Long time no typie! It's been forever since i updated my blog. This blog in particular is mostly therapy for myself. I get to get stuff inside me out and just pretend i'm chatting with my closest friend.

SURPRISE! I'm prego with baby Risch #4! This pic was taken about 10 days ago. I'm not a day away from 17wks along.

This surprise has really throw me off whack. First three months were terrible, i practically lived on the couch... i was much of a mother... definitely not doing good with homeschooling (so we are quite a bit behind the schedule i had all set up *tear*) Because of that lovely first three months everything around me fell to shambles. You know (ok you might now) but i'm not the greatest house keeper.... just ask my husband >_< and since becoming pregnant well.... it's bad. Now that i am over the 24/7 morning sickness and starting to get a little energy back i am trying my best to get the house under control. Little by little. I take two steps forward and then three back it feels.

Lately i've been trying to downsize a little. I went through my sons toys which are currently all being kept in the living room since his actual bedroom is upstairs. Having them in the living room can drive me nuts some times but their really isn't a better place.
Today i focused on the girls room. We use to have a system in the girls room. I organized all the toys in clear plastic bins and put them on a high shelf in the girls 'toy closet' which also had a door on it. They were allowed to get 1 bin each to play with but if they wanted another toy they had to pick up all the toys from their current bin before they were allowed to get another one. That worked great until i we did some changing after Christmas of last year. We made them a kitchen set and it had all the dishes and food.... that was in their main room and not where it could be shut away. Also we brought out the barbies in a special compartment. That sounds all fine and dandy right? Well when you end up having barbies, barbie cloths, play food and tiny play kitchen utensils EVERYWHERE you no longer have a clean room LOL
On top of that my dear husband opened the toy closet one day during my sick months and the girls ended up climbing up and getting every plastic toy bin off of the toy shelf and dumping it into the floor..... it took until today for me to finally get it put up. FINALLY.... after a couple months >_<

Today i downsized their toys.... i do try to do this about this time every year in preparation of the Christmas season and knowing they are about to get a bunch more stuff. I usually have to do this again after Christmas because family tends to spoil them lol

Their 'toy closet' is quite large and bright... they like to play in it, so i decided to do some rearranging. I moved their kitchen set into the closet and also hung their barbie storage in there on the wall so i could get both of those out of the main area. I moved out the book shelf that was in the closet before and put that in their room, that way they would still have some storage and places to set things. By putting the kitchen set in the closet i had to bring out their storage bins with their dress up cloths. I figured this was a better switch off because they love to dress up the best (they live in their dress up dresses) Now everything is tucked away nice and neat and i am going to go back to our normal rule about the toys. I will open the closet and let them play with kitchen set but they need to clean up when they are done and they need to make sure everything is put away before they are allowed to get out any bins. I'm crossing my fingers this will help us.

I had no idea at the time that this was considered a Montessori method, to only let your kids have limited amounts of toys and put up the other toys up, out of the away. I know this was a great thing for my 18m old. I thinned out his toys and he actually spend more time playing with the toys i left them he normally would do before. He spent forever working on putting his train tracks together which before he never really attempted. So it was quite nice.


I have been sooooo excited for Christmas season! I wanted to decorate for Christmas right after halloween but my hubby stopped me. He made a good point and said i should start that till the house is clean >_< ugh! He also added that i had to wait for the week before Thanksgiving even if the house was clean. Boo on him! I've been trying to get the house clean so i can decorate. I've got some great ideas this year i am hoping i can pull off >_<

There for awhile i was stressing out about how we were going to pay for Christmas gifts period. A lot of unexpected things popped up and i was super stressed out. Then God provided! Hubby won some logo design contests on 99designs.com and got some extra cash for us and then i found surveys! LOL sounds stupid but i found this great survey site where you can earn cash quick. I've been doing surveys a couple days over a week now and earned $25 dollars on one site.

So far i have been able to buy 7 gifts for $6 dollars, thanks to my amazon points we earn from paying our bills with our amazon credit card and also the survey money.

We have a chase amazon credit card where you earn points. We use that card fro everything we can, bills, food ect. Then every month on pay day we pay off the card. When you pay off the card you earn points. We earn $20-$40 dollars a month buy using our card to pay for our bills and it also had made our credit very nice! Total our 7 gifts should have been $83.27 but only paid exactly $6 for them. Isn't that awesome? So exciting! Plus i was able to win a Kiinde breast bump kits for free (normally about $40 i think) through this awesome page i found on facebook that tells you all the recent giveaways and drawings you can enter.

