make your own gratitude branch

Hello friends!  Thanksgiving is just two days away.  Are you ready?  We are staying home for the holiday.  It'll just be our little family around the dinner table this year.  I am cooking our Thanksgiving meal and the Mr. has eagerly agreed to help.  It's going to be delicious.  A piece of my heart is missing my family this holiday season but being far away and on our own gives us a chance to establish our own traditions.  This year, we had a little Family Home Evening that focused on gratitude.  We each took a turn sharing something we are especially grateful for and why.  Then we wrote that one special thing on a cutout of a feather (you can google free feather printables).  One of my kids obviously likes to do fun things outdoors ;)   We strung our feathers up with bakers twine and placed them on a branch I found in our backyard.  The branch sits on the wall over our table, reminding us of all that is good and dear to us.   Afterward, we watched this video.  (This video is good too.)




It's easy to make your own gratitude branch.  You can find other cute ideas here and here.

So what am I grateful for?  Motherhood.  My children mean everything to me and I love them dearly.  I miss them the minute they walk out the door in the morning to go to school and my heart is happy the second they walk in the door after long days in the classroom.  They teach me to be patient, kind and to laugh even when I'm mad.  Being a mom is my chosen career.  I wouldn't have it any other way.

What are you grateful for?

tricks-or-treats

Halloween was a little test of our sense of adventure this year.  Our costume budget was slim to none because we had to pinch pennies thanks to the government shutdown.  By the time Halloween rolled around, the Mr. was back at work but we decided it would be best if we continued with our original plan to have the kids wear costumes made of things we already had around the house.  I may have snuck out to JoAnns for some felt, cheap blue fabric and glitter snowflakes, but kept my spending to a minimum.  The kids opted to be made up superheroes.  I guess wearing capes is too cool to pass up - even if you are eleven.  We ended up with a Super Nerd Guy, Super Shadow and Super Snow Girl outfit.  And at the last minute, Hailey decided she wanted in on the candy action too & threw together a cat costume.  I don't blame her - I like chocolate too.



If you follow me on instagram, you know that we had quite the adventure on Halloween night.  Rain was in the forecast but we managed to get through the whole night with beautiful weather and only a few drops fell from the sky.  The kids had such a fun time running from house to house with friends, filling up their treat bags with lots of chocolate candy for the Mr. & I to eat later.  Just kidding.....sort of.  

Did you have fun trick-or-treating adventures with your little ones?

crafting with the kids: finger knitting

We are in the thick of summer.  It seems to me that the few weeks that fall smack dab in the middle of summer vacation are the laziest of them all.  The excitement of no school has worn off and the kids are getting super lazy.  My kids want to watch netflix all. day. long.   Or just play with legos all. day. long. Don't worry, I don't let either of those things happen (hardly ever) ;)



In an effort to teach all of my kids (which range in age from 6 to 14) something new, I pulled out my basket of yarn and taught them finger knitting.  I remember doing this early summer mornings after my mom dropped my sisters & I off at my grandma's home so that she could carpool to work with my grandpa.  It kept us busy for hours upon hours and they were so long we used them as jump ropes.  My two oldest were hooked right away and finger knitted chains that stretched down our hallway.  I even caught them finger knitting for a couple days after that.  Tatum seemed to enjoy it on the first day & Noah gave up all together within the first hour.  You win some, you lose some.



If you are keeping up with my instragram (username: annieandm), you know that we also used yarn one afternoon to make a maze in the hallway for the kids.  Getting to our storage room and the hallway bathroom proved to be a challenge for the Mr. & I, but the kids had a ball climbing over, under and through it.  It was the perfect boredom buster.

Need ideas?  Look here!
Great finger knitting tutorial here: Flax & Twine
Yarn maze examples HERE & HERE

diy//desert terrarium 101

This is a fun and super easy project for your kiddos to do.  Carter needed to make a terrarium for scouts and I was missing the Arizona desert, so this project satisfied both of our needs.  I let Carter do most of the work, only stepping in to help keep the soil from going all over the place.  We put the terrarium together in our living room because the best natural light is in that room of our home and I needed good light for picture taking.

As for the materials, we were able to purchase the succulents and cactus soil in the garden section at Lowes.  You need cactus soil for succulents because it drains well.  I picked up the white rocks at PetSmart where the fish supplies are sold.  They have several colors to choose from.  I went with the white rocks because they go best with our home decor.  The fish bowl was less than $4 from Michaels. I am loving the way this terrarium turned out and hope my brown gardening thumb doesn't kill it ;)

our first garden

When we moved into our little brick rental home, I was super excited about the possibility of growing our first ever garden.  I've wanted a garden for years, but always put it on the back burner because we had a handful of pesky gophers on our property in Arizona that ate anything and everything in sight.  Those sneaky suckers were so tricky to kill (nearly impossible, really) that I knew any efforts to grow juicy, delicious veggies would be in vain.  But here in Virginia, we've been told we can grow just about anything and I was hooked on the idea of having a little garden in the back yard.

