Giveaway!

Jen at Tatertots and Jello is celebrating her 200th post with a Mod Podge giveaway! She Mod Podged frames and a barn star...and she incorporated black/white toile! Swoon! Go check out her blog--it is just as cute as the title leads you to believe!

Frugal Mommy of 2 Girls always has loads of giveaways. I'm crossing my fingers for her Vincent Shoes $75 gift certificate giveaway. I've never bought Vincent Shoes before, but I've read great things about them...plus they're super cute!!

Frugal Mommy also is doing a giveaway for BioGreen Bottles! I've never used these before either, but I've switched my children away from traditional plastic sippies and water bottles and would love to try a new brand of BPA free products.

Kimba at A Soft Place to Land is having a giveaway of a $50 Lisa Leonard jewelry gift certificate! Gorgeous stuff...that mama necklace is calling my name!

Jerusalem My Destiny

Marshmallow Rainbow

We had a morning filled with crafts today and my children LOVED it! Our first craft was making marshmallow rainbows using multicolored mini-marshmalows. Marshmallows are a rare treat in our house, so first they each ate two and then they got to work! I drew the rainbows and they did the gluing. Both children had such a good time. I found this project on No Time for Flashcards.

What really surprised me was that my 3 year old sat and did the whole rainbow without stopping to take a break. He really had a good time!
My 5 year old had a good time with this too and told me everything she knows about rainbows. It was great to see the two of them crafting together at the kitchen table.
Now I have two marshmallow rainbows...but I'm not sure what to do with them! They sure are cute though!
We did another craft project too, but still have to do the finishing touches. My little guy really enjoyed himself a lot and asked if he could do more projects. I love seeing them enjoying creating things.

Decoupage Easter Eggs

Easter decorations are few and far between in my house this year--the construction project has me all out sorts and I just couldn't get into decorating for this holiday. I did, however, join in the decoupaged Easter eggs craze! I've seen these all over blogland and just had to give them a try.
They were super easy--just take plastic Easter eggs, use a foam brush to put on a layer of Mod Podge, then put on torn bits of tissue paper, then brush on some more Mod Podge. Easy Peasy! One word of caution though...I tried doing some with plain tissue paper and they did not turn out well. I think that tissue paper was too thin whereas the rose pattern tissue paper was thicker.

One thing I like is that the underlying color of the plastic eggs shows through the tissue paper a bit and changes the colors of the outside. I don't think you'd get the same effect with scrapbook paper.

Root Beer Cookies

Last week I was woefully behind on my Bloglines subscriptions and was tempted to mark them all as read, but I'm glad I didn't! I read about lots of great craft projects, but what REALLY tempted me was a recipe for Root Beer Cookies by a guest poster at Make and Takes.
Those are my cookies...I'm drooling just looking at the picture! Too bad they're all gone now...

I have to be honest, after I made the cookies I wasn't impressed. They just didn't have the wow factor I require from cookies. Then I frosted the cookies (you CANNOT skip the frosting with this recipe!) and the cookies got a whole lot better! And then the next day they were even better. Maybe the root beer flavor became more concentrated?? I don't know, but the addition of the frosting and then a day or two of time made these cookies REALLY good.

Yum. I highly recommend!

By the way, these take a LOT of butter...one cup in the cookies and one cup in the frosting...but hey, what's another inch or two on my hips?

Lampshade Update

Although I like the lamps I have in my family room, I'm not a fan of the lampshades. To be honest, the budget ran out when it came to lampshades, so I settled for the most inexpensive white lamp shades that I could find. They're quite boxy and not at all my style, but they do the job.

Here is a picture of the lamp on my dresser/sofa table when I had it decorated for Valentine's Day. See what I mean? White and boxy!

I decided that adding some ribbon would help me like the shades a bit more...and it does! Unfortunately the pictures don't do it justice--the ribbon makes a big difference for me. I'm still not a huge fan of the shades, but the addition of the ribbon means that the purchase of new lamp shades has moved waaaaay down on my priority list.
I bought a spool of black grosgrain ribbon with white stitching for less than $2.00 at Michael's and hotglued it to my two white lamp shades. Much better!
Voila!

the BIG project has started!

There is no turning back now--work on our family room addition officially started yesterday! I'm a ball of stress because I don't deal well with messes and this is MESSY!! And as of now the mess is only in the yard...I don't know what I'm going to do when the mess moves inside! Ugh!

