Justin's Predictions for the 2014 Academy Awards Nominees

Best Actor
Bruce Dern--Nebraska
Christian Bale--American Hustle
Leonardo DiCaprio--The Wolf of Wall Street
Matthew McConaughey--Dallas Buyers Club
Tom Hanks--Captain Phillips

Best Actress
Amy Adams--American Hustle
Cate Blanchett--Blue Jasmine
Dame Judy Dench--Philomena
Emma Thompson--Saving Mr. Banks
Sandra Bullock--Gravity

Best Picture
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Gravity
Nebraska
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Philomena
Rush
Twelve Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Director
Alfonso Cuaron--Gravity
David O. Russell--American Hustle
Martin Scorsese--The Wolf of Wall Street
Steve McQueen--Twelve Years a Slave
Woody Allen--Blue Jasmine

Best Original Screenplay
Gravity
Her

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Wolf of Wall Street

Best Animated Feature
Despicable Me 2
Frozen

Best Special Effects
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation of a Good Book
Iron Man 3
Thor 2

Jude's Doctor's Appointment

Not surprisingly, Jude is still in the high ranges for height, around the 90th percentile.  He has actually gone up in weight, the highest he's ever been, around the 60th percentile.  

We have had a cold at our house this past week, and we found out at the appointment that he has an ear infection!  He has given me no indication that this is the case.  It is impossible to tell how sick Jude is because he's one of those kids that just goes, goes, goes no matter what.  He's also starting to get pink eye again, which I did know.  Soooo, we got an antibiotic that should knock both of those infections out.

The doctor was having this medical student ask Jude questions and give him smarties when he answered correctly.  Questions about what colors things are, and "if an elephant is big, then what is a mouse?"  This is all fine except that Jude gets pretty introverted when there are strangers around.  So, he wasn't really answering very often.  So, the med student said, "he's pretty shy, isn't he?" and "I understand, when there are strangers around," etc.  But, it just annoyed me because after it was all over, he said, "well, he's probably smarter than what he is showing..."  So I said, "yes, he's very smart, he knows his colors, animals, and letters; it's just that is is very shy."

Ugh.  I just wish he could have seen how smart Jude really is and didn't have to take my word for it.  I don't know if he believed me.

Funny thing, though.  I got Jude some Perry the Platypus shoes because they were really the only boy sandals in Jude's size that would work.  But, Jude doesn't watch Phineas and Ferb so he just thinks they are duck shoes.  The med student asked Jude who was on his shoes and Jude said "duck shoes" but the doc thought he was answering wrong and corrected him.  "Is that Perry the Platypus?"  Jude just looked at him like...??

Thankfully, there were no shots, so it was one of the less painful appointments.  :)

What Books Have You Read?

I got this from my sister, Kelsey.  Here is: Kelsey's List

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell         

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma – Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Read=18

Not bad, but as an English, Literature, and Creative Writing student, you would think I would have read more of them.  Kelsey has read 34!  She is a reading machine.  :)

Projects!

I have been having a really fun time lately doing projects to decorate our house and make it feel more homey.  I revamp some things we already have, and get a lot of things from D.I. and then fix them up.  That way, it doesn't cost very much.  Here are some of the results!

I have had this toy box for as long as I can remember.  Originally, it was bubble gum pink.  Then, in the summer of 2004, I got really "creative" and started painting random things all over it.  I should have taken pictures of all sides of it; you would really get a sense of the transformation.  

 Here it is now, all one color:

We are using it for storage under our entertainment center now.  And I am still planning on adding a cushion to the top of the box, in a colorful print, so more pics on that later.

These next items are ones I found at D.I., like this picture frame.  I thought it was really interesting to look at.  This picture was taken after I removed the ugly floral print that was in it before, so this in and of itself is an improvement to the original.

 And I love the end result even more.

I liked how this thing was a little unusual looking.

 I repainted it and hung it right inside our front door for our keys.

I was really excited when I found this twelve by twelve frame, because it was a completely blank canvas.

 Justin and I picked this cool bird print off of Art.com, and I painted the frame the same blue to match the "pink box" and the tones in the print.

I forgot to take a "before" picture of this frame, but it was just a plain brown frame.  I sanded it down and painted it.  I like how chunky it is, and how the greens in the background of the photograph play off the frame color.

Our living room furniture is all browns and blacks, so I really wanted to paint everything to be bright and happy.  The colors I am using are ones that I pulled out of a bright, multi-colored area rug we bought.  I think once I get all the pictures hung, they will play really well off of each other.

To see my rug, click here!

This is the cutest wagon I found at D.I. and I just had to get it.  I didn't really know what to do with it at first.

 But look how cute it is with a couple succulents planted in it!  I just pray I don't kill them.  They are supposed to be very hard to kill...but that's never stopped me before, unfortunately.  :)

It's been a blast to remake things into my own style.  I still haven't really hung any of them yet, so that's the next step.  I will post pictures of how they all look when I do.

Ciaran!

I wanted to update everyone on Ciaran.  He is 10 months old (tomorrow) and he is my little smarty-pants.  This isn't always a good thing, let me tell you.  He has figured out how to take the outlet covers off, and how to pull Jude's legos apart so they are in even smaller pieces.

But, it's really fun how much he has started mimicking us.  Whenever I point to a toy across the room and tell him to go get it, he points at it and starts babbling.  Yesterday, Justin was leaving for work and he kissed Ciaran goodbye and Ciaran made the kissing sound at the same time!  What a cutie! 

His favorite toys are balls; anytime I bounce or toss a ball, he gets really excited. He loves to play catch with us.  No, really, Ciaran DOES play catch.  He throws the ball to us and we throw it back.  I am amazed by him every day.

He loves being outside.  Any time anyone opens the front door, he makes a beeline for it.  The other day, it was raining pretty good and I let Jude go out in it for a little while.  And, sure enough, Ciaran wasn't far behind.  He sat in a puddle and started splashing away in it.

He has four teeth now, and it wasn't fun for anyone getting them ha ha.  (I'm laughing so I don't cry.)  He is also still really clingy to me, which gets old at times.  But, it's still nice being the one person he wants all the time.  I love this kid so much!

What I Wanted to Do For Mother's Day

Take family pictures!!!

 Look at my adorable boys!

Best 6 years of my life!

My Graduation!

I had a wonderful graduation on Saturday!  Let's take a look, shall we?

Where's Jesse??

It's almost my turn!

Getting my diploma (...holder)!

I love love LOVE Ciaran's expression in this pic.

And, yes, in this pic, too (Ciaran didn't want me to put him down ever again after our traumatic 1 1/2 separation).  FYI, the medallion I am wearing is for the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the beads are for the English Department...woot!  woot!

With my Dad and Keshia!

Check out the Dads representin'!

And with Jake and Annie!  And, yeah, Ciaran again.

Our Family!

I want to thank everyone who came out to support me, and for those who couldn't make it but really wanted to be there.  I got tons of words of support and congratulations from so many people, not to mention cards and gifts.  Thank you all!