What is even more great is i was able to share this survey site with my friends and family and one of my friends that is having it rough to this year has been able to earn money to buy presents for her kids, I almost cried when i read that! Makes me so happy!

Planted our garden April 26th 2014

Pictures taken before I watered the garden lol

Plot #1

• Two cherry tomato plants of different varieties
• Two Brandywine tomato plants
• Leaf lettuce planted from seed
• Marigolds

Plot #2

• Two Brandywine tomato plants
• Spinach planted from seed
• Cilantro
• Sage
• Oregano
• Lemon Basil?
• Marigolds

Sage and Oregano were perennials that came back from last year  

Plot #3

• Four pepper plants, two different varieties
• Four okra plants
• Bush beans planted from seed
• Marigolds

Plot #4

• Two Brandywine tomato plants
• Two cucumber plants
• Two dill plants
• Leaf lettuce planted from seed
• Marigolds

Potato Bin

Just added 2 5 gallon buckets worth of dirt on top of the plants. Looks like we will be doing that every week. Only reason we aren’t doing more dirt (suppose to put dirt up until only a few inches of the plant is showing) is because there is little plants that have not grown as big as these and I don’t want to smother them

Garlic and red onions!

The big plants you see here are the red onion. Hope we get something from them!

Above pictures are from plot #1

Cherry tomatoes already have tomatoes and all the rest of my tomato plants have flowers! Yay!

Second picture is my leaf lettuce sprouts. I know it’s kinda late for lettuce but I wanted to give it a go. We shall see!

Bush bean sprouts from plot #3 that were planted from seed. Excited to see them popping through!

Plots #2 and #3 You can see our compost and rain barrels back there. Can’t wait for hubby to use the weed eater back there! Our dream plans is to brick in this whole area and get rid of all the weeds and grass!

Been having fun with making a few photo props and finding some other material in my many bags of material, that i can use as backdrops!

I found a couple i think will be adorable as a backdrops for Dr Seuss themed pictures. Thanks to their Aunt, Matthew and the girls have gotten several Dr Seuss stuffed animals and books so i figured i should use them! That and plus i did a Dr Seuss themed picture with Matthew when he was tiny:

 

Plus i made a fringe prop like this:

But different colors of course. Can’t wait to see how that looks in some pics.

And then I've had this link pinned on my photo board on pinterest for a long time and finally decided to give it a go

Tutorial HERE

Of course i didn’t have half the things they used so i improvised.

Like instead of a cup i used some glass jars (i save all glass jars, never know when you might have a need for them lol)

Instead of cement i use peat gravel.

Instead of a wire frame i use cardboard and newspaper

Instead of dried moss i used yarn pom poms like i saw another post use.

This was how mine turned out:

Of course i just threw this up to take a pic of the flowers. My backdrop isn’t ironed or anything lol

The Anabel saw it and wanted to take a picture right then…. in her dirty play cloths she was playing outside in, but i said sure, why not?

I’m thinking ‘Alice in Wonderland’ kinda feel.

I can’t wait to actually take some pictures with my new props ^_^

We are moving my photo area to the basement as well. And I'm actually glad because i think i might actually have better light down there believe it or not, plus lots more room! lol

Can’t wait to take Easter pictures! With all my new backdrops and props! Fun Fun!

So for a long time i’ve been battling tiredness… badly. My reason for it i think it the getting up 2-6 times a night with Matthew which can surely do it to you…. i have always been someone that seemed like i needed quite a lot of sleep. But i have a feeling there is other things that play a part in it like: not drinking enough water, not getting the vitamins i need and not eating very healthy.

So since i can’t change how often i get up with Matthew i can attempt to change the other things. I can’t really take vitamins…. i sure have tried and failed every time because my stomach just doesn’t handle them :\ So i got the bright idea (lol) why don’t i try to get my vitamins through my food? Yah i’m not really into ‘healthy’ foods per say. I’m not about to give up my sugar or dairy products but i can try to add better things into my diet.

I got on pinterest and look up ‘energy boost’ and found some things i really liked. One thing i found which i thought was intriguing was ‘Dr.Oz’s 3-Day Energy Booting Cleanse’. Now i don’t think I'm ready for a full fledged cleanse but i figured i could incorporate some of the things he said to eat into my daily routine.

