Mummy cupcakes!

We're headed to our ward Halloween party tonight, and they asked us to all bring some cupcakes for the cupcake walk. I'm not really posting this so much to show off my cupcakes, because...well, I don't think they're that great, but I wanted to show a cool trick I discovered for transporting cupcakes. I don't exactly want one of those fancy cupcake holder thingys, I mean, I would hardly ever use it and it would just take up room in my kitchen. I suppose it would be great for people who bring cupcakes places ALL THE TIME. But I don't.

So I came up with this! Use strips of paper towel or napkin, about 6"x1". Put one in each hole in the cupcake pan, and put the cupcakes over the paper. Like this:

Then cover loosely with plastic wrap, and when it's time to get them out, it's easy to grab the ends of the paper and pull out the cupcake without touching the frosting. Easy as pie, and it doesn't require any special boxes or materials. Yay!

Here's my favorite mummy.

Isn't he just adooooorable??

Kids, house, dog. My life!

It's been a while since I updated! I honestly haven't had a whole lot to blog about. I'm working on finishing the family room right now. As of now, I have the popcorn ceiling scraped, repaired and painted, the walls and trim painted, curtains hung, and I need to finish the fireplace and accessories and it'll be done. The fireplace is the big job right now that I've just been putting off...as much as I love home projects, that one is going to be a big one and I'm not really looking forward to it!!

Here is a sneak peek of the family room! Isn't the ceiling just lovely?? I'm pretty proud of it, I must say. It's certainly not perfect but it's still a hundred times better than the popcorn.

 Here's a before picture for comparison - you can't really see the popcorn, but if you look close you can tell it's there.

Popcorn ceilings are tricky to show before/after pictures of, because it's a HUGE difference in real life, and you simply can't show how amazing it is on camera! The thing that shocks me every time is how much higher the ceiling feels without it.


Other than little home projects here and there, I've been doing a lot of crafting and trying to keep the kids and dog entertained.

Here is a recent project:

I got the idea on Pinterest and re-created it. The wood is plain old pine boards from Lowes that I "weathered" using vinegar and steel wool. Soaked the steel wool in vinegar, rubbed it on the wood. Repeat 5 times or so, over the course of a few hours, and that's the color I got. Then I used acrylic paint to finish it. Easy peasy, much better than regular stain, and I love how it turned out!


Yesterday I let Benjamin try finger painting for the first time. He did better than I expected. He tried to eat it first thing, but after he tasted it one time he didn't try again. I guess it isn't very tasty stuff! I think today I'll try making edible play dough. I remember my mom making that when I was little, and I loved it! I bet my kids will too. :)

Ginny is getting big. She is still VERY much a puppy though, of course. She's almost house trained, but still has accidents here and there. And she's pretty bad at using her designated spot in the yard, she prefers to go right outside the back door, but...we're working on that. *sigh* Nothing like going outside in the morning to find a pile of poop. Blech!

She's really good at sit, stay...sometimes. She automatically sits when I get her food now, and doesn't go to eat until I say so (at least, for a couple of seconds! haha). I think that's pretty good. In the first picture, if she could talk, she would be saying something like "HEYCANIGETUPORWHATTHISISN'TVERYMUCHFUN!!!!!!!! YOUHAVEABOUTASECONDOKAYI'MDONENOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

It was extremely difficult to get that picture of her sitting. Just saying.

Isn't she cute, though? Sometimes I have to remind myself of how cute she is, because she sure drives me nuts. She and the kids like to work together: they take turns being naughty so that I don't have a second of calm. But, yesterday I was feeling sick, and I was able to take a nap. So I really can't complain. Life is good!

Welcome the new member of our family!

Our new puppy! Her name is Ginny. Will and I haven't yet had a dog together as a couple, and since we just got settled in our new home, have a great fenced back yard, and both the kids LOVE dogs, we considered it. We looked around for a while at the pet store and the humane society but didn't see anything we wanted. We decided we should just get a cat instead, because we both love cats and, well, they're easy. Give them a litter box, food, and some toys, and they're good. Dogs, on the other hand...well, let's just say I wasn't considering a puppy lightly. I know how much work they are at first. (Maybe forever.)

So, we're driving to Lowe's the other day to buy a new washer and dryer, and Will said to me "How are you feeling?" I was a little confused for a second, but caught on really quickly and asked what he wanted. He wanted to go to the pet store. Alright, no biggie - we'd been there a few times already. At the pet store there were two brand new, adorable little Beagle puppies. Now, Beagles are ridiculously cute, but I've heard that they're stubborn and difficult to train. We had already decided earlier that we wanted one anyway, because they stay small, they stay cute, and they're awesome with little kids. We got her out and played with her for a while, and I said, no. No way. We have to wait. I'm not ready, in any sense of the word, to care for a 10 week old puppy and two toddlers. And we left.

