Owl in the Family - Halloween 2017

In the past 6 months, both of my daughters have grown extremely fond of the adorable series Owl Diaries. These are beginner chapter books with vibrant pictures on every page and the dialogue is very chatty. I find the books quite cute myself and they are perfect for beginner readers, in my opinion. The main owl, Eva, is sweet and her best friend's name is Lucy, so that is obviously a hit in our house since we have a Lucy too :)

Molly has started drawing owls all the time now and she is getting quite good at it. In September, I was going back and forth on what to suggest for Halloween costumes and then one night I realized that it might not be too difficult to make them owl costumes. When I suggested it, the girls were SO excited so we settled on it. They wanted me to be an owl too, so I decided to make mine a bit more like Hedwig. ;)

I think the end result was pretty good!!

I loosely followed this post to make the costumes and I ran into a few hiccups along the way due to my own choices in fabric, etc, but the girls love the costumes and I love how much free time I have now that I'm not making their costumes. It definitely took me a lot longer than that post outlined, and I think I am going to break down and now (after Halloween), sew their wings on so that they can play better with the costumes in the future.

I also decided to make their eyes on winter hats, but we have had unseasonably warm weather here lately and they wore their costumes indoors at school etc. so I also made them masks. Lucy, aged 3 1/2, decided to wear her hat and mask at the same time and there was no talking her out of having 4 owl eyes. Oh well! haha This is the post I followed for their masks (and mine too).

My costume is fun too because it's pretty work friendly (I wore it to work on Halloween without the mask!) and comfy. I think I'll keep it for years to come because it's easy :)

Hope everyone had a great Halloween! I will admit that it is not my #1 favourite holiday but I was happy to have the time to make the costumes this year and hoping to make it a yearly tradition :)

Homemade toys for kids (Tuesday's Tot Talks)

Happy Pancake Tuesday, everyone!! We are having pancakes, bacon and sausages for supper tonight with some fruit salad! I have been craaaaaaving fruit salad lately (Not the worst thing, really!) so I can't wait to have some of that with supper. We're having my in-laws over and it will be fun! I often try to give something up for Lent, or take something on. This year, I am not giving anything up (because it is going to be a bit of a weird Lent with having a baby right smack in the middle of it all) but I have thought a little bit about taking something on. My "thing to improve upon" is to stop keeping a tally in our marriage. I read this article yesterday and thought, hmm...we are happy, sure, but I definitely "keep track" of certain things without really intending to, and there's really no need for that. I know that I am really going to be needing Brian's help in the next 6ish weeks, so I need to trust that he is going to be able to help me without me nagging him to do so constantly.

And now, onto the fun stuff!!! I have been planning this post for awhile, and I debated splitting it up with tutorials for each toy, but I might do that another time if anyone is interested. As I've mentioned before, my lovely husband (the structural engineer) has enjoyed making toys for Molly since she was about a year old. Most of these projects have started off with something I saw on Pinterest and mentioned to him. Usually, I ahd planned to attack the projects mostly on my own, but he is just much more skilled at "building" so he has taken over a bit, and he has loved it.

Here are a few of the fun things Brian has made for Molly, with some links to tutorials we used for more information.

1) Cardboard mailbox covered in duct tape

I originally saw a cardboard mailbox idea on Pinterest with a link here and thought it would be fun for Molly to play with. Brian took it to the next level and bought different kinds of duct tape and velcro tape to seal the bottom flap. Molly still plays with this after a year and a half, and every kid who comes to our house plays with it too. The best part is that it cost us almost nothing to make, and that you can "mail" anything you want!!

Check out some other great ideas for things to make with cardboard boxes HERE, HERE and HERE. The possibilities are endless, really! I especially like the cardboard slide on the stairs on this site...I think Brian would like it as much as Molly ;)

2) Play kitchen from old cabinets

Fridge/freezer, sink, stove and oven

The stove and the oven - the stove portion was from another electronic stove toy, and was re-wired to work with this (obviously I had nothing to do with that aspect of it)

In my mind, a play kitchen is a prime toy for a toddler, and almost every "play place" that you go to will have one. It makes sense - if Mommy spends a lot of time in the kitchen (which many mommies do!), kids will want to do that too! We found these cabinets on the side of the road between our house and Brian's parents' house with a "free" sign on it. They were brand new, and I guess they just didn't fit in the person's renovations. We bought the tap and countertop for less than $10 at a great store with used home items, Restore (items donated to the store; all proceeds to Habit for Humanity) and the sink is a mixing bowl. The stove part is from a little stovetop bought at a Garage sale, and it lights up when the burners are turned on (so that you know that the burners are hot!). The oven has a cookie rack shelf and is spray painted metallic grey. Molly plays with this all the time now, but it took her a little while to get into it.

