Greetings, all! I apologize for the drought in posting; I think that I was in need of a longer summer break than I originally thought – after teaching and taking my own classes (as part of my master’s degree in English literature) for the past nine months, when the semester ended in May, I was ready to lounge on the couch and relax! But, here I am , ready to work on posting more regularly.

I figured that a good start to introducing myself to you was by introducing my readers to my husband, Jordan, and our puppy, Wyatt. Now, I’d love to show you another part of our lives: our home!

I wanted to start the home tour in the kitchen because that’s the room that is most “finished” decorating-wise, so here goes!

We live in an apartment in South Dakota. As many a renter knows, it can be difficult to make an apartment feel like home, but we’ve tried hard to inject our personal tastes and touches into our apartment. It’s still a work in progress!

As you enter the door to our one-bedroom apartment, this is what you see! Our kitchen (see picture at the top of the post) is one of my favorite parts in the house, because my husband, as the resident chef in our home (that’s right – I lucked out with a husband who likes to cook!), always makes yummy meals for us to enjoy together.

Our apartment was brand new when we moved in, so it’s nice and modern. We chose to decorate the kitchen using accents of yellow, one of my favorite colors (and one of our wedding colors!). We love the black appliances, though if my husband were doing the writing, he’d share how much of a drag our stovetop is, as it’s ceramic and, thus, very difficult to keep clean. But, we tried to make our rental feel homey, since we’ll be here for at least another year, as I finish my master’s program!

Above our sink, we purchased and hung a Grundtal wall shelf from IKEA to anchor the wall. As you can see, we keep our dish soap on top of the shelf, as well as kleenexes for easy access. The shelf also came with these S-hooks to hang from the shelf, which is perfect for our potholders!

Above the shelf, we hung a nine-picture brown frame that we received as a wedding gift. It’s currently full of wedding photos, but I’m sure that as our life changes and grows (hopefully including children someday!), we’ll enjoy switching out the pictures at whim.

In this close-up of our kitchen, you see the various canisters that we utilize in our kitchen, primarily for pasta noodles. The canisters were a gift from my Mom, and we love them! The smallest one has been filled with wine corks since this picture was taken; we enjoy tasting different kinds of wine, and keeping the corks has been fun for us.

In the corner of the kitchen is a chalkboard that we utilized in our wedding decor; I finally purchased some chalk so that we can write messages, recipes, or shopping lists in a centralized location, which sounds like a great idea to me!

The last part of the kitchen that I want to show you is our wine racks, which we also purchased at IKEA. I love these racks so much – they have so much character! Right now, seven out of eight slots are filled with bottles of wine that we received as Christmas gifts from Jordan’s parents. We love trying new wines, and since Jordan’s parents are quite the wine connoisseurs, their recommendations are always great!

So, that’s a tour of our kitchen. Next up: our bedroom and bathroom!

[All photos by me]

I’m a Momma to our little canine boy, Wyatt the dog. He’s our two-year-old Yorkie, and he’s our rambunctious, cuddly puppy that keeps us busy each and every day. We purchased our puppy before we were married (before we were even engaged!) from a breeder outside of Brookings, a small town in South Dakota, and we chose Wyatt from a picture of him and his brothers and sisters on the breeder’s website. While I was a bit nervous about picking a dog based on a picture, instead of meeting him first and then bringing him home, something just felt so right when we chose Wyatt. There’s just nothing that I can compare to picking Wyatt and then meeting him and realizing that he was perfect – our little Wyatt just fits perfectly into our family. He’s just the right amount of cuddly for me, and plus –  he hates being alone and, therefore, has a penchant for following me, his Momma, everywhere I go (which delights me to no end!). My husband Jordan loves to play ball with Wyatt, and the puppy is just one of the best things in our lives.

As silly as it may sound, Wyatt has also given me a wonderful dose of what it means to be a Momma. While I have no idea how mothering a child will change me and my priorities (though I know that I can count on the fact that being a Momma to a baby certainly will be a life-altering, blessed, difficult experience), I feel so fortunate that I’ve had Wyatt the dog to “prep” me for what it means to tend to another being’s needs before satisfying my own, most of the time. After we brought Wyatt home for the first time, we learned that while our breeder had led us to believe that he was potty-trained, Wyatt in fact was not even close to potty trained. After a few stressful days of cleaning up after Wyatt, I even said to Jordan that I was feeling a bit of what I imagine post-partum depression to look like. I don’t boast to know exactly how post-partum depression manifests itself for everyone, but when we brought Wyatt home, that’s sure what I felt that I was going through! I was so overwhelmed, so emotional that I cried all the time; I was disinterested in tending to Wyatt’s needs, and all I wanted to do was hide under a pillow. And this is just a puppy, not a baby! But, Jordan and I helped each other through those first few stressful weeks, and by the time Wyatt was home for a month or so, we felt like we were the ones who were finally in control, instead of Wyatt.

