Indoor cat door

This may seem like a weird thing to some people (or maybe an obvious thing, I don't know), but putting a cat door on our storage room door was genius.

To explain, when our basement was unfinished, Danger (the cat) could just run downstairs to get to her litter box and her food and water. We had a door at the top of the stairs with a chain lock on it, so I would keep that on but the door open and Danger could slip through that little 6 inch gap and my daughters could not. Our stairs looked like this,

{These are some freaky steep stairs, folks.}

so it was really important to make them inaccessible to our toddler.

Well, I started thinking about how I would handle the littler box and the cat food as we got closer and closer to finishing and one day it occurred to me that we could just put a cat door on the storage room door to cut off toddler access to those things (Eleanor is still 2 or 3 inches away from being able to get an actual grip on the door knob, so a closed door will be enough of a deterrent for awhile yet). I wouldn't have to worry about having the door open for Danger and closed for Eleanor. Brilliant!

The installation was very straight forward and simple. I followed the instructions that came with the cat door we got (it was this one) and basically just found the center of the door, traced the shape of the cat door so it would be centered, then cut it out with a jig saw and screwed the door in. So simple.

My jigsaw lines weren't perfect, but the cat door has that little casing bit that covered them up. I'd do a whole hallway shot, but right now the hall leading up to this door is so full of junk that if I backed up much farther the cat door would be obscured by boxes. Hooray!

So, now that I've shared my genius plan, what do you think? Would you have cut a big ol' hole in your brand new door? 

A most excellent egg hunt birthday

My big girl, Mim, turned 4 on April Fool's Day (such an awesome birthday). It was the day after Easter, so we decided to have a big Easter eggs hunt as part of it. We have a pretty big piece of property (that feels even bigger than it is because our bitty house is just in one little corner of it) and I've always wanted to host a big neighborhood Easter egg hunt. There was one just up the street from me when I was growing up and I LOVED going there every year. Anyway, I was thinking of this as a step up to that. We've done cousin ones for the last 2 years (that were also part of Mim's birthday celebration) that I kind of considered a warm up to this one. Baby steps.

Mim wanted to invite her preschool friends and her church class, which are about 14 and 10 kids, respectively. And the cousins that were her age, which was another 3 kids. I was like, "Sure, why not? If we invite that many, it'll probably be about a dozen that show up." I was very wrong. We had about 2 dozen kids that came. Apparently the 60% attendance rule does not apply to kids. Good thing I'm a paranoid over-preparer and we had just enough of everything.

So, the first thing the kids did as they got there was decorate their Easter "baskets."

I set up a few tables in our living room (after I rolled back the rug) and scattered supplies down the center, thusly:

I tried to give them a really wide variety of stuff to work with because I wanted this activity to last for a bit so everyone would have time to show up. They had pom poms, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, cut out shapes (including but not limited to: dinosaurs, butterflies, super heroes, flowers, stick figures, lobsters, fish, and animals) and tape and glue sticks and SOOOO many stickers and NO GLITTER. I'm not insane.

{Around $20 of dollar store stickers- I planned on having extra and I needed to restock the girls' sticker supply anyway.}

After they finished their bags I gave them all one balloon in their requested color. They chose one sticker to put on it and then we wrote their names and threw it downstairs. More on that later.

{Some of the finished bags. We had them wait in the kitchen while we rounded everyone up and put shoes on- it was pretty crazy.}

Then it was time for the big hunt. There were over 200 eggs, so even though we had many more kids than I expected it still worked out just fine. I told them to stop when they had 10 eggs and help somebody else. That kind of worked. My sweet niece got a bunch of eggs, then came up and showed me, asking "Is this more than 10?" It was about 20. I told her it was a lot more and she totally started re-hiding some and I sent the kids with only a few eggs to follow her around and gather them up.

{Almost everyone.}

We came back in and did presents and then cupcakes- the cupcakes were rainbows with clouds on top.

{Don't mind the tupperware lid serving platter. My husband is a problem solver, what can I say?}

The rainbow cupcake idea came from here (if you follow the link you can see that I obviously didn't care to much about actually layering them- I just plopped in all the different colors and let things happen), but the marshmellows on top were my idea. Anyway, the cupcakes were a big hit with the kids and I decided to not even bother with the ice cream I had bought for the occasion.

After they finished their cupcakes they got to go downstairs and find the balloon they had put their one special sticker on. The twist was that there were 130 balloons downstairs in the family room and we had mixed the marked ones up with those. When they found their balloon they took it to Mike and got a little prize, then they got to play in the balloons some more.

I can not describe 20+ kids amongst 130 or so balloons. It was amazing and loud and crazy. I just let them run amok for the last 10 minutes or so until parents came and picked them up.

