Baby Organization

Babies involve a lot of stuff, which means your house becomes a mess. So what to do? Buy a billion bins at Target!

Now most of these tubs are actually for my husband. After having a baby for 2 days, he came down the stairs with his hair all disheveled saying, "I can't find a single thing in the baby's room!" Then the next day, he tried to put clean clothes away, and they were just all over the place :). So I used my teacher labeling machine to label lots of tubs. Since then, I haven't heard him complain about not being able to find things, and everything has ended up in the right drawers. Yay!

A planter to help contain all of the stuffed animals!

A cute tub to store diapers, antibacterial hand  stuff,  thermometer, diaper rash cream

A tub to store all swaddles because my husband can't ever locate these things

A tub to contain the billions of socks

The changing table/dresser

Everything we use at night

My husband doesn't ever know what is in each drawer :).

A tub for the boob juice

Posters and Turnips

I made a post a while ago about some posters that I was thinking of printing. I decided to go ahead and get those puppies printed. I am pretty happy with the way they came out, too! Disregard the price tag stickers on the picture frames.

It was much cheaper to go to the local camera store and have these 11X14s printed as matte pictures rather than having them printed at Kinko's as posters -- $5 each versus $38.95 each. The picture frames were $7.99 from Garden Ridge, and we spray painted them white to match with the curtains and white trim. Yahoo! Still cheaper than similar things I've found online like this.

Turnips Fries - (before baking)

On the eating front, we always get turnips from our local Farmer's Market and then have no idea what to do with them. Peter is always determined to take the vegetables I don't like and turn them into something tasty. It just wasn't happening with turnips...until I found a recipe for turnip fries! Yes, fries. When you eat them while they are hot, they are pretty convincing as French fries. I would highly recommend them if you are curious or needing something to do with turnips.

Turnip Fries Recipe:
4-5 turnips
2 tbsp of vegetable oil or olive oil
1/3 cup of parmesan cheese (the kind in the green can)
1 tsp of onion powder
1 tsp of garlic powder
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp chives (optional)
sprinkle of ground pepper (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
2. Wash turnips and then cut into "steak fries."
3. In a bowl, pour oil and mix with turnips. All fries should have a light covering.
4. Add in cheese, onion powder, garlic powder, paprika, chives, and pepper.
5. Toss all fries, so they are covered in the mixture from step 3.
6. Spray a sheet with cooking spray and spread fries onto sheet evenly.
7. Cook for 20 minutes.
8. Eat soon after (--I like them while they are still hot) and enjoy!

Turnip Factoids (wee!):

Turnips have less calories than potatoes.

Turnips have less carbohydrates than potatoes.

Turnips are higher in calcium.

Stuffed Animal Organizer

So maybe I've been Pinterest-ing a little...but what a good way to organize stuffed animals! They always seem to fall off shelves and take up space on flat surfaces. Tada! Thanks, Peter!

By the way...if I knew that blackout fabric was this cheap, I would have totally made my own blackout liners for the white curtains we just bought! Just wanted to write about this in case anyone is reading and doesn't know this either :).

Owl Love Discounts!

I just wanted to share that ModCloth.com is having a deal right now where if you sign up for a new account, you get $20 your order of $50 or more. (Here is the referral link if you are interested: http://sharethelove.modcloth.com/a/clk/4r1Lcc)

This was very exciting news to me, because I've been wanting this owl lamp but didn't want to spend $56.99 on it. Now my order was $40, which makes me not feel so bad about it. Yay!

Nocturn Owl

Plus this fulfills my need to buy something for the baby's room. Now I feel accomplished. This child will have a lamp.

Rachel's Bridal Shower

My future sister-in-law's bridal shower was today, so everyone was running around like crazy trying to get things in order. There was TONS of food (as usual), cute decorations, wonderful guests, and lots of laughter.  I hope Rachel had a good time and enjoyed herself. Here are some of the details of the day:

  

Guest Room Re-Do

I've tried several times to rid myself of my love of blue, but I am never happy with the final product. I tried painting my bedroom green, so we could do the "earth tones" look with magentas, greens, and browns. Bleh. I hated going into my bedroom. Even though it looked presentable, it just wasn't me.

I tried doing maroons, golds, and yellows in the guest bedroom, but I never really felt that the guest room was anything to be proud of.

Once I realized that blues are just really calming to me, I decided that it's my house, and if people want to say, "Wow... that girl sure likes a lot of blue," then so be it. Because you know what? I am the one who has to live here and has to try to destress here. So blue it is!

Here are some befores of our guest room:

Today I decided to paint the room a new, cool color that has a slight blueish hue to it. I also repainted my picture frames, shelves, and mirrors. Here's a sample of what is to come!

Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper Review

We adopted Lennon, the Australian Cattle Dog mix, because we wanted a pup, and she was just too adorable. White and brown hair, white stripe down the nose, white socks, 2 different-colored eyes, peed out of excitement when they put her in the little room with us. She didn't move from the puppy fetal position for about 20 minutes, but then eventually she crawled into my lap. I was sold.