We bought our washer and dryer, and the whole time I knew that Will was DYING because he absolutely fell in love with that little puppy. I was terrified of the idea, but I finally caved, and we went right back to the pet store and put down a deposit, so we could pick her up the next day. That night (before we picked her up) I had nightmares all night long about really bad little puppies. We got all the needed supplies yesterday and picked her up last night. She's super adorable, and the kids love her. (The feeling is mutual, of course.) I think she'll be a great dog for us. Please cross your fingers and send me good luck to get this "difficult to train" dog house-trained!! It's going to be a crazy few weeks here.

I would have taken more pictures, but wiggly kids are hard enough to get pictures of, and a wiggly dog AND two wiggly kids are even harder. Maybe later sometime I'll get them all??

My first project: Removing the popcorn ceiling

I love our house. There is just one tiiiiiiiny little problem. I cannot stand popcorn ceilings. And guess what? Our house is chock full of them - including on all of the vaulted ceilings. (The silver lining here is that our house isn't that big.)

Kaylee's room was the first room that I knew I had to do some work in. I can handle all the dark trim, the wall colors, etc. in the other rooms, but a black and red, creepy room, it just simply wouldn't work for my little 3-year-old. No way. She went into her room and she said "Mommy, it's dark."

First thing, the popcorn ceiling had to go. I figured I might as well, since I wanted to paint everything anyway. And I wanted to try it out, see how doable it really was to scrape the stuff off, because most everything I'd read online said it was a pretty big job, but not very difficult to do. Just took some time and effort. There were a couple of places that said it was way too much work for what it's worth, and one that said it was SO EASY!

First, I covered the floor with plastic. Now I will warn you that if you ever do this, REALLY cover the floor with plastic. I always struggle with plastic so much, and of course all the edges ended up coming off and leaving a few inches of carpet on all sides to get nice and covered in popcorn. I vacuumed it up later, but I still need to go over it some more. We have a pretty..."plush" carpet up there, and I think there may still be a few layers of popcorn and drywall dust hiding in there. Yuck!

The next thing I did was choose an area of about 9 square feet, and took my trusty little spray bottle and sprayed away. Now, every single tutorial I read said to use a garden sprayer, and really soak the ceiling. Well, I didn't HAVE a garden sprayer, so I used a little water bottle. Don't laugh! It worked. Sort of...my bottle broke halfway through. Nothing that a quick trip to Target and $2 couldn't remedy, though. ;)

After the ceiling was good and wet in the area I wanted to work in, I used a sturdy 6 inch drywall knife to carefully scrape off the popcorn. It came off in big chunks, and there wasn't much dust. I did end up with bruises on both of my palms by the end, but that's okay.


Once the popcorn was all off, I went over the spots where I'd ripped the paper covering with drywall mud, let it dry, and sanded everything very lightly. I didn't try to make it totally smooth, I wanted a little texture. Okay, I was exhausted and didn't want to sand anymore, but we'll just pretend I wanted texture.

After that I dusted the ceiling, and primed the whole room. One coat on the ceiling, two coats on the walls and trim. Then one coat of ceiling paint, two coats of wall color and trim. Whew! Lots of work, but I got it all done in 4 days, even with packing, unpacking, and taking care of two kids. I'm so lucky my kids are very self-sufficient and can play for hours without getting into TOO much trouble. I just make sure to do a lot of checking up on them, and everybody's happy.

I took this picture pretty late in the day and it was getting dark, so you won't really get the full effect of the difference it made. I can't wait to finish it all now and get her things in there. Oh, and we didn't change the carpet color - it's just a very different exposure than the "before" picture.

So, the final verdict: was it worth it? YES, a thousand times yes. The popcorn actually darkened the room more than I even thought it did (I guess because it made a million little shadows on the ceiling), and when it was gone, I felt like the ceiling was higher. I felt a little "closed in" before, and taking the popcorn off totally changed that feeling. An absolutely amazing difference. I know that it wasn't just the wall color changing either, because I felt the difference before I did anything with the walls at all. Of course, lightening up those helped immensely as well. I am rather determined to do all the ceilings in the house, but I have no idea how long that will take. I think I'll just take it slow and work on it little by little. My husband thinks I'm a bit nuts, but he probably would either way, so I won't let that stop me!

Our new home!!

We're slowly but surely getting moved into our new home. Last Saturday we hired movers to get everything from our storage unit and move it to our house, including the piano, the freezer, and the fridge. The piano was the real reason we hired them, but they were able to do it all in around 2 hours, so with a decent price it was WELL worth every penny. I'll put some pictures up, however I will say that I haven't gotten a picture of the front of the house yet. I was going to do that this evening, but it didn't happen. *sigh* The kids are being pretty crazy lately so my main goal every day is for all of us to survive, and smaller goals, such as taking pictures, don't always happen. ;) Also, the pictures I've taken have been before we moved things in for the most part, so it's pretty empty looking. At the moment it's a huge mess with things being moved in and us trying to find their homes, so it's a good thing I took as many as I did before. There are a couple of missing rooms still, though.

