WOO-HOO! 2011!

Ahhhh, the New Year. I don't know about you, but I get so excited for the incoming year! It's a time to look with hope and excitement toward a bright and shiny future ~ to break old habits and become better versions of ourselves ~ to write a list of goals and resolutions, stick to them like glue for the first 2-3 weeks and then forget you'd ever set out to reach them in the first place. {sigh}

Last year, SNDR was brand-spankin' new & I felt compelled to share my list of goals for 2010. I then set about failing to fully reach any of them. That's not entirely true ~ I'm being too hard on myself ~ but I have to admit that I half-a$$ed it through quite a few of the items on my list. I did use my sewing machine, but I've far from mastered it. I learned to crochet, but still can't knit. I ran the full 5k distance on a handful of occasions, but I never entered a race. I spent more time going out with friends, but it still wasn't as much as I'd hoped for. I did give more generously to food banks and the like & I did try out quite a few new recipes, although I'm not sure if I pulled off 1 per month. I started on the bedroom, made myself a new headboard and chose a paint color, but I didn't get around to purchasing or using the paint & the hampers in my bedroom can't seem to stay away for more than a couple of weeks at a time. My sleep schedule is still seriously jacked up ~ and it's even worse than it has been b/c of Christmas "vacation". Oh...and I haven't given up swearing ~ I'm not sure that's even possible for me, really.

As I was sitting here thinking about my {massive} failure, I came to the conclusion that the reason I didn't reach my goals is because I didn't write them out and put them someplace where I would come face to face with them every day. I was contemplating writing them down on a very stylish & sexy sheet of college-ruled notebook paper when Jen at TT&J posted a link to a blog I've never happened upon before. I headed over to 30 Days and saw an adorable printable that Mique has been kind enough to share with us all. It's super cute and happy! Unfortunately it doesn't quite go with what I have going on in my craft room....so I used her printable as inspiration and made one of my own, which I'm also sharing with you all!

Click here to download the 8x10.

And remember, you can always have it printed at your local photo lab if you don't have a color printer.

Of course, making this myself allowed me to go back into PS & type in my goals for the year after I'd saved the blank printable for you loveleys ~ now all I have to do is head to Costco tomorrow and pick up my print....so I can tack it up right next to my computer....where it will stare me in the eye every day. Hopefully I'll do better w/ sticking to my goals in the new year!

I hope everyone has a fantastic time ringing in the new year ~ Be Smart ~ Be Safe ~ PLEASE Don't Drink & Drive! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hello, Again!

OK, so I'm more than a little behind. As many of you know firsthand, when you're a stay-at-home-mom the "vacation" part of Christmas vacation is pretty much non-existant. We spend a lot of time baking, shopping, wrapping, cooking, cleaning, driving, and kid-occupying. Not that that's not enjoyable (at least to a point), but it leaves little time for some of the other fun stuff a lot of us would rather be doing. I managed one project over break, and I'm just now getting around to sharing it....because I am, after all, a world-class slacker.

I started out with a massive wooden frame that I got a couple of years ago at a garage sale for $3. I completely disregarded the warnings on the spray paint and went out to the garage on a less-than-50° day to hit it with a coat or 2 of silver.

Once it was dry, I used the handy dandy staple gun to attach a rope to the back of the frame - zig-zagging back and forth in a big "z" pattern.

Then I stuck the sucker on the wall, using clothespins to attach the cards to the rope. Ta-Da!

By the time Christmas actually rolled around I was running out of room in the frame, so I'm thinking I'll have to attach another line or 2 of rope onto the back before next year. I'm also toying with the idea of putting this frame up in my craftroom to hold art projects from the tiny people, thus keeping my fancy magnet board clear for other things.

Christmas here was phenominal - filled with a lot of fun and some wonderful family time that just plain doesn't happen often enough. We're looking forward to a New Year filled with (hopefully) only good things - and I wish the same for you!

We've Got Spirit, Yes We Do....

This week is Spirit Week at Tiny Person 1's elementary school ~ and we're having waaaay too much fun with it this year.

The school is celebrating it's 50th anniversary, so they chose to use Decades as the theme. Monday was 60s Day, and I had a few ideas rolling around in my noggin. I called my mom, who was in HS in the 60s and she offered some helpful suggestions and insight, and then I set about my search. I was planning on having her wear an untucked men's style white button down over dark jeans, cuffed with one wide roll...but do you think I could find the right kind of shirt? Of course not. What I {did} find, though, was sooooo much better. At Target, I stumbled upon a sweater which looks, to me anyway, exactly like the old letterman sweaters from back in the day. And it was on sale. {SCORE!} I hatched a plan.

First, I found a font that was meant to look like an old-school varsity letter. It's a {huge} help to find one that shows an outer and inner version of the letter...you'll see why later. I printed it in a size that I thought looked about right, checked it against the sweater to make sure it would fit, and cut it out. I then traced the shape onto the grey felt, which I was using as an accent color. Then I cut the shape out of the grey felt. Here's a picture of the felt, with the outer shape cut.

I then cut out the inner letter from the printed "H"...

I traced the letter onto the burgundy felt and cut it out.

Then I placed the inner letter inside the outer letter, just as it appears in the font that I used, and secured the 2 layers together with no-sew fabric glue.

I attached the letter to the sweater using the same glue, for a temporary hold. My sweet neighbor, Sue, who kicks butt with her sewing machine (without even swearing at it much!) offered to stitch the letter on for me when I showed it to her, so it will soon be permanent. :)

So there you have it! The sweater was around $8 on sale. The felt is usually 25cents a sheet, but was 50% off, so I only paid a quarter to personalize the sweater. And the tiny person {loves} it. I'm sure she'll ask to wear it again...which is fine by me ~ it's stinkin' cute!

Today is 70s Day, which we kind of phoned in with a shirt she already had and a pair of corduroy pants. But 80s Day.....ooooooh, just you wait for 80s Day! ;)

If you're the praying kind...

As a mom who knows where her children are....who knows that they are safe and warm and okay....I have to do what I can to get the faces of these three boys out to as many people as I can ~ because their mother isn't as fortunate tonight.

This hits close to home for me as these boys are missing from Morenci, MI ~ a town about 4 miles away from my own hometown. My mother taught at Morenci until her retirement. Searches are being conducted in and around both towns, including the areas surrounding the state park where I worked when I was in college.

They have been missing since Friday, when their father gave them to a "friend" he had an internet relationship with. She was to take them from the home so that their father could take his own life, and return them to their mother's home at a designated time. The father's attempt failed, and the woman never returned the boys. Police have not yet proven (or disproven) that the woman really exists and are uncertain if the father's story is true.

Click here for more information. This story is also being picked up by CNN and other national news outlets.

PLEASE....no matter where you are, look at the faces of these boys. Memorize them. Know their names. Keep your eyes open for them. If their father is being honest, they may be with a woman driving a silver van, and they really could be just about anywhere by now.

And, most importantly, I ask that you pray for them and for their family ~ for safety and comfort and courage and strength ~ and for their safe return home.

Ooh! Ooh! Pick me!

Jen @ Tatertots & Jello is giving away a Silhouette machine! Now....I'd LOVE to win that bad boy, but I realize the odds of that happening are pretty much slim to none. There are so many amazingly cool projects you can do with a Silhouette! Head over to TT&J to check out some of the things Jen has done with hers, and leave a comment to enter to win one for yourself!

I'd love to stay and chat/post more/catch up, but I can't at the moment and when I {do} tell you all about it you'll understand why. I promise. I hope everyone is doing well! Have a fantasticly wonderful Thanksgiving ~ and good luck to all of you crazy Black Friday shoppers!

What Sleep Deprivation Will Get You...

I'm tired. The hubband is gone hunting for the weekend, and he has my guard dog with him. Not that Molly (dubbed "the brown mound of lay-around" by my brother) isn't a force to be reckoned with...when she's taken her arthritis medication. ;) I just feel safer with 92 lbs of yellow dog at the foot of my bed. Even if I do think he'd probably lick an ax murderer.

Anyway...It's late and I'm putting off sleep and I started playing around in photoshop. Oh, c'mon ~ you know you've been there. I was thinking about making a Christmas printable to share, and trying to choose my favorite Christmas song from which to steal some lyrics...and then I thought, "Well, I always did like Bing Crosby." No ~ I'm not going the "Little Drummer Boy" duet with David Bowie route....I'm going old school...



How many of you are having flashbacks to the pool scene from "Christmas Vacation" right now? Right!?!?!? :)

***Edited*** This printable is available for download! :) It's formatted to a 5x7. {Click Here} if you're interested! I should also mention that I've linked up to the Weekend Wrap-Up Party @ Tatertots & Jello!

I think I might be tired enough to sleep now. G'nite folks!

One of Those Days

As moms, we all know that at some point there is going to come a day when everything just goes wrong. That was my day yesterday. I got up in the morning, got tiny person 1 to the bus stop, and spent the morning making my list/s of things that I wanted to get accomplished while tiny person 2 was at preschool. Then I went to the basement to get clothes out of the dryer only to find that the clothes in the dryer were...wet. Cold, and wet. I ran the dryer and started sorting the laundry into loads (am I the only person in the world who can do at least one full load of {pink} every week?), then I went back to check on the clothes in the dryer b/c I wasn't having a good feeling. Yep...still cold. AWESOME. I told the hubband there was a problem with the dryer (perks of having him work from home!) and he checked it out...and then called the repair dude.

I went on about my day, and as I was preparing to take tiny person 2 to preschool, I realized that tiny person 1 had left her homework folder at home. Oooops. So, I threw the folder in the car, took TP2 to preschool and went straight to TP1's school to drop off the folder....only to find that the secretary had been trying to reach me b/c TP1 was in the office....throwing up. Seriously - f.a.n.t.a.s.t.i.c. Of {course} I'm going to have a puking kid....when I Can't Do Laundry!

So now, I've got 2 kids at home all day, and I have to get the house picked up and clear the area around the dryer so that repair dude can do what he needs to do when he gets here....TOMORROW. Yep - I've got laundry ~ literally ~ hanging from the rafters in the basement. Anyone wanna trade? NO!?!?!? Oh, c'mon! ;)

On the bright side, when I have a {crap} day, I usually find that doing something I really want to do makes me feel better. At least a little. So I have a quick, easy and inexpensive project to share ~ just in time for Thanksgiving. Here's the finished product, displayed in the entryway of our home...

To start, I picked up an inexpensive wooden craft frame from Michael's. I brought it home, spray painted it brown, and measured the opening to determine the size of the print I'd need to fit inside it. Now, I've showed you this trick before, but I'm showing it again b/c 1) it's one of my favorites 2) when it comes to "oversized" prints, this really is a cheap and easy way to get what you want & 3) I want to remind everyone that you don't have to be limited just b/c you don't have a color printer at home. I used the measurements to make the art for the opening, then determined the closest {larger} size available from my Costco photo lab and moved the art onto a plain background in correct print size, so it looked like this...

Sometimes I darken the excess area, but I didn't bother with it this time. All I had to do was cut off the excess, do a little trimming to make sure it fit well, and bust out the mod podge to attach it to the frame.

So there you have it! A quick, easy, inexpensive little reminder to "Give Thanks" ~ which is just what I needed on a day when nothing seemed to be going right.

OK...I'm going to try to share this and see it it works! {Click Here} to download this printable ~ it's made to print as a 12x18. Enjoy! Go check out all the great ideas being shared at the Weekend Wrap-Up Party @ Tatertots & Jello!

Loving Fall!

There are so many things to love about Fall! And that month or so of fall between Halloween and {Thanksgiving} ~ when we can bring out all of our "pretty" fall stuff to replace our "spooky" fall stuff ~ is my absolute favorite. This year, I threw together a quick little something for our front porch.

For {$2} I grabbed a straw broom and a leaf vine from the dollar store, hit 'em with a few dots of hot glue & Voila!

It's a great little punch of color for the porch ~ one that only took, literally, 5 minutes to put together (including the time it took for the glue gun to warm up! for reals!) ~ and I love that it was so inexpensive.

In the next few days I'll be posting more Fall-type stuff! I have always loved {Thanksgiving} and, as much as I'm going to try to get my Christmas decorations up and the holiday shopping finished at the beginning of December, I refuse to skip Thanksgiving!

Celebrating {six}

On Friday, the not quite as tiny person got even less tiny...she turned six! :) There was a great deal of excitement in our house ~ in fact the first thing I heard that morning (aside from my very rude alarm clock) was the voice of the tinier tiny person saying, "Sister! Sister! Happy birthday, sister!" Pardon me while I {melt} just a little.

The 6-year-old requested princesses on her cake, and my mom and I debated long and hard about how to accomplish that without having to pay someone else to do it. We scoured the toy department and the cake decorating aisles at the store and found {nada} that we felt would get the job done. And then, my mother had a moment of genius. Goodie bags...

The goodie bags we found came in a pack of 8 ~ we simply cut the picture of the princesses off of the front of one of the bags, frosted the whole cake, then placed the picture where we wanted it and piped some frosting around the edge. Obviously, it's not edible, but the birthday girl was {thrilled} with how it turned out, it was super easy and way inexpensive. Sneaky, right?

