Marriage

I heard Katie speak at our Mops Auction earlier this year and have been following her blog ever since.  She writes about her kids, books, motherhood and yesterday about marriage.   I just loved her post and wanted to pass it on to you all.

You can go to Katie's post here

I think my favorite thing she tries to do was this one 

When I do my husband's laundry or something else for him I use that as an opportunity to pray for him. Whenever I am hanging up his work shirts I am thinking God for how hard he works for our family.


 I just loved it.  What a great idea!  It's so important to pray for our spouses and what better time than when you are doing things for him or come across something like his clothes that make you think of him!  


It's so easy to become like "roommates" in marriage or to put the kids needs above your hubby's!  But she definitely has some great ideas to combat those!  Marriage is work and there is definitely some things I could do much better and these are great ideas to put into practice!  

Hope you all enjoy her post as much as I did !  

Homemade Granola Bars

I have made the time this week to  try some of my pinterest pins.  I finally tried one of the homemade granola recipes I have been looking at for months so I thought I would share.  There are so many out there but here is the one I actually made.

http://laurassweetspot.com/2012/09/20/homemade-quaker-chewy-granola-bars/

I took pictures and was going to post them along with this, but lets face it I stink at picture taking and this bloggers are way better so you get to enjoy her pictures instead!

Mine weren't setting up as fast as they should have ( I think I put in a little too much honey) so I put mine in the fridge.  They are a little sticky but taste really good!   I will try them again with a little less honey next time to make them more like store bought ones!

The thing about these is they aren't "clean" since there is brown sugar in them, and crisp rice cereal but hey it's a starting point and still much better for you than store bought!

Homemade Taco Seasoning

My husband loves tacos.  Each week when I ask if there is anything he wants me to make he always says well I always like tacos. Of course I don't mind either, they are EASY.  And since I have been trying to make healthier meals tacos are a good one.  We can use whole wheat tortillas, some veggies and to top it off homemade taco seasoning.  Taco seasoning isn't expensive but at $.50 to $1.00 a pack making your own can save a little bit, it's easy and the most important it's so much better for you so why not!  We've all seen a million different pins of homemade taco seasoning but I made this one a little while back to try it, loved it so made some more today.

I took the recipe and x'd it by 10 so  I would have some for awhile.  I bought generic spices when I could and still have plenty of spices left over to make more again when I use it all again.  

Here is the recipe that would season 1lb of meat.

1 Tbsp chili powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp black pepper

All you have to do is mix it up and it's ready for the beef!  

Family Night

Can I just say Saturday was wonderful.  We didn't have anything we HAD to do or anywhere to be all day!  

We thought about going to the pumpkin patch in Arthur but since we didn't know how Carson would do we decided to just get some pumpkins in town.  When we went to get pumpkins Noah was way more excited than I expected and he picked one out for Carson and him and then I picked out a bigger one for Matthew and I.  Once we got in the car they both wanted to hold their baby pumpkins.  

Just love their happy faces!

Excuse my boys in their scibbies, didn't want to ruin any clothes!  Also not sure how it happened but yes Noah is missing a sock, haha.  

Noah was very into painting his pumpkin. Carson on the other hand wasn't so much. He dipped his hand in paint and messed around with his pumpkin  for a little bit and was done. 

My little cutie, snacking while we finished pumpkins

After Noah was done with his,  I let him put his hand in paint to put prints on our big pumpkin.  He acutally liked it for bit then asked to wash his hands.  Some things never change!

The front side of the finished pumpkins with help on the faces by Matthew

The back side, kids did on their own.  Pretty ugly, but we still love them!

We had such a great day/evening, wish every day could be that relaxing!

Proud Momma

 Don't let these faces fool you.  This boy is ornery, ornery, ornery and doesn't listen to his mom one bit.  However, for others he is usually the opposite and such a  good boy.

I was so proud of Noah yesterday when I got a text while he was at daycare letting me know my boys were doing great and that Noah was the kid of the day.  

Jen (his in home daycare mom) sent him home with a new book for being such a good boy.  After some fighting I finally got him to stop playing "shapes" ( don't judge, trust me we have been doing plenty of shape time) and hold his book for a pic.  Whenever he says cheese he always scrunches his face.  His eyes disappear just like his mommas!  

