. I am working on getting some of my monogramming stuff on Ebay and Etsy, though, in hopes that that will help increase sales some and have had some decent size orders recently, so I've got enough to keep me busy for now.

We are leaving tomorrow to head up to North Louisiana to spend a few days with each of our families. I've already put my request in to my mom on what I want to eat! :) I'm looking forward to being at my parents for a few days. This will be the first time all of us (including Matt) have stayed with my parents overnight. Usually, we just go for the day or Juliette and I go by ourselves, so I'm looking forward to being able to spend a longer amount of time with them! This weekend, we'll be with Matt's parents, so we are banking on them keeping Juliette (which will not be a problem) so we can go on a date. That is about the only time we get to go on dates.

House wise, I still haven't decorated the living room and the sunroom is mostly cleaned up...I just need to do a few more things before taking pics. I promise those pics will be up next week when we get back.

So you aren't left without a picture on this post, here is a recent one of Juliette from before we moved with all her "princess jewelry" on!

Have a great week and weekend everybody!

It's Thursday and that means it's time for our first Lafayette Tour of Pizza Places! (Remember in an earlier post where I said there were a ton of pizza places here and we were going to try a different, local one each Thursday night?) Anyway, well we cheated a little bit tonight, because we've been to this place before, but my brother Chad, my sister Donna and my nephew Austin came to visit and this was where Chad wanted to go. Dean-O's is great because you get to make your own pizza...from the crust up! Don't want pizza sauce? Then you can get cheese sauce instead and the list is LONG of all the things you can put on it too. Pretty much anything you can think of. And, if you aren't that creative, they also have some specialty pizzas for you to choose from...a lot of them with a Cajun twist that includes crawfish, shrimp, crab, and lots of spices! I'm not very adventuresome in the pizza department and like to keep mine simple, so the first time we ate here, I just got pepperoni. It was good, though. Chad LOVES the cheese sauce and I have to admit that it tastes great and will probably get it next time. If you are ever in the Lafayette area and looking for a good pizza place, I think this one won't disappoint!

I had a really productive day today and was able to get the Master Bedroom unpacked and decorated. Then I talked to my sister around 9 pm and she said that her, my nephew and my little brother are coming to visit for a couple of days tomorrow, so I made a mad dash--quite literally--for the guest bedroom and got it in order, so tonight I have pics of not only the kitchen and the other bedroom, but of the master bedroom and guest bedroom as well. This leaves just the living room and the sunroom, so we are almost there!!

This is Juliette modeling the entryway into the kitchen from the living room. I got the cute fleur de lis from Beehive in Ruston.




Yes, there is a picture of Juliette crying in the kitchen. This is a frame I used to have in our bedroom and it matches the tile in the kitchen now. I will be changing the picture out, though.
This is my cool new gadget that I got at Target. You can put other stuff than just cereal in there...beans, oatmeal, rice, etc.
In the corner by the stove is this lazy susan drawer that I put all the spices in--all in alphabetical order. I was tempted to use my handy dandy label maker to make little labels but decided that would be a little overboard!


Our double closets. We had a big walk-in closet in our other house, but these actually hold more!

This is the bathroom that is off the guest bedroom. It was not part of the original house and is newer. The only thing about it is that this bathroom is the only one with a shower (Juliette's bathroom doesn't have a shower head), so Matt and I use this as our bathroom. There is a door on the left that will bring you into the bathroom from the sunroom, which is the way we have to enter when we have guests to keep from walking through their room. There is also a door from the sunroom into the guest bedroom as well.

Hopefully, within the next few days I'll be ready to post the last pics of the living room and the sunroom, so stay tuned!

Chuck-E-Cheese--of course!! Juliette has been asking to go there pretty much since we found Target because she now recognizes it and we have to drive past it to go to Target. We figured it wouldn't be very busy if we waited to go at dinner instead of lunch and we were right. Juliette enjoyed herself and even got to do "Head & Shoulders" with Chuck-E before he took a break!

As promised, below are some pictures of our new home: the outside of the house, Juliette's room, Juliette's bathroom/hall bathroom and the dining room. The kitchen and the other bathroom are unpacked and decorated, I just need to straighten them up before I take pics, so I'll post those tomorrow. The living room is unpacked, just undecorated. I'm feeling kinda unmotivated to decorate it and keep moving stuff around. Maybe tomorrow, I'll feel the urge to finish it. Nothing has been done to the guest bedroom, but that is last on my list, because I don't think we are getting any guests for at least a few more weeks. And that would leave the master bedroom and the sunroom--the thorns in my side right now!! I absolutely HATE doing laundry and hanging up clothes and it looks like ALL of our clothing is ALL OVER our room. UGH! It's so depressing to look at, but tomorrow Matt and I HAVE to get it done. I've been wearing his t-shirts because I can't get to mine and I've been jumping and hopping over stuff to get to my shoes, so I think it's time. Now, my part of the sunroom is done and I can't wait to show you my mad organization skills, which may or may not include the overuse of a label maker. And Matt's music stuff is set up and for the most part the second living area is set up, but there is still this whole sea of crap--for lack of a better word--that needs to be moved to the storage room and neither Matt nor I have had the desire to get out in the heat and move it and reorganize the storage room, which would have to be done to make room for it all. We both have high hopes, though, that this is the week--the week that the unpacking will end for good. Ok...I'll quit ranting about what needs to be done so you guys can see what has been done!!

