Cats Homes

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Chloe & Sparky in their New Home:
Chloe and Sparky are enjoying the new balcony and I let them out during the day.

Chloe has managed to attract a huge number of boyfriends whereas over protective Sparky is busy these days marking his territory around our block.



Chloe's favorite hiding spot is high above on the kitchen cupboards and Sparky has clearly learned his way around after getting lost twice in our residential cluster of blocks. He has visibly shed his chubby fat and can now climb curtains courtesy Chloe Madame and incase you are wondering Chloe is the orange and white puss whereas Sparky is the grey and white 'Tom like' Tabby!


Chloe is Pregnant & unfortunately I can't celebrate her pregnancy since we have a baby in the house, I should have gotten her spayed a long long time ago and to make matters worse resolving the issue now with the help of some vets in international city could cost us nothing less than 700 to 800 dirhams...Big Ouch factor!

New Home

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Christmas to New years, shifting home and get-togethers, updates from where we last left off!

Home Sale! ALL Bath Towels, Sheets, Blankets on sale 2/19-2/25

….Looks and feels like a chalet. A huge green garden fit enough for a modest picnic or sheesha evening with friends is just a block away. Took Sam for a stroll the first few days and found a convenience store across the street including the barbers, lots of groceries, a bakery, a rent a car, a garments boutique, an internet cafe and a ladies parlor just a stone throw away....
New Kmart Deal of the Day - new offer daily!

Past few days haven't been very happening. After new years, it was like a cold storm swept our home except for Sam of course who entertained us with her babbling baby talk and her 'Ama' when she wants her feed. We tried mashed potatoes and apple sauce with her but the hungry baby is now teething and ready to stuff anything in her mouth expect Food. Her dads been trying to make her say papa but instead she just coos at him and gives her flashy gum smile, too cute a princess for this castle maybe.


Papa on the other hand has been busy with video shooting for a couple of days. The artist sucks big time but as long as the dough is good, he couldn't care less....Production and Post- production occupations really drain a person out but they do get those creative juices flowing!
30 minute meals and fast food burgers, pasta and sandwiches are our thing these days. Just a couple of days back we picked some groceries from Hyperpanda, festival city and there was a promotion on EVERYTHING, wish i had visited this place ealier. Funny, how burdubai, deira, garhoud, ghusais, everything seems so close to International City. Dubai Mall remains my favorite mall after festival city of course, I really like the serenading pavilion there, even took Sam there on the weekend but she didn't really enjoy the windy breeze, instead she wanted a cuddle and her beauty nap, hate to keep her up but mama does need to chill sometimes....

Parcel tracking Deal of the Day

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Parcel from doting mother in London, the good, bad and ugly of cooking and never-ending baby responsibilities....Here it is!

Sam received a belated Christmas present from her Grandmother in Oxford shire, surely there were quickly scribbled notes on her card and envelope, pointing out the reasons for delays but never the same, I am grateful and eager to try all garments on my baby. Luckily the clothes are bigger in size which makes planning and shopping for Sam a little inexpensive. She outgrows her clothes so soon, oh boy, my little ballerina is already chubby and round.

New Kmart Deal of the Day - new offer daily!

My sister came to deliver the parcel along-with a good friend of hers and after a coffee break together, we ended up chatting about our celebrity, Sam, Sam & Sam. She loved Sams half done-up nursery and I just whined partly because that is another errand in my incomplete list of to-do tasks. Her friend Komal liked the house and the picture frames and the wall paintings and after whining about how she has to burned her wallet every time she'd go hunting for some, I suggested her my regular shopping marts whereas dearest sister offered to take her along on her next shopping spree. My moto; Why buy expensive stuff when its breakable and damageable. For usable and meagre stuff needed around the house, I go for the bargain offers in mediocre neighborhoods almost always end up with a humungous bags of decorum for under $50.
Papa wasn't too thrilled about the parcel but got him interested anyways, still have to display the content in front of him though. The busy body has loads of work lined up at his office for this week, he comes home real tired and to top it off there is still some post-editing stuff left from his friends music video....Urgh, Money does come in the hard way these days, its 90% work and 60% profit and 0% free time!
I made meatballs from scratch for my Meatball and Potatoes dish with egg fried rice and they turned out Yummy but the mix beans recipe failed. Still not the one to give up so easily, I learned how to make Papri, a Salty and savory Indian Appetizer and Pancakes Alas! I should compile a notebook of recipes but then again my incomplete organizer is suffering the affects of a busy mom loaded with household errands, baby feeding and diaper changes, dinners to serve, friends (and husbands clients) to entertain while having a huge smile across my face.