Here is the back of our house before we started any demo. Excuse the overgrown ferns--I've since trimmed them back. Spring definitely hasn't sprung here yet!
Our addition will take up the area previously occupied by the little deck and the patio--basically we're bumping out the backwall from the lower left corner of the house over to just past the sliding door. The window on the left is in our family room (teeny tiny family room!) and the slider is off of the breakfast nook. We're adding about 270 square feet to the house in the family room and breakfast nook.
We demolished the deck ourselves to save some of the labor costs and we'll also be painting the interior and exterior of the addition.
We found someone's old nasty shoes under the deck. How gross!! They were all the way up by the house, too. Blech!!
Yesterday our contractor started on his part of the job. Eight weeks from now, he'll be done. For right now, he's turning my yard into a mud pit! Right now I have a small bulldozer parked in my backyard, waiting for him to come back today and dig the foundation. Yesterday he removed the patio...which turned out to be six inches thick rather than the more typical 3.5 inches!
Handsome and Princess are enthralled by the digging, especially because they have front row seats! As for me, well, I'm worried about naptime! Yesterday I managed to get them started with nap while our contractor was taking our patio to the dump...but after an hour they woke up when a chain saw started in the backyard. Yikes!

Sculpting with Packing Peanuts!

The other day I received a delivery that was cushioned with biodegradable packing peanuts. I'm a big believer in recycling, so we had some fun with the packing peanuts. I like these biodegradable ones much more than the icky styrofoam ones.
We made sculptures with them! Dip them in a bit of water and they start to "melt" and will stick to each other...
It was only a little bit messy, I promise! The children were fascinated by it, too. Handsome is three and Princess is five and they both enjoyed this activity.
It was a good lesson for Princess, too, as she tends to be a bit of a perfectionist (hmmm, wonder where she gets that from?!) and biodegradable packing peanuts and perfectionism do not go well together!
Next time packing peanuts come into your house, check to see if they're the biodegradable kind...it is inexpensive fun for your children!

Better than Brownies!

What is better than chocolate fudge brownies?? How about chocolate fudge brownies that you don't have to make yourself!
I'm not usually a brownie mix kind of girl, but Princess REALLY wanted to bake something all by herself and I thought this would be easier for her than baking from scratch. She picked out the mix all by herself (I think the word "fudge" is what swayed her!) and then carried the box all through the grocery store. I had to put a halt to the brownie box lovefest when, at the register, she was bestowing lavish kisses all over the box before putting it on the conveyor belt.
Handsome was not pleased to be relegated to the role of observer, but he was pacified by the promise of warm brownies. Meanwhile, Princess did a GREAT job! She read the recipe and did a really good job with it--I did help with the amounts of the various ingredients though. She's great at reading, but we haven't covered fractions yet!
I had her stir with a fork because I didn't want to deal with the huge mess she would have made with the handmixer. She didn't seem to care though!
The brownies were wonderful and Princess was so proud of herself! I'd post a picture...but we devoured them already! Yum!

Pumpkins in March?!

My five year old has been taking ballet since September of 2007 and her spring ballet recital coming up--she will be a pumpkin in the Cinderella performance. I'm trying very hard not to think about how much money I'm paying for her minimal amount of stage time...but let's just say it is cringe-worthy! The cost of lessons, performance fees, costume fees, and ticket fees (yes, we must buy EXPENSIVE tickets in addition to all the fees!) really adds up. As in hundreds of dollars. Ouch. They're doing three performances and she's on stage for about three minutes in each performance. Yup. Not exactly a fiscally sound move on my part, but she is very very excited about this. *sigh*

I'm excited that she is a pumpkin (her whole class is) because she's been my pumpkin since before she was born--I painted my pregnant tummy to look like a pumpkin back in October of 2003! She even dressed up as a pumpkin for her first Halloween. The costumes the studio chose aren't exactly my style (shiny orange leos?) but they do the trick. I think tutu dresses (that I could have made for waaaaay less than the costume fee) would have been cuter, but whatever.

The problem is that these leotards and matching headpieces are supposed to be for flower costumes, not pumpkins. So I was volunteered (not quite sure how that happened!) to turn the flower headpieces into pumpkin headpieces.

The headpiece on the left is how they all came to me--not nearly as cute and fluffy as in the picture on the costume company website! I started by cutting off the fluffy bits in the middle of the flower (as you can see in the headpiece on the right.)
Then I korked some green grosgrain ribbon to make the pumpkin vines. To kork ribbon you just wrap the ribbon around wood dowels (use clothes pins to hold it in place) and bake it on a clean cookie sheet. I spray the ribbon-wrapped dowel with water, too, before baking it at 205 for about 20 minutes.
After baking it, you can spray it with starch to help it keep the tight kork (especially if you're making bows with it), but I didn't need to do that. I just took the ribbon off the dowels and cut it into shorter bits. (And yes, I korked more ribbon that what I'm showing here!)
See, nice and curly! This is like the ribbon that stores like Gymboree use to make their hair curlies. You can buy korked ribbon on etsy and other sites, but it is SO simple to kork it yourself.

Anyhow, then I made stems out of felt and stuffed them...then I hotglued everything onto the headpieces. I fixed the "vines" down in a few spots so that hopefully the little girls won't pull them straight.
I think they look very pumpkin-y and the director loves them!
Princess is very excited that her mama made all the pumpkin heads--she's easily pleased!