Things that never used to occur to me

It never ceases to amaze me thing things I do now in the name of saving time.  Now that my girl is scootching around and pulling herself up onto things, running to the basement for something takes careful consideration.  For instance, yesterday I had to pee.  Ran to the bathroom, heard a loud *crash* and came running still hiking up my yoga pants.  There was a massive fisherprice car accident in my living room.  I'd like to tell you no one was seriously hurt...but some of the little people barnyard animals were squashed pretty hard and are still recovering.  My daughter managed to get a rather large bruise on her forehead from it.  *sigh*.  Anyway, I realized yesterday there was a small mountain of dirty clothes upstairs, so I figured I'd better get on my laundry.  As I'm about to put my girl into her "circle of neglect" (aka exersaucer) I also realize I need to take a picture of myself and weigh myself and send it in as I'm doing a weight loss challenge for 6 weeks.  The scale is downstairs.  I also needed to bring up dinner for the evening and a couple boxes to continue packing my house.  Oh yeah, and bring up my turkey roaster to do a batch or two of nuts and bolts.  Finally, I realize my brain is on complete overload in trying to remember everything I need to do in the basement in one shot, so I made a checklist in my iphone.  I climbed the babygate at the top of the stairs.  I should mention Izzy is about 15 minutes shy of going down for her nap, so shes crabby, and starts screaming that i'm not in my usual 5 foot radius.  So I run downstairs, pick up the dirty clothes as I go, get down there....

realize my phone is upstairs on the counter still.

*sigh*

I used to be organized...really I did...

Happy weekend all <3

A Creative Few Weeks

Well, once again, blogging has fallen victim to the daunting tasks of being a mom, wife, cheercoach, and now crafting extrodinare and expert packer.  I coerced my husband into giving me an hour and a half of his time on thursday night, and lo and behold, our basement is about 75% packed!

But that is not the point of this post.  The point of this post is, as my sister calls it, "Crafting".  I see all kinds of blogs, like my friend Beth at keep the shiny side up that have all these wonderful crafting ideas, so I'm almost always game to do some crafting, I just didn't expect my sister to be my partner in this!

A few weeks ago, my sister K phoned me and said she wanted to "craft".  At first, I thought she was drunk and someone roofied her.  Seriously.  My sister is was the type of person to sit and drink wine and watch my mom and I do "domestic" things like baking, cooking, sewing, crafts, etc.  Once I was over my initial shock, I was elated that I'd have a partner to do these things with as my poor momma is very busy with school right now. 

So on the 27th, K came over, helped me feed, bathe and put my daughter to bed, and then we got started.  We picked a craft from Here and promptly decided on the various (and copious) crafts we wanted to do.  I had bought the supplies ahead of time for #38, the holiday soap pumps.  This was actually pretty easy to do, I'd even go as far as to say this would be a good craft for slightly older kids to try! since you have to use acrylic paint, you don't want kids who don't understand that paint doesn't fall in the 4 major food groups to do this. 

You'll need:
a bottle of liquid soap with a pump
white spray paint that adheres to plastic
a hair blow dryer and/or a bottle of goo gone
acrylic paint & various sizes and shapes of paint brushes
newspaper
ribbon

To start:  use a blow dryer to heat up the stickers on the bottle to loosen them to take them off.  The original blogger said she used the goo gone, we didn't have any, and honestly it didn't seem like we needed it.  Just make sure you do it long enough.  Then we stood the bottles up, took the pumps off, stuffed the top with kleenex, and sprayed the bottles with the spray paint.  While those dried, we painted some random wood plaques I had from years ago with christmas sayings.  Once they were dry, we pulled out the tissue and we painted with the acrylic paint.  once all of that was dry, we screwed on the pumps, and tied a nice bow around the top.  I'm actually pretty impressed how they turned out!  My sisters "joy" one didn't turn out as nice as I think she was hoping (puting "joy" in black against red...c'mon...maybe in ozzy osbournes house) but here is the finished product:

 K's are on the left, mine are on the right



The Backs of our red soap pumps

Not too shabby eh?