The Mr. and I picked up supplies one weekend, along with some seeds of several kinds of vegetables.  Carter needed to pass some projects off for cub scouts, so he and the Mr. built the frame for the garden using a circular saw and a drill.  We planted the seeds just this weekend, keeping our fingers crossed that something will grow successfully.  It's a small leap of faith to put so much effort into something and not know what the exact results will be.



To protect our seeds and future crop, we put together a cage using chicken wire and sticks we found in the yard.  While putting it together, the Mr. & I decided there were probably 100 other ways we could have done it better, but decided to move forward with our original plan and make a better one next year.  Hopefully it will keep the deer, moles, and voles out.  Hopefully......



The weekend was so beautiful and we finished up the garden this past weekend.  The kids came out to enjoy the weather and found a few fuzzy caterpillars scooting their way around the yard.  The last time I saw a caterpillar was in Pennsylvania where I grew up as a little girl.  It makes my heart happy that my kids get to have the same little experiences with nature that I did growing up.  Moving them across the country has given our littles so many more experiences with nature.
 

handmade laundry soap

A year before we made our big move to the east, a sweet friend gave me a recipe for homemade laundry soap.  Her son had actually tested her homemade laundry soap against a well-known store bought brand for a school science project and the results were amazing.  I was intrigued and asked her for the recipe.  I've been using it ever since.  I may have even shared it on the blog before, but I think it is worth re-sharing because there are just a few things I do differently now than I did when making it before.

First, let me give you the recipe:

1 bar fels-naptha soap or zote soap
1/2 cup baking soda
1 cup washing soda
1 cup borax

Shred the bar in a food processor (some people use a blender).  
Change the shredder attachment on your food processor to the blade that sits in the bottom.  You will need to empty the shredded soap into a bowl first.
Add the rest of the ingredients in with the soap, stir and pour back into food processor.  (If you use zote soap instead of fels-naptha, you will need to split your load in half so that everything is mixed well.  In other words, you'll be blending everything together two times instead of once.)
Blend well.
Pour into container.
Use 2 tablespoons for every load of laundry.

So here are the things I have learned from using this over time.  First, fels-naptha soap works just as well as zote soap (which was the soap my friend told me to use in AZ - find it at Walmart).  A bar of zote soap is larger so you end up getting a couple more laundry loads out of it than you would with fels-naptha.  Fels-naptha soap smells stronger fresh out its package, but makes no difference when your clothes are dry.  Second, washing our clothes this way has saved us big bucks.  Laundry detergent is expensive so we opt to make our own instead.  Maybe if I started couponing and got laundry detergent for free, I'd use that instead.  Maybe.  Or just keep it for backup.  Third, this is not the only homemade laundry soap recipe out there.  But I'm sure you already know that.   There are tons of recipes for dry and wet soap.   The most helpful hint I can give you if you are ready to try making your own laundry soap is to find a recipe first and then see if anyone made comments about it (easy to do if you find the recipe on a blog).  People are so willing to share what their laundry soap successes, failures, tips and tricks.




I am going to experiment with scenting my soap in the future.  Do you make your own laundry detergent?  Do you scent it?  If so, with what?  I'd love to know, so please share in the comments!

easter weekend recap

Our Easter weekend was filled with egg dying, candy eating, dinner with friends, church and soccer games squished into the mix.  The Bunny treated the kids to a new soccer ball so they can practice at home and Hotel Transylvania - our new favorite movie.



The kids left the bunny a little note and the Bunny kindly replied.



I hope your Easter weekend was filled with good memory making.

DIY easter basket

Easter is practically here!  While our family focuses on the Savior on Sundays, we are all about the Easter Bunny bringing us goodies on Saturday morning.  Since the Bunny & I are pretty tight, I already know that candy and treats are prepped and ready to go for the big day.  Egg dying happens Friday.  But while getting ready for the festivities, I realized I only have 4 baskets on hand.  The Mr. & I kind of wing it from year to year, using whatever we can scrounge up in the house to use as a basket.  Sometimes we end up just using a bowl.  Well not this year my friends.  I was super inspired by Mer Mag's bunny basket made out of a oatmeal tube and duct tape and wanted to give something like that a try.  You really should click over and check it out - her basket is adorable.

