Addie picked up the red tongs at lunch yesterday to grab a piece of bread and blurts out…
“You should never shake hands with a lobster. Chomp, chomp!”
Wise words indeed.
Snapshot Sunday ~ Lobster Wisdom.
3
Well…
…this kinda takes all the fun out of poking the bottoms to try and figure out the good fillings, huh?
Nonetheless…it did the trick for a quick sugar fix this afternoon. Thank you, my sweet Valentine.
Crafty Tuesday
We had a productive/crafty weekend around here…finally!
First up, we got around to switching out some lighting around ye ‘ol house. I was positively giddy on Saturday after our new friend Mike hung four different fixtures and put in a bunch of dimmer switches for me.
My mostest, favoritest, bestest new fixture is the kitchen. It is so very pretty.
See the old fixture there in the foreground. Blech…but look at the new shiny pretty one! It has an Edison filament bulb in it, which regrettably doesn’t give off much light, but I don’t care. It really looks so nice. Let’s look again from another angle, shall we?
It is my favorite room, but I think the award for the biggest change goes to the dining room. This is the um…chandelier (?) that we had before. It is brass/glass/out-dated and just a little too busy for our room. As you can see…we have a lot of architecture and details, we needed simple – but a lot of light because it is a huge room.
And so we found this one. Love.
I’ll have to take a better shot of it tomorrow…but trust me, it is a huge improvement. Simple, elegant – goes with the style of the house with a bit of a modern twist. Love, love, love it!
But, enough with the house stuff…it is Valentine’s Day after all!
Thankfully the girls both wanted the same valentines for school…and I got a free download over here – plus they were simple assembly. Score all around.
I also “borrowed” this idea that I found on Pinterest and made these little Valentine candles for our mantle.
I didn’t have a book that I could sacrifice, so I used some scrapbook paper that worked just as well. I’ll light them tonight for our romantic dinner-in with the girlies. 😉
And I put together a birthday gift this weekend. My sewing machine was so happy to see me (and I was just as excited to visit it!).
This is for our sweet little Elizabeth who turned 3 last week! It is a placemat…
Flip it over, it is a chalkboard mat…
And roll it up, it is portable for fun on the go…
I’m not going to promise anything, but I might be making more of these, so maybe I can take photos and tutorial it soon. (Again…no promises!)
And with that…I’m off to some more house projects! What crafty goodness do you have for us this week?
Snapshot Sunday ~ Daddy Pileup.
You’d never know we have another 2/3 of a sofa…the girls found the best seat in the house – I’m not quite sure how Daddy got a nap in the midst of all of this, though.
Crafty Tuesday
Birdie #2 and I have discovered crafter’s Nirvana…they have opened a Hobby Lobby a mere 35 miles from our house. And it is worth every last mile. I had forgotten the allure of the Hobby Lobby (we had one in Naperville when we lived there.) – it is like a Michaels, a JoAnn Fabrics and a Home Goods all rolled into a store the size of Home Depot.
It. Is. Heaven.
Or at least as close as Two Birdies can get to Heaven here on Earth.
Needless to say our (way too brief!) stop there last year left me itchy with the crafting bug and a few new supplies, but not much to show for it this week.
I have however made a dent (albeit, a little tiny dent) into our House To-Do list. Tell me this isn’t intimidating?
But a dent was made – mainly in the lighting department. Now I am looking for an electrician to come transform our dreary, outdated chandeliers into light and loveliness. Before the aforementioned stop at the Hobby Lobby we traveled to the (this time OPEN) Lamps Plus Outlet. Luckily I found a traditional, simple chandelier with a modern twist for our dining room, which then led to finding foyer/entry way lighting and a top-of-the-stairs pendant, as well. Today with Nena and Grandma’s help I found kitchen lighting and now I’m just looking for something for the girls’ room. Sooo….close! I can’t wait til it is all up and I can show real progress. Right now since all of the boxes are stacked in the garage it still feels a little like “pretend” progress.
I have a few other projects in the works but they’ve been put on hold since we have visitors out here this week. In the meantime I’m looking for good Valentine projects to do that don’t take a lot of time/work/energy but are still pretty. So far we have this…
I’ve only had to refill it once. 😉 Leave your craftiness for all of us to peruse! Happy Tuesday.
My girl.
