This is not what it looks like. I do not have a gigantic bag of weed in my car. I don't! So you can stop gearing up your car to hunt me down for my massive plastic bag.
Recently, I was offered this gigantic bag of green. My coworker was trying to thin out his garden and I have a very sad looking yard and it could definitely use some real "green". As we stood in the covered parking garage next to his truck, Brett filled the plastic bag with "green" from a pink plastic bucket and I felt extremely suspicious. I wasn't even doing anything illegal but I knew there were security cameras in the garage and every time someone passed by, I wanted to shout, "It's not what it looks like! Brett is not my drug dealer!"
This is also terrifying because plants and I don't have a good track record.
My first year at college my mom offered me one of her many bamboo plants to make the gray dorm feel more "lively".  Do you know how to kill bamboo? I don't but it died in the first week and I mourned it: poor Frank.
After a year plant-free, I wanted to give it another chance. I brought Spike to Nauvoo. Lovely Spike, a wonderful drought resistant Aloe Vera Plant. He survived with me the whole year before I brought him back to my mom for safe keeping.
So we're going on a 50% living plant posterity and Brett just bestowed me with more green than just one plant to keep safe. Three different kinds and a lot of each.  Alright, my darling green, lets build this house into a home!

 The first thing I see is that there are no doors on these stalls.  Second thing is the obese dog sitting next to the entrance (which also doesn't have a door). 
I'm pretty sure this was a restroom that people have been murdered in. With some difficulty (weaseling the faucet on/off with my feet), I washed my hands and walked out/maybe ran out.

  Law and Order: SVU is by far one of my least favorite shows. I dislike the grisly, disturbing rape/molesting stories that appear.  Unintentional frowns and cringes hit me just thinking about it.
Anyway, it's ratings time. That lovely thing that happens quarterly with an increase of new episodes and "intriguing" promotions.  These promotions look like Dr. Phil talking to a woman who has multiple personalities or Nate Berkus' screaming guest hosts. Law & Order's hook is "star factor". Every episode is teased with a guest star. Last night's episode featured a disturbing Daddy issue James Vanderbeek. I expected their promo to feature another star maybe up on the star factor like Jennifer Lawrence or something.
Well, it wasn't. They teased Martha Stewart.  That's right, you read it correctly, crafting/cooking/organizing guru and jailbird Martha Stewart will be on Law & Order: SVU  next week.

Picture by Delish.com

I can almost see her sitting at a large wooden table fashioning beautiful colored box system for Ice T to use for his files.
"Incest and rape: it's a good thing." Flash over-cheesy smile.

Sometimes I think Las Vegas, Nevada is the most awkward place in the United States. It's an odd collection of people from different places and different levels of intelligence.
Dave and I spent a weekend in Vegas for a birthday/one year engagement celebration.
One night we're walking and already we had an odd following. We were walking behind a bunch of girls and in front of a bunch of 20 something guys.  In front of us people were marketing "clubs" for the girls and as soon as they passed they flicked cards at the boys for "boobies".
One of the guys we're walking in front of runs up to Dave, "Wanna get some yogurt later?"
Dave's reacted immediately, "Yogurt?"
"Ya, we've been following you guys for a while down the strip and maybe we should ya know?"
Yogurt with strangers...drunk strangers...which we didn't do...but it was still an odd request. Maybe we should have got their phone numbers or something.

I've been reading a lot of blogs lately.  I aspire to be a great blogger. I have so many great stories jumbled in my brain and sometimes I wish I could string them out like everyone else.  Today I'm following a letter prompt: S.
Letter S huh? In my head I went through 12 words before I landed on "sister". Sorry, Lara, this one's for you.
I have one lovely sister. From childhood she prefers to think of herself as glamorous. The picture albums my mom has around the house feature her in dance leotards, excessive stage makeup and awkward costumes for theater performances (she never played the ugly old witches).
Today she attempts to keep herself neat, but her life is consumed by games.  Before she moved we always played games as a family where silly, embarrassing nicknames became your calling card while you played your minerals in Catan.  Now it's all sports with her three boys playing two or three sports at a time in Ohio. Ohio is an odd place where you aren't anything if you don't love the "Cincinnati Reds" and the "Bengals.
Last summer Dave and I made a trip out there with my tax return for my niece's graduation and to introduce Dave to the Bingham brood and their games.
Our first night there, Lara says to the kids, "Help us clean off the table so we can play adult games."
My husband is often a 14 year old boy when it comes to phrasing things; "Adult games already, Lara? I'm not sure that's a good idea, I just met you and Michelle is your sister. That's kind of like inbreeding isn't it?"
We laughed pretty hard because of how prim and proper my sister tries to be. She loses her marbles every time I say "boobs", which I try to throw in at least three or four times when we go shopping and is proud that her husband, Greg, is only the second man she's ever kissed. 
She wanted to play adult games on the table with my husband and I. We still tease her a little for that one.