In my head I'm a total go getting… i mean i want to just go head first and try to implement a bunch of stuff at once. I know this…. but i still tend to attempt it, even if i fail lol

Like i want to give me and Bob a 7 day challenge. That includes getting up at 6am (not early for most but very early for me!), starting out our morning with a fruit smoothie while cooking a light but healthy breakfast and finishing it off with a energy boosting work out, all before he has to leave for work at 7:30am. And then incorporating the Epson salt bath every night for a little detoxing. Sounds doable right? Maybe lol See i don’t get up that early 7:30-8am normally, i typically don’t eat breakfast and my morning shake is usually a coffee and i sit for awhile tired and moping in my head about how i need to get up lol soooooo ya!

I also am like ‘Oh I'll start my flylady app plan for cleaning the house again, I'll start the girls daily routine chart again…..ect ect’

This would also be cutting out my usual coffees. I’m not sure if i really should try and start ALL of these things out the first week…. i might be going through caffeine withdraws and feeling terrible.

But wish my luck cause I'm serious, i want to try it. Perfect timing too cause i need to go shopping LOL

Today i made the fairy wand favors. Got the idea from:

I got my dowel rods from Wal-Mart 1/4” 36” long for $.57 i do believe. I sawed them in half making them 18” long. I bought 3 different kinds of ribbon and then i had the butterflies on hand.

I also painted my dowel rods. Doesn’t take much paint and it was very fast.

Here is mine:

   

I also ordered the invitations. The invitation graphic i made i thought would work best as a post card so i hoped online to walgreens.com to get some printed but their site wasn’t working right so i went to wal-mart online and it was actually cheaper.

The front:

And the back:

It says:

“Rumor has it, that there is a secret treasure that contains Captain Hook's most valuable plunder. During her time on the Jolly Roger, Wendy thinks she might have figured out where to start looking but she needs help! She sends this request in hopes that you will come to her aid and promises to share all the plunder that you help her find! Hope to see you there!”

Excited! I think these will be cute :)

Neverland Party Planning (4)

Hubby pulled through and made me some vector imagines i can use on the invite and cupcake toppers ect. Excited! Not going to show the actual invitations yet but here is a sampling:

Neverland Party Planning (3)

Next graphic I'm working on is the favor bags. Girls bag next!

My inspiration:

I have a bunch of ‘Iunch’ brown paper bags which i am using. They 12 3/8 x 6 1/4 x 4 inches. I made the bodice template and the wing template. Again like the boys bags i made the outline so i could print it onto colored construction paper (in this case green). The wings should be cut out onto a fold to make the wings and then add glitter for detail.

(Click image for full page)

(Click image for full page)

My pieces all cut:

Neverland Party Planning (1)

Neverland Party Planning (2)

Next graphic I'm working on is the favor bags. First up is the boys.

My inspiration:

My graphic:

have a bunch of I made an outline of each layer so i could print it onto colored construction paper to give a thicker feel. Here they are for you if you want to print them for yourself:

(Click image for full page)

(Click image for full page)

(Click image for full page)

I printed it out and tested it:

(Left – supplies) (Right – Putting it together using foam circles as spacers)

Neverland Pay Planning (1)

Neverland Pay Planning (3)

So when planning for the Neverland party i decided i wanted to do a treasure hunt where inside the treasure chest was gold bricks (filled with candy). I found on amazon.com these gold brick favor boxes:

It’s a 12pk for $5.36 No candy just boxes and the review said they were a great idea but really to small to be good favor boxes

So i decided to try and make my own. I searched for a DIY box outline that would work for me. I couldn’t find one but i did find one that you could purchase and it just so happened to have a small snapshot of what the outline looked like but it was far to small for me to actually use to make my own. Then i got this bright idea to use that idea but make my own in Photoshop and that is just what i did!

Here it is:

(Click to get full size)

 

My brick is about 1” tall, 2” in width and about 7 1/2” in length

 

Here is a picture of the one i put together. Pardon all the lines on it, i accidentally printed in ‘portrait’ view when it should have been on ‘landscape’ and since i was just trying it out i wasn’t about to waste a piece of card stock lol

Now I'm going to make them with cardstock and then use gold foil gift wrap from Hobby Lobby to wrap them and make them gold and shiny

I’m excited!