Gifts, Crafts and Decor for Easter 2012

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Easter Crafts 2012

This is an easy paper craft for Easter. You can stack these Paper Egg holders of a shelf and the plus point is that you do not need to boil or break an egg for this. Simply place your egg in the egg holder and display out of reach but in full view on eager on-lookers.   

The following method is for 3 Egg holders. Lay a newspaper down on your workspace and begin. 
1.      Take 3 A4 white paper sheets and assemble together.2.      Fold the assembled sheets in half lengthwise.3.      Bring out your water-colors and paint half of the 3 pages of every page in a dark green shade.4.      For a darker contrast add a tint of blue paint (Optional).5.      Turn the papers over and paint the opposite sides in a lighter green shade. 6.      For an even lighter contrast add a tint of yellow paint (Optional).7.      Now clip the ends together with a clothes peg and leave out to dry.8.      After they have dried. Cut along the folds. You will have 6 strips of paper, 3 lighter green and 3 darker green.9.      How fold each paper in half, similar to folding a card and glue them together.10.   Stencil a bit of grass on each of the glued paper bits and leave to dry. I have used THIS.11.   Cut along the grass-outline using scissors or paper cutters. 12.   Hold the ends together of the darker green shaded papers and glue down.13.   Similarly hold a little more of the ends of the lighter green shaded papers and glue down.14.   Leave to dry.15.   Using the stem of your paint brush, roll the extended grass towards the outer edges to create a curve. To this for all of the grass on all the papers.16.   Place the 3 light green grass papers in-between the darker green ones, one for each.  17.   Cut out 3 tiny flowers and paint them your desired color, the brighter, the better. See the reference HERE.18.   Now bring out your beads or spare buttons and place one in the center of each flower.19.   Glue each flower to the front of your grass holders.20.   Display on a high shelf with eggs in the grass-holders.21.   Optionally arrange them on a platter with green fake grass around them.
If anybody tries this craft, please let me know, how it came out, Post your Pictures if you like and share some ideas. 

"God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life"

           Keep a Watch on this Post, will be Updating soon!

Don't these beautiful yet simple decorations from Amazon look lovely, I want to make them myself.

My Blurps for the upcoming Easter

Easter 2012 is fast approaching and while I battle between choosing steamed vegetables over steaks, my mind is seeking an answer to the question, how do I make this special for our little baby. 


Sam will be 7months a day after Easter 2012 and I have already purchased colorful balloons to go with all those colorful chocolate eggs. I love whats on Amazon (pic enclosed) I will update a picture of her Easter nursery soon, but am just hoping she doesn’t  find a way to pinch one of those blown-up balloons. I have to hang those very high somewhere. 

I cannot do the Easter egg hunt with her or hubby at home but I am seriously thinking of cooking something special just for the three of us besides indulging in some Easter 2012 crafts and Easter decorations. Whats next? Easter Mass, Easter Songs and those pretty Easter greeting cards, oops forgot the Baskets and I am so late already? I partially tinted some Easter eggs green

Here is something for you to SMILE about - FREE Easter Greeting Card software....Share your Easter greetings with your Loved ones, send them a card, take some pictures, create an album and post to Facebook or Email these Easter cards all for free. I just love this app, hope you do too! 

Save on Easter Dresswear for the Entire Family plus get FREE Shipping on orders of $49 or more thru 4/8

Gifts for Easter 2012, Spring, Summer Autumn and Winter

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HURRY, excellent offer on Wreaths for all occasions!

 Based in Dubai, UAE, we have excellent offer on Wreaths for all OccasionsAn Indoor Potpourri Wreath to scent up your home naturally. Clients can request personalizing Wreaths with ribbons, bows, gift-tags, beads, sequins and fake stones/gems. We can create SPRING, SUMMER, WINTER and AUTUMN Wreaths to meet the Clients needs.
Choose this special Unique gift for your:

• ANNIVERSARY
• BIRTHDAYS
• NEW YEARS
• CHRISTMAS
• EASTER 
• VALENTINES
• WEDDINGS
• .... and all other occasions.

Place online order on my email Sonz_Doreen@yahoo.comShipping Charges Apply All Wreaths come in small to medium sizes & Clients are requested to indicate their preferred color combinations.

Deer Creek

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June 19-21: A little vacationWe took a break from life for a few days. June 21st we drove to Orem to spend time with family. Joe and Natalie were in town and that was SUPER news! These few days were spent with family. We were able to do a few things, but the main excitement of the trip was boating! WOOP WOOP! Monday morning we went up to Deer Creek Reservoir. We spent the day on the boat, tubing and water skiing. Then we went to Kathy and Craig's house to swim and watch movies together. It was a blast!