Me and the sister;  I love her!

Dave and I are an interesting couple and we're real....really awkward and hilarious.
Every girl has some super cheesy story about their relationship and how they met, dated and married their husband. I am no exception, except there isn't a lot of cheese in these stories...besides Dave's one-liners that I will leave out to keep you from rolling your eyes at this blog.
First Met:  I graduated the summer before we met in 2010 and like every other college graduate out there I had a difficult time in the fight for employment. Dave had his own struggle for employment after leaving a job he'd been with for a while. We both gave up on the search and said, "Fine, customer service, swallow our souls."  So we ended up in the same training class at Verizon Wireless.

My first impression was, "Dang this guy is smug." Dave's impression was, "She likes No Country for Old Men, I must date her!" (This is my story)
Dave was fun to talk to and our instructors definitely noticed that we liked to talk; so we sat across the room from each other the full eight weeks. Across the room was not far enough to them, we still managed to drive them crazy with our sarcastic banter.
After we transitioned to taking calls, Dave and I started doing lunch every weekend until I got a new job. My last day at Verizon Wireless Dave asked me out for real.
First Date: Sushi, frozen yogurt and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I. He was even smug on the first date. I was impressed with the stories of his trip to China, the price of the sushi AND frozen yogurt on the first date. *Previous boyfriend did a lot of free dates (not that I hate free dates, just not used to a boy spending money).*  I even offered to pay part of the meal. Dave's motives were unclear and I was a little hazy on "hang out" vs. "date. Harry Potter was probably the best: he took the cue and scratched my back. I think he had my heart that moment.

First Official Boyfriend Status: I can't remember the exact moment in fact. I think it may have been in passing like, "You're my girlfriend/boyfriend, right?"
First Kiss and First I Love You: This depends on who you ask.  I was fairly torn about our relationship from the very beginning. I spent my life learning how these things are supposed to go and how the man is supposed to be. Dave was everything and yet different than what I was taught. Yet despite this, I knew dating him was right. I was trying to end it before it got too complicated.
I was crying on the couch and he says he is falling in love with me and kisses me. *Not exactly, "I love you" but it's same diff*.  It was like the movies, ultra cheesy and totally not my style--but it was perfect. Too bad I kept fighting the rightness of "us" for a long couple of weeks.
After finally opening my eyes and realizing that what God has in store for me is different. That Dave is right for me--Cameron happened, which created a huge scary relationship wall.  
Wait, I'm losing focus! This is the basics not our life story!
Proposal: Three words sum up the night of the proposal: vomit, birthday and ring. It was Dave's birthday and I was excited for my gift: The Wire: The Complete Series on DVD. I was was pregnant *get over it everyone* and sometimes at night I felt a little sick. *Dave's toilet got an almost daily cleaning thanks to Cam-a-roo.* I joked that he better not propose to me right after I puked....and he did.
We threw the wedding together in two and a half months.
I married my best friend. We didn't have a typical Utah relationship: meet at awkward single adult hang out, exchange texts, commence in dating, flash a bling ring, spend three or four months planning a cliche' reception, spend the whole day stressing about the wedding night, honeymoon on a beach or Disneyland, be friends for years and introduce spawn to the world. I like to think we got our real relationship challenges out of the way early on. Now we share our relationship and it's still the same but different. Dave is still smug about his random bits of knowledge; we still play video games *sometimes while holding Cameron* and we still enjoy a sarcastic jibe. Some days it feels like we did everything backwards, but in a cheesy way to sum up this post; it is a "real" relationship to us. 

"It's like an orange on a toothpick."
I may need to get used to hearing and utilizing the whole scene from So I Married An Axe Murder  regarding the size of Charlie's brother's head. My baby has a giant head.
Two magical stories.
Last Friday we had her six month checkup.  The doctor mentioned her growing right where she should be 60 percentile length and 50 percentile height.  Then she shows me the chart about head growth and the line is so steep it could almost be a straight vertical line; that is to say above 90 percentile. In fact, the doctor wanted to have Cameron come back in just to check her head out in a month and a half instead of wait for the 9 month appointment.
At church on Sunday Dave and I were observing an especially expressive baby, crawling and walking with help of the chairs (knowing developmental facts, somewhere around 9-12 months old.  Dave leans over to me, "Cameron's head is bigger than his."  It's a true statement. My kid has a gigantic noggin and maybe it will have it's own zipcode.  Thank you television for giving me a string of insults my child may hear in the future so I can teach her to laugh.