Children's Hospital Mask

One of the first (and easiest) projects I wanted to tackle when I decided to start this project of cleaning out my sewing/crafting room was something that I had, ahem, put off but that was soooooo easy.

I started following an Instagram account called PrayersforBailey and a few weeks back her mother posted on IG that Bailey was not a fan of the hospital masks, and it had taken a lot of time to get Bailey to wear one during her current hospital stay. I've made fabric hospital masks before, in fact our first nurse that came to the house to watch the kids had shown me some that she had bought online, and I asked to borrow one so I could recreate it. I ended up giving her a few more and my initial mask that I made was too small, but it fit Genny perfectly, so we added it to her doctor's kit.

I chose some scrap fabric, then whipped up two pediatric-sized masks and finished up one adult mask that I had found while searching for fabric. Voila! A mask for mom, and two for Bailey. Now my only problem is figuring out how to get them to her... I've tagged her on IG but she hasn't responded (they get so many comments I'm not surprised they don't sit and read all of them. They do have two kids, one of which is constantly in the hospital)

These are the fabrics that I grabbed. I wasn't sure how long it would take me to make one (it had been a while) but I knew that I wanted to make one for her brother if I had time.

This is my super mathematical way of figuring out how long to make the ribbon loop. Yup, I graduated high school with this logic.

Here is my unwitting model. I think she would have looked happier if I had told her the mask was for her. Once she realized she was not going to get the mask, she lost all emotion in her face. (I'm not sure where she gets that drama from...)

Here are the finished three! It took me about a half hour to make the two pediatric size ones (the purple fabric and the princess fabric) and I also finished up the adult pink fabric mask in that time. I was out of time because the kids needed to be put to bed, but when I posted this picture on fb for Bailye's family to check out, I offered to make her dad and brother one too. If they don't end up responding to me, I will probably just call up Rady's Children's Hospital in San Diego or St. Jude to see if they want them.

See you next time as I clean out my crafting room!

It's Been A While...

Well, well, well. This feels a bit rusty, but then again it's been AGES since I last blogged so that's probably why... Don't get me wrong, I've thought about blogging. I really have. But Life has gotten away with me. Or so I say. Don't we all claim that our lives are too busy when we really just didn't take the time to do something? But if it's actually important, then we MAKE time. So that's what this post is about... Making time to create the things that make me happy. Because I'm a crafter by nature, and I craft almost every day. So I decided that since I'm in the full swing of Christmas crafting, and since I'm also in the full swing of a few other life-changing event preparations, I'd try to document my crafting as I do it during the week. Let's see how quickly I fizzle out on this claim to document all of my crafts, shall we? I'll tell you what: if, by the end of December, I have documented my crafting at least once a week, then I will hold a give a way for the three people who actually read my blog. Who knows what it will be, most likely what every I'm in to at the moment. But don't hold your breath, I'm not good at maintenance, so I'm sure I'll miss posts here and there.

Don't you worry- I'm not going to dangle words like "life-changing event preparations" and not go into any detail. So here it goes: I'm pregnant. Yay! Five months! But don't get too excited; it's not mine. Ha! That hasn't gotten old yet! No, seriously, I'm a surrogate for a wonderful couple and I'm so very happy to be pregnant (I really do love to be pregnant!) and it really puts the cherry on top to know that this baby girl is going to go to such a wonderful set of parents as well as extended family. Seriously ladies, if your pregnancies go well, think about becoming a surrogate. It's such a wonderful experience! But even though I know logically that this is not my baby, my instincts are still the same as with my other pregnancies. IE: I'm nesting. Big time. All the time. I'm rearranging. I'm organizing. I'm throwing so. much. stuff. AWAY. It feels great!!

Now onto life-changing experience two... I'm moving in eight months. Across the country. This was not an anticipated move. No, in fact, it was down right out of left field. You see, we just bought this house in December. Of 2013. And we're moving. In June of 2015. That means we'll have spent roughly a year and a half living in this, my self-proclaimed dream house. But that's how it goes with the military, folks. That's just how it goes. So this impending move to a [smaller] new house has had me change gears from WE NEED FURNITURE TO FILL THIS HUGE HOUSE! to WE NEED TO GET RID OF EVERYTHING BECAUSE WE'RE MOVING BACK INTO A 1500SQFT HOUSE! Big item on the list? My craft room. Do you know how wonderful it is to have a craft room?! It's the cat's meow. Seriously. Especially for a right-brained girl like me who starts and stops projects as the wind blows and can never keep her stuff organized.

