It’s time for a healthy eating update! I’ve officially been on the Lose It app for a full month, and the Pajama Jeans have been ordered. I’m beyond excited.

I know guys. But stay with me here. They’re pajamas. AND they’re jeans. And they’re as seen on tv, so it’s pretty much a given that as an owner of a Magic Bullet, some Nelly’s Dryer Balls, and Mighty Putty, the Pajama Jeans are gonna make an appearance at my house sooner or later.

But that’s beside the point! The point is Lose It has done exactly what I wanted it to – it has completely changed the way I eat. You’re only alloted a certain number of calories a day, and you log what you’re eating as the day goes on so you can see where you’re at. If you eat an Islands burger and fries, you’re easily gonna blow all of your calories at lunch, leaving virtually nothing for breakfast or dinner. If you want to be able to eat heartily for all three meals AND snackage, you better start picking healthier alternatives.

I said before, I’ll say again. I’m not dieting to lost weight, really. I’m dieting to get healthier. Last night was the first time in a month that I’ve had fast food, which is pretty much amazing. I haven’t had a soda since xmas. I go to the gym once a week, and find other ways to be active at least 1 or 2 other days of the week. My plan is to do Lose It all through 2012, just to really hammer in the healthy eating. If I can do this for a full year, I’ll have a really good handle on what to eat, and what not to eat.

I bought some Smart Dogs soy hot dogs to try out last week, since they had way less calories than regular hot dogs and still a good amount of protien. Seemed like a good thing to try for lunch with Phil. (He loves em by the way.)

And it brought up an interesting question… You know how it’s widely accepted that hot dogs contain less than desireable parts of the cow… Lips and a-holes, that’s the saying…

This question is a little delicate.

Um…

What about Smart Dogs?

Is there an undesirable part of the soybean? Am I eating it?

Yikes.

Here we are, a little more than a week into the new year, and my resolution to start living a little healthier is going awesome! Check out the fab tomato and bean soup I made last weekend using a recipe from The Soup Bible Carole had given me for Christmas. I made tomato sauce from Nadia G’s new Cookin’ For Trouble book last week, too, and had some left over. Into the soup it goes!

I’m not a large-framed person, so pretty much every time I’ve mentioned to someone that I’m on a tiny bit of a diet I’ve heard the same response. “Um, you don’t need to lose any weight. If anything please gain a few pounds.”

Don’t worry, folks. I’m not on a I want to lose weight diet. I’m on a I want to be healthier diet. While the Lose It app on my phone says I’m going to lose 5 pounds or so in the next month and a half, I fully expect to gain weight, because I’m trying to work out, muscle weighs more than fat, etc etc etc. I have a healthy body image – I don’t think I’m fat, I think I’m out of shape and had a babby a year ago.

So here’s the thing. I’m using the Lose It app, and have been extremely good about it for a full week now. I haven’t weighed in, so I don’t know what the results are so far, but I feel good and not gross, using it has made me ultra aware of what I’m eating, and has in turn encouraged healthier choices. Instead of my regular Fancy Coffee Friday featuring a Mocha Latte with Whipped Cream, I cut the calories in half by ordering it with nonfat milk and no whip. And guess what. Still delicious.

I’ve set kind of a strange goal for myself to encourage the healthy eating for a whole month. If I can stick with this thing for an entire month, I’m allowed to buy myself a pair of Pajama Jeans.

It’s important to reward yourself with something you’re really excited about. And I’m pretty ridiculously obsessed with getting my own pair of Pajama Jeans.

My friend Heather thought it was hilarious when I told her. “It’s funny that you’re rewarding yourself for being healthier by buying fat pants.”

Well, yeah. I’m not saying I’m going to eat healthy forever, guys. This way I’m preparing for the future!

Stay tuned – if I can keep up the healthy eatin’ through February, I’m totally buyin’ myself a Slap Chop.

When we got to Grandma’s for the holidays, she had a big surprise for Phil in the form of a table he could stand at to play with his toys. Little boy was all over it for the entire 2.5 weeks we were there.

This week was back to the grind in the home office. And about 3 minutes after starting work, I heard Phil making his very frustrated “UHHH UHHHH UHHHHHH!!!” right behind me. I turn around, and he’s got his huge car transport toy halfway on and halfway off the dog crate, which he’s trying to use as a table to stand at.

I help him get the car on top of the crate, and 3 seconds later I got more “UHHHH UHHHH UHHHHH!!!” because there was no room to push the truck around and it had already fallen off.

So I dragged a couple of old diaper boxes into the middle of the room to recreate his stand and play table. And he played at that thing all day long for the next 2 days. It started getting kind of gross because he was eating snacks there, too… and the boxes were getting a little, shall we say, GOOEY.

Enter the Ikea Lack table. I’ve never had a use or need for these when I’ve seen em at the store, but when it looked like we needed a more permanent solution they were right there in the Ikea warehouse ready to lend a hand:

Kid has been a happy camper ever since!

(P.S., he walks on his own now. Yeah. Stop growing, Phil.)

I can’t lie, Phil is a big fan of corn dogs. We found this out while traipsing through Sam’s Club with Grandma Carole over Christmas vacation. Phil held my hand and we walked through the store, coming to a stop at one of the sample tables that was handing out little mini corndogs. “Phil’s never had a corndog, let’s try this out,” I thought as I picked him up to see what was being handed out.

He downed that mini corndog so fast as we walked back across the warehouse to Grandma. Then he turned me around, and headed me right back to that sample table for another snack.

