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!

Monday Sunshine: Independent Play & Finsihed Projects

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

The weekend got away from me and now it's Monday.  It was filled with visiting with friends, cooking for lots of hungry teenagers, and a Sunday afternoon nap.

We also finished the Catch-All-Room, now known as the Green Room.  I can't wait to post the "finished" photos!

G-Girl has moved towards more independent play time in the mornings which gives me a little bit of extra work time and "wake-up" time.

Last week was fully spring: warm weather, flowers blooming and gorgeous days.  While today is a lot colder and we've got temperatures back down where they really are supposed to be for March, all the reminders that fairer weather is coming are still out in the yard: daffodils, crocuses and buds on the trees.

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!

KitchenAid Shredded Chicken

I have had my KitchenAid mixer for 5 and a half years.  It never ceases to amaze me the things that this puppy can do.  If you are contemplating the investment and you like to cook: it's worth every penny!

So in flying by comments on a blog-post somewhere in my recent memory, I saw someone mention that you could use your KitchenAid to shred cooked chicken.  No WAY!  I filed it somewhere in my brain and the thought surfaced again today.

Sometimes I buy a full 40 pound case of boneless/skinless chicken breasts when a local restaurant supply has it on sale.  A friend of mine called and investigated their "regular" price this week and found out it wasn't that much more than when it's on sale.  I had just used the last of my chicken, so I asked if she was willing to split a case. She was game so I gave her some money and promptly forgot about it.

This morning we were in the middle of Domino Projects since Fridays are HandyMan's day off.  The dog goes nuts and up to the door walks my friend with 20 pounds of chicken.  Oh yeah.  So I quickly package about 12 pounds of it up for the freezer and I remembered the shredded chicken trick I had read.  I threw the remaining chicken in my crock pot to cook it:

Five hours later, I chopped each breast into three or four pieces and threw it in my mixer bowl:

Mixer on low, three minutes later, shredded chicken:



Oh yeah!  It was that easy.  I ended up with 8- 2.5 cup containers of shredded chicken in the freezer for tacos, chicken salad, or whatever random meal I need it for in the coming months.  I'm so glad that my mommy-brain held on to this little tid-bit of information!