This is where the blog comes in. Not only is it October (best time to start Christmas crafting!!) but I also am nesting and in need to clean out all of my crafting supplies to hopefully bring a much smaller amount with me to Chicago.

Here are a few pictures to show you what I'm in for... Granted, I'm sure this could look much nicer if it was all Pinterest-Organized, but guess what? I don't want to spend my time in there organizing when I could be making. Am I right? (go ahead, mutter, "that's right!" to the computer, I know I did as I was typing)

And here it is folks. The ugly truth that I call my sewing room. This is the built-in desk that I went ahead and covered with not just my sewing machine, but also random scrapbooking supplies. I also have a basket that has who-knows-what in it that has been there since moving day, and our printer which somehow doesn't get swallowed up in the mess.

Then we have the desk and shelves. I thought I was a genius when I cut cardboard rectangles to use as fabric bolts. But the only way it would be genius, is if I did it to all of my fabric. That giant pile on the desk? It's my projects... Hoping to see it shrink as the weeks go by!

And finally we have the foot lockers with my scrapbooking stuff. Did I mention that I used to be a demonstrator for Stampin Up!? So I have waaaaaayyyyy too much scrapbooking stuff. Way too much! My goal when Glenn started preschool this year was to make quilts with my existing fabric and to catch up on scrapbooking. I'm only 4 years behind, so that should be easy, right? :/

Ok! Tomorrow I'll post what projects I worked on today, and hopefully I'll have worked on something else too. Spoiler: I made some scrapbook pages and started a quilt. Don't get excited- I start quilts all the time...

Welcome to Genny's Room

I've been on a kick lately... I'm thrifting furniture and refinishing it! It's a very frugal (and I believe stylish) way to fill in the empty spaces we have since we've moved to a house that's more than double our old square footage. The first piece I did was a TV stand I bought for $20. It was missing a door handle, and it was that honey oak, which didn't match our furniture style. I painted it a pale green, bought new nobs, and put it in the kids play room. It's a perfect height for the windows in the play room, and since it has doors, it can hide some toys!

Before I bought the TV stand for the kids play room, Thomas and I found a round table and chairs to go in the kitchen nook. It was old, smelled like play dough and was pretty dirty. I cleaned it and am still working on painting/staining it. I'm sure I'll do a post about it when I'm done.

My next purchase was a small double-door cabinet which is the perfect size for about any room in our house. Because it was such a perfect size, it took me a while to figure out where it should go. In the end I decided it should go in Genny's room, since there wasn't any storage in there to corral her explosion of toys, book, and doll clothes. I painted it a light grey, And kept the handles since they were still good.

And now we'll take a look in Genny's room! I'm not done yet (we just bought her a night stand yesterday that I'll be refinishing soon), but I know that my mom and sister want to see the room in it's entirety, and since it was picked up, and vacuumed, I thought, why not?

And now onto the main event: the cabinet!

I love the shelf in here- it really allows more storage! This inside color was the original color of the cabinet, but it was scratched and the color was fading in a few spots, so I knew it had to be repainted.

And there you have it! It really was pretty time consuming, what with all the painting and waiting that it required, but with a LOW budget, and with the result I got, I'm excited to do more!

Here is the TV stand I painted for the kids' play room, just in case you were curious. :)

Teaching Our Children About Real Heroes

I want to start by saying that I love Disney and it's Princesses. We had Disneyland passes last year and Genny picked a different Princess dress to wear each time we went. We have the movies, we have the books. We pretend we're the Princesses, and we have the toys. With that disclaimer, I want to explain what I did in my kids' rooms.

I recently started following Nuria Perez on Instagram, then found her blog. She blogs about adventures that she and her two daughters have together. A recent blog was on real live women heroes and why you should teach your daughter(s) about real live heroes in addition to learning about Disney Princesses. I loved her wall of female heroes she created for her daughters, and have been wanting to do something similar. Now that we've settled into our new house, I decided it was time. Then I thought, what about Glenn? Well, as it turns out, it's just as easy to find real male heroes as it was to copy the female heroes from the blog.

