For Christmas the kids got an easel from ODD’s brother’s family. They love it and use it almost every day. The chalkboard especially gets a lot of use. Peanut and Wingnut draw pictures together (sometimes happily; sometimes not) on it and Peanut likes to practice writing letters on it.
This morning I noticed a large Y drawn on the chalkboard but instead of thinking, “Oh, that’s the letter Y!” I, being the nerd that I am, thought, “Hey! Peanut drew a Flux Capacitor!”
I know. I’m a geek. I can’t help myself. It wasn’t until Peanut told me herself and I took notice of the S and T behind it that I realized it was, in fact, a Y. Considering she’s never seen Back to the Future it really was too much to hope that she’d be designing something that “makes time travel possible.”
A couple of things have been happening around here lately that I wanted to post about. One is that I’ve figured out some things to do about my maternity clothes woes and am now putting a bit more thought into my clothes the way I do when I’m not pregnant. It’s been fun. Also, after reading my whiny post about it my dear friend, Em, brought over a couple of huge bins of great maternity clothes that she isn’t currently in need of so I can have some great options. Wasn’t that thoughtful!? I must admit, I have some awesome friends.
The other thing is that I decided to start a new blog. You can find it at http://everything-is-amazing.com.
A good number of bloggers I read and feel inspired by attended Alt Summit in January. I loved reading all about the great times they had while there and thought someday I’d love to go myself. You know, when I’m not ridiculously poor and when my husband has control over his own schedule so he can stay with the kids. Then I came to the realization that this little blog of mine, regardless of how very much I like it, is not really in the same realm of content as so many of these lovely women. This is not a design blog, or a lifestyle blog, or even a food or craft blog. Rather, it’s what I affectionately refer to as, for lack of a better term, a random crap blog. It’s a mish mash of whatever I feel like writing about at the time. Topics range from recipes to cute things my kids do to not-so-cute things my kids do to sewing projects to meandering thoughts rolling around in my little brain. Whenever I’ve read something about “improving” my blog it almost always mentions finding my niche and working on improving that. I’ve always rolled my eyes because, really, what kind of niche does this little blog of mine fit into? The thing is, part of me wants a separate place to post things; a place that does have a niche. I’ve put it off for various reasons for a few years and finally decided to just do it.
Everything Is Amazing (this explains the title) will be a place I can feature cool or interesting things I like, read, use, make, or have done. Occasionally things will be double posted both here and there but for the most part I’ll keep the content separate. Everything Is Amazing won’t include all the personal stuff or the goofy things my kids do but it will include things that don’t show up here. If it’s not your cup of tea, I totally understand, but I thought I’d post about it here initially anyway in case anyone was interested and wanted to follow me over. Today you can read in more detail about my maternity clothes solutions. In any case, thanks for reading!
I’ve written before about how much my kids love strawberries. They both get downright giddy when I bring some home. Usually, after hulling them I cut them in quarters and the kids eat them as fast as they can with their fingers. In an effort to help them slow down and actually taste the berries I started giving them toothpicks to eat with.
Peanut’s pretty good with a fork and Wingnut’s getting the hang of it but for some reason toothpicks are just a tad more fun and my kids love them. It makes me want to pick up some cute, reusable ones. They like eating with them so much I’ve started giving them some when we have any kind of fruit, not just strawberries.
While I’m writing about berries, I thought I’d share a little trick I learned on pinterest to help my fresh berries last a little longer. When I get home I fill a bowl with cold water then pour in a little white vinegar. Working with one carton of berries at a time I dump them into the bowl, swirl them around, then pull them out and drain them in a colander.
I usually rinse mine afterward but there’s so little vinegar used it isn’t actually necessary. I don’t know how it works but something about the vinegar stops the berries from molding as quickly as usual so they last longer than just a day or two (if you don’t eat them all first).
I have a set of plates, cups, and bowls from Children’s IKEA for each kid so they don’t have to fight over both wanting the same color at the same time. We’ve used them for years and love them (I must confess, though, I hate the matching cutlery). Then a year or so ago I noticed how quickly we seemed to be running out of cups so while at IKEA one day I picked up an additional set. They come in packs of six, which is awesome. That means, when all the dishes are done, we should have 18 cups floating around available for use. Even adjusting for the loss of one or two to the back yard someplace that should still leave me 16 cups! However, this is rarely the case. Even when I’m staying on top of the dishes we still seem to blow through the cups like they’re toilet paper. It is maddening.