Anyway, pictures!!

Front entry, looking from the living room.

Living room

Looking upstairs to the bedrooms

Kitchen - view from the dining area

 

Dining area

One of the bathrooms

Master bedroom 

Ben's room

Kaylee's room

Basement, main room

We also have a family room, but I never got a picture of it because Will put a ton of boxes before I got the chance. I'll take one very soon, before I do anything. Except Will already changed the sliding glass door in there so that it opens on the other side, so it's already different! I really need to be quicker on the picture-taking front. Man am I bad at it! Problem it, I always want it to be juuuust right, so I put it off, then it's too late. Ahh well...

 

We're very happy about our house and so excited to be moving in! As you can tell there's a lot of updating to do, so I have to say I'm kind of looking forward to that. I already did one big project...I'll write about it very soon.

Kaylee's birthday and other happenings

Well, our little girl turned 3 on July 31st!! She's in a crazy stage right now, I must admit. I've heard numerous times that 3 is one of the harder ages, and 2 is really not that bad. Yeah, so far I agree, she started this a couple of months ago. Basically, she does everything in her power to let me know that SHE is in charge. Lately her big thing is asking for something and then throwing a fit when I give it to her. For example, she asked for mac and cheese for lunch. Sure! Mac and cheese it is. I get out the pot and she starts screaming "I don't WANT mac and cheese!!!!" and stomping and slapping herself. Oooookay?

Even with all of her silly 3 year old quirks, she's a lot of fun. She's learning so much, and getting to be a really good talker. I'm impressed with her ability to use words like yet, now, later, soon, etc. She can sing the ABCs and is learning to write letters. She drew our whole family the other day, but also included Aunt Mary in that (hear that, Mary??). She still considers Aunt Mary to be part of the family, I guess! One of her favorite things to do lately is tackle Ben and squeeze him till he squeals (not out of joy). It's a little bit funny, but not to Ben I suppose. One day Ben is going to tackle her, she'll scream for help and I will just laugh at her. ;) She is girly as ever. She absolutely loves shopping, pink, and princesses. She loves painting nails and, believe it or not, to get her hair done. Works for me!

On another note, we get our house in ONE WEEK. Everything is still on track and going well, as far as I know. The loan is processed, we have our down payment ready to go, it all looks good. I can hardly wait to have that lovely fenced back yard! I know the kids will love it. They're getting so bored here, I can tell. They really need some more room to play and explore. Next week can't come fast enough! And then, of course, we have to do all the hard things like...well, moving. Again. The nice thing is, we hardly unpacked anything, just the basic minimums we needed for a couple of months here. So it shouldn't be too hard. Not only that, but we get to move at our own pace, instead of everything all at once.

One more week. One more week. One more week...

Colorado update!

I've been meaning to update for a while, basically since we moved, but, you know how it goes. Our first few days here Will's parents had our kids (back in Provo), so we could drive the moving truck out and get all moved in and set up. Then they drove the kids out.

I must say, it was extremely nice to be able to move without them there - it would have really complicated things. We had to go from apartment to storage unit a couple of times to unload the truck. We didn't have any help unloading except for the piano and fridge, thank goodness a couple of guys in the Elder's Quorum were able and willing to help us out with those with pretty short notice.

Will and I had a good time being a "single couple" and had some fun late-night dates. We saw "Oblivion" one night, and another night we drove up to Lookout Mountain road and had ice cream overlooking the city lights. It was really fun! I hope I can find a good babysitter soon so that dates like that can continue. :)

Anyway, we got our kids back, and Ben was sick. He couldn't hold much of anything down for FOUR days. He wasn't super dehydrated, so I just watched him close, but man. He was one sick little guy. Thank goodness today he's finally feeling way better. He's still really sleepy but at least he's eating, drinking and playing. *whew*

So for the first time today we got to go do something together, we went to a park and had a picnic lunch.

I was so happy to see a face from him that was not crying or whining! I'm glad to have my boy back.

Kaylee was having more fun on the rocking toy than it looks like. She sometimes goes a bit blank for the camera.

I want to add more pictures of the area here and our new place, but I've just been really busy (of course, caring for a sick toddler) so I haven't taken any other pictures. I do want to say though, that it is absolutely gorgeous here! Every street is lined with trees, it's clean and well-kept, and our "backyard" at the apartment here is the mountains. Okay, so compared to Utah it's really just big hills, but it's a beautiful view. The other side of the complex faces down, over the city. Overall, we love it here so far!