Here's a different tutorial for a DIY play kitchen (There are TONS on Pinterest too if you have a spare shelf etc!)

3) Barn for her 2nd birthday party (which I decided would be a farm theme 1 week beforehand)

It actually lived in our living room for about a month and now it is folded up in the basement

I decided to do a theme party for Molly's 2nd birthday about 5-6 days before her party. I saw this on a blog HERE and asked Brian if he thought he could make it for the kids to play in during the party. He exceeded my expectations, yet again!! Molly was over the moon excited when we brought this upstairs and showed her. She played in it and peeked out the window for days. She brought everything she owned in it. Brian made this from flattened cardboard boxes that were reinforced with more boxes (Very engineer-y of him). It is in two parts so that it can fit through doorways (the bottom part folds, and the roof turns sideways :)). We covered it with fabric and stapled the fabric to the cardboard. I wouldn't call it overly sturdy, but we kept it anyway because Molly loved it so much and might get use out of it as a playhouse again sometime (for now, it is in storage because there wasn't enough room in our living room to house it!)

Some cardboard barn/farm party tutorials from Pinterest are here and here.

4) Chalkboard easel

We decided that an easel would make a good Christmas present this year, and as soon as I suggested it, Brian said "I'll make one!" This one turned out to be a bit bigger than expected, but it's great. It is basically 2 sheets of MDF painted with chalkboard paint and a wooden frame. The only real regret I have with it is that it is really tall, so Molly can't reach the top, but maybe that means she will be able to enjoy it for longer. I also sometimes wish it was magnetic. She loves it and it's great for teaching letters and numbers :)

5) Stationary tricycle

Brian whipped this up in about an hour. It is just a very simple wooden frame, and the trike is completely removable from it. We obviously already owned the tricycle, and it is still a little bit too big for Molly so she hasn't gotten a lot of use out of it yet, but I'm hoping it will encourage her to stay off our exercise bike (which is WAY too big for her and a bit dangerous to climb on).

Some of my future ideas include a DIY dollhouse out of a bookshelf/cabinet (this one might not happen, LOTS of work), rain gutter bookshelves on the wall or on the side of a dresser (I am working to get Brian on board with this), a quiet book, and a tent for Molly's room or for a slumber party someday!

If anyone wants more information on how to make any of these items, just let me know!! I just wanted to share them today, but I didn't go into very much detail on some of the items.

Happy Shrove/Fat/Pancake Tuesday and see ya tomorrow! ;)

Weekend fun and 2 easy projects

Just making my way through another Monday and reflecting a bit on our weekend, which was a nice one. I am feeling fairly rested and relaxed this morning, so can't complain about that!! :) We took it easy on Friday night and watched a Netflix movie - Drinking Buddies (I probably wouldn't recommend it but it was OK) and went to bed early. On Saturday, we (Molly and I) got haircuts (her first, not mine ;)) and that was exciting for her...then we went to visit our good friends overnight about 45 mins away - so that was fun! They have 2 kids and Molly loves to play with them (both kids are older so she often just watches them). We drove back mid-morning on Sunday and played outside in all the snoooooow in the afternoon, and then had the world's most delicious seafood chowder for supper at my in-laws' house. All in all, a pretty good weekend and both of Brian's picks for football came through yesterday so he was happy about that.

This is the view from our friends' house on Sunday morning:

I started today off with a delicious protein pancake and Molly had one too - she loved it!! :)

I have 2 fun projects that I've been meaning to share on the blog...one is VERY simple and the other is very SPECIFIC haha...but both are easy! 