Since last summer I’ve been trying to limit the kids to one cup each day. They start with it in the morning and keep it throughout the day. At least, that’s how it goes in my head. In real life they finish breakfast and promptly toss the now dirty cup in the (sometimes empty and clean, sometimes not) sink. Now, I’m happy to say I (mostly) have them trained to clear their dishes and put them in the sink. It’s awesome. But I would like their designated cup to be an exception to this, otherwise we are swimming in dirty kid cups within hours. I wish this were an exaggeration but it isn’t. Even if all they get is a small dribble of water, once it is consumed the cup is dutifully tossed in the sink. With so many cups, because, let’s be honest, the sink usually has dishes in it already, once the most recent cups has been deposited it is hard to know which one it was. And thus we go through 16 cups in a matter of hours.
So here’s my solution. I think it was put in my brain by Mrs. Bailey Park sometime last fall. I bought each kid one special cup. Each is the only cup in the house that looks like it so if it doesn’t get added to the pile in the sink I will still know which cup belongs to which kid. I’ll still make exceptions to this with hot chocolate cups and that sort of thing but I’m hoping this will curb the constant barrage of used kid cups cluttering up my sink, counter, and dishwasher.
Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. While I like Valentine’s Day it’s never been an especially big thing for me. As a kid my mom always made my brothers and sister and I a big heart shaped sugar cookie. She took some cake decorating classes in her 20s and would decorate them beautifully with flowers and our names and everything. They were always waiting for us at the breakfast counter. Despite my general dislike of sugar cookies it was always something I looked forward to every year.
This year, since my kids are getting older, I thought I’d try making Valentine’s Day a little more fun and festive for them. I found a couple of little mail boxes at Target and picked up little boxes of chocolates and conversation hearts for each kid. For Family Home Evening on Monday I had the kids make each other Valentines to go in their boxes. I wrote them each a little letter as well. On Tuesday they woke up to their mailboxes of goodies and were happy as could be.
While it started out well things got to be a bit chaotic as the day went on. Peanut had preschool, Wingnut and I went grocery shopping and ran a couple more errands, Peanut had dance class, then I had a meeting for music at church. It went quite long and I didn’t even start dinner until quarter to five. Normally, this isn’t a big deal but ODD is the ward mission leader and the missionaries are in our ward this week which means he needs to find people to feed them. Nobody else was able/willing to feed them for Valentine’s Day and since we don’t do anything terribly special for it we agreed to have them over. Horribly romantic, I know, but it since we were having a nicer dinner anyway we figured we may as well. They were planning to come at five. So yeah, it was a big hectic trying to get everything made. Luckily they were running late and so was ODD. We didn’t even eat until almost 6 and the kitchen was a complete disaster. ODD had to go with the missionaries to their next appointment and they had to leave before we even had dessert so Wingnut and I ate pavlova while Peanut told us how much she disliked blueberries and blackberries. After a while we cleared the table but left pretty much the rest of the mess. Yes, we are party animals.
Today I was absolutely exhausted. I did laundry but that’s about all I could muster the energy to do. This morning, though, I thought I’d try something fun I saw on Pinterest a while ago. I filled a couple of ziploc bags with two primary colors of paint, and taped them to the table with a piece of white paper behind. The kids got to mix up the paint colors, smear them around, and finger paint in them without me having to deal with a big mess that usually accompanies finger painting. Considering how tired I am today, even after having a nap, I felt pretty good about my efforts. The kids had a lot of fun with it, too. And ODD tackled the kitchen nightmare after the kids were put to bed. Now that’s love.
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Hello. 
I'm HairyShoeFairy. In general I blog about random crap - everything from crafts to cooking to my family to anything that's on my mind. To find things I think are especially cool or interesting clickety over to my other blog, Everything Is Amazing.
My Family ODD - My husband.
Peanut - My 5 year old daughter.
Wingnut - My 2 year old son.
Cashew - My newborn son.
Please Don’t Steal Stealing = Bad!
Linking=Good!
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