March Madness

March Madness around here I assure you has NOTHING to do with college basketball. We've been busy training the pup and celebrating birthdays around here. Hard to believe it's already March and soon to be April, but boy am I ready for warm weather and sunshine. Anyhow, here is a glimpse into life around here these days.

February is my Dad's Birthday. The last two years I've gifted him a home made dinner from me. Last year it was his choice and he chose Thanksgiving for dinner. The most complex meal he could think of. These are pics from his real b-day in Feb when he got his dinner choices gifted.


I was pretty proud of the cake I decorated for him!


Pa teaching the young one to lick frosting of the candles.

Brayden learns fast. :)

We scheduled this year's follow up home made dinner on St. Patty's day. Yes we had Italian on St. Patty's day this year. I crafted some silly Irish decor for the party.

This is my interpretation of a rainbow of Easter eggs with a pot (pitcher) of gold (fabric/eggs) at the end of it. Hey, this is what I can do with things laying around the house so I don't have so spend money!

I do have a little shamrock pot I filled with greens from the yard and added some green food coloring to the water in my mini vases with the green eggs resting on top. So funky, but it was green so I decided that it was appropriately festive.

So, for his dinner this year, he got three choices under appetizers (he chose crab stuffed mushrooms), entree (meat lasagna) and desserts (he couldn't decide between the apple pie, carrot cake and lemon bars). The mushrooms just got thrown together and they were ok, but needed something. I'll have to work on that one, so they aren't pictured. The lasagna however came from The New Best Recipe cookbook from America's Test Kitchen and it was SUPERB! SOOOO good.


The process of building the HEAVY lasagna

All cooked up and being devoured.


The complete meal
The birthday boy enjoying his meal

SO you know how I said Dad couldn't decide on the dessert option, well neither could the baker Steve either. So he made all three. Here is the dessert buffet (bad picture, sorry). It was so good. Steve being such a great baker is a blessing for my tummy and a curse for my workouts.

Update on the fast growing pup. Her name is Bailey, I'm not sure if that was reported in the last blog or not.

She is very skilled at taking naps.


Taking naps ANYWHERE that is.

She loves to be right under foot in the kitchen. We're working on this one.


Some couch cuddles. She is so delightfully warm so a very welcome cuddle buddy for me.


Won't be able to lift her up like this for much longer. She is just shy of 13 wks and very close to 27lbs. Growing like a weed. Steve estimated about 1/2 lb a day based on her weight gain.



And this one is just one more random pic. This was one of the most simple yet flavorful meals I found on one of the food blogs I look to for inspiration fortheloveofcooking.net
Baked chicken flautas. YUM. so easy to make and they tasted SO good. I love when new things work out :)

Ok, that is it for the update now.

New Little Meliza

Well, we have another new canine girl in our family. She is an absolute sweetheart. She was down in Portland from Olympia for a cardiology appointment on Feb 17th. We went to meet up with the breeder, her son and the whole litter for the appointment so we could pick between 2 girls. It took us the entire hour to decide and it was SO hard to make up our minds. In the end the little one with the pink ribbon won our hearts because she was such a love bug.

It took us quite some time to come up with a name and only today have officially decided she is Bailey Meliza. Here are a couple photos of our little one.









Of course we are in the deep depths of potty training and she is really doing well. She finds the need to piddle what seems like every 20 min, but mostly she makes it outside. She has NOT once messed in her kennel, even during an 8 hour stint while we were at work. We are so proud.

Anyhow, just wanted to introduce you all. We are happy to have her :)

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

How have you been? Things have been rather quiet around here, so it's been a while since I had anything to post. But it's time to celebrate mushy love day. Every day is love day, Valentine's day is mushy cards and yummy dinner excuse day :) And also an excuse to create this CuTe sign to hang up on our mantle to decorate things up a bit for the lovey dovey day.

This has brought me such happiness this month. So simple,made out of only things I had on hand. I love this kind of project. Quick. Cheap. Cute.

On a different crafty note. We decided at work this year (since our Secret Santa fun was such a success in December) to make Valentines! I wish I had pictures of our heart baskets at work for you. They are light pink, hot pink and red with glittery names on them and they surround the whole island of computers at work. It is such a fun pop of color amidst a sea of sterile blue. Anyhow, the rules are like at school, if you make valentines for anyone, EVERYONE gets one. Thus began my journey to making 40 of these little loveys. Used Pinterest to find creative inspiration again and came up with this craft for my Valentine. All I needed was wax paper, my sewing machine and pink M&Ms. Step one above, cut out 40 matching pairs of hearts and sew together.


Step 2. Have Steve make a handy dandy M&M funnel to get those goodies into those tiny hearts.


Step 3: Fill hearts with chocolate love.

Step 4: Sew up the remaining edge. Gotta be careful to not overfill so they can still be sewn closed. I somehow failed to get a final product picture, but you can kind of see them in the background of step 2's picture (without the thread tails trimmed yet).

This was Valentines Day dinner. Surf n Turf. Starter course of Hungarian Mushroom soup in a mini roll bread bowl. VERY delicious. Dinner was a shared steak, tilapia with crab topping, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus. Restaurant (almost) quality meal, for a fraction of the cost, no crowds and I got to eat dinner in my sweat pants. Happy? YES.

I didn't want to ruin a perfectly good dinner with my baking, so I left that to the professionals. Got us a sampler of Coconut Cream Pie and Cherry Cheese Cake. YUM-O.

Anyhow, that is how we celebrated love day around here. Hope you had a lovely day and got to spread the love with all your friends and family!

