Runaway October

Some­times it’s so nice to just wipe a slate clean and start over again.

Last years res­o­lu­tions were hit or miss.

1…) Stop cussing, com­pletely. Neg­a­tive

2…) Smile more. Kinda sorta, I guess.

3…) Spend more indi­vid­ual time with Declan and treat him like an adult. Yes and no.

4…) Cre­ate and add some items to my Etsy shop. Nope.

5…) Do more craft projects — for myself and with the kids. Yes!

So, once again I’m going to set some res­o­lu­tions and think about them ran­domly throughtout the year and feel bad when I don’t hit them 100%. Yep. Sounds about right.

1.) Stop cussing, com­pletely — How did I end up wih such a potty mouth? While I admit that Declan telling me my ass is too big makes me gig­gle, it’s also quite embarass­ing in public.

2.) Detox­ify the house — This one is dif­fi­cult because my mom buys her own clean­ing prod­ucts and calls me, jok­ingly, a tree­hug­ger for my choices. It’s just so easy to have things build up under the sinks. Thank­fully I clean so infre­quently that it’s not a real issue to toss every­thing. I’m also going to start “No ‘Poo“ing my hair again. I tried before while work­ing but couldn’t han­dle going out in pub­lic dur­ing the really wonky phase. Here’s a great Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity for it. We have an on again, off again rela­tion­ship with the health­ier beauty prod­ucts, mainly because of finances. I think it might be time to just suck it up and buy what I know is best for the fam­ily — not best for my bank account.

3.) ETSY — Seri­ously, why can’t I get this going? I’ve decided not to do any­more swaps, so maybe that will make it eas­ier? Wih the purc­ahse of a new sewing machine (50% off clear­ance sale) I’m definitly going to com­plete more projects, but I’d like to make a lit­tle extra cash too.

4.) Try to cut back on HFCS and MSG — With that com­bi­na­tion it leaves next to zilch to buy. Thank­fully Matt is on board with me and we’ve both done some research into the issue. Frankly it scares us.

Alright, I think that’s enough bab­bling. And the boys are wait­ing on me to watch a movie.

Thanks for reading!

I’ve been feel­ing quilty lately. Baby show­ers seem to be the best inspi­raion for me. I gives me a dead­line and an excuse to give a gift that will last instead of some­thing that will be used for a month or two and then donated.

I have few baby gifts that we still use now that my youngest is a year. One of them is a small sam­pler quilt that my mom picked up at at a truck stop some­where out­side of Payson, Az.

Here’s the ver­sion I cre­ated. I think it turned out really well. I had a cou­ple dif­fer­ent quils in mind when I des­gined this. Purl­Bee lists a great tuto­r­ial. Crazy Mom Quilts had a beau­ti­ful ver­sion. Don’t for­get this sassy one too.

I used 6or 7 dif­fer­ent greens that I picked up at JoAnns. The brown is a super soft linen blend. The back­ing is Alex­ader Henry’s Giraffe Cross­ing.

When I asked the mama-to-be what her nurs­ery theme was she said giraffes and out­doorsy col­ors. I hope it fits in okay. If not I know quite a few boys here that would be happy to keep it!

(That’s my 6’2″ brother for size reference!)

A cou­ple week­ends ago we rounded up the kids and my mom and hit up the Ari­zona Sci­ence Cen­ter. We had a sur­pris­ingly good time with a 2 year old in tow.

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When  we would try to move on Declan would get upset because he thought we were leav­ing, not just mov­ing to another room full of cool stuff to do. The Grossol­ogy exhibit was tons of fun.

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Thanks again to Grandma Ann for gift­ing us with the mem­ber­ship. Hope­fully it’ll cool down soon so we can use the Zoo mem­ber­ship too.

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Check out the ‘Pix’ link at the top for more new pic­tures of the boys.

Where are your favorite places to take young kids?

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that for the longest time I detested thrift stores. Just think­ing of them brought the mothball/sanitizer/old lady smell to my nose and images of peg boards filled with head­less Bar­bies danced in my mind. I hated some of the ugly (to me) clothes that my mom picked out and forced me to wear and there was never any of the cool stuff that all the other kids had.

I’ve decided recently though that I like thirft stores now that I’m in charge of what I buy. Did you know that Good­will car­ries Fab­ric, notions and other crafty bits? Totally! That’s how Mom got me in there in the first place.

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These were pan­els that I also found. Declan loves the lit­tle map blankie I made him.

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Other nifty stuff:

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(As always, click for big­ger pictures.)

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I used a pat­tern from Hip Hand­bags and love the way it turned out. I’ll def­i­nitely be using the pat­tern over again, as both my mom and myself really liked the size and shape.

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Only prob­lem is that it’s more of a medium purse than a mar­ket tote.

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I went ahead and put a reg­u­lar dou­ble welt pocket in it any­way, using match­ing pip­ing from the out­side. The lin­ing is the Sage Kleo from Alexan­der Henry’s Fash­ion­ista line that I am totally in love with.

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I totally love the way it came out, but I real­ized I could really use one of those itty bitty mini irons. I just could not get the wrin­kles out of the bot­tom cor­ners. It got pretty man­gled try­ing to sew the bot­tom on. Appar­ently my machine does not like tight cor­ners when using buck­ram and heavy inter­fac­ing. Who knew?

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I hope you enjoy Eliz­a­beth. I’ll get it in the mail as soon as I have some­one to watch the kids!

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On another note, here’s the iron­ing board cover I did recently. Cute, no?

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I really need to work on tak­ing pic­tures indoors. Sum­mer sun is just too harsh to take stills outside.