THEN it was the night before halloween, and since its I's first Halloween, we didn't want to disappoint her and be lame and not do a pumpkin.  Her and I were doing a little tour around central Alberta for halloween to see both her grandmas and grandpa, my grandparents, my husbands brother, 2 of his cousins, and my moms BFF, and poor K (hubby) worked so he wouldn't be home until 7 to hand out candy.  Ah well.  Anyway, being the wicked parents we are, we choose "kid friendly" patterns.

I did mumble, K did Elmo.  I know...mine's better :)

And then lastly, I took a page from a friend of mines craftiness and made my girl some homemade finger paints.  They were easy and fun!  Messy once my girl got her hands into them, but it was a blast :)  Thanks again Jenn!!  (interesting fact about Jenn, her and I both had our first babies, both girls, 3 hours apart on the same day)

Recipe:

2 3/4 cups water

1/4 c cornstarch

mix the two together in saucepan

1/4c water

1 envelope knox plain gelatin

mix together and set aside

Heat the saucepan until cornstarch and water come to a boil.  Mixture will thicken as it heats.  Make sure you keep the lumps out of it.  Remove from heat and add gelatin mixture.  Then i poured into smaller containers, mixed in some food coloring for fun colors and let it sit in the fridge to cool off.  I laid down a sheet on the floor, stripped my girl down to her diaper, and here's how it went!:

On her face

 we started on the floor...but it kinda was more like leg painting than finger paintin

 working on our second masterpiece

breaking for a quick chew on the high chair harness.

All in all, its been a great week or two.  Looking forward to doing some more crafting with my sister, packing, and my bff's wedding in 2 weeks.

Much love to you all :)

I'll pop you one better!

I haven't written a post in a while because my daughter is on a sleep strike for what feels like my entire lifetime.  Last night, so far, was the worst.  How any one living being can scream for hours on end and not be hoarse or exhausted (or both) is beyond me.  Ah well, I am lucky to have her, and I will take her bad nights in stride. 

I wanted to post these in my blog because I gave them a try and they are amazing.  I will warn you, however, unless you have unreal will power, these are dangerous.  You absolutely will NOT be able to stop at one!  He'll be mad at me for telling you this, but my husband ate close to 15 over a few days...he said he just couldn't get enough!
Cake Pops

I'm going to give these a try for my BFF's wedding shower coming up in November.  They were relatively easy, however the rolling in chocolate part, for me, was hard because I couldn't justify wasting the candy sticks on a test run, so I just used toothpicks.  In hindsight, I should have use a bamboo skewer, something with a little more girth to hold the weight of the cake ball.   I, however, would start with slightly less icing than what the recipe calls for, or maybe a whipped icing? Even a home made icing maybe.  I felt they were a little on the hurt-your-teeth-they're-so-sweet side.  I am looking forward to doing these again but using different flavors.  Its going to be a bit of a challenge because my BFF is allergic to chocolate. I think I'll do the tuxedo one in a red velvet with cream cheese icing (yes, I know that its still chocolate, but I'll make her a special set of just vanilla).  I wonder if any of you have any ideas on different cake and icing combos that might be good? I need another kind that would work for the bride one.

Ooo almost forgot, here is a link to a how-to video on youtube.  I found this VERY helpful
video

I hope my readers (if I even have any at this point) are all enjoying the fall weather we're having, autumn is truly the prettiest season I think!  Cheers
xo

Here comes the bride...

I love weddings.  I love everything about them.  Cake, dancing, drinking, fancy attire, speeches, kissing...the whole thing.  I know there are so many cynics out there that think marriage is the last legal form of slavery.  I am not one of them.  I've had the honor and pleasure of being a bridesmaid twice and am about to participate in my third wedding as Maid of Honor for my very bestest friend.  I can't wait!! Today I got to do one of my favorite things about being in a wedding...ordering a pretty new dress.  My bestie, E, picked a gorgeous dark blue color for the dresses.  Not going to lie to you, its going to be one hot bridal party.  and BONUS! I won't be pregnant in this wedding!! One of the other two weddings I was in, I unexpectely got pregnant AFTER I'd  bought a cute little mermaid cut number.  Thank god it was ordered 1 size too big.

