Easter Sunday Sunshine

The Easter Egg Inspector

Practicing contentment by remembering the graces of the week and practicing gratitude through giving.  

This was a relatively peaceful week.  HandyMan was out of town for two nights for work, and I had myself prepared for the craziest, and, thankfully, it didn't happen.  We had play dates, time with friends, and adventures in egg dying.  G-Girl is having a lot of fun checking on and watering her flower seeds we planted on Thursday.    It's so much fun to watch her explore the world around us.

I made some changes this week, and found my missing energy.  Well some of it anyway!  It's been nice to not feel like I'm dragging myself to get anything done.

Now that I'm a grown up, birthday money gets put towards grown up things, like appliances!  On Friday the new dishwasher came and HandyMan worked to do the finish work and get it installed.

Itty Bitty is growing and moving.  Some days my due date (June 20) seems so close, and other days it seem so far away.  Either way, I'm sure Itty Bitty's arrival will be here before we know it!

On this Easter Sunday, I'm thankful for the peace that comes through faith and the joy we have in the hope of Christ.  May you find peace and joy this week.  Take a moment to look at the signs of spring around you and celebrate life!

Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light.” (James 1:16 -The Message) May the light of the Father brighten your week!

Dyed Egg-Shell Seed Starters

Last weekend I saw this idea for re-purposing egg shells and containers for seed starters.  G-Girl is three and old enough to get the hang of plants growing and all that jazz.  So I saved our egg shells this week.  Then, because dying eggs is fun, I decided we'd dye the shells for the planters while we were dying our Easter eggs.  I pulled out four packets of flower seeds that have been sitting in my gardening bin for too long and we gave them new homes.

We found that a baby-spoon was the perfect size for little hands to fill the eggs with soil:

Then, the my Favorite Helper/BabySitter would put the seeds in.  When G-Girls attention span waned, I used a teaspoon to fill them up a little faster and then G-Girl topped them off once the seeds were in.  Since watering needed to be done at a slow pace since we were working with such a little space, a sippy-cup without a valve was the perfect tool:

As you can tell, I have a very serious gardener in the making!

Sunday - Rainy Day - Sunshine

Practicing contentment by remembering the graces of the week and practicing gratitude through giving. 


Sitting at home, on a rainy afternoon, and I am thankful.  Here are just a few things that have highlighted this past week


.: MOPs mornings out 
.: Childrens' play museums
.: Sunday afternoon naps
.: Birthday outings
.: Play-dates with friends
.: Daffodils that make it through frost and ice.
.: Projects finished (did you see the Green Room?)
.: Pandora.  Now that I have easy access to decent speakers and music (aka: TV moved to the Green Room) I've been playing music regularly.  I've realized how much I've missed having music around.
.: Waking rested.


It has been a full, great week.  I hope your week went well and you can look forward to the coming week with anticipation of good things.


Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light.” (James 1:16 -The Message) May the light of the Father brighten your week!

Ta- DA! Finished Green Room

So if you also follow our family blog, this is kind of a repeat-except from my perspective.  Since most of you don't - enjoy!  You'll remember the "before shots" from a few weeks back as this project was in progress.

Here are the "after shots".  I still need to get some things up on the walls -  photos and such, but small details in scheme of the project!  De-junking was by far the largest part of this project for me and there are still a couple boxes stashed in corners that I have to finish going through.  HandyMan did a fabulous job on the flooring and it is such an improvement over the previous floor covering: industrial carpet that was glued to the slab that is the foundation of our house!

 So the freezer has a new corner and we added shelving above it for large kitchen items, canning jars, and extra pantry space.  The DVD player and Roku will eventually go on a small shelf under the TV.  The table also doubles as work space for kid crafts, my sewing or just setting up a laptop.

The quick-project pockets and the utility shelves are now on the wall where the freezer was and organized so that toys and supplies can be easily found.  A coat of paint to the mounted shelves leave a more finished look than what I started with before.  

Comfy place to watch TV from and my cabinet of sewing stuff in the corner, finish out the room.

Short of the flooring which was budgeted as part of a larger home improvement project, I cleaned this room up for about $75 and used a lot of things we already had on hand.  Here's a rough breakdown:
$10 - Toy Baskets (more about these later!)
$30 - Gallon of paint for the walls
$15 - Shelving brackets
$7 - 3M Command Strips and hooks to hang stuff
$13 - Curtains (there's another story here too that I may get to later)

Items we had on hand that I used included white and dark green paint used for shelves,  polycrylic that I used on the shelves and white utility shelves.

I'm so excited to have this project actually finished (for the most part) and to have (another) comfortable place to hang out in our house.  We like to have multi-purpose space in the house and while this will mostly serve as a play room and tv room, it will also convert easily into guest space in the event of large gatherings.  We simply break down the table and pull out the air mattress.  While we had done that in this room before, it is now a much prettier guest space!