Independence Day

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Wow! 4th of July weekend was PACKED! 
Friday July 1: Cars 2 and Diamond Rio with Kam and Ruth Ann's family. (What a great combination!). We hung out with the kids while Ruthie went to get a hair cut. During this time, the girls all made brownies, and the boys tossed the football around. After that, we went to watch.....CARS 2!!! It was super duper terrific! Then we all met up and went to the stadium to watch Freedom Fire and DIAMOND RIO!!! It was awesome! 



Saturday July 2: Swimming at Kathy and Craig's House and Stadium of Fire. Ben and I met up with Rena (one of my old roomates and best friend ever!) and her sister Emily. We went to the cool 4th of July shops down in Provo and looked around. Then we met up with Ben's family at Kathy and Craig's house where we had lunch and went swimming in their pool. Later that night, we went to the Stadium of Fire, sat outside and hung out with some old friends. :)


Sunday July 3:This day was the only day that wasn't jammed packed full of activities! We went to Church with Ben's parents and then had a pretty relaxing Sunday.
Monday July 4: Scout Breakfast, Provo Parade, Carolyn and Hyrum's House for lunch, Grandma and Grandpa Shurtz's condo for swimming and Grandpa's Birthday party. 
We went to Ben's parent's church at 7am to eat breakfast. The scouts had prepared a cool 4th of July Ceremony and we had yummy food! Next we went to the parade. I absolutely LOVE parades! 

Liz and Anna.

SCOOBY DOO!!

The Star Wars guys were way cool!

Llamas=neat!

After the parade, and weaving our way through parade traffic, we went to Carolyn and Hyrum's House for lunch. Good food, good company. Then we headed Grandma and Grandpa Shurtz's condo for swimming and Grandpa's Birthday party.Swimming was a blast! Ben, Sylvan and Adam were doing those cool fast sporty moves of throwing and catching while jumping in and then throwing to the next person in line. I decided to join them. It was super fun, but I'm pretty sure they are all more cool and fast and sporty than I am at doing the whole catch/jump/throw thing. Liz was taking pictures on the side, and as you can see, I could get the jumping in part, but catching it seemed to be a bit of a problem. It was fun anyways.
After we were exhausted from swimming, we ate dinner and had a really neat birthday program for Grandpa Shurtz. And...this weekend I found out Ben has more relatives that I even knew about! There were quite a few times this weekend that I turned to Ben and said "Who is that?" I got to meet a few new people and took some time to get to know a few of them better.

Wolf Creek

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Saturday July 9-Tuesday July 12. Wolf Creek was a blast! Here are a few highlights of the trip:

1. Swimming...and getting tan!

2. Swimming with Danika! (Note that we both have a "grumpy Dani face" haha)

3. Hanging out with my Hubby!

5. Cute baby bath in the sink! Who could ask for anything better!?

6. Playing Tennis (They had a cool scraper dealio to wipe off the rain. Ben was a stud for clearing off the court!)

7. Playing Scum, one of the best games ever!!

Service Project Saturday

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Saturday July 30, 2011Service Project! Our Stake and another student married stake had a service project on Saturday. A big group of people worked on cleaning out an old trailer park and another group took shovels and dug up weeds on a hillside on campus. Ben and I were part of the weeding group. We were instructed to dig up something called Myrtle Spurge. This is a really cool looking plant that was introduced to our area. Since it is not native to the area, it is starting to take over and going all sorts of crazy. Here is the before shot:  We dug up all those plants (and they had some MASSIVE roots!!!). I forgot to take a picture after we dug them up, but let me tell you...we plowed through that hillside! It was lots of hard work for a few hours and it was really  enjoyable (no joke). Since it was a church activity, there were a lot of people coming up with lessons to be learned with Myrtle Spurge. One of these days I'll have a great talk prepared for sacrament meeting and I'll owe my thanks to digging up weeds.

Honor's Graduation!!!

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Ben has been working so hard at school. He is finishing up his last semester in his Senior year and moving onto a Concurrent Masters program next year. He has been in the Honor's program and has just completed it. For those of you who don't know what Honor's is...I'll explain a little. It's pretty much doing extra work in about 1 class a semester. This not only gives Ben more experience in the classes he is working on, but also helps him create relationships with the Professors and expand his horizons.

Mechanical Engineering is already a really time consuming and difficult program at Utah State, but doing Honors on top of that adds a lot of pressure. The people in the Honor's office were surprised to see that Ben was still in Honors at this point. They said they couldn't remember another Mechanical Engineering student who had not dropped out of Honors by their Junior year. So...not only is doing Honors a difficult thing, but it is almost impossible in the Mechanical Engineering program to graduate with Honors. Ben has stuck to it and really done a great job.