Brian made Molly a chalkboard easel for Christmas. I'll talk about that more later sometime, but since he had leftover chalkboard paint, I asked him to make me a chalkboard to hang in our living room to write seasonal quotes on, such as this one:

(Via)

I think I still need to put a frame around it or something, but here's how he did mine, and set it up for me to come home to:

He used chalkboard paint from Home Depot which you can buy here and painted it on a sheet of MDF that he had leftover (although if you wanted to frame this, you could use even thinner wood or probably even cardboard). He rounded it using a fancy new tool called a router that he got for Christmas, but again, that probably wouldn't be necessary if you were framing it! Molly coloured the bottom of ours, and I have yet to find an inspirational quote for January so maybe I will just wait until it's closer to Valentine's Day to write something nice on it! :)

The other project I finished recently took me about 10 minutes and I've made 2 of these for myself and now one for a friend who is smaller than me. If you've ever been pregnant, you have probably seen these:

(Via)

They are called maternity belly bands and they rock because you can still wear your old pants, but leave them unbuttoned and wear this over top. I usually secure my pants still with a loop elastic so that they don't fall down.

When I was pregnant with Molly, I made two of these in black for myself and I have used them a lot, so I decided to make one for a pregnant friend. I used fabric which is similar to yoga pants, (bought at Fabricville) measured it around myself, cut, and literally hemmed it and it was done. You have to make sure that the stretchier part of the fabric is the wide part and not the length. You can make it any length you want,  I used the stretch fabric setting on my sewing machine:

And this is the final product for my friend, who loved it!

Here are two other more detailed tutorials if you're ever interested in making one of these :)

A Beautiful Mess

DIY Maternity

And so we slowly climbed over a ladder with no other side

Today is S.H.I.T. ("Sorry honey it's Thursday"), which is the prequel to T.G.I.F. that I learned from my lovely hubby last night. Honestly though, I usually really like Thursdays. I find that I can start to almost smell the weekend, and we have usually either made plans for the weekend (like this one), or made plans to do NOTHING (which is also great!). Overall, the weekend means more time at home (i.e. more time to clean my house), more time with my toddler (yay!) and more time to rest (sleep in until 6:30 instead of 5:30 wooo!)

This week, with Journey2Wellness, we are following a no-carbs/fruits/sugars after 3 pm challenge. So I've been getting pretty creative with our suppers and hubby has been following it with me, for the most part. We had spaghetti squash (technically a starch but allowed on the challenge) with spaghetti sauce & salad on Monday, slow-cooked rotisserie chicken with carrots & broccoli on Tuesday, and last night we had pretty much the same meal as Monday night, but with green beans instead of salad.

As part of the no-carb challenge, tonight we are probably going to have delicious hamburger soup which I made last night and also brought for lunch (hello leftovers). I loosely followed a recipe for said hamburger soup, but I also added lentils for extra protein, and some different veggies. The lentils "drank up" all the water in the soup while it was simmering (how rude!!) so I have to water it down tonight & add some more spices. I have an impossible time following soup recipes. I always end up adding extra delicious ingredients and then there is no room left in the pot, and I end up making a humongous batch of soup when I intended to make enough for a couple of meals. That being said...soup freezes well and makes a great lunch at work!!

In other food news, I have been using my new Epicure spices constantly. Mind you, I have not necessarily been using them for their intention, but they have added flavour to everything I've cooked lately. Hubby especially loves the Rustico spice and the 3 Onion dip mix (have not made the dip yet though). I am honestly not sure if I will use the spices for their intended purpose, but I don't think it matters because I am using them to compliment the foods that I am already cooking.

My big food project for the weekend is going to be attempting to make my own greek yogurt. I have no idea how it is going to turn out, but I eat greek yogurt every day, and it is expensive, so hopefully it works out! I have been buying greek yogurt at Costco, and the last time I was there, I bought 2 packages of 3 tubs and froze one. I thought it would thaw out normally, but it did not, so I am not only able to use those for smoothies (the consistency/texture is awful). I will keep you posted on how the yogurt turns out!!

My other project for the weekend is to make some homemade non-slip headbands with cute fabric ribbon I bought last week. I'll post pictures of how those turn out too! I also need to update my running playlist, and get out for a run tonight & another one on Saturday. Saturday is going to be my cheat meal because we'll be at a friend's house for supper, so I am hopeful that I can get a longer run in before we head out there.

Today's song title is "Remember When", and it is a sad but also very visual lyric. It's from a newly discovered band called (appropriately), Heathers. They are twin sisters from Ireland and I am loving their music! (It's not just because of their band name). You should go check them out now!