We reclaimed our living room....

and I slept 11 hours last night! Okay, so being 9 1/2 months pregnant, I probably should not have undertaken our tasks yesterday. But, oh my, it does feel good.

Living in a small house, it's easy for your world to be overtaken by stuff for toddlers and little kids. Now adding in another baby in less than a month, we were really starting to look like a daycare instead of a home. So...we took our junk room off the living room (which was really an old front entrance room (5x5) that had been closed off) and turned it into a toy room. Everything in that room finally found a home, we sorted through all of the toys. Which resulted in 2 garbage bags and 1 box of toys being sent to Goodwill and another garbage bag of toys that were either broke or missing most/all of the parts.

The kids absolutely love it. Instead of their toys and stuff being spread out, it's all separated into bins or stacked into a shelf. They can easily find everything. Connor still is a little hesitant about picking up one bin and putting it away before getting out another but time and patience...

Emily had to bring treats for her Christmas party at school and these are the two treats she made (I really should learn how to use my new camera because my outside pictures are fabulous...inside...not so much). We made Reindeer Pops using this tutorial and Melted Snowman Cookies using this tutorial.

OH. MY. YUMMINESS. The reindeer pops may be an everyday treat at our house until the baby is born. I could easily eat, well, okay, I can eat more than one, let's leave it at that.

My only goal for today is to do some more laundry and finish the dishes. Both of which are everyday events around our house but lately doing the dishes is difficult because I have to stand a foot back from the sink!

A simple kind of quilt...

I feel as if our house has imploded. I would like to think that we only have the grandparents to blame, however, we ourselves seem to have went a little overboard. It's hard because the kids are at "that" age where there is so much joy is the magic of Santa Claus. We did have a lovely Christmas with family and the candlelight service at church on Christmas Eve was truly beautiful and moving.

We have some organizational cleaning to do this week. The biggest project being cleaning out the "junk closet" in the living room and turning it into a toy/storage room. It's actually an old front entrance that we closed off and turned into a closet so it's a nice little 5x5 foot room.

I have two Christmas presents for the kids that I did not get finished before Christmas. They each were supposed to get a "kind of" quilt from mommy and daddy, however, I just ran out of time. Con was more than happy to get his Thomas the train blankkie this morning. I am calling it a "kind of" quilt because a quilt would cringe if they saw it!  :) My kids love textures so there is minky on the back side and a cotton woven on the front and I used satin quilt binding. Which I machined stitched on! I thought about doing yarn ties but settled for sewing a big X across it to keep it from bunching up. You gotta love a happy 2 year old!

Now I'm off to try to find the kitchen table and later to find some free patterns for Barbie Doll clothes because Daddy told Em, "Ask mom to make some." Thanks...a bunch...

I know we've been busy...

I'm just not sure what we've been doing! We did get about 20 inches of snow on Saturday. That was amazing! We haven't had snow like that in probably 20 years (and that just made me old since 20 years ago I was a freshman in high school).

Since we couldn't go anywhere, we started on some christmas presents...cause you know we really should have started them 3-4 weeks ago. We're giving away goodie bags full of yuumminess including homemade lip balm, sugar scrubs, and bath salts wrapped up in pretty little brown paper bags tied with raffia and an ornament. Saturday we did get the ornaments done and we made ornaments from paint sticks. I used this tutorial. My 4 year old daughter had a blast with helping me Modge Podge all of the ornaments. Dad even got into the fun and finished them up by tying on the wires. They really do look a lot cuter in real life than they do in the pictures. We used a brown spray paint that had gold glitter in it. We were able to use our ink jet printer with no smearing as long as I used the photo setting. (I'm really not sure why even picture I've taken today won't come out, I think the sun shining and the snow is throwing everything off).

Emily also helped me make her and her little brother some Christmas pillows.

You really can't get much simplier. Two pieces of fabric 11x17. We left an opening and Emily filled them full of polyfill from an old pillow we had laying around. The kids have no taken their regular pillows off their beds and will only sleep on their "Santa Pillows." You gotta love when the simple things in life make kids so happy!

Emily and I also made Chocolate Orange Lip Balm this morning and oh me oh my does the kitchen smell heavenly! So very easy. I tried taking a picture but between my flash, the bright snow sunshine and the clear tubes, it was not turning out. But here's the ingredients below.

Chocolate Orange Lip Balm
4 tbsp. Cocoa Butter
10 chocolate chips (I used milk chocolate but I think dark chocolate would taste even better)
1/2 tsp. Vitamin E oil
1/2 tsp. orange extract (I think vanilla would also be good!)

Melt the cocoa butter using a double boiler and remove from heat. Stir in chocolate chips, Vitamin E oil and extract. I used a syringe to place into lip balm tubes (placed in the freezer first). There was still some leakage in the tubes. I think if we continue to make this, I'd change to a pot container but for now since we have a ton of tubes, this works just fine!

We still have a ton of stuff to make but I think next we'll finish up the lip balms and then move onto the bath salts and scrubs.