This is our new home--complete with Juliette in the front because I wouldn't let her come in the street with me to take a picture. Eventually, we will put chairs on the front porch. This neighborhood is super cute and reminds me of the Garden District in Monroe. Everyone's homes are decorated and landscaped so cutely and Matt and I are constantly pointing out cute houses to each other. Our home is just one block from this cool looking neighborhood store that is among all these houses. In fact, the first time I saw it I thought it was just an old store that had been closed for a long time because it looks that way, but actually it is still open and they serve plates lunches as well. I just think it's really cool that we are only a block away from this little store that you wouldn't expect to find in this neighborhood! We haven't checked it out yet, but plan to.
This picture is a little blurry, but I wanted to show you the side of the house and the driveway. The driveway is on the right of the house and has a covered parking area with a large storage room to the left of it. This is all fairly new to the house. The original driveway is a little ways to the left of the house (not right on top of it) and has a two car garage with an apartment on top of it. When the owners set about to make this rental property, they rented out the garage apartment separately, so therefore they put down the new driveway, covered parking and storage room for the main house. In the picture below, you can see the car that is parked at the garage apartment.
This is a view of the back of the house/the sun room that you see from the driveway. Right now we keep the roman shades down and the windows closed because it is just too hot. Because the sun room was added to the house sometime around the 60s and because they put a flat roof on there, it does not have central air and heat--just a window unit and ceiling fan. Right now, the mornings and the evenings are pleasant--with or without turning the window unit on--but the afternoons are quite sweaty down there without the window unit, ceiling fan AND a freestanding fan on. I'm about to get back busy with my monogramming, which will take place in this room, so I quite literally will be working in a sweat shop during the afternoons!! We are hoping, though, that come winter, this room will be very pleasant and won't swing the opposite direction and be a meat locker!
The dining room is off the kitchen and you have to walk through it to get to the bedrooms and bathrooms. When the house was built, this was a bedroom and our room--which shares a wall with the living room--used to be the dining area and the wall didn't exist, so in the 30s, you got to the other bedrooms and the bathroom (there was only one then) by coming into the hallway through the dining room and you didn't have to walk through this room. When they made this house more "rental friendly," they put a wall up and made the dining area--which was huge--into the Master Bedroom and made it so you have to walk through this room to get from the living room and kitchen to the rest of the house, thus pretty much forcing most people to make this a dining room or have a bedroom that everyone has to walk through. Since it is right off the kitchen, though, it makes a great dining room and is the perfect size. I splurged on the floral arrangement on the table that I got from Paul Michael for half off. I saw it in there a few weeks before we moved and wanted it, but decided not to get it. I couldn't resist, though, and went back right before moving day to get it. The best part, though, is that when I went in there to buy it, they had put up a sign at the register that says that Paul Michael is opening a store in Lafayette in October! I'm super excited about that, because that was one store I was definitely going to miss!
I got this cute iron shelf from Hobby Lobby for $30 off, which was great because I needed something else to fill up the dining room since I've never had a separate one before. I'm really loving this room and we have actually been eating at the dinner table more since we moved in than we did before. Maybe because it looks so pretty??
This is a view of Juliette's room from the hallway. This house has A LOT of metal blinds in it, which makes it hard to hang curtains, because the top of them sticks out more than other blinds do. I bought some cute hot pink curtains that have the tie tops, but those didn't work out because you could see the top of the blinds in between the top part of the curtain and the tie, so I'm still looking for non-sheer, tab hot pink curtains for her room. During the day, though, we mostly leave her blinds open, so it's not as noticable that curtains aren't hung in there. Oh, and because Juliette's room in this house is much bigger than her other one was, pretty much all of her toys fit in there and we have NO toys in the living room. Woohoo!!
This is a view of Juliette's room from one of the corners. See those awesome built-in drawers? The guest bedroom has these built-in drawers in it as well. We are thrilled to have all these awesome built-in storage spaces. (Wait until I show you the living room and kitchen!!) She also has two closets (I was standing in front of the other one). The one you see is for her everyday clothes and the other one has her dress clothes in it.
A closer picture of the adorable painting my best friend Amanda's sis-in-law, Natalie, did for me. You can check out her awesome creativeness over at www.natkatdesigns.blogspot.com. I sent her a pic of Juliette's bedding and told her I wanted to incorporate the stripes and the pink giraffe print and she did an awesome job! Juliette LOVED it! Originally, I was going to hang it on her door, but after I got it and saw it, I couldn't NOT put it above the bed. Had her bed been on a larger wall, I probably wouldn't have, because it would have looked small on a big wall by itself, but since her bed sits on a small wall, I thought it looked perfect and am very happy with it.