So behold! Our heroes that we will talk about and learn about. I didn't have six 8X10 frames to use for the project, but some sticky tack and page protectors worked out just fine.

Genny wanted to pose with her pictures, can you tell she's the shy one? ;) From left to right: Malala Yousafzai, Rachel Carson, and Jane Goodall.

I decided that since Glenn was still only three years old, I wanted his heroes to be out of reach. So they are above his dresser. From left to right: Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, and The Wright Brothers.

Who would you pick to be on your child's hero wall?

Painting My House (myself!)

I didn't realize it until today, but when Thomas is tasked with something that takes him away from our little family for longer than a normal working day, I start planning. When he left for Afhanistan for the first time, I painted the nursery for my son. When he left for Afhanistan for the second time, I painted my sons current room. And now that he's made Chief, which starts with six weeks of long hours and overnight tasks, I decided to FINALY finish the outside of the house where we had the windows put in our master bedroom a year and a half ago.

It helps my motivation to live vicariously through my next door neighbors, who are getting their house ready to rent it out so they can move to the desert. I've always loved HGTV type discussions, programs, and seeing the finished project is always worth what ever it took to get there. So watching them paint their cabinets, and renovate other things, it makes me itch to improve my house in some way. It reminds me of a show I used to watch on HGTV where a couple would want to sell their house, but they had to do several (mostly minor) renovations to get it ready to sell. After they fixed up their house every single couple would say, "Wow, I almost don't want to leave anymore!" which is why they probably made the show Love it or List it. I always thought to myself, "If I keep my house nice enough to sell, then I'll always love it" But alas, day to day things get in the way of the greater picture and priorities shift from season to season, day to day. But here I am, with my priorities set to upkeep of the house mode. And I'm ready!

Don't get me wrong, I am all sorts of good at ignoring something that needs to be done. But then one day I'll get super motivated and want to do everything on my to-do list. All of it. So this weekend I decided I wanted to be happy with the way my house looked from the outside, and decided to fix and paint it. I know what you're thinking, wow, Kari must be really handy! Nope. I can't even use an electric screw driver. But I grabbed some ready-mix stucco and checked out youtube for some how-to videos, then went outside to look at the project at hand. If you didn't catch that, I didn't look at the project at hand until after I had bought the supplies and learned what I needed to learn on youtube. Classic Kari mistake. I got out there and saw that the only thing I needed to to was paint! How wonderful is that?! So I loaded up the kids (one still in jammies, none of us looking like we'd done anything except step out of bed and into the car) and returned the laith and stucco mix to HD and bought some paint. Then I psyched the kids up for the job on the way home, and they painted for about five minutes, then I finished the painting while they played. It was fantastic. It was wonderful. I am so happy that I did it! Five years in a house dreading the first time people come over because they'll see how ugly the house is, and all it took was $30 of paint and two hours.

I feel so accomplished. I feel like superwoman!

It was pretty early when we left, I thought I'd give proof!

Like I said, the kids had a blast for the first five minutes, but then they were over it.

No wonder I had random contractors knocking on my front door asking if I wanted my house painted or any work done. They would say, "I see you just had some windows put in, do you have anything else that needs to be done?" My reply would be, "Well, those windows were put in a year ago and we can't afford to have it finished. So no thank you, we can't afford anything right now."

My companion once the kids left. He'd follow me into a lava pit if that's where I happened to be headed.

I had enough paint to paint the spot under Glenn's window. It makes me more happy than a night on the town sans kids to have this looking better! (Do you see the guilty puppy? I wonder what he was up to when he realized I was watching...)

Below is the finished wall outside my bedroom! yay!!!

After a break and shower, we went outside in the sun room to do some fun painting. Well, fun painting if you're a three and five year old. Give me a roller, some paint and a wall and that's fun painting to me!

Below you will see two pictures progressing from Genny showing Glenn her painting, to Glenn getting an unwanted, unboyish streak of pink paint in his hair.

But all is well when you can't see said pink hair, and you have green paint on your finger.

