My Husbands V-Day Present

I have found over the years that coming up with presents for guys can be very difficult. However, there is one thing that never fails...food!

For valentines day this year, my hubby is getting a tower of snacks. I got all the bases covered, salty, sweet, sour, and I had one more empty jar left so I went with fruity. The salty was from me of course (oh baby!) I filled it with pretzel pizza combos. For sweet, I went with Hershey chocolate hoping that he will share. The sweet jar is from our baby girl because there is no one sweeter. (awwwww) Sour is of course sour patch kids, the jar looks empty because there wasn't that many in the box. (rip off!) Sour is from our dog Buddy since he tore up the carpet downstairs. For fruity I filled the canister with dried apples and thought about putting a picture of his old manager on the jar, but refrained. ( I crack myself up.)Look at me being all crafty! I got out the squiggled edge scissors and everything. I wish I could say this was my idea, but I branched off something I found online called cubicle snacks. Theirs of course was much cuter, but did they have a tower? No! That was all me! (and really lets be honest for a moment...girls, do guys care about cute? no. They care about food. Glad we had this talk.) My husband is getting his gift today because I am just not sure that all that chocolate will stay put for very long.

Happy Valentines Day!

Adding to the Real Deal

I have pretty much settled into my new place now, (yep the house is a mess) and I thought that I would update you on what I have been up to. I have discovered some awesome crafty/ cooking blogs floating in blog land. Seriously, there are some creative people out there and I wish they would come over to my house and change up the place.

Here is my new favorite cooking blog, Our Best Bites. So there I was looking at this blog and all of a sudden realized I was starving. They pretty much inspired me to run to the store, and buy a bunch of munchies, so that I could resume looking at all their awesome food pics without passing out. I settled on this recipe...

Baked Chicken- Bacon Alfredo

minus the artichoke hearts (hello who has that sitting around in their cupboards? better yet who would want to buy them? have you seen those jars? I think they are kept by the pickled pig feet in the grocery store...ew.) This recipe was super easy, super good, and is now a family favorite.

After I visited cooking land, I stumbled upon crafting land. The thing with craft blogs is that you become very aware of all the blank, boring, empty walls in your own home. Plus if you are not careful you could spend weeks looking at pages and pages of all the crazy awesome projects that they have come up with, which inevitably leads you to ponder for months how they can afford to be so crafty. Here is my new favorite crafty craft blog I am Momma Hear Me ROAR! I really want to create a gallery wall like she did. I love it!

I have some projects of my own in mind, one specifically for V-Day, I will let you know how it goes! These blogs will be posted on the "Real Deal" over there <----

As a final thought I leave you with this... Yes, that is a Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie. Now I don't have to suffer alone.

Child Safety

The child gate broke...So I made my own gate out of things my 1 year old hates.
Once in a while I see her peek her head out of her room, see the vacuum and crawl back into her room as fast as her legs can go. I guess she just doesn't like cleaning.

Cleaning Fail

I got some of these!

Thought I would wash this... Now I have a giant spiderweb dripping in my bathroom.

Water Storage

We drink a lot of juice at my house. I did not realize this fact until today when I started emptying our water storage out in the bath tub. I came up with 4 trash bags full of empty bottles! I am amazed I found space for them in our little pantry. Seriously that closet could have been Marry Poppins magic carpet bag.

(Me with 2 years worth of collected bottles)

I decided to only take 2 bags of bottles with us. I felt silly with 4. Honestly I still feel goofy with 2 bags...but I would hate to have to start all the way over. My friend Danti came over to help me pack, and was shocked to see me pulling so many water containers out of the pantry. She mentioned she wanted to increase her and her husbands water storage as well, so I gave her 2 trash bags full.

(Danti collecting bottles)

I did learn a few things from this experience. First, its good to rotate your water supply. Opening a few of those bottles was quite disturbing. Lets just say...I am very grateful that we did not need them! 1 bottle was completely rancid. I thought I was going to die. It about ruined me and my desire to ever want to store water again. Right now there is a full gallon of water sitting in the trashcan because I refuse to open it to dump it out. The rest were fine.

I dunno how that happened. I tried really hard to clean out the bottles well before filling them. Still, one bad bottle out of a hundred isn't bad. Danti mentioned adding bleach to the water. I will look into that before I fill them up again.

Left Overs

Sorry I haven't really done any homemakery stuff recently. Well, I did nuke some frozen meatballs in the microwave and am now eating them out of a plastic tupperware dish. Does that count? No? ok. At least I am using a fork and not my fingers! Those things are hot! That and I dont want meatball keyboard. Ew.

Don't get me wrong, I want to do homemaking stuff. However, the goal right now is to use up the food we have so that we don't have to truck it 500 miles. See? I am doing my part by eating these meatballs.

I hope to be settled into our new home by the beginning of next month. By then I should have some exciting posts! And better food!

Car Wash Guarantee

Oops...
has it really been almost a month since I last posted? Forgive! Forgive!
Well I have news...
Remember how after 2 years I had finally finished unpacking all those boxes in the nursery? And then remember how I threw all those boxes into the dumpster? Whelp they are back. Its like when you wash your car and than it rains. Same principal applies for unpacking. You unpack the last box , then your husband gets promoted, and then you move! So the moral of the story is if you want your husband to get promoted, unpack all of your storage items.In other news, here is a picture of a REALLY cute homemade trick or treat bag... that I did not make. I did make that really really really cute baby however. AND I also made her Halloween costume. K went to trunk or treat as a flying squirrel. I stuffed a sock with toilet paper and then safty pinned it to her pants. I thought it was very clever. Feel free to steal this costume idea for next year, or a trip to the zoo or something.