Being that I am on a super tight budget and don't have enough duct tape lying around, I decided to cover an oatmeal tube with scrapbooking paper I already have on hand.  I also pulled out some velvet ribbon to use as a handle and glue strips to hold it all together.  I cut one piece of 12 x 12 paper in half.  While holding one of the pieces on top of the tube, I carefully traced along the top of paper with a pen and then I cut along the pen mark with an exacto knife so that the tube was 6 inches tall (the same height as my paper).  Then I glued one piece of paper down on the tube.  I trimmed the 2nd piece of paper so that it went exactly half way around the tube.  Then I put glue strips on each seam and added my ribbon.  I eyeballed the ears and bow tie, figuring that if my first try looked to crappy, I could trash them and start over.  Luckily, I didn't have to!

Did you make an Easter basket this year?  I'd love to see - leave a link in the comments.

new design

I had been wanting to do a redesign of this little blog for quite some time and was beyond happy when the amazing Elsie and Elise introduced a new online course called Blog Design Love late last year.  It's a blog design course for those who don't know how to code.  It's meant to make blog design manageable and doable.  I was completely unhappy with the first blog design that I came up with after I signed up - probably because I flew through the course material to get it out of the way so I could enjoy the holidays with my little family.  By the way, Elsie and Elise advise against this.   So after all the holiday rush and craziness was over, I revisited the course with a fresh set of eyes and came up with a completely different design.  And I love it.  Like, LOVE it.  But you must be warned that no family photos are up yet in my "About" page because it's been crazy yucky weather here to go outside and take some.  Also, my "Shop" button takes you to my etsy shop.  It is not opened yet, but will be very soon.  I am making plans and working on things bit by bit.  A big announcement will be made when it's all set to go.  I've worked hard on this design and talked my Mr.'s ears off about design worries.  He gets an A+ for helping me paste the right code into the right spot.

So what do you think?  Take a look around.  Click things.  What do you want to see more of at annie and m?  I'd love to get your input.

home decor//mixed frames

I'm sneaking in a little bit of blogging today (my weekend schedule is CRAZY).  Sigh.  All I want to do is plop down on the couch and watch a long movie like Steel Magnolias and eat chocolate chip cookies.  Instead I am running the kiddos all over and I have yet to see my hubby today.  A bright spot??  Carter won his basketball game today.  Boo that I missed it to get Tatum to a birthday party across town but I am so proud of him and the Mr. who is coaching this year.

On to today's post......I wanted to share another simple way to add some pictures to your walls.  Every time I go to thrift stores, I head right for the frames section.   In a handful of trips, I found four frames that had enough decoration to make them visually interesting.  They are each a different size so in order to make them look cohesive, I spray painted them a glossy white.  To break up all the white, I added a black letter B and a black plaque to the mix.   Before hanging them, I laid the frames out on the floor and moved them around until I came up with an arrangement I liked.  Then I adhered 3M strips to the backs of them and hung the center frames first, working my way out from there.


 I filled the frames with simple prints.  Here are my sources:

Center Frame: Chalkboard printable

http://www.settingforfour.com/2013/01/free-printable-for-valentines-day.html

Letter B

Michaels

No 3 print

Essanel Press 

Families Are Forever Plaque

LDS bookstore – Mesa

Love At Home print

made by me using PSE10

Be Strong & Of Good Courage

Kensie Kate

Do you have grouped frames on your wall?  I'd love to see!  Share a link in the comments below.

home decor//sitting frames

Hello friends.  I'm back with another simple way to spruce up your walls!  On Monday, I told you all about our current living situation as renters.  In an effort to drive as few nails into the walls as possible (mostly to keep our landlord happy), I  decided that sitting frames would be the best way to add framed prints to our small living room.  Atop our piano sit three prints.  The silver framed Mesa Arizona Temple print was gifted to us from my mom a couple of Christmases ago.  I purchased the black and white print from Tolman Bryant's etsy shop (I already had the frame), and the Debbie Patrick drawing was a fabulous find at a thrift shop in Midlothian.  I wanted to keep this grouping of buildings together so I simply sat them on top of our piano, overlapping the frames a bit to tie them all together.

 

I'll be back Friday to share one more simple & cute framing idea with you so be sure to stop by then!
 

christmastime around the house

Christmas has slowly but surely made its way into our little brick rental home this year.  I have been keeping my little hands busy glittering up reindeer, wrapping wreaths with fuzzy yarn, and cutting felt to my hearts desire to spruce up our cozy living room space.  Christmas cards from dear friends and family are trickling in.  I wish this month would never end.



The kids are anxious for winter break to officially begin. We drink hot chocolate and watch Christmas movies almost every night. They make their wishes known and jot them down on pieces of paper and leave them in a special spot for Santa to take with him Christmas Eve. Oh to be a kid again.