When we went to lunch at the Park Bench Cafe in Huntington Beach this week, it was his first kids meal featuring a corndoggy main event. Total success!

But what he liked even more than the corndog was the sheer volume of real dogs at this restaurant. Big dogs, little dogs, everyone brings their dogs to the Park Bench Cafe. It’s such a dog friendly outdoor restaurant they even have a dog menu!

The food at Park Bench Cafe is basic and delicious cafe fare – burgers, sandwiches, salads, but don’t forget your sense of patience! You’ll wait a bit to be seated because they’re always busy, and once seated you’ll wait a bit to be served. But the laid-back outdoor atmosphere is great for a leisurely, unrushed lunch with friends or family because it gives you lots of time to chat.

What’s your favorite dog friendly restaurant?

I do blog layout work on a regular basis for CAbi’s shopping and style blog CAbi Canary, and I wanted to share the New Year’s Eve Party edition!

Photo montage layout for CAbi Canary's New Year's Eve Party blog edition

This blog edition featured the usual layout and photo montage work, but has an extra zing here and there in the form of custom map and note card graphics, along with a free downloadable pdf containing delicious party recipes!

I designed the custom recipe cards using InDesign and inputted the supplied recipes and photos. For quick navigation I added bookmarked sections to the pdf so once downloaded, people could easily find the cocktails, house party, and quiet night at home with family fare.

Even better? As I was laying out the blog, when I linked to that online pdf I got specific, and was able to code it so when you clicked on something like the word “cocktails” in the blog post, you were taken to that cocktails page of the pdf instead of page 1.

I really like the idea of having more downloadable things on my own blog in the coming year – what sorts of things would you want available? A cute calendar to print and post in your cubical, coloring pages, games? The possibilities are pretty wide open, lemme know what you’re into in the comments!

We’re keeping New Year’s pretty low-key and mellow in Hearts and Laserbeams land, with that night being our last evening in New Mexico. We’ve got a long drive ahead, folks! How are you celebrating? Anyone doing anything exciting out there? We want details! And pictures! And for you to have a safe holiday!

Cheers!

Phil was a trooper when he had to get his flu shot. So afterwards, he and dad went to Rite Aid to share a scoop of Chocolate Chip ice cream.

I think he completely forgot about the shot.

If you follow us on Twitter, you know every now and then we’ll post a link to awesome stuff we catch via iPhone and post on Tumblr for Phil’s grandma in New Mexico to see. I’ve been wanting to do video on our blog for a while now; I finally got around to trying it out this morning using this clip of Phil’s atrocious table manners. (He’s super cute, which makes up for being a little rough around the edges.)

If your site’s built using WordPress and you have a smartphone, I highly recommend downloading the WordPress app. It lets you write and publish posts and pictures on the go, and that’s a neccessity when fresh content keeps blog readers coming back. One thing I discovered this morning, though. It is awful at uploading video.

The workaround that I’m using to get video from your iPhone to your WordPress blog takes more steps, but works. Get yourself a YouTube account. Using the YouTube app, upload your blog video to your YouTube account. THEN, when it’s posted and public (it takes a little time to process, be patient!) go to your video’s page, and underneath the video hit the “share” button. Click “embed”, and you’ll see a chunk of code appear that starts with < iframe . Copy alllllll that code, go to the html view of your blog post, and paste. Voila! Video blog!

An added bonus to this is getting increased visibility to your site by having your videos on YouTube. Make sure to have your website link in your YouTube profile, so people that find you via your videos there can visit your website!

The Patchwork Indie Arts & Crafts Festival is kicking off their holiday season this Sunday with a show in good ol’ Long Beach!

Y’all know I don’t do shows anymore so I can focus on my graphic/web design biz, but I’m still gonna go check the show out and so should you!

Patchwork is a great place to get started on your holiday shopping. Visit the myriad of indie small biz vendors and you’ll be sure to find a one of a kind something for pretty much anyone on your shopping list!

If you’re reading this post from your email on Monday the 7th, don’t fret – there’s 2 more Patchwork shows coming up. Here’s all the details:

Patchwork Long Beach
Sunday, Nov. 6th, 2011, 11am-5pm
Marine Stadium at Bayshore & Appian Way
Click here for google map

Patchwork Culver City
Sunday, November 13th, 11am-5pm
Helms Bakery at Venice & National
Click here for google map

Patchwork Santa Ana
Sunday, November 27th, from 11am-5pm
Museum District at Main & Buffalo
Click here for google map

A couple of months ago, I saw Fab.com had a discount on subscriptions to HOW Magazine. I’m not sure why I never got this graphic design mag before – oh wait I just glanced at one and the cover price is like $10.95. That explains it.

So this week, I received HOW Magazine’s November 2011 Design Business Annual. And I’m flipping through it nonchalantly as Josh and I are waiting for dinner to cook, and I get to page 100. It’s an article about Etsy, how they operate as a company, and what their home office is like. They had a lovely photo of one area of the office on that first page of the article, and my jaw dropped.

Did you see it? Let’s take a closer look:

I am totally taking up a square centimeter of space in a major graphic design magazine. OH. EM. GEE!!

A couple of years ago, Etsy was moving their digs to a new corporate office. They contacted a handful of artists to create signs for various areas and conference rooms at the new office. Each artist received a name that was one part food and one part band name to work with. I was super excited to have been picked to paint two signs. My assignments? Soy Division and Oreo Speedwagon:

These were super fun pieces to work on, and I’m honored to have a place on the walls at Etsy. I’m stoked Fab had that subscription discount, too, because if they hadn’t I totally would have missed this!