That's what she said...: November 2011

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

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!: