mamaLove

Domestic Mommy

I’m feeling quite domestic this weekend. I baked a blueberry pie. Yes, I cheated and used a ready made crust and pie filling from a can, but hey. It was my first time making a pie and it was delicious. I made it yesterday early afternoon and I’ve just about eaten the whole pie by myself. Gasp! No wonder I’ve gained about 5 pounds this weekend. Yikes!

I also made a small pillow for Amelia. I cut up an old yucky pillow, washed the cover and removed about 1/2 the stuffing, then sewed it back up. Now she has a small rectangular pillow instead of a big standard size pillow.

I finally figured out that it was the big pillow that was giving her a hard time falling asleep. It’s been a week that we’ve been struggling with her going to bed, then getting up several times during the night. So I thought about it and thought maybe it was the pillow. I switched it out last night for one of her small pillows that she used before and it worked. She went to sleep and I never heard a peep out of her again til morning. So I made her a small pillow. I hope she likes it. We’ll be trying it out tonight.

DH was gone for the weekend so it was just Amelia and I. We’ve gone to the grocery store about 4 times this weekend. I made cinnamon rolls yesterday for breakfast. We’ve played outside almost all day today. Yesterday, we played with the play dough. And I’ve just about got the laundry done. Plus I’ve vacuumed the living room twice this weekend also. I did manage to read a bit, knit a bit last night and watched football. Wow!

Oh yeah. As part of my purging, I’ve going through and getting rid of some cookbooks. So I downloaded a recipe software and am entering in some of my favorites out of each book that I’ve either really liked, or want to try but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m then going to take the cookbooks to work and see if anyone wants any of them.

Ha! This is what happens when I get domestic and my SAHM personality kicks in.

Tags: domestic, baking, cleaning, pillows, sewing

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Frugality

I’m not the most frugal person, but I do my part in little ways. I’ve been having a fight with my conscious about it, so I need to remind myself that I do make some effort to be frugal, even if it is just little things.

• I make coffee every morning.
• I take lunch to work.
• We eat at home every night.
• I shop for clothes infrequently and when I do it’s on gift cards or at discount stores.
• I purchase my daughter’s clothes at consignment sales.
• Most of our bulbs are CFL
• We traded in our truck for a more fuel-efficient compact car
• We don’t travel much
• We have a programmable thermostat and set it higher/lower when we aren’t there using it
• We have a new energy efficient A/C unit
• I don’t get regular manicures or hair cuts
• DH cuts his own hair
• We don’t go to the movies
• I’m working on making my own dish rags so we can stop using paper towels.
• We use our towels more than once before washing them.
• I always dry clothes on medium heat.
• I always wash clothes in cold water, except towels, which we only do a load of about once a month, because we re-use so it takes a while to build up enough towels for a load.
• We only ever do a max of 3 (sometimes 4 loads) of laundry in a week.
• I take showers, not baths (I used to take lots of baths)
• We don’t water our yard (yes our yard turns brown and yucky, but we save a buttload by not watering)
• We wash our own cars, but not often and when we do, we have a pressure washer so the water isn’t constantly running out of the hose.

There are many things I could do better at, and I’m trying. And then there are some things that won’t change or are not feasible to change, like commuting. Public transportation here isn’t like in many other areas in the country. My job won’t let me telecommute as much as I’d like to. And my DH won’t give up his HD cable and DVR. But we try in other ways.

In what ways do you try to be or are frugal?

Technorati Tags: frugal, thrifty

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DeCluttering

For some reason, I’ve got a bug in me that my house was too cluttered. I’m sure everyone feels the same at some point in their life. So I told the husband that we need to get rid of our junk. Stuff we don’t ever use, haven’t used in a long time or ever, stuff that we won’t use ever again.

We started last week. I made the emotional decision that there really isn’t a need to keep all of my daughter’s old baby clothes. If they don’t fit, get them out of the house. The whole point is to only keep the necessary, and most loved items. So all of her clothes are going to be sparced out to friends who have younger children that may want the slightly used clothes in the near future. The same thing with extra blankets, towels, burp rags, baby monitor, and toys. I’ve come to terms with the reality that we don’t know when/if we’ll have another child and when/if that ever happens, we’ll get that child new/used items as needed.

We cleaned out probably around 50 DVD movies that we will most likely never watch again. I’m going to sift through the books on the bookshelf that have never been read and if I know I won’t read them, I’m going to get rid of them.

Getting rid of stuff doesn’t necessarily mean throwing it away. Many items will be surely donated to Goodwill, sold to friends and family for a cheap price, given to friends and family and taken somewhere to be traded in for credit towards other items. Who knows, I may even convince my husband to have a yard sale. Gasp!

