I want to share with you a picture of my baby.  Not THAT baby.  Well, okay, here’s a picture of my real baby (you twisted my arm):

I’ll give you a little break while you take a deep breath and marvel over her absolute beauty.  I’m not kidding.

But on to my other baby.  My darling, pet project.  One of those things you generally want to do but never do… and I did!  Here it is:

It’s hard for me not to break out into a rendition of “Isn’t She Lovely” here.  This is my hideous, almond colored 1990s fridge that works too well for me to contemplate replacing it.  Now, it is a fun chalkboard ready for Ida to get bigger and draw all over it while I make dinner!  A fun chalkboard ready for my weekly menu!  A fun chalkboard ready for notes written right on it rather than post-it notes stuck to the handle for Andy and my sister in the mornings!

It was a piece of cake to make, actually.  I used three thin coats of Rustoleum’s Magnetic Primer, and then two medium coats of Valspar’s Chalkboard Paint.  It took one afternoon – I gave the three priming coats 30 minutes to dry between applications (the first coat was the hardest, but after that it was easy peasy), and then took a break to run some errands for a few hours before I applied the chalk paint which meant it was good and ready.  Then just another 30 minutes between the two layers of chalk paint and it was done!

There was then a minor disaster in which I decided to purchase chalk markers instead of regular chalk, and the ones that I bought brutally stained my lovely new chalk finish in neon colors.  All it took was a paintbrush and a little more chalk paint to cover it up, though.  So now we’re back to normal and we are using only regular chalk from here on out!

The only difficulty, really, was working with the magnetic primer.  It was very grainy and hard to get smooth, so that combined with the already textured surface of the fridge left a slightly rough finish to my chalkboard.  It’s no harm, just means that the chalk is a little dustier than it would need to be when you write with it and it takes a little extra effort to get it perfectly clean again (the chalk wipes off easily with a damp cloth, just leaves a little bit of a dusting behind in the grooves if you do it quickly).  When I was covering up the stains with a paintbrush, though, I found that the result was much smoother than working with a roller, so if you’d like a smoother finish I suggest doing your last coat with a brush instead of a roller.

Cost was less than $50 for the primer, paint, and a small roller/tray kit.  I also had to spend $5 on frog tape which put me up above $50 but if you have it on hand you’re good to go.  Beats shelling out $1500+ for a new stainless steel fridge, huh?  And I think it adds a fun, whimsical character to my kitchen.  I’m in love!  What do you think?

When money’s tight, you get creative.  At least that’s what I’ve been doing around my house lately, trying to spruce up some tired old picture frames that I’ve been staring at for the last four and a half years.  I don’t love canned art from the store anyways, and don’t have money for anything more original – and I do love to see my family’s smiling faces on the wall.

So in an afternoon, I updated fourold picture frames and gave them new life and gave myself the warm fuzzies of happiness while I did it:

This one was so easy – just laying scrapbook paper over the mats in two frames and cutting it to fit.  It looks even cuter in person!  These frames will not stay near each other because the colors don’t match, but for now it’s fine!

This one was fun to do!  (I apologize for the reflections in the photos).  It’s a 12×12 opening and I just cut a piece of fabric to fit and traced on “S” onto another fabric to lay over top.  The contrast isn’t everything I wish it could be, but it looks very cute for now.

This project was my favorite!  I simply took a frame that had two 5×7 openings and covered it up with scrapbook paper, then laid a wedding photo and a map of Pennsylvania overtop, with a heart marking the area we got married in.  I love the way this looks on my wall (perhaps I could add some trim on the top and bottom sometime), and am planning to make a matching one with slightly different paper, a map of Ohio, a heart over Cincinnati, and a photo of Andy and I with our baby Ida.  I’ll then hang them on either side of this mirror in the dining room:

They will add some character and some history!

Well that’s a few imperfect projects for you today.  It took 2-3 hours total while Ida took an afternoon nap and after she went to bed one evening to get those done, and it made a huge impact on my living room and my general happiness with my house!  Try it today!

Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations about community.  Community is nice – it provides friendships, people to call on for help, people to support you when you’re down.