It was my first party for my girl and I am marking it down as an awesome success. It was happy faces all around. There are a few things that I think were crucial to making the party work and having be as low stress as possible for me:

1. Preparation. Duh. This is true about anything. I did most things as far in advance as I could, like rolling back the rug and setting up the tables the night before, making all the decorations earlier in the week, buying most things early in the week, and making the cupcakes 2 nights before. Most of the egg stuffing happened earlier in the week, as well.

2. Helpers. I had two of my sister in laws there helping as well as my husband and my little brother. My little brother and his wife totally saved my butt the morning of- I hadn't found plain white or brown gift bags at any of the other stops I'd made (or had my husband make) and so planned on getting them the morning of the party. That all kind of fell apart so I called them in a panic to see if they could get them and they came through in a big way. They even brought chairs, since Mike was delayed on his errand and couldn't pick up the ones he'd planned to. My sweet neighbor also saved me in the chair department. I went over there in the morning when I realized Mike couldn't get the chairs and she sent me home with her kitchen table bench. Love her.

3. Keeping it simple. We only had three activities in the whole hour and a half. Decorating bags, Easter egg hunt, and balloon finding. I had some other backups in case things didn't take as long as I thought they would, like letting them all feed the chickens and a few balloon games, but we didn't need them.

Here's a few more shots of the party fun, since I feel like I've kept it reasonable so far:

{They couldn't wait to dive in}

{So many helpers with her presents.}

 That's how the party was, here's what I actually did:
First, rainbow streamers and tissue paper cloud pom poms every where:

 Second, a basement filled with balloons (I really recommend using an air compressor to blow them all up):

 The picture on the left is 130 balloons, which I thought sounded like a ton, but in reality it was much sparser than I had envisioned. For Mim's actual birthday, Mike bought over 200 more balloons that we blew up the night before. It was much more like what I had mentally pictured and Miriam was just delighted when she woke up on her birthday and saw how many balloons there were. Simple and fun and hours of entertainment.

Third, (and no pictures, sorry) eggs filled with temporary tattoos, stamps, some candy, the entire contents of Mike's change bowl he keeps on his dresser, plastic animals, bouncy balls, and tiny containers of goo. It was really fun to think of things to go in the eggs that weren't candy. I've seen a bunch of lists out there, but it was really simple and easy to just go to the little party supply store and grab a variety of tiny toys.

I also made a big cake for her actual birthday and let her help me decorate it with sprinkles. Fun stuff.

Best aunt ever, part 2

I decided that I want mailing cool stuff to be my "thing." I now have a sister and a sister-in-law in Texas. Not to mention some very close friends here and there around the country. So when I saw THIS blog (via Pinterest, of course) I was really excited. I had no idea the kinds of things you could send through the mail! Pretty much anything can go, with regular ol' stamps, as long as it's 13 ounces or less. And when you think about it, 13 ounces is almost a pound, and there are lots of cools things that weigh less than that.

So, my first awesome thing I sent was a ball. I wrote my nephew's address right on it, Mim helped me decorate it with stickers, and off to the post office we went (we had to take it inside, since there was no way it was going to fit into a mailbox). I didn't get any pictures, though. There's one HERE on the Giver's Log, though. Imagine the same sort of thing, but with one of the even bigger balls (the 16" diameter kind).

That kicked off a whole little mailing spree. I sent a few things to my sis-in-law who just had a baby, a birthday present to my sister, and a belated birthday/kindergarten graduation gift to my niece (which I blogged about HERE). I packaged them all the same way, though, with vinyl.

{I sent my sister some flip flops one at a time, too, but didn't take any pictures. Hers are the blue and red ones, I made them the same way I made THESE.}

 With the flip flops I was originally going to just write the address right on the sole, but I got too worried about sending them through the mail unprotected, since they were embellished. If I had just sent them plain, I probably wouldn't have put them in vinyl.

Anyway, if it's hard to tell, I just took two pieces of vinyl and used my largest zig zag to sew them together. I used a Sharpie to write the addresses on and put one "forever" stamp for every ounce the package weighed (I used my kitchen scale). I have some more mailing ideas- now I just need to get things done and send them off!

I could just dye

Oh, puns. Remember THESE? You might, since I just mentioned them in my last post. Anyway, I sent a link to Rit Dye about them and they ended up posting a picture and a link on their blog, which I thought was pretty awesome. About a week or two after that, I got an email from one of the blog's editors asking if I wanted some free dye. Ummmmmmmm... YES!

So a few weeks ago, I got a pretty heavy box. I opened it up...

