The Family Gallery Wall

Except for one missing photo, our family photo wall has been complete for some time now. After the comments on my Instagram photo yesterday, I figured I would finally share the entire wall.

This wall started out with just a couple picture frames and has expanded to a full gallery wall. Originally, I started with some black and white photos with black frames and decided to continue with that theme.

When my mom was here the first time, we took a trip to Target to stock up on a few frames. When the parentals returned after Juli's birth, we took a second trip to Target to gather a few more frames. There has been a ton of adjusting along with countless little holes in the wall, but I'm pleased with how the gallery wall turned out.

I plan on leaving it as is for now, and might consider an addition frame or two once Juli grows a bit.

DIY Olaf Onesie Costume

Do you want to build a snowman? While I won't be building any actual snowmen anytime soon, I did piece together an adorable little Olaf costume for Juliana to wear for Halloween on Friday.

It actually took me up until about a month ago to even watch Frozen. However, Frozen fever has hit my home for Halloween this year. Finding costumes for Veronica and Adriana was simple. Veronica wanted Elsa, and since Adri lives to mimic Veronica in every way possible, Anna was a simple choice for her. Target for the win.

Juliana, on the other hand, took some searching. Costumes in the 0-3 month size are severely lacking. For the most part, any cute costume that I could find in that size was one of those super thick and heavy ones that would instantly over heat my baby. So, I decided to take costume making into my own hands.

Lucky for me, I already had all of the necessary materials on hand. Juli has tons of little white Gerber onesies and I actually had some felt scraps from a felt pumpkin activity that I was working on for the older two.

Before taking the scissors to fabric, I practiced drawing an Olaf on paper. He's incredibly easy to draw. Once, I was confident in my abilities, I cut two eyebrows, two circles for eyes, and the mouth (minus a giant tooth) out of black felt. For the carrot nose, I cut a slightly rounded and imperfect triangle. Seriously, too easy.

To get all the pieces stuck on, I busted out my glue gun. A few dabs of glue around all of the edges, and we were good to go. If I had wanted to get fancy, I would have used iron on adhesive, like I used to do in college for sorority t-shirts, but honestly, who has time for all of that?! Not this mama.

Just to be sure that the pieces were in fact stuck on, I lightly passed the iron over all of the pieces. Originally, I had planned to outline all of the felt pieces with puffy paint, but I decided against it just to avoid any potential accidents.

Last week, Juli rocked her costume at the girls' preschool Halloween party. It held up perfectly! It even survived an accidental spin through the washer and dryer.

Making Your Own About Me Image

Notice my cute new "about me" image on the left? I made it myself with PicMonkey. I've been using PicMonkey for a while now, but I was recently lucky enough to be upgraded to a Royale membership in return for spreading the word about their awesome features and providing tutorials like this one. I loved using the free version of PicMonkey, but let me tell you, Royale is even better! There are so many more overlays, fonts, and edits available when you upgrade.

When I got my new blog design, an about me section was not included as part of my package, it was going to be costly to have one made and I knew I could do it relatively quickly and easily myself. When I had my blog consult with Sara a few weeks ago, she pointed out that I should definitely get the image made ASAP.

I started out by creating a blank collage. I used three ducks in a row.

From there I rotated the image to make it vertical and change the size to 195x585 so that it would fit in my side bar. The height wasn't super important since I knew I'd have enough room and I could crop out any extra later. I set the spacing to 0 and rounding to 50% so that my image would have rounded corners like the images that are part of the blog design. If you want your image to be a circle, you can set the rounding to 100%.

Next, I inserted my image from the computer. Once you have your image, you can just drag and drop it into the top square. Once your pretty face is in, go ahead and save your image, then open it up in Edit mode.

After opening in Edit mode, click the P on the side and choose the main font that you want and click to add text. Quicksand was most like the default font on my blog. Type or paste what you want your "about me" section to say. Make the width of the text block the same width as your image. Adjust your font size and then move the top of the text block to where you want it.

If you want to be extra spunky, choose a few keywords from your mini bio and add some flair to them. Highlight the word that you want to jazz up, pick a new font and/or color. I used the colors from my background. You can type in your own hex codes for colors and then press enter.

Once I was spunkified and had my rainbow of pretty words, I had to crop my image to remove the extra from the bottom. When you're happy with what you have, click save. You'll have to upload to a website like Photobucket, and then insert the HTML for the image to your page.

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Sprayable Sidewalk Chalk

I have this good friend that follows the best pages on Facebook. She doesn't have kids or anything, but every now and then, she'll send me a screenshot of a fun little activity, craft, or recipe for the kids from her news feed. It's been rather boring around here since the splash park is only open during Adri's nap time and it's kind of just too hot for the regular park. So I improvised.

I remembered back to a text I received a while ago. Sprayable sidewalk chalk. There weren't instructions or anything, just the picture, so I did some searching. I found a pin on Pinterest, but it was made with cornstarch. I don't have cornstarch in the house. It's used so rarely, that if a recipe calls for it, I just sub flour. I figure it does the same thing anyway. So this time, I tried the same substitution.

This activity is fun, cheap, and easy. Absolutely perfect for the kids. If they hated it, it would have only been a loss of a few cents.

What you need (per bottle/color):

• 1 1/2 Cup warm water
• 15 Drops of food coloring
• 1/4 cup of flour

I took four spray bottles from Walmart, which were $.98 each, and filled them half way with water. You want to add the water first to avoid the flour clumping up at the bottom of the bottle. Next I added 15 drops of food coloring to each. Finally, I used a funnel to pour the flour into the bottle. Shake well and you're good to go. The girls went to town on the patio and had a blast.