But it’s more than that.  It’s more than the people you interact with at church and school and in town.  Community is an organic, lovely thing that, I think, continues to live on down in our very souls.  It shapes us; it actually creates our personalities and our interests and our talents.

I’m talking about more than the parents who instruct us through rules and examples; more than the pastors who teach us what the Bible says to do; more than the teachers who guide us to maximize our potential.

I’m talking about the chance statements and encounters of the people surrounding us that may mean nothing, but that plant a seed in us that grows into a part of our very nature.  Let me share four quick examples of things that seemed like passing comments, but that have actually made me who I am today.  Things that other people believe are just “me”, but who I know very clearly to be other people living on within me.

I love creating a good, clean kitchen.

But where this really stems from is my friend Mary Kate, and an evening when I was about 16 years old. We had just finished a big family dinner and our mothers had asked us to clean up the kitchen. I grumbled my way into the kitchen and half heartedly began stacking things in the dishwasher; Mary Kate, however, fluttered about like a fairy cleaning the nooks and crannies, rearranging the knick knacks, and neatly setting food into the fridge. When I was long finished she was still wiping down the counters with a dry towel, and a moment later she stepped back and sighed, “Nothing makes me feel better than making a kitchen clean and fresh.” I looked at her as if she was an alien, wondering what this bizarre satisfaction with doing kitchen chores felt like. Ten years later, I find myself wiping down the counters with a dry towel after making sure to spruce up even the corners and cracks of the cabinets, and taking a second to just turn around the kitchen and admire the freshness.

I love a nice, fresh bed and believe that kids need a good-night-tuck-in, something my youngest brother and sister adore.

One night we were visiting my Mom’s dear older friend Libby when I was quite young – perhaps 7 years old? – and Libby took me into the guest room to get some sleep while the grownups stayed up late to talk. She pulled back the sheets from a large, beautifully made up bed. I remember the sheets were crisp and white. She put me in, pulled the covers up to my chin, and proceeded to tuck me in all the way down like a mummy, to “make me nice and cozy.” She left the room and I felt – unusual for a young child – that cuddling up in bed was actually a lovely thing, perhaps even something to look forward to. Ever since I’ve loved tucking in young children to bed, making bedtime something comfortable and lovely.

I love to decorate.

This may seem fairly intuitive, right? Wrong. One time when I was in middle school or so, my Mom was telling me about a friend of hers that had a knack for decorating. She told me that she could put the most lovely colors and items together that most people would never have thought to arrange. She said that she could look at a painting on the wall and find flowers to place underneath that brought out a color that was only an undertone in the painting, but with the flowers, looked alive and fresh. Ever since, I’ve tried to squint my eyes sideways at patterns, fabrics, textures, photos, paintings – and try to choose something unexpected to pair with them, something with an unnoticed color. I delight in looking at a room full of vibrant colors that didn’t seem to go together until I found the perfect way to bridge them.

Things that I do naturally now – that others value in me – that are a part of my every day life, are the product of a small, chance conversation or event that someone in the swirl of community around me said or did or demonstrated. I wouldn’t be the same person without Libby, Mary Kate, or that unnamed friend of my Mom’s. How many other things have grown up in me from a source I can’t even remember?

It makes me stop and think about what I do. It encourages me to share with others, because who knows what they’ll take away from it. It reminds me to be careful of the negative seeds I could plant in someone. It makes me grateful for community, and for people that have other desires and interests and talents that leave a little piece of them with me.

I just discovered Hobby Lobby.  I know, I know.

I sort of went crazy in there.  It just had EVERYTHING and was so CHEAP!  I wanted to make a couple of items for my Mom’s birthday and decided to make some for myself, too.

They’re imperfect, remember.

First up, we have yarn-wrapped letters.

I used chip board letters instead of the papier mache ones and it worked really well for me.  The first letter I made for my Mom didn’t turn out as well as these ones and let’s face it, they’re all flawed.  The process was rather painstaking but really quite simple.  All I used was yarn, the letters (I used chip board letters instead of the papier mache ones and it worked really well for me), and a hot glue gun.  I just snipped short pieces to wrap around the edges that wouldn’t get wrapped, and then just wrapped and wrapped yarn.  They don’t tell you this in the tutorials I’ve seen, but there are always some spots that you just CAN’T wrap.  For those, I snipped longer pieces of yarn to hot glue in place and then wrapped over the edges.  You can see what I mean if you look for the looser yarn on the below letters.