Lennon needed a friend, and I have always been a "everyone needs a friend" kind of person. We found a newspaper ad that said someone was selling a litter a black lab mix puppies. On our trip to the seller's house, we soon realized we just had to adopt a puppy from them, because leaving a dog there would just be cruel. They were drunken, sloppy people who were amused by feeding the puppies beer and screaming at them. The puppies were all well-behaved and cute, and Peter really seemed to fall in love with Lily, her one white foot, and her whiny nature. 

Now that you know the background, you can see that it never occurred to us that having 2 dogs with different -colored fur would be a problem...until about a day later when the light tiled floor was covered in black hair and the dark wooden floor was covered in white and tan hair. And since then, our floor, clothes, couches, car interior, etc. are all covered in hair of one color or another. Lennon's hair is the worst--it is like little needles that are impervious to vacuum cleaners or lint brushes.

Just as an example, here was my dark brown carpet with Lennon's white hair before.

Today I decided I would try one more thing--the Evercare Pet Hair Sweeper--and I am seriously glad I spent the $7.99. It cleans the black and white hair up sooo well! I cleaned my sofa, the front seats in the car, my ottomans, my coat! 

After a swipe of the Sweeper, here is the carpet after. Yahoo!

Yay, now I don't have to look like the only person in a business meeting with a suit covered in dog hair!

IKEA: Part 2 (with some sneak peek pics)

We decided to go for it and ordered IKEA furniture online. They make you pay a shipping fee, but let me just say that, with our small cars, it would have taken at least 2 trips to get the stuff anyway. So we saved on gas money, food, and time.

Peter was going to go to DC on a work trip, but things got a little crazy with the weather, and it ended up being cancelled (--I know some dictionaries say it's spelled, "canceled," but I am of the phonics rule that if you have a syllable with a short vowel sound, when you add -ed, you need to have a double consonant. Ex: sun-ned, rub-bed, surpass-ed [has 2 double S's at the end already, so you can just add -ed]. You get the idea. I'm an English nerd). Therefore, we didn't end up getting the panels and coffee table. We are still debating the coffee table, but we found an alternate draping for our window nooks.

The bookcase that was going to go horizontal over the desks is absolutely way too heavy, so that is just not happening. We have another idea for it.

You can see the gray wall color we picked and the new door handle that we added to our tiny, minidoor.
Now we won't bang into a doorknob all the time. Yay! The white trim makes such a difference. LOVE IT.

We searched high and low for a cute, white, minifan.
The loft has an angled ceiling, so a regular-sized fan just won't do.

This is my joyous couch. I will let my dogs on this one. For $150, it's not too shabby.

Here are some sneak peaks.

IKEA -- the solution to everything

I've been a little overwhelmed lately with work. And to top it off, I am getting over the flu. It seems like everyone  wants to have a meeting with me when I have the flu. Coincidence? *shrug*

In an attempt to get my mind off work and stress for a while, I am going to blog about my bedroom loft. We live in a cute townhouse that has 3 floors. 1st floor has the living room, kitchen, dining room, 1/2 bathroom, washer & dryer room/pantry, and closet. 2nd floor has 2 bedrooms, one full bathroom, a linen closet, and 1 master bedroom with full bathroom. Inside the master bedroom, there are stairs that lead up to a 3rd floor in which  you will find a "loft." The loft literally overlooks the bedroom, and it's a nice-sized space, but we've never really known what to do with it.

First we turned it into a place for storage, then we tried Peter's office, and next we tried an extra bedroom. Well, storage has been winning so far, because it gets lonely when Peter goes up to the 3rd floor to get online, and the idea of a guest bedroom that overlooks our bed (literally) is kinda creepy, soo... You can see how storage wins.

Recently we decided to make use of the loft space, so we can actually have 2 guest bedrooms on the 2nd floor, and we will turn the loft into our "office." (That's just a fancy word for "place we keep our computers.")

Peter put together a little model to show what it might look like, because we needed to see what type of furniture would fit in the space.

We are painting the loft a light gray color, painting the trim white, accent vases/things will be purple (a new color to me), and, with the help of IKEA, we are going to incorporate this furniture into the mix:

Coffee Table - will probably be used to hold a small TV.

Shelves - These will go above our desk, horizontal.
I will line the wall with purple-colored paper, so it pops with some color.

Vases -- ok, these are from Target. I have a fuscia one and a purple one. 

Panels - A panel will hide our window inlets that we usually use for storage.
This will make the space have more of a flat wall, which will be helpful when arranging furniture.

Tiny sofa - This will go in the corner where Peter's old computer desk is right now.
The TV will be its mate.

Two desks - We will put these desks facing each other in the middle of the room--against the creepy little door.

One storage cabinet - This will be used as an extension for one of the desks, whoever needs it at the moment.

Well, what do you think? I need some cute options for dressing up the loft a little with color. I wanted it to be tranquil and calming--that way it's not distracting if I have to do some work at home. I was thinking maybe this behind the couch or something. The birds would be purple-y fuscia.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions for me?