Christine's Crafty Corner

BEFORE

AFTER



So Steve told me to get a hobby. He has lots, I didn't really have any. So I started following looking for one.I knew I liked making our house/yard pretty. I love doing things for cheap, making them really personal to me and it does allow for some creative outlet too. With a little searching the web for inspiration and ideas I have caught the bug for homemade, refurbished, thrifed redone/reused DIY projects. My favorite spots for inspiration are pinterest, and two blogs called thepleatedpoppy.com and ourbestbites.com.

I have been trying since I bought this house to commit to art on the wall. I have only manage 3 pieces. One in the dining room (purchased before the house) is of poppies that I oddly fell in love with at Target because I'm really not into floral stuff. The next was a picture of a creek called "Duncan Falls." I purposed to go out and find a serene nature/tree picture and when I found out the name of the falls pictured, well I had to make the purchase. That went up in the family room. The last one is a gift. Giving art as a gift is risky, but my Aunt Suellen and Aunt Kathy picked out a piece for us as a wedding gift and I really liked it when we got it, and now I love it. So in 3 years, I have managed to hang 3 pictures in this place.

I have commitment issues when it comes to art. It's expensive and so I have to LOVE love LoVe it if I'm going to convince myself to buy it. In my crafty blogging searches I kind of fell in love with the idea of being able to display art in a pretty way, but the actual ART could be changed out. Lots of posts on this regarding displaying kids art. Well, since I have a commitment phobia with art, this sounded like a great thing for me.

Below is my interchangeable art wall. And it makes me happy. It's not for everyone, but I am thrilled.

I started by buying some ugly frames that had good textures and spray painting them yellow. I wanted COLOR. I don't like white/tan bland. I used the pot holder I had made years prior as my color palate inspiration.

Next was finding a way to arrange them on the wall. As you can see, I traced the frames onto newspaper and taped them to the wall until I found the layout that was visually appealing to me. This is a tip I picked up in the blog world somewhere I think of pinterest. Also the idea of painted empty frames came from there too. Really, there is not any original idea of my own here I don't think. I just took others' ideas and made them fit me. Anyhow... here is the "in progress" photo as the frames went up.


When that last frame went up, it just wasn't inspiring. Not bad, just didn't make me jump up and down and clap over the "cuteness" factor. But then I came across this:

at less than perfect life of bliss

But I wanted mine to be magnetic. SO off I went to Michaels and I bought myself a magnetic dry erase board and some chalkboard paint. The board didn't fit my frame, so I ended up having to take it apart and peal just the metal sheet off the backing to the original product and we (Steve helped here) glued it to the board that fits the picture frame. (This is where in the future the project could look more polished if I try it again, but I'm still pleased.)

Anyhow, here is the metal magnetic dry erase surface attached to the board from the picture frame. We sanded the glossy surface a bit before spraying the chalkboard.


(INSERT ANGELS SINGING!) LOVE IT! (INSERT CLAPPING FOR CUTE-NESS!!!!))))
The frames give me a fun place to hang my weekly menus to "glam" up the everyday life stuff. These are the first wedding pictures I've put up anywhere in the house. I'd love some quality prints of wedding shots someday to hang, but again, I can't commit to the ones I'm totally IN LOVE with. Someday. Until then, when I get tired of these, I can change them out for new ones! And I love the idea that I have a chalk board for notes OR can just use a magnet to throw up a recipe I want to keep handy for the week, an invite, or whatever. The organizer in me seriously screams with giddy joy at the versatility of how my magnet chalk board can be used to help me be organized. LOVE LOVE LOVE it.

Another pic just printed out on normal paper. The corners curl, it's not good quality, but it's up and I'm loving it and didn't have to have the pressure of money behind my decision of what pics I wanted to chose to put up, because they don't have to be forever.

And in the beginning, I wasn't wild about the black clip option of holding the images in the frames. But I saw them used in the picture above (the "home is where your art is" gal) and it worked. I was thinking ribbons with mini clothes pins or paperclips, but neither was working how I wanted. This works.

So there is the finished product again. Hope you enjoyed it :) I had fun doing it! And it turns out this shop we are creating out in the garage for Steve just might come in handy for this crafty side of me. I'm sure Steve won't mind pausing to help me create something CUTE, right?

Christmas 2011

Christmas is simple this year around our place. No garland, simplified decor. I'm going for easy, homemade and CHEAP! Here's a little glimpse into Meliza Christmas this year!


I'm into yarn lately. Not a great picture, but I am enjoying the jingle bells, cranberries and yarn balls this year. Goes with the cheap, simple, homemade theme this year.

My Black Friday buy! This is all I went out to buy black Friday and I saved $5 too :) Didn't want to go with the bow, so I tried my hands at some posies. I was inspired from thepleatedpoppy.com. One of my favorite blogs to follow.

My posies up close. I love them.

We found it! Took a bit of looking. The place we went I don't think shaped the trees at all, which is fun to have a natural looking tree, but I wish I would have taken a pic when we got it home. It was wild and outta control when we got it in the house. I did some major pruning and shaping and this is what we ended up with.

Pretty!

When we went through the stuff in the garage, we found Steve's old ornaments. These sweet little skates were recovered and I am just in love with them.

Well that is it for now. Stay tuned as I may add more as we actually get closer to Christmas. But first, did you catch Linus' monologue on what Christmas is all about? No? Allow me to link you. I am simply in love with this kid and his delivery of the Christmas message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn10FF-FQfs

Merry Christmas!