This is Juliette's bathroom/the hall bathroom. There is a big closet across from the tub. I found that tall hot pink tub at the Beehive in Ruston and want to put some fake flowers in there...just waiting to catch them half off at Hobby Lobby. Oh, and the gas furnace really dates the house. They don't work anymore, though. There is one in the kitchen also, which makes me wonder how these people stayed warm in the winter when those two furnaces were their only heat. Did they just hang out in the kitchen and the bathroom all winter?

Hope you like our new home so far! Check back tomorrow for pics of the kitchen and the other bathroom--and maybe, just maybe, I will have done something to the master bedroom. We'll see!

It's been almost 2 years since I last blogged. Shame on me...considering I have loads of people checking my blog everyday and wondering when I will write again! Just kidding...no one has missed me on here! But, we are starting a new chapter of our lives, a little over 3 hours from where we've spent the majority of the last 10 or so years and now we are more than a quick hop-and-a-skip from our parents and friends, so I figured it was a good time to revive the blogging so everyone can keep up with all the loads of fun we are having...or right now, just the loads of unpacking we are doing!

For those family members and long, lost friends who need a recap of the last 2 years, here it is: In the last 2 years, Matt had a successful surgery on his back for a herniated disc and is doing fine now; Juliette has grown, and grown some more, learned lots of new things, will be 3 at the end of August and is STILL not potty trained (I'm sure you'll hear more on this in the days to come); I started a monogramming business: www.melissasmonogrammingonline.com and earlier this year lost my job of six years in the publishing industry to company downsizing and relocation, so I am currently going on my 3rd month of job hunting. After 5 years of rejections, Matt was finally accepted to 4 Ph.D. programs in English at Kent State in Ohio, University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Middle Tennessee State University in Nashville and University of Louisiana Lafayette. Only one school was able to offer him funding (which means they pay his tuition and give him a monthly stipend for teaching 2 classes a semester) and that was ULL. Almost 2 weeks ago we moved to Cajun Country and that brings everyone up to date!

We are living in a large house that was built in the 30s and are loving it so far. We have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, kitchen, separate dining room, tons of storage space and a huge enclosed sun room that runs the entire length of the house, which is serving three purposes: my sewing/craft room; Matt's guitar room; and a 2nd living area. Out of all of those rooms, about half are unpacked and decorated, so I still have lots to do. Check back tomorrow and the rest of this week for the tour of our new home, as I will load pictures and show you around as soon as I get a new battery for my camera and find the cord I need to download the pictures to the computer.

So, not to leave you empty handed, here is my list so far of the Pros and Cons of Cajun Country and our new home:

Pro - Super big house holds ALL our stuff and we still have empty drawers and cabinets!
Con - We don't have a disposal anymore, but thankfully neither of us have to be the dishwasher.
Pro - Lafayette has a recycling system with a separate can to use just for those items.
Con - We no longer have a privacy fence which means I will not be donning a swimsuit to play in the kiddie pool with Juliette. :)
Pro - SUPER Target. Do I have to say more?
Con - Apparently the Grand Theatre thinks their facilities and movies are far superior than anyone elses and changes $8.50 per person.
Pro - Three and under are free at the Grand Theatre, unlike at Tinseltown.
Con - Moving is horrible on the sleep habits of a 2 year old. Juliette has yet to go to sleep before 11:30 every night.
Pro - Chuck-E-Cheese is right here in town. Quite possibly this will later turn into a Con after a handful of trips to see the rat.
Con - I have yet to find a job in this Cajun Country that I am qualified for that pays enough. Mostly all the available jobs are in the medical field.
Pro - There are Starbucks EVERYWHERE. On the way to Target (which you know has one in it), at one intersection, I am within a few blocks of 3 freestanding ones and 2 in-store ones. So far, I've only given in to the urge for a Mocha Frappicino once.
Con - Where are all the donut shops?? Apparently, no one eats them here!
Pro - There are plenty of pizza places, though! This is more so a pro for Matt and Juliette since they are the resident pizza lovers, but I am fascinated at the amount of them. I've yet to count, but it's definitely in the double digits and I'm not talking about chains either. Matt and I have decided that Thursday nights will be Pizza Night and we are going to sample pizza from a different, local pizza place each Thursday to see what we like the best.
Con - It's going to cost me a lot more to get my hair cut and highlighted now! :(
Pro - Albertson's Butcher Deli -- now I don't have to buy 2 lbs of chicken at $7 if I only want 1 lb and then I only have to pay $3!
Con - I can't find an eggplant colored bed skirt in this town! Or at least in the 4 block radius of Wal-mart and Target.
Pro - Because we haven't met anyone, I can freely go to the store without make-up on and know without a shadow of a doubt that I will not run into someone I know.

OK...I suppose that is enough for now! Happy Monday everyone and check back tomorrow afternoon for some pics of the house!

Melissa