New house project roundup

Baby Room

This was the biggest project other than just repainting the living area. We painted the walls a cool gray (notice how the previous almost-fluorescent green is gone. Nothing like fluorescents to calm a baby...), painted a rug, created a mural, hand-sewed a mobile and refinished a couple pieces of furniture, including an old record player cupboard that we ripped the insides out of and repainted. Another nice dumpster pick from Wheaton Center.

The inspiration for the room is a birch forest, but we wanted it to be modern and girly. Hence we added the fuschia curtains and the fuschia, pink, orange and yellow birds.

I also painted one of the walls in our carpeted living room, creating stripes with the two colors that we used for the raindrop wall in our last apartment. You can see that wall here. It definitely brightens the room, but I'm not sold on it yet. Although, I'm at the burned out phase for that project, so it's done for a while either way! Dane did his best to help:)

We also hung a photo grouping of frames that we'd gotten in the old apartment, matching the paint.

Next up on the list is painting the bathroom, our bedroom and finally, the upstairs hall. All this before the baby gets here, right?

Curtains

Finally, we're mostly moved in. The old lease ends Wednesday and it'll be great to have all those loose ends tied up. The house we moved into came with some pretty yucky curtains in the living room, not to mention a color scheme that made me gag. Picture flesh tone + sage green. Ew. So after days of repainting everything a cool grey and white, I finally got the awesome fabric I ordered on Etsy. It's beautiful! So, over the last couple days, I finished up the curtains (6 panels!) for our living room. Brightens things right up!

Dumpster pick up

Our latest find at the dumpsters was a dresser for the Dane man. He's getting to the point where the last dresser we found (on the side of the road) is too small for his ever-growing clothing collection. We found this one, looking pretty dumpy, and had to snatch it up for its potential. It had great lines and cool detail, and was FREE, perfect for refinishing! Below are the before and after photos. It only took 4 (ha ha, only...) coats of white gloss and $3 worth of scratch dent handles from Ikea, and it's good as new. Probably better, really:)

Guac...in 10 ten seconds or less

Mark and I discovered a shared love of homemade guacamole shortly after we met, thanks to my good friend, Sarah Kahler, a guacamole-maker extraordinaire. Not only is it easy to find the ingredients all summer long in grocery stores, cilantro is also a simple thing to grow on the porch, so we like to grow what we can. Recently, while making pureed fruit and veggie cubes for Dane, we thought we might try doing a batch of guac for ourselves. We couldn't eat it all, so we tried freezing it. Amazing! Frozen into ice cube trays, we're able to defrost them for a couple seconds and bam! guac for a taco. So easy. That's my kind of snack:)

Mark and Larissa's Mostly Homemade Guacamole

4 avocados (we've liked the Haas variety)

2 tomatoes (medium, on-the-vine, or home grown)

1/2 bunch cilantro (we like a LOT of cilantro, add based on your taste preference)

2 tbs. lime juice

1/2 cup store bought salsa (it's so much easier than seasoning separately)

salt and pepper to taste

We seed and mash the avocados to a slightly chunky texture, cut the tomatoes to 1/2 inch cubes, or smaller for Dane. Dice the cilantro finely, add the lime juice, s & p, and stir. Voila! Delicious on grilled chicken tacos, with chips, or really even just by the spoonful if you're Mark:)

While it's not quite the same as fresh, when Dane's had a rough day and we haven't had time to get to the store, it makes for a great summer dinner fast.

Mexican getaway

Just got back from our "babycation" with our good friends the Swees to Cancun. I hadn't yet been out of the country, so decided that Mexico was a perfect place to use my newly minted passport. Here's our photo journal of the trip:)

Phew

Life, if you couldn't tell by the frequency of posts, has been a little crazy since we found out we were pregnant again! I just wanted to add some of the photos we took on our date downtown, sans the babe, for St. Patrick's Day. We had a great time watching the river turn green, despite the rain. And our dinner at Hub 41 on Friday night was fantastic! Two thumbs up for adult time alone:)

Breakfast

It's always a good day when I have time (and energy!) to make a real breakfast to enjoy with Mark, and in this case my sis. Blueberry pancakes with apricot maple syrup...mmm:)

Button Bib Necklace

One of the gifts I made this Christmas was a bib-necklace. Statement necklaces were all the rage this year, big and chunky or in layers and layers. I realized that I had a bunch of really great buttons laying around and they were either no longer associated with clothing I still owned or I'd completely forgotten what they'd belonged to at one point. It was super simple to do and a cute, fun idea for yourself or a gift.

Start by choosing a base fabric. With bib necklaces, more substantial fabric is better, as it will hold it's shape.

Next, lay out the buttons in the shape you'd prefer. It's called a bib necklace because of the half moon shape, so try to generally keep that idea in mind to create a good lay on your neck. Once I found the layout I liked, I snapped a quick photo to help as I moved and replaced the buttons while sewing.

Cut the fabric around your button layout leaving about a 1/4-1/2 inch selvage edge. Sew the buttons on in your desired pattern. At this point, I added a second fabric on the back, a swiss dot lace, with the edges peeking out. Finally, I used sewing tape for the tie, but you can use whatever you have around. The fun of this is that within the basic shape, you can kind of just let your imagination go, and embellish to your heart's content. Feathers, sequins, beading, tassels, buttons, other reused pieces of old jewelry...the bolder the combination, the bolder the statement necklace.

Rainbow food

Dane's started to work on solids, and hence, I've started to make baby food for him. I was daunted at first, but it turned out to be incredibly simple. We have an amazing restaurant-grade blender, and so it turned out be just a matter of cooking then pureeing the foods. After putting them into ice cube trays and freezing them, I have bags of delicious pure fruits and veggies at my finger tips. Freezing them allows me to keep a wider variety of foods available, as I don't have to worry about timing the ripening correctly or keeping watch for food getting old. Below is a current list of great fruits and veggies to work with.

Veggies - Sweet potato, snow peas, squash, carrots and Dane's personal favorite, avocado

Fruits - Mango, banana, blueberries (although this one stains things so badly that I've stopped making it recently), strawberries

We've also recently added tofu, which was kind of a challenge to make in a form that Dane liked. I ended up making a smoothie out of tofu, mango, passion fruit and strawberries that he loves. This is runny when thawed, so I just add a bit of oatmeal and it becomes the perfect consistency.

If you like the idea of making baby food but don't have time to cook everything, you can also use high-quality frozen fruits, or steam in the bag veggies.

Some of our favorite ornaments

As Mark and I have slowly built our life together, we've collected a few ornaments along the way. From the tiny airplane with moving propeller that he gave me when I flew to FL with them our first Christmas while engaged, to the glittering silver droplets my mom gave us for our first tree married, to our new ornament commemorating Dane's first year with us, they represent many great moments in our lives. Even on nights that Mark's away, I love sitting in our living room with the tree shining in the corner and just feeling warm knowing how lucky we are. It's been so lovely to be reassured over and over this year that God brought Mark and I together for a reason; we hope to have many more trees together and continue to add ornaments representing all the times we will cherish with each other. What ornaments mean the most to you?