The mixed rinsed off pretty easily from our vinyl fence. Unfortunately, there were some subtle stains left on Adri's bathing suit from the purple spray. You can cut back on the food coloring to avoid staining light colored clothing, but the chalk won't be as vibrant. The other colors washed right out though.

It's a Pinterest project Weekend

I seriously feel as though life has gotten in the way of blogging lately. Jacquie and I have spent the night at each others houses just about everyday for the past three weeks or so. Since we're together just about 24/7, I haven't gotten a chance to blog very much. What's worse is I haven't had much of an opportunity to actually follow the blogs that I follow. I'm sorry you guys out there in blog land! I promise that once Hubs is home I'll be posting a bit more regularly and showing off pictures that are of better quality than the cell phone pics which I usually post.

Today and yesterday were spent shopping for material for various projects that will be worked on in the next couple of days weeks. Jacquie and I bought the materials to make a wooden bench, coasters, bath bombs, and lots of Christmas stuff made out of fabric. Friday was Jo-Ann Fabrics, today was Lowe's, and tomorrow will be Jo-Ann's again (they're having a 25% off sale) and possibly Lowe's for something we forgot today. The only thing that I've actually completed so far is my set of Christmas pillows.

The bench might be done tomorrow. We started Jacquie's today but weren't able to finish because of a missing piece. It was seriously so easy though. This is where we got the inspiration from.I'm so excited to complete the bench! I have absolutely NO idea where it's going to go, but the fact that I made it myself and it only cost about $40, makes me happy.

Source

Have a great weekend everyone! I'll be catching up very soon!

I Should've Been a Mechanic

Ok, not really.. But I've seriously impressed myself with Hubster being gone.

Saturday I woke up to both car batteries completely dead. Lovely. The Tahoe was parked head-first in the garage so there wasn't really a way for us to jump start it. Thankfully Jacquie was at the house and she was able to drive us around everywhere.

Our first stop was Walmart for a new battery. Whoa. The price was a bit of a shock. They didn't have the correct battery though so we averted that financial crisis. What to do next though..? Call daddy of course! He suggested that we buy a trickler (battery charger) so we did.

Upon arriving home, I hooked up the battery charger to the car/battery and let it go for a few hours. When the meter said the battery was charged, I disconnected the thing from the wall and then the car. The car started right up and is still starting effortlessly.

The day that I dropped Hubs off at the airport to go back to Afghanistan, the car overheated on the way home. It figures that terrible things would happen when I'm already in a bad mood and have no husband to help me out. Damn Murphy's Law. Even though the only issue was that the coolant needed to be refilled, I was mighty proud of myself for doing it on my own.

With Hubs gone I've also changed the headlights on the truck, fixed the garbage disposal, put up gutters, landscaped the yard, built a fire pit, and installed a shelving system in my closet. Google and my dad have been invaluable resources. It's pretty amazing what all you can do when you have no other choice.

Ring of Fire: We Built A Fire Pit

A friend and I decided to get a little crazy these past two days and build the fire pit that I've been dreaming of! Now while it wasn't a breeze to build, it certainly wasn't that difficult. Thankfully we've been working out in preparation for our husbands to come home and were able to use our brand new muscles.

After a bit of searching and internet investigating, I found a local landscaper that would build the pit for $1200. What?! No. They would deliver all of the materials for a mere $900. Thanks, but no. From there I decided to see what I could get from Lowe's or Home Depot.

Going into Lowe's, I was expecting to pick up one of their $200 kits with all of the bricks and metal ring included for you. Well after seeing the kit, that wasn't going to happen. Boy were those bricks ugly. The nice man at the store said it'd just be cheaper for me to just pick my own bricks and get the ring separately any way. Ok. Seems simple enough. Jacquie and I proceeded to load 68 wall pavers onto the flat cart with the employee's help. We also needed 2 bags of paver base and 2 tubes of Liquid Nails. I already had some of the tools (shovel, rake, level) but needed to borrow the hand tamper from a friend.

Friday morning started bright and early at 8:30am with us digging up a 5ft x 5ft area of grass. This was one the hardest part. We removed the grass and then started raking the dirt level. Once we were satisfied with the level of the dirt, we dumped the paver base and leveled that. The hand tamper was used to pack that down. I made sure that everything was level while Jacquie started bring the pavers from the back of the truck.

Jacquie kept bringing the pavers while I started placing them in a circle. I thought CrossFit was tough but it's nowhere near as physically demanding as building a fire pit was. As I laid each paver, I had to make sure that they were level with one another. The first layer was really the only one that we had to worry about. For each additional level, we applied some Liquid Nails and placed the paver over the space of the two pavers below.

The three top layers didn't take much time at all to stack up. When everything was complete, we poured some egg rocks around and called it a day. The two of us were SO surprised at how well everything turned out. The total project was less than $250 including all the extra little materials that went into the construction. My pit is four layers high of pretty textured brick while the one that they sell in the kit is a kinda ugly plain three layered pit.

I haven't shown Hubster yet because I want it to be a surprise when he comes home on R&R. He is going to be shocked that his wife and her friend put this thing together. It's much too hot to use the fire pit now, but I can't wait for Hubs to be home for good in December so that we can snuggle and toast marshmallows.