I also love weddings because it reminds me of my big day.  It also reminds me how incredibly lucky I am to have found K.  I've been to more than one wedding that I feel won't last past this seasons glee cast graduating high school.    Another great thing about weddings? lets be honest with each other.  Any of you ladies out there reading this know what I'm talking about.  I like to go to weddings and pick out little things that I feel like I did better.  Don't scoff, or deny it.  Because way deep down, you know you do it too.   When I get some rinky dink little souvenier that I don't like (like a pen) I think "yep...gave money to sick kids...your pens can suck it". 

On that note, I must go get cracking on cleaning my house and ironing fancy wedding clothes.  K, peanut and my folks and i have a family wedding to go to this weekend.  I was pretty leary about going due to the fact that I was under the impression some of the "less desirable" members of my family would be in attendance.  After a brief FB chat with the bride though, I suddently am REALLY looking forward to going!

Hope to chat with you soon! I'll be a whole year older by the next post ;) xoxo MUAH!

Blog: the pilot project

Just last week I was talking to a friend of mine who said I should write a blog. I don't know if she meant it or not, but here is my attempt at it!

Welcome! Thank you for checking out my blog! I've never written one of these things, but I figure, how hard can it REALLY be?!

I'll start with today, I suppose. Seems like a good place to begin!

My day started off a little rough. My girl is going through a phase of not staying asleep. After much harping by my mother, I have her on a pretty good schedule, but at nights...I don't know what her deal is! Anyway, that is perhaps another post for another day. K came home at 7am, turned on the TV and watched the PVR'ed episode of Big Brother. At full volume. *sigh*. So peanut wakes up, screaming at the tops of her lungs. I haven't had a solid 4 hours of consecutive sleep in weeks, so to say I'm a wee bit cranky in the morning is an understatement. So, up I get with peanut, and we walk to her room to do the diaper change. I won't say I understand babies, because I don't. The average baby goes through 8 diapers a day. Peanut is more than 7 months old, therefore we have A LOT of diaper changes under our belt! Yet, like clockwork, everytime we change her diaper, she screams like I've just beat the sense out of her (its actually pretty awful!). So, while I'm trying to calm her down, change her diaper and undress/redress her, my husband has decided while brushing his teeth to come and inspect. I'm not in the mood, at all. The whirr of the electric tooth brush proved to be the straw that broke the camels back. I turned around and snapped "I don't need a f*cking audience, thank you". At least he was smart enough to know to just turn around, go to the bathroom to finish brushing his teeth and go to bed.

He's lucky he made it out alive. Poor guy.

After that, peanut decided that she'd sufficiently wound me up enough for the time being and decided to fall back asleep. I assumed at this point I probably wasn't too terribly welcome in my own bed, so her and I had a sleep on the couch. Then my mommy friend Lindsay and her son, E, texted us and asked us to go for a walk. In true peanut fashion, my girl waited until we were at the furthest possible point away from home to have a complete and utter melt down. *sigh* thanks dear! after another nap though, all was well. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing and reading books and sending daddy off to work!

Tonight, so far, has been eventful! I went with my neighbors adult daughter and another neighbor from down the streeth more my age (and peanut, of course) and got one of these new trendy feathers put in my hair. Tomorrow when I do my hair I will post a picture of it (its rad, as the cool kids say). Once we got home, and peanut was in bed, I showered and continued work on my "labor of love" for her. Thats right, folks, I've made 27 cloth all-in-one diapers for her. Please, hold your applause. I have 8 complete that we alternate days with, and I am working on another 19 as we speak. Hopefully they'll be done by the long weekend as I'm having some special company! More on that later. Now, I'm writting a blog post with a load of clean laundry yelling at me to get off my arse and fold it. I want to fold laundry about as much as I want a boil on my ass. But, such as life. After this, off to bed, and watch the rest of Mr. Deeds and sleep.

Thank you for reading my first (rambling) blog post. I promise they won't all be like this!!

Tune in tomorrow for my next post: "my internet friend is coming for a visit!! Hopefully shes not a pervy old man..."