So back to the decluttering. Last weekend, I managed to clear out the baby’s room of 2 garbage bags full of clothes, toys, and “baby stuff” that was lingering around. I cleaned out her top dresser drawer which had become a junk drawer. We cleaned off the movie shelf and eliminated 1/2 of the toys that were taking over the living room.

I can think of many things in my house that need to go, like the countless cookbooks I don’t use, the casette tapes from another era, the CD collection that is kept in a box in the closet. I also have many other things that I know of that are just wasting space in our house.

Just thinking about purging all that junk is a good feeling. I can’t wait to get rid of it all.

Technorati Tags: cleaning, clutter, organizing, purging

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Almost Two!

My daughter will be two in a month! I can’t believe my baby will be 2. It seems like just yesterday I was saying hello to my newborn. I still remember when my water broke and we were on our way to the hospital at 4am. And despite being in a heavily drug-induced state, I still remember bits and pieces of my labor and delivery.

My baby quickly outgrew her baby stage and is now a full-fledged toddler leading me headfirst into the terrible-twos stage. I love that she interacts, talks and has a whole personality of her own. But I sure miss those days when she would fall asleep in my arms and I could just sit and cuddle her.

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Slacking Once Again

I’ve been slacking in the blog posting department again. I guess motherhood and work has been keeping me busy. Actually, that’s not true. Motherhood and knitting has been keeping me busy. But that doesn’t mean there’s been knitting content posted over on the knitting blog either. Sadly. Lately, my internet time has been spent on Facebook and Ravelry.

The AB mommies kept sending me invites to Facebook, so I finally took the plunge and joined. I didn’t realize how many of my friends were there. Within a few days I had over 20 friends and that’s a lot for me. A lot of my cousins are there as well, plus friends I’ve lost touch with for one reason or another. So it has been so much fun reconnecting with everyone. Then my husband joined and he’s totally addicted to the flair. LOL!

Besides Facebook, I’ve been obsessed with Ravelry. And in conjunction with the Summer Olympics in Beijing, we’ve been doing our own knitting version…the First International Ravelympics. It’s been great fun trying to knit as many projects as possible or just one challenging project during the summer games. So lots of knitting and spinning has been going on the past 2 weeks.

Amelia has been keeping me busy. What’s going on with her? A lot. She got her playhouse at the beginning of August. My Father-in-law came up and he and my husband put it together for her. It’s a 6×6 foot playhouse with 3 windows, a door, a 2ft front porch and cedar shingles. Pretty sweet little crib for a 2 year old. So we bought her a play kitchen that looks like Cinderella’s castle and a bunch of accessories for it, so she can cook up some delicious meals for us.

She’s talking to much now, it’s sometimes frustrating trying to figure out what she’s saying. But we’re slowing learning her language. She tries to dress herself and last night managed to put her shoes on all by herself. Of course they were on backwards, but it was adorable.

And the biggest news of late…she’s teething. She’s got the two bottom molars coming in, plus one if not two teeth coming in at the top (neighbors to the front teeth). So she’s been miserable lately. Cranky, clingy, fussy. on top of that she has some sort of cold that keeps her coughing. And the poor thing smashed her fingers in the door at daycare this week. I cringe every time I picture her crying and hurting and I wasn’t there to cuddle her. It hurts me that I wasn’t there when she needed me. Thankfully she has wonderful teachers that cuddled her in my place and rocked her to sleep at nap time. But it’s never the same as mommy. So we’ve been giving her extra cuddles lately as she deals with these mean, painful teeth. I’ll be glad when they finally break through and give her a bit of peace.

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The Vacation is Over

We’re back from our nice weeklong vacation. It’s nice to be home again, but all the responsibilities that come with it are a bummer. Fixing dinner every night, doing laundry, cleaning house and mostly going back to work. Blah! I have to work hard to get back into code-monkey mode.

But we had a great time. We got to FL on Monday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon, I took Amelia to visit with her other grandparents. Wednesday, we went to Cypress Gardens. Amelia loved the kiddy-coasters. She got mad every time the ride ended and I took her seatbelt off. She fussed and tried to buckle it back up. It was cute though and we got some good pictures of her on the rides. Thursday we had a boating fiasco and Amelia screamed the entire ride, so we had to cut it short. That afternoon we went swimming at the pool in my grandmother’s complex. Amelia loved the pool and discovered how fun it is jumping in.

She was so exhausted though because she barely had a nap all day, that she had a really hard time going to bed. Friday we made it a point to do nothing so that she could rest. She took a 3 hour nap! Then we headed back home on Saturday and got back yesterday around lunch time.

So now, it’s back to the daily grind. Amelia off to daycare and me off to work every day. It’s hard. After a whole week of being with her, it’s hard to drop her off knowing she’s going to spend the whole day there without me.

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