Dear Gracie Girl,
Apparently you have started to look like your Mama. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not, but we have been hearing this sentiment from a lot of people lately. I have never doubted for a minute that you are my girl. You are stubborn (like your Mama), a little bit type-A (like your Mama), and the last few nights I have caught you reading under the covers long after the lights were supposed to be out (er…not that your Mama ever did that! Hi, Mom & Dad.)
Last night I was in the backseat next to you and Daddy was DJ-ing during our ride home. He said, “this one is for Mommy,” and it was The Good Life by Kenny Chesney. While we were listening to it, I told you the story of how Daddy had given me that album to listen to, specifically that song, when I was pregnant with you and driving from Michigan to Aunt Meesh’s house, and how I listened to it at least 50 times that trip. When the song got to the line (that always makes me cry!)…
“Cos the one thing stronger than the whiskey: Was the sight of her holdin’ my baby girl.”
I felt your little hand slip into mine and you gave me a little squeeze. With tears streaming down my cheeks and you gently rubbing my hand the exact way I often do, I offered up a prayer of thanks for you. My girl.
Thank you for holding my hand, and my heart, sweet girl.
Love you,
Mommy
Snapshot Sunday: Making Piecrusts
Grandma Moffat taught JB and I how to make pie crusts today! So my Snapshot Sunday is a little late this evening, but the pie crust was delicious!
Any fun Sunday activities that I missed while I was in the kitchen?
Those Little Things.
It is the littlest of things that sneak up, grab me and squeeze my heart just a little too hard.
Like the girls coming down from the shower all squeaky-clean the other night and climbing on the sofa with me. They still shower together mostly for ease and efficiency, but I am no longer needed for the “is all the shampoo out of my hair” check, they (most of the time) happily check each other for leftover soap. But the showering and getting ready on their own bit of independence has been coming for quite awhile now – that wasn’t the little thing that sent me reeling. This was…
Addie says to me, “Look Mama – we cut our all of our toenails and even our fingernails. All by ourselfs.” (Yes…she did say ‘ourselfs’ instead of ourselves. Cuteness that I know I should be correcting, but just can’t for a little while longer.)
Now, mind you, I didn’t relish the chore of cutting their nails, clearly not a job that was top ‘o the list for me. But the fact that they don’t need me to do it anymore? That was just one of those little things.
Those little things that remind me just how fleeting that time is when we have the girls all to “ourselfs.”
Cheese from the milk from the cow.
Remember way back in May when I announced the new arrival to our family…the cow?
Well she finally put out. The cheese arrived today! Yum.
Crafty Tuesday
Thwarted again! This week I missed out on the fabric run in downtown LA’s fabric district because I was sick! I had my list of fabric I need – no, really! I do need some fabric, although after cleaning out the stacks of fabric and moving it up to the sewing room, I’m pretty sure I’ll have a hard time convincing anyone that I need anything. But, I do need some fabric for the roman shades I’m dreaming up for the bathrooms and kitchen. I have all the supplies – and hopefully I can find what I need this week.
Meanwhile, I’ve been pinning stuff on Pinterest like crazy, but haven’t actually done any of it. I have so many ideas for Valentine’s day…I gotta get started. And my house project to-do list just continues to grow. I think it is so large right now that I’m thoroughly overwhelmed. Every room needs paint, some sort of furniture, new flooring or rugs, LIGHTING…it is just too much. So I’m trying to tackle the “little things” – things that not many people would even notice, but I do and it makes me feel like I’m making some sort of progress. Things like – cleaned out linen closets, re-populating photo frames with new pics, culling our book collections and spreading the stacks out throughout the house. All things that seem to take a few hours…but I notice it when I walk in the room.
Oh…I do have one thing to share – a most excellent recipe! After many, many years I finally realized that J. would really much rather have cheesecake than real cake for his birthday. (I think I just couldn’t believe that there are people who wouldn’t like a big piece of chocolate cake on their birthday!) So, I have on occasion made the quick, no-bake cheesecakes for him – or grabbed one from the Cheesecake Factory. See, I am not a fan of cheesecakes – eh. I can take it or leave it and would usually just leave it. But then I found this recipe for Company Cheesecake.
Oh my. You guys…I might have to make it for my birthday now. It.Is.AMAZING. We had chocolate, berries and homemade whipped cream to douse it with…but it doesn’t need a thing. It is delicious. It has pecan crust – instead of graham crackers. Mmmm…it is so good. It is a little time-consuming and I’ve found a bunch of ways to try to not get any “cracks” in the top that I’ll file away for next time.
Oh, there most certainly will be a next time!