Don't worry, that's my coffee. We don't start caffeine intake around here until you're at least in first grade...

Another project I've started, Aaralynne's quilt. It will be her birthday/Christmas present this year and I can't wait to finish it and give it to her!

Have a good week everyone!

Family Road Trip with a 3 and 5 year old

We did it! We went on a three week road trip as a family. This included myself, my husband, my three year old son, and my five year old daughter. We were so happy and blessed to be able to see almost every living family member in both of our families, and we saw some fun sights along the way. One of the tricks we used was driving our long drives at night. An example would be our first leg, where we left our house in Oceanside, CA at about 9am, drove to Phoenix, AZ and spent about six hours with my aunt and uncle, then left Phoenix at about 10:30pm (we put the kids to bed, then transferred them to the car) and drove to Clovis, NM.

On the nights following a drive-through-the-night we slept in a bed. I know what you're thinking, there is no way I could drive through the night but we knew that our young kids would be bored to pieces if we drove the long hours during the day, and since we are still fairly young parents (I'm 32 and my husband is 29) we knew that we could survive on six hours of sleep a piece and preferred to be a little tired rather than have screaming crying kids who want OUT of the car.

Since we recently downgraded to a smaller car (we went from a Ford Freestyle which has three rows to a Volkswagon Jetta Sport Wagon which has two rows) we realized that space was going to be a big issue and my husband wanted to utilize the luggage rack and put our soft carrier on top of the car. Now, I'm not a materialistic person, but the new feature of a full-length sunroof was such an exciting new thing to me that I didn't want to use the carrier. And I'll go ahead and pretend that I knew that adding the carrier would cut down on our mpg... Yah... We'll say I knew that.

Packing was hard because Thomas and I are both over packers, plus I knew we'd be picking up stuff along the way, but I made a plan and stuck to it. Here is my packing list:

Packing List:

5 outfits for each of us

4 jammies for the kids, 2 for the adults

1 sweatshirt for each of us

3 pair of socks for each kid

2 running outfits for each adult

1 wedding outfit for each of us

2 pair shoes for each of us

1 swimsuit for each of us

Genny's cathing supplies

Genny's enema supplies

3 beach towels

Sunscreen

Toiletries (I didn't pack things I knew our relatives would have like q-tips, hair dryer, etc)

Books and Kindle

2 computers

2 divided plates (this helped out with crafts and also eating)

Large soft lunch bag for cold items such as veggies and fruit

Food bag with: bagels, almond milk, chips, pretzels, variety packs of crackers, candy, and several 1 liter water bottles

Ear plugs, sleep mask and neck pillow

3 throw-size blankets

2 pillow pets

I put like items in bags, I used handled grocery bags so I could tie the handles making the contents stay in better. My bags included: shoes, kids clothes, adult clothes, jammies. I also used smaller drawstring bags, one for adult undies and one for kids undies and socks. I used one wet bag for our running stuff and an one for swimsuits. It was nice to have everything separated because it was easier to find and pack. We had a 24 hour bag which had cathing stuff for Genny, one pair of undies for each child, an outfit for each child and jammies for all of us. I also had two bags for dirty clothes, which is a must-have in my opinion. I don't have a link for those bags, but I've been making them and giving them to anyone who sponsors my Three Day Breast Cancer Walk.

Things to keep us busy while driving:

Leap pads

DVD players, DVDs and headphones for the kids (the headphones were the best idea of all)

Paper, new coloring books, stickers, and crayons

It turns out that almost everywhere we stopped, our hosts had something to give the kids for the trip. Some gave stickers, some gave stuffed animals, and my sister topped them all with a bag of items including Crayola Model Magic which is similar to play dough, but it doesn't crumble. I also bought small packs of beads and elastic string which was a big hit the 2nd to last travel day when we woke up at the Grand Canyon and ended up back at my aunt and uncle's house in Phoenix.

The thing that was the most stressful was putting together the itinerary. Once that was done, I typed it up and sent it out to everyone on my e-mail list that was in the area we were visiting. Thomas and I have wonderful family that open their doors for us if we're in the area, and it was great to spend time with them all. We are so happy we went on this trip, and if you have any questions that I didn't answer, please feel free to comment below.