Last week (Wednesday April 18th) was Honors graduation. This was a night to honor those all those at the University who graduated or will be graduating with Honors from Fall 2011-Summer 2012. They had a really yummy dinner, a slide show presentation highlighting the accomplishments of each Honor student, and awards.

Here are some pictures from the evening:



Ben is WAAAAAAAAYYYY in the back. (Sometimes he forgets he's a little bit shorter than his older brother Joe. Haha) 

One of the ladies who works in Honors even remembered that we were having a baby boy in June. She gave us a special gift of a little newborn onesie. This shirt has a little bit of a background story. Utah State has some game day shirts that say "We are HURD" In the "U" the is the word "State" for Utah State. The Honors department decided to make a little spoof off of these shirts for their students. These shirts say "We are NURD" This little onsie says "NURD in training" haha! We love it! 

Here is Ben with his Honors Diploma and his medal that he gets to wear when he walks for graduation.


Way to go Ben!!!! I am so proud of all the hard work you are always doing! Way to stick through the program and graduate as one of the only Mechanical Engineering students to graduate with Honors from Utah State!

38 Weeks Pregnant

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Not much to report this week. I am obviously STILL pregnant and starting to get REALLY impatient. I want to meet my little boy NOW!!!!!! I think what helped keep me sane with Lincoln was having an induction date set. I don’t have one at all and I literally have no clue if I will go over or under my due date and girls go over their due dates 2 weeks sometimes! That would kill me! That is ten months of being pregnant and I have already done nine, no way could I do ten.

I have 10 days left until my due date on the 20th. That sounds like nothing but it definitely feels like for-ev-er. When I think about how I feel, I feel great. If I was only 34 weeks pregnant, I would be all happy with how easy this pregnancy is. But I am not 34 weeks, I am over 38 weeks and therefore I feel every ouch, pain and I am oversensitive to every single contraction that leads to nothing.

The only bad thing I am suffering from is still acid reflux, but as of lately it has gotten ten times worse. There hasn’t been a night that I don’t have my head in the toilet. I try not to eat past 4:00 because by the time ten rolls around my stomach has produced enough acid that I have to puke. It is awful and the last few times there has been streaks of blood in my puke from my throat being so raw.

But don’t you worry! This has definitely NOT slowed down my weight gain. I have gained 31 pounds and I am still packing on the pounds. This little guy better come out weighing ten pounds so I can feel like this weight is at least going somewhere!

Overall I feel amazing and as long as I am not thinking about labor, as if that ever happens, I don’t feel very pregnant at all.

Here I am 38 weeks pregnant and very swollen. My hands and feet have really swelled up these past couple of weeks……ugh! I am in a swimsuit so don’t judge me too much for looking like a beached whale! I dread pictures lately and want to hide from the camera so this literally might be the last pictures of me anyone sees. 

Three Weeks Post Pregnancy

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Well baby is here and now I need to get my body back! So the blog continues on as my motivation to lose the weight and get in shape!

I gained 32 pounds throughout my pregnancy but only want to lose 27 pounds (because I am breastfeeding I need a little extra weight).

Anyways, when getting home from the hospital I stepped on the scale. Big mistake! I knew I shouldn't from experience with Lincoln, but I was just too curious.

Any guesses how much weight I lost after giving birth to at LEAST ten pounds of baby and other things?
Answer: Four pounds.
Yep four lousy pounds! Same thing happened with Lincoln. I was obviously swollen and retaining water (insert angry face).

One week went by and I was now down 14 pounds! It was coming off fast!

Two weeks went by and I was down 17 pounds and the weight loss was slowing down. My parents came and I ate like a pig!

When I stepped on the scale today, I was only down 15 pounds. I gained two pounds! Yep, I was definitely eating like a pig with the unrealistic belief that the weight would just keep coming off. I can assume all the baby and water weight has now fallen off and the remaining 12 pounds are gonna take some work.

With Lincoln I lost all of it, except five pounds, in one week. I believe I got cocky because over the next two months I GAINED ten pounds! Seriously Heather! I don't want that to happen.....again. I lost it all by five months, but it took an entire year to look the same as before. I was fortunate that my body only needed time and not work to lose the weight. I also lost an extra ten pounds! I think I looked darn good for being a mommy.

This time I want to lose it all by three months and plan on actually working towards that goal. By six months I want my body back.

Over the next three weeks I am going to focus on my diet until I can work out again. Hopefully I can lose a pound a week.

Then I am going to start working out and running. Those goals I will post later when the time comes.

I will report back here with my progress!

This is my before

My angel is totally worth the weight