I’m going to mount them on the wall in my kitchen but I am still deciding exactly where to put them so for now they’re just going to light up my windows!

I also made these candle jars.  Well, they’re really only for LED flameless candles, but they still look pretty!  I just dipped strips of fabric in a glue/water solution and then applied them, facing outward, to the inside of ball jars.  At first it was really hard, but by the end I was a pro!

Aren’t they cute?

So that’s me continuing on my way of doing things for fun but not spending a ton of time on them.  I completed these in two days just using time after Ida went to bed and while she napped.  Speaking of, I hear her squawking now for her dinner!

We – that uncluttered, minimalistic, neat couple – now live in Baby Palooza Land.  I am, officially, THAT Mom.  The one whose home looks like a daycare center.  Who seems to own every possible item for their baby.

Downstairs alone, there is the Jumperoo, the Exersaucer, the playmat, the Bumbo, the swing, the playpen, the bouncer, the basket of diapers and wipes and, of course, an assortment of odds and ends like blankets, stuffies, board books, boppy pillows, burp rags, hats, slippers…..

But I promise, there were a lot of things that I didn’t buy!!!

But Ida uses or has used everything she owns a LOT.  Every day.  The girl likes to play, to move, to explore.  The tummy mat and the bouncer seat need to be packed away as she’s moved beyond then, but everything else is in daily rotation.  But she does have favorites, and I’d like to share with you Baby Ida’s Top Six Baby Items.

First off, we have the Aden + Anais Burpy Bib.

This girl is messy.  Very messy.  Always has been.  These large muslin burp rags are awesome because they actually cover your whole shoulder for spit up, and they can snap around baby’s neck to serve as a nice, absorbent bib during meal time that encircles their entire shoulder and back.  This was also useful during nursing as Ida tended to let excess milk drain out of her mouth and end up with soaked shoulders.

Next, there’s the Bumbo seat.

This girl likes to be vertical.  The seat may have seemed like a silly item but she has adored it since she turned two months.  She’s a good sitter and she likes to be up and look around.  It’s also useful for spoon feeding, with the play tray attached.

Item #3 is the Moby Knot Hat.

Ida practically lives in this hat.  The 6-12 month size is still a tad large, so I just flip up the edge.  It is a nice, thick knit and it’s also tall.  So it’s warm (but not too warm for indoors) and doesn’t slide off her head like the smaller, more fitted hats do.  (Oh, yes, I love my matching Moby Wrap too, but I haven’t got a picture of it!)  I’m looking for it in stores as I want like five of these when she gets bigger.

Next is the Skip Hop Treetop Stroller Owl toy.

You hear those mothers say that if their baby fusses, just give them that favorite toy and they’ll cheer up.  I always thought that was silly, till Ida and her adored Mr. Owl came along.  I have spent 30+ minutes on road trips just rattling this owl till I thought my mind would go crazy because as long as he rattled and danced, she smiled – and the second he stopped, she screamed.  This is her number one favorite item.  Mr. Owl lives on her carseat but frequently travels throughout the house.

Item #5 is the Boppy Pillow.

Ida and I could not function without the boppy pillow.  Even now when her long legs are dangling off of it we can’t nurse without it.  We’re both more comfortable and Ida nurses longer and better.

Item #6 is the Miracle Blanket. I don’t have a photo of Ida in it (although she is hilarious) but this item saved me and Andy’s sanity.  Ida did not want to nap or sleep in her crib and she twitched herself awake all night long.  We had tried swaddling but she screamed and broke out of anything we tried.  Once the Miracle Blanket entered our lives (she was two months old) she couldn’t get out of it no matter how much she tried – and she began to sleep soundly through the night and even to take naps.  She’s now a champion sleeper but she must be swaddled up nice.  I don’t know how or when she’ll have to stop swaddling, but I could cry just thinking about it…

And there you have it!  Six favorite baby items, Ida approved.  We’ll share more some other time!