New Year, New House

My new year's resolution this year is to do more crafty stuff with my 3 year old daughter and work on fixing up our house. We bought our house in the spring of 2010. It has been stuck in the 1980's. Not the fun '80's but the sad maroon red, navy blue and emerald green kind. The previous owner was a retired woman. She had not put alot of effort in updating the house at all. This past year has mostly been fixing any immediate issues, cleaning out left behind junk and clearing out the overgrowth in the yard.

 

I think this light switch montage is a good visual on the house. It's a hodge podge of different light switches throughout our house. Changing out old, outdated, dirty, ugly or broken switch plate covers is an easy way to update.  Instant mini-makeover. It is an inexpensive and quick one too. Covers cost 25 cents or less per switch/outlet for the basic white.

As part of helping me to organize the year - our time and money on project, I found this helpful 52-week organization guide http://www.home-storage-solutions-101.com/kitchen-organization.html on Pinterest. You can sign up to have it emailed to you - great reminder! I'll be posting pics along the way of what I did at our house along with some renovation projects we'll be doing.

Best Spoons Ever

I am not a fan of the baby spoons available out there. The are either too small or too flat. We started giving our daughter a big person to use but she had some trouble with the long handle. While babysitting, my mom happened to have a taste tester spoon from Baskin Robbins and it was the perfect fit - short handle, big bowl for scooping up stuff, and light weight. We stopped by our local ice cream shop and picked up several for ourselves - after ordering yummy ice cream too!

Get cooking

My mom (GMa) and husband both brought me the same article from the local paper about making your own baby food. It was pretty inspiring with the creative meals. Ideas like butternut squash curry, minty peas and potatoes, beef risotto and so many more. A local mom started by making baby food for her friends. Now she does it as a business AND she delivers to the Kansas City area. Her website is http://www.bebeappetit.com/. I also like that she recylces the glass jars by picking up last week's and re-fills them for the next week. Very cool.

Sewing Nests

I finally put up some custom crib set ideas on etsy - http://www.littleowlsnest.etsy.com/ I love creating 'nests' for other little owls. It started with making my own crib set for my little one before she was born. I could not find anything I liked online or in stores. It was all too pink or too commercial or too cheap looking. The local fabric stores had nothing that caught my eye. I ended up looking at online fabric shops and found a whole mess of modern and colorful fabrics. There are sooo many options out there now. I found a fabric called Amelia and feel in love with it. It's in blues, greens, yellows, and browns. It's still girly without being pink and purple. There will be plenty of time for those later!

Adventures in Baby Food

My husband and I cook all the time. He comes from the restaurant biz and I'm a life long baker. Majority of our meals are made from scratch so it naturally made sense to make baby food as well. So far it's turned out really well. And easy - just peel, cut up, boil in some water, run through the Cuisinart and freeze in ice cube trays. That’s it! When it comes time for a meal, we just defrost the veggie pop and ready to go.

The first round was squash. It was very easy. The only thing I would have done differently is to put it thru a fine strainer and mix with more liquid. It was too much for our baby to work through if you know what I mean. Went back, strained it, watered it down and she has no problems now.

Second round was bananas and organic carrots from the store and peas & green beans from the farmers market. The peas were pretty pathetic looking but the insides had lots of fat peas. Bananas were the easiest - just cut up into slices and freeze. She made a crazy face when she tried bananas. I think the texture threw her off. A note about carrots...we heard the conventional grown carrots have alot of nitrates to make them grow big so look for organic carrots. I used baby carrots.

This third round I bought organic from Whole Foods, apples, peas, apricots, peaches and an avocado. The pics are from this round of cooking.

So far she has eaten everything we put in front of her. Don't know if she's just a good eater or if the better tasting stuff appeals to her. I bought jarred carrot baby food to try it out and thought it tasted like tomato soup. The fresh stuff tastes so much better. My favorite so far has been the squash.

Hatching...

I don’t know what an artsy fartsy person is doing writing a blog but here goes! I’m into sewing, baking, gardening, interior design, and baby raising so this will be a little bit of all that.

I recently saw this funny image at a friends house with the line “I’m so crafty I make people” By the time I found it was from someone on etsy selling t-shirts, bags, pins etc, I had already started my own baby onsie. You can find the original at http://www.muthacrafter.etsy.com/. I’ve been described as crafty my whole life so this just fits in with that whole persona.

So I guess this is my tribute to the original mutha....