 It's possible that me and my big girl spent around 40 minutes arranging and rearranging them. That's 15 bottles.

Anyway, I'm so excited to get going with some of the things I have planned for these. I have something dyed, I just need to finish sewing it before I put it up here.

So, the moral of this post- if you do something cool with a specific product, it can never hurt to let the makers of the product know. They might send you $50 worth of awesome FREE stuff. 

By the way, Rit didn't ask me to post about them. The editor, in the note, said she'd love to see what I did with it, but that's it. I thought it was totally awesome of them.

Not a party blog

So, I had thought I would take some pictures of the little party we had for my daughter's birthday.

NOPE.

{At least there werre still a few left.}

I got some of the important stuff: my daughter, her cousins, unwrapping presents, etc. But so far as decorations and craftiness and whatnot, the picture above is the only one.


And that's why this isn't a party blog.

Here's where I learned to frost the cupcakes- it was faster than spreading it with a knife.

You can freeze everything

First, my disclaimer:  I'm no food expert.

Freezing food is great, especially if you didn't get around to canning anything this year.  Like maybe you had a baby right around the time the whole canning season rolled around...or something.  It was always my plan to go big on canning once we had a garden, but it didn't happen for me this year.  However, our garden was still kind of planned around canning in future years.  We had 6 tomato plants.  And I don't even like tomatoes (in their unaltered form- I love salsa, red sauce, ketchup, etc.). 

My mom totally saved the day when she told me you can freeze whole uncooked tomatoes.  You just wash the tomatoes, cut off the top, and stick them in a freezer bag. Awesome, right?  I had no idea.  They're great for using in sauces and soups, apparently.  You can even use them in fresh salsa in the winter, but you need to make sure that those frozen tomatoes are blemish free, since you're not cooking out any possible germs. 

{These will be sauce.}

Another of my recent favorites when it comes to freezing food: pesto.  I know you can freeze fresh herbs (though I've never done it), so it made sense that you could freeze the finished pesto.  I especially love it when I'm making a creamy pesto sauce, because it removes half the process.  I should have done this with more of my basil before it all flowered.

{I freeze it flat, breast milk style.  It makes thawing it so fast.}

Your own pie crust.  The pie crust recipe I use makes 5 single crusts.  I don't often need that much at once, so I freeze it like they do in the store- I roll it out on top of wax paper, then roll it up.  I wrap that in saran wrap, then aluminum foil.  Another way to freeze it- if you have any of those disposable pie plates, you can lay the dough in those, trim the edges, and seal it up with saran wrap.  They don't take as long to defrost as the rolled up ones.

{They remind me of Christmas crackers.}

As well as freezing this stuff, I also froze broccoli and cauliflower.  We planted more than we could eat fresh, so I just blanched the excess and stuck it in freezer bags.  

That's most of my new freezer-ing.  I need to go check out the frozen foods aisle for more ideas.  

Open kitchen shelving

I have a dilemma.  Here's the setup:  I love white kitchen cabinets, but mine aren't.  I would have no problem sanding them down and painting them up if they were crappy old ugly cabinets, but they're not.  They're solid oak.  And not that old.  See?

Definitely dated, though.  For my temporary, non-committal solution, I took the cupboard doors off to see what it would look like.

It was just to give me an idea of how much more open the kitchen would be if there was less oak.  I kind of like the open shelving, though.  If I do put doors back on, they'll be ones with glass panes.


So besides my painting/not painting dilemma, I have a question.  Is it weird to just have this one section of cupboards with no doors?  Should I remove more doors?

Here's a tip

I always keep one of these in my car:

They're good for everything.  And they only cost sixty cents!  I use it, of course, when I go to IKEA, but I also use it when I go to Costco- I don't bring it in to the store, but when I'm loading my car in the parking lot, I put all my smaller items (small for Costco, at least) in the bag so they're easy to unload when I get home.  I use it when I do my normal grocery shopping sometimes, too- especially if I've gotten a lot of cans.  You could use them as a picnic basket, even.  Or a small tent!

I'm pretty sure there's nothing they can't do.

A riddle.

What do you get when you have these:

and these:

and you add:

and

and

{my favorite}

and then you throw in a little of this business:

{the ones with almonds and the caramel filled ones}

{for those who prefer the classics}

and then finish is all off with some of this:

??????

A SMORE-GASBORD!!!

Oh man.  Pretty good, right?  I am a pun champion.  Mike and I and the Mim were away this weekend with some of our friends and we put this together for dessert the night we were in charge of dinner.  The possibilities were endless.  I don't have any pictures of our actual set up because it was dark and our camera's just not up to a challenge like firelight, but we did have all these things.  I will never go back to plain ol' smores again.