A Very Tangled Birthday

Sugar Plum Fairy wanted a "Tangled" birthday party this year. SO, I did a little surfing of the net (this will link you to the blog that most of my ideas came from) and came up with a few ideas that turned into a lot of work. I am really not the crafty type. Birthday parties in the past have consisted of renting a bouncy castle and buying cupcakes at the local supermarket. This was fun, I'm still not sold on the merits of the Martha Stewart fever that seems to have spread to so many moms out there. BUT, I did learn a thing or two.
#1 lesson learned: Take pictures of the cupcakes for your blog post before the end of the party when they look a little dried out and dented. Still, you get the idea.

#2 lesson learned: Make the right friends. I have a wonderful friend named Kara who took a cake decorating course at Hobby Lobby. I've toyed with the idea of taking the class too. Domestic abilities is kinda my weak point (I made that sound like I only have one. Reminder to self: the purpose of this blog is not to belittle myself but to BETTER myself. Moving on...). We both made cupcakes and ended up with 5 dozen. I frosted the cupcakes and she did pretty much everything else. I LOVE the ivy on the tower. Isn't it gorgeous!
#3 lesson learned: You can never make too much food. These cute little boats in the water were the easiest part of the party. If you can believe it all 5 dozen cupcakes and the 22 jello cups were gone by parties end. We had 20 girls here plus 6 14-15 y/o girls for our beauty parlor experience. Which leads to...
#4 lesson learned: Have lots of help & be prepared with plenty of bobby-pins. Each little girl got the full treatment: manicure, face-painting and hair. I made a bunch of little hair pins which were so adorable I can't believe I didn't take pictures of them. There were bobby pins with purple and green gems glue-gunned to the end and tiny clips with little pale pink and white cloth flowers glued on. The idea was to have flowers/gems through their braids just like Rapunzel when she visits the city. (Okay, there were no gems in Rapunzels hair. Bling is in. Period.)
#5 lesson learned: Again, take a picture that really shows off your handy-work. This is a little sad but this is the best picture I got of the gigantic braid I made. I'm guessing it was around 16 feet long but I didn't measure it. It took FOREVER. Each section of braid was 30 strands (so 90 total) and the cutting of the thread was a little time-consuming but the real bugger was when I realized I had to braid these super long cords!!! Next time I'll go shorter (next time, ya right).
#6 lesson learned: Make at least one item that gives you ideas for the future. Honestly this was probably my favorite creation. I just took heavy cream colored paper cut it in half and then exacto knifed a design out of it. Then I super glued the to pieces together and placed faux tea lights inside (bought 3 for a dollar at the dollar store). I loved these and now I am looking for Halloween designs to cut out of paper for the month of October coming up.

#7 lesson learned: No matter how incompetent I think I am with the crafts I CAN do it. I don't have lots of fancy tools so it may take me longer but I DO have a creative brain to come up with bigger and better ideas for next time. Woo Hoo! I survived.

Baby Food Binge

On Monday I went a little crazy making baby food. I wasn't able to finish freezing it all until yesterday. My baby will be happy to know that he has more of a variety to choose from now. I think bananas and rice cereal were getting a little old. Speaking of rice cereal... I found this really simple recipe on line. It's made with 1/4 C brown rice or 3 T millet and a cup of water. I have only tried it with rice. I bought a coffee grinder for around $12 to grind up the rice and a very large bag of rice is CHEAP so I was really glad to find an alternative to the boxed baby cereals.
I can't believe that I bought all of my baby food with the first two! #1 It is so expensive! We did have more money when my first two were babies but it's always a good time to save money. #2 It tastes so much better. I snuck tiny tastes of the girls baby food and it was gross, cereal too. With the homemade stuff I don't mind cleaning off their spoon. That's gotta be better for the baby too. Next step: finding some good recipes and combos once he's had a good sampling of plain fruits and veggies.

Cleanliness/Godliness

Q: How do you go about cleaning a house after being sick for over a week?
A: One room at a time.
Yep, over the weekend I picked up here a little and there a little. By Tuesday I felt completely depressed. The house was still a wreck. A little less of a wreck, but so what? A wreck nonetheless. So I cleaned the kitchen. I mean DEEP cleaned the kitchen. It felt awesome!!! There was one clean room among the several not-so-tidy rooms. You might ask if it is still clean as of breakfast ending this morning... it is not. BUT it is significantly better than it was yesterday and I feel much better about not tackling the rest of the house 'til the weekend (or at least until the laundry is done).

Goal: Come Sunday morning a sparkling house! (Sparkling may be asking a bit much but you get the idea). I'm planning to start painting Monday and I can't begin that kind of project without a clean house. I'll definitely post some before and afters.

Dirty Confession: Bathrooms

It's not that I don't like cleaning the bathroom, it's that I don't like getting started. Let's be honest, getting started is more than half the battle. Vacuuming the entire house- No problem (Okay, unless you count the trouble of getting the kids to keep their rooms clean). Why is this? I'm thinking it's because floors are all one job. The bathroom is the shower, the tub, the TOILET, the sinks, the mirrors, the floor/tile, etc. It's so many jobs rolled into one that it sends my brain into frozen-in-fear mode just at the thought of reaching for my handy dandy cleanser dense bucket.

What is the answer? Motivation in the form of built up gunk? No way. That makes me even less likely to tackle the bathroom. Avoidance is king. I think the main keys are:

1. Do a little surface cleaning every day so that when it comes time to get down to the nitty gritty it won't seem so daunting.
2. Get one all-purpose cleaner for those quick wipe downs.
   
3. Don't have a lot of clutter in the bathroom. If the surfaces are covered it makes it much harder to do that quick wipe down. Keep everything stored out of sight.
4. Get rid of unnecessaries. We all have them. A few hours of de-cluttering the bathroom and getting rid of that bath salts that you'll never use will make future cleaning a breeze.

Like I said, once I get started it's not so bad. I look at the clock and it didn't take as long as I thought it would.Maybe you are already a bathroom pro, not me. As Alice said, "I give myself very good advice but I very seldom follow it."