Mini nature walk

Now that C has semi-recovered from his most recent bout with illness, we decided to go exploring around the little community where we live. We found lizards, spiders, flowers, pinecones, and other interesting things on our adventure. Poor thing isn't anywhere close to feeling 100%, but I didn't want him to feel like a prisoner at home... and I'm sure giving him fresh air and some sunshine wasn't going to hurt, either. ;)

Knit nap

While C has slowly been recovering from the flu, the flu slowly found its way into the rest of the family. Poor J's been miserably uncomfortable for the past few days. I've managed to squeeze some knitting time into his many naps.

It's fun seeing the Hermoine Hearts Ron hat slowly come into shape. The pattern is available as a free Ravelry download.

J's thrift store score!

Gotta love secondhand stores for those basic baby needs. We needed a boppy for J to sleep elevated on, and Once Upon a Child in Oceanside delivered. :D

Brotherly love...

Shortly after I left these two like this to brush my teeth, I heard C sleepily say, "I love you, Baby J."

They then began to cough on each other. Hahaha :)

Rolly polly!

Someone was afraid of this harmless bug today.. Looks like we'll have to do some bug finding adventures, especially with the recent rains. :)

Tummytime skype...

...with lolo and lola :)

Playground knitting

We spent the afternoon at our favorite park. C got to burn off some energy and J napped for a few minutes. I got to squeeze in a little bit of time on a variation of the free Rocky ribbed beanie from Ravelry... And then Jordan was up for some people watching at the park when he woke up.

The hat is far from perfect.. I usually end up knitting it in the dark or in an awkward post-breastfeeding position, so it has definitely been a challenge to make. Especially since it uses fingering weight yarn. I'm happy with its progress so far, but the next hat will need to be made with yarn that's at least worsted weight. ^^;

Slow Cooker Hawaiian Chicken

Our attempt at adapting and merging a couple of recipes for our crock pot dinner... With C as my lovely assistant and J in tow.

Recipe to come soon in an update. ;)

Mama's little helper

C loves watering the plants.... Particularly this one. When we moved into our townhouse two years ago, the previous tenants left behind a large, flowerless pot of leaves. We kept flowering it, and to our surprise, this year it started popping out flowers like crazy. Apparently, they're cymbidium orchids. :)

Some daddy time...

Caught this precious moment with daddy shortly after I arrived home from work. Joel had already warmed up a bottle of milk, so I let them have some bonding time. :)

Loooooom

Ah, knitting looms. Over a year ago, I gave up knitting because C had too much fun trying to find my projects and gleefully unravel them... But last November my post,partum self decided, on a whim, to buy one of those plastic knitting looms, and I've been hooked since.

Since then, I've acquired several additional knitting boards AND have picked up my knitting needles again, and I'm practically addicted.

My parents gave me a 28" adjustable knitting board, and I've been using it to slowly make baby blankets using a pattern from American Knitting Boards. I'm impressed with the project so far. Cabling became so much easier-- It's practically effortless. :)

I highly suggest knitting looms in all their shapes and forms for busy knitters who want to work on projects they want to be able to walk away from for periods of time and can eadily pick up and start again without losing their place. The bigger ones like the knifty knitter may even be great for people with arthritis or low vision problems.

The simplest pleasures...

Trying to enjoy every moment as much as I can. Being able to spend every evening together as a, family truly is a blessing.

J loves playing with my yarn while I knit. :)

I've heard "The days are long, but the years are short." Goodness, it's so true. They grow up so quickly.

C's Bed :)

I used to tell people that having a baby helped me realize how much time and money I had when I was single... now that I have TWO little ones, I can truly appreciate how much more time and money I had with one. ^^;

So much has been made up until the baby was born, and I haven't been able to document anything. It's so tough to find time to blog when I'm trying to balance everything else at home, especially with working full time (as a nurse working 3 12's a week)... but I Really wanted to put up an ongoing project that we've made a good amount of progress on because I'm so happy it's finally gotten to the point it's at.

We've been trying so hard to convince C that he likes sleeping in his own room. He's gotten to the point that he's willing to sleep on his own mattress in our room, and he ends up waking up in his own bed in the morning (more often than he wakes up in ours). We're hoping that having a cool & interesting bed (that, of course, fits within our budget) would help steer him in that direction.

Enter (used) Ikea Kura Bed.

Here's the final product:



We couldn't justify paying full retail for the thing, and while it sells for much cheaper on Craigslist in Northern California, we were able to find it for a reasonable price here on Craigslist in San Diego (after semi-patiently waiting).

After we brought it home, we immediately set to doing the popular Ikea-hack of turning one end into a magnetic chalkboard. I wanted to put several more coats of magnetic paint on it than my husband, but he was so eager to get it over with (mostly because my parents were visiting) that we settled in the middle for only 4-5 coats of it.

I put up some affordable clearance Lightning McQueen curtains that we found on the Walmart.com website. The original plan was for glow-in-the-dark star fabric, but I couldn't find any that I liked in the local area, so we opted for one of Caleb's favorite things.

We opted out of doing the overhead star canopy because we figured it would be much cooler to have a Good Night Turtle that could project stars overhead at night. ;)

He enjoys napping and playing inside the bed for now. Hopefully he'll be sleeping happily in it at nighttime. :)





Hopefully I'll be able to archive other projects, especially recipes, in the near future so I have somewhere I can easily reference and find them. It has been helpful to have this blog on hand to send my sisters and friends links for recipes they have enjoyed in the past.

For now, I'll just do what I can in the little time that I can squeeze. It's much more important to devote the rest of the time to my two boys. It's amazing how quickly time passes once you have children. They grow up so fast. :(