I Could've Cried...

And I would have if I had thought for even one second that crying would've been helpful. But when the pipe that runs underneath your bathtub decides that it's {d.o.n.e.} and can no longer resist the urge to grow a little hole....during bath time....and the water seeps through the drywall and the ceiling tiles in the finished part of the basement near the guest bed....yeah, crying doesn't do much good. This is part where I declare how glad I am that I married a man with handy-type skills ~ he went right to tearing down the tiles and ripping out the drywall. He located the problem, and starting taking stuff apart.

It sat like that over night, he got to work right away this morning and had the tub officially {fixed} before tiny person 1 got home from school. {Whew!} Thank goodness he's confident enough in his abilities to go ahead and at least {try} to do something that he's never done before rather than go straight to the yellow pages & call in a plumber. He totaled the receipts to right around $40. I don't even want to think about what the total would've been for someone to come out and do it for us.

Of course this is going to lead to other projects ~ installing an {access panel} in the ceiling (which should've been done by the people who finished the basement...) and probably tearing down {all} of the ceiling tiles and replacing them, or painting the drywall. I've been wanting to paint the walls down there for years, but was always told that we shouldn't bother to mess with it ~ I wonder if I'll get to paint them now!

So that's the excitement we've been dealing with here. Try not to be jealous of the glamour. ;)

What's for Lunch?

Ahhh, packing the school lunch. Trying to find options that are healthy, liked by the tiny people, not messy and can be consumed in 30 sec. flat....as it seems there's not a lot of time set aside for actual {eating} during lunch time. Apparently recess is so much more important.

In an attempt to switch things up a bit, I decided to try something different - sandwich rolly-things. So far it's a big hit, so I thought I'd share it with you lovely peoples.

Step 1 - Smoosh the living daylights out of a slice of bread. Now, you could use a rolling pin, but I find that using a flat-bottomed casserole dish does the job just fine. Smoosh....Press down hard....Flatten that sucker. {Enjoy} it. ;)

See? Pretty flat. You can press down again if you notice any spots where it might not be as flat as you'd like.

Step 2 - Cut off the crusts. For most of us, that's a step in the lunch-making process anyway, right?

Step 3 - My tiny people don't care for mustard or mayo, so I butter the bread before putting the lunchmeat (1 or 2 slices) on the bread. Cut up a cheese slice into smaller strips and set one on top of the lunch meat. If you have mustard/mayo/ketchup lovers, you can run a single line of it along the cheese so you don't go overboard, if you prefer to do that rather than slather it on the bread.

Step 4 - Roll it up...

It'll end up looking like this.

I can fit 4 of these in the not quite as tiny person's sandwich box, but I usually do 3 and a side of some sort of snacky-type food.

I usually round it out with a serving of fruit and something to drink, and call it good. The teachers at our school have implemented a policy that makes the kids bring home what they don't eat (unless it's horribly messy - like a partially eaten yogurt cup or something) and I can tell you ~ the not quite as tiny person eats these babies up. She even told me that she likes it when I make these b/c they're so much quicker to eat. {SCORE!}

Works great for PB&J, too - with PB over the whole slice and a line of jelly (or honey...that's a good one, too) placed about where I put the cheese on these.

So there you have it! Go smoosh some bread!

On A Roll!

Three posts in three days!?!?!? It's MADNESS! ;)

When I first starting setting up my {craft room} I knew I'd need a place to put stuff up on the walls....a corkboard, magnet board...something. I bought 4 of those lovely little corkboard squares that come with the little adhesives that are supposed to hold them up on the wall. I say "supposed to" because I found out really quickly that those little adhesive thingies don't work for poo. So I consulted my stash of magazines and came across a dog-eared page in an old issue of DIY Ideas....

Those nifty metal {thingies} are actually gutter covers. Yep - the things that are meant to keep leaves and stuff out of your rain gutters. I paid around $10 for 5 of them. 2 cup hooks for each panel and a few quick taps with a hammer and {bam} ~ these babies were on the wall in about 5 minutes once I decided where I wanted them. Now, mine have the hinges on them, and I need to clip them off, but aside from that I'm pretty happy with the end result.

I picked up some clip-style magnets at Target ($6 for 6 magnets, so a little pricier than I wanted, but they're strong magnets so I'm happy) and then I went to town with a little {mod podge} and some scrapbook paper to personalize them and tie them in with the room.

Only having 6 magnets means that I can't over-clutter the area, which I think will help me weed out the old as I put up the new. Let's see how that works out. ;)