Mommy Musings

"You Are My Sunshine" is Charlie's favorite song.  So it was pretty much a no-brainer when it came to thinking of what theme to have for her second birthday. I browsed for some ideas for Pinterest, but mainly came up with everything by myself.  I try and come up with a party theme a few months in advance so I can take my time searching for decorations.  For this party I got all the supplies at Michaels, Party City, and Five and Below. For the food, I made the cupcakes, cookies, and macaroni salad myself.  We ordered two 3 ft sandwiches from Stop & Shop.  For drinks I made some lemonade and put out bottled water. Now for all the pictures!! I made the little signs on PicMonkey and printed them out on stock paper.  I taped them onto extra tall toothpicks.  I got these cute little boxes in the dollar section of Michaels and filled them with M&Ms....simple and easy! I ordered this vinyl online and put it onto this piece of wood I had painted I made ...

Something about the impending spring {hopefully, yes, spring really is coming?} makes me itch to do some work around the house.  So the past few days have been filled with trips to Lowes and TJ Maxx, and dozens of things being changed around here.  Every time Skip gets home from work something is different. But one of the favorite projects so far has been replacing my curtains in the bedroom.  We've had these red, plain, boring, really too small for these windows curtains since we first got married.  They worked great at the condo, but just weren't cutting it here.  And after years of just putting up with them, I was finally ready to do something about them. But something you must know about me first, is that I'm one of the cheapest most frugal people you'll meet.  I rarely buy anything at retail value, and am always trying to find a way to do something for less .  But after some marathon shopping and a lot of price comparison, I finally fou...

With the lack of Christmas decorations up now, our house is looking a little bare .  I don’t mine the cleanliness look at all, but the girls really love when we decorate for the holidays.  So I've decided to start putting up a few Valentine’s decorations around the house. I've seen some really cute things online I could buy, but I decided to break out my crafting skills a little instead.  I headed to the craft store where I picked up some red and white Valentine’s Day ribbon, a large blank wooden sign, and four blank wooden hearts. Once I got home I painted the sign and four hearts with white trim paint I had lying around the house.  I used a black {though I really should have used red} Sharpie marker to write Skip’s, mine, Emmy’s, and Charlie’s names on each of the hearts.  Then I found a nice quote to write on the sign.  I chose “Our family is filled with hope and faith, held together by love and grace.” Once it was all dry, I used some ...

Today I'm linking up with these lovely ladies for their Dog Days of Winter. Today's topic is All About Organization, and I have a super simple project for you.  Like most little girls, Emmy loves to color, paint, and create beautiful pictures.  But with a hobby like that, little bits and pieces of paper quickly accumulate everywhere .  Add in the hundreds of pictures and projects she's bringing home from school now, and some days I feel like we'll all get lost under a pile of crayon and construction paper. I wanted to display her {and Charlie's!} lovely creations, and most importantly to keep them from just being shoved in drawers and saver boxes.  I had a big blank space of wall above the chalkboard in the girls playroom that I knew would be perfect.   I purchased 12 black document frames from the Dollar Tree.  I made sure they were document frames, as they are slightly larger that 8x10's and I wouldn't have to cut any paper.  I went through...

Today's house project was one of the easiest and biggest impact I did.  You need a little back story first. Skip and I have never had a "real" bed since we got married.  The condo we lived in for the first three years of marriage was teeny tiny so we only had room for our queen sized mattress on the frame it came with.  We always said we'd get a real bed when we bought a house. Well in May 2008 we finally bought our current house.  And while the master bedroom was indeed bigger, we still didn't buy a bed.  In fact we ended up not even using the bed frame anymore.  You see, Shiba {the dog we have that I hardly talk about} sleeps upstairs in our room.  And she would hide under the bed and attempt to bite you if you ever tried to get her out.  We tried putting things under the bed to block it off, but she still got under.  So putting our box spring and mattress straight on the floor was the best plan for now.  I felt very Asian with my bed ...

Hello Readers!!!  I am very excited for my next few days of blogging.  Every day this week I have decided to showcase a different project that I did around the house.  My house is no where near perfection or real fancy, but I like it.  And please excuse all the pictures, I meant to clean up before I took them, but I just ran out of time!  This first project of mine was inspired by things I have seen on Pinterest {what did we do before that by the way?!?!}  I wanted a way to showcase the outfits I brought the girls home from the hospital in...it made me sad to thing of them just sitting away in the attic.  So when I was at Michael's a few weeks ago, they had some shadow boxes on sale...perfect!  I grabbed two and headed home to get to work. This was seriously one of the easiest projects ever.  I wrote up the girls stats on the computer {name, birthday, birth stats} in Microsoft Word, printed it out, and cut them to fit inside the box...

My craftiness seems to come in spurts.  Sometimes I'm super creative and other times everything I try to create just ends up in a mess.  So when I got the itch to do an easy, but pretty permanent craft yesterday, I wasn't sure which way it would end up.  But I felt like our very own CHALKBOARD WALL would be something the girls would absolutely love.  {and since the end result turned out pretty good, I thought I'd share my little how-to with you!} So I loaded up the girls {and my mom...have you every tried to shop with two little girls?!?} and headed off to Lowes.  We returned a little while later with all our supplies.  {totally forgot to take a picture of the white trim paint, but you need that too....I got white glossy pain.  You also need some blue painters tape, whoops!} I have other rollers, but this one was small and perfect for the job Since you can't all use this super cute assistant, you can substitute in your own First you need to tape o...