No matter how ornery this boy is, still love him sooooo much! Someday we will figure out how he ticks and get him to listen to me once in a while.  (crossing my fingers, anyway)

2nd Attempt

 At our last house, I always had color and lots of it mostly on the walls. When we moved to our current house, it had all white walls.  I was excited at the chance to start fresh in every room and really get it right.  Well anyone who knows me knows I change my mind a lot so to think I will every really get anything right can happen just not for long.   First off I knew I wanted to go neutral on the walls.  The first space we painted was the living room and it wasn't what I had exactly planned out the color was a little too gold but it still matched the big canvas I had bought for inspiration so we left it and went with it.  Below was the first after picture I took  after we painted and decorated which later we mounted the TV and added more curtains but I was never really in love and the room never truly felt like home or that it was "us".

Most of you probably saw my facebook post about the curtains but in case you didn't, one day Carson was playing peek a boo and pulled one of the rods halfway out of the wall.  I had to take the other half down and when I really looked began to realize maybe I liked the windows without curtains better.  However the way it was set up that wall just really needed something else besides a mounted TV and that is why we had got them in the first place.  Well after some talking and convincing Matthew agreed to let me re paint and get a "few" new accessories.

 The first thing I did of course was to scour pinterest for some new ideas.  I like to think I'm creative but I'm really just a big copycat! I really don't know what we used to do for ideas before Pinterest was around.  I use it for everything anymore.  

An idea for the color scheme came from this.  We have light brown microfiber and since it was just barely a year old, it had to stay so I loved seeing some colors with it. 

 Absolutely loved these ceiling medallions like most Pinterest projects theirs are much better than mine!

 Idea for our entry

Here is what we ended up with

We painted the room mostly tan (twice actually, the first color was a complete fail, instead of tan it turned out a weird shade of purple)  with 2 accent walls the one with the windows and the wall our stairs are in in the kitchen, moved the furniture a bit, mounted the TV over the fireplace instead of in between the windows, and got some new decor that I love !  

 Someday  hopefully sooner than later we will  replace those sweet fans and get some bookcases for under our ceiling medallions.  The space there still looks funny with it being so empty and it's one big wall.  

Closeup of my spray painted medallions 

 Our entry way, idea used from Pinterest

 Closeup of the pillows I made.  I ended up making 5 chevron, 2 green patterned and bought 2 orange.  We will never be short on pillows in this room!  

Since all the decor in the kitchen/dining area was red too I had to  wanted to change the decorations in there as well.   The picture is terrible but you can see my trellis curtains I love.  (I spotted them a while ago in Target and have been dying to find a spot to use them, I actual saw them in blue first but was even more excited to see them in a burnt orange color when I went shopping for stuff).  I also have always wanted a big spoon and fork and so I found the perfect ones at Hobby Lobby and the Eat letters.  They don't look that big in the picture but trust me in real life they are pretty large!  

Overall I really do like how it turned out.   I feel like it's a lot cozier with how we changed the furniture around and the look is more us!  I'm sure we will add stuff here and there, it's just to expensive to buy everything at once!  Decorating isn't cheap!  

Our Bedroom

When we first purchased our house last May, our room looked like this

Blah, blah,blah.  And for awhile it looked like this,  I wasn't going to put anything up on the walls until we had painted so bare it stayed until we finally painted earlier this year!  

 After well over a year we finally have somewhat of a finished bedroom. We painted, the hubby made me headboard and did a great job on it.  He knew I wanted a sleigh bed/ upholstered look and  he nailed it!  You can't really tell from the picture but the back is curved to mimic a sleigh type look and the middle is a creme canvas.  We got matching side tables and the latest addition was the 3 new family canvases to go over the bed.   I have known what I wanted up there ever since we painted months ago but just had to wait for the right family pictures to put up there!  Minus our dresser situation ( we still have the white ones) it feels pretty much finished!  

I forgot to take a picture but for a different wall I made flower boxes, here is an example and tutorial here.  I didn't follow all the directions but got them to turn out and love them.  I used creme and purple flowers to match our room!  Easy and cheap wall decoration!  Thanks again Pinterest!