As an introduction to Wyatt the dog (who I imagine will show up on my blog every now and again), check out the video linked in the photo feature at the top of this post, which chronicles Wyatt’s homecoming. We couldn’t love Wyatt more!

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
~Peter F. Drucker

Welcome to What About Sara, a space I plan to use to reflect on life’s blessings and other happenings. It is my hope that this space can be a platform for me to muse about a variety of things, including marriage, crafts and creations, motherhood (of the puppy variety – for now), education (my own, and my efforts to educate the youth of America), recommendations of must-read literature, our home, my adventures into the world of photography, blogging, creating a sustainable life, searching for my authentic self, my dreams and goals, and other ventures and undertakings.

I’d love for you to join me on my adventure into marriage. I’ve been blessed to call my best friend my husband for seven months now. Jordan and I met about five years ago while we were both working for a nationally known bank in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We were married just seven months ago in Sioux Falls, a day that both Jordan and I were committed to handcrafting, so that our wedding day was reflective of us as individuals and as a couple. Click here to read about our wedding day over at my other blog, Eco-Vintage Weddings. I hope to add motherhood (of the human variety; I’m already a mother to our loving Yorkie pup named Wyatt) to the mix eventually in the future, and I can’t wait to utilize this space to chronicle my successes and foibles into the world of mothering a child someday.

Join me as I begin to navigate the world of teaching. As a teaching assistant and graduate student in English literature at a local university in South Dakota, I’m definitely learning how to teach while teaching. I graduated in 2009 from a local private college in South Dakota with a double major in English and journalism, but I’ve never had any formal education training. My forays into teaching college freshmen (I’m teaching English composition and introduction to literature) have meaningfully fostered within me a love for education, and I plan to pursue my teaching certification immediately following the completion of my master’s degree, and, later, possibly, I’d like to pursue doctoral studies in either rhetoric and composition or in education (possibly a policy-related degree track). I’d also love to use this space to recommend compelling, life-changing literature for others to read. I believe that writing plays such a pervasive role in our society, regardless of the advent of technology, which is precisely why I elected to pursue a master’s degree in literature.

I invite you to join me in my forays into the second quarter-century of my life. I’ll be 25 in November this year, and I can’t wait to see what the next 25 years (if I’m so blessed to endure that long) has in store for me. The first 25 (well, 24 plus a few months) have certainly been an adventure, full of family reunions, weddings, birthday parties, Barbies, moving from SD to Missouri as a child, and then back again, imagining, to-do lists, the excruciating loss of three grandparents, learning to drive, and then learning to drive again (this past summer: a manual vehicle), sleepy summer mornings spent watching reruns of “Dawson’s Creek,” music (particularly of the Backstreet Boys variety), pets, love that’s failed, and love that’s endured.

Join me as I try to navigate the worlds of making our house a home. We’re in the process of trying to make our small, kitchen pantry-less, one-bedroom apartment feel like home, so you may encounter some home decor posts along the way. Our aesthetic style shifts quite often, but my dream is to own a home (someday) built before the 1950s with the original woodwork still in tact. I’m a lover of all things old and vintage (see: our wedding), but for now, we’re (slowly) trying to navigate the intermediate (and hopefully rather temporary) world of apartment living with the things we currently have.

Join me as I attempt to learn how to snap beautiful photographs, and how to blog in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful to me (and, hopefully, in a way that’s interesting to you). I think that these two goals of mine operate in tandem with one another, meaning that through photos, I hope to find fulfillment and meaning in the everyday adventures of my life. Whether it’s snapping photos of our puppy Wyatt dressed in his yellow raincoat or taking pictures at a family birthday party, a reunion, or in an open field, I hope to learn to capture the joy and the beauty of everyday life, and to use these photos as fodder for this space. {NOTE: My camera is a Canon T1i.}

Finally, I hope that you’ll join me as I search to uncover the ways in which to lead a sustainable, authentic life. I’m a believer in (someday) using cloth diapers and making homemade baby food, in upcycling, and in reusing. I’m a lover of handmade and upcycled items (hello, my name is Sara, and I am an Etsy addict). I’m obsessed with the idea of growing and preserving food for my family; I’d love to try to do that someday – for now, our apartment is rather limiting to us in terms of the fact that our home is lacking entirely in garden space. I love the idea of intentional communities, and I am eager to learn more about educational opportunities that surpass the options of public and private school (including charter schools, Montessori schools, etc.).

I am eager to develop this space into a platform for reflection, conversation and fulfillment. I’d love it if you’d join me in my adventure to navigate life’s daily blessings and other happenings.

{Photo by Creative Kindling, our outstandingly talented wedding photographers}