A Weekend in Review

Friday night started off with me going to Gloucester to paint the kitchen floor at a rental there and then came home to find out that AJ ordered Chicken Kabob salads for us with a plain pizza. So, our Friday night was salad, a glass of wine, the movie Larry Crowne with Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks and the new Pottery Barn catalog. We live adventurously. :)

Drew gnawing on the pizza crust. :)

On Saturday morning AJ and Drew did a dump run while I went up to Gloucester and polyurthaned the kitchen and dining room floors.

AJ finished the trim around the windows outside with his little helper Saturday afternoon.

Then we walked down the street to the elementary school and played on the playground and on the turf field... I think the field is Drew's new fave place.

After playing we drove to Danvers, dropped Drew off with my parents and went out to dinner at a swanky restaurant in Wellesley. Matt and Alison gave us a gift card there for Christmas. Last year. :) I told AJ we should dress up because the menu prices were high, I just pictured us showing up in jeans and looking WAY under dressed. Here's us dressed up, and luckily nearly everyone else in the restaurant was dressed to the same caliber. We were cheap and pretty much bought the most inexpensive things on the menu.

Dress: Calvin Klein (TJ Maxx), Necklace: Stella and Dot, Boots: Ralph Lauren (Macy's)

AJ's vest: J. Crew, major sale. Can't remember anything else. :)

Our meals were good, I'd describe it as Asian Fusion... even though I'm not 100% sure what that means. I got the Coconut Shrimp, Asian Veggies and Noodles in a Peanut Sauce.

And on Sunday we went to an open house in Beverly for one of AJ's real estate clients after church and then I went up to Gloucester to put the finishing touches on this rental before the new tenants move in today!

Makeover Monday: New Duvet

For a while I've been wanting to make a duvet cover or a quilt for Drew. You can imagine that this was intimidating for me as I am the world's worst sewer. If I could have stapled Drew's duvet and had it look okay and not cut him I probably would have done that.  But alas, I knew I had to bite the bullet because I didn't think this pink flowered, but super comfy, blanket was working well with his decor... it wasn't uber masculine. :)

So Drew and I went off to Joann Fabrics on Friday armed with a coupon and his crib sheet so we'd know what would work well for his color scheme. We came away with a fabric on clearance (bought almost three yards). I washed and dried it so it would be softer and not shrink after sewing it up... My edges frayed even though I used pinking shears on them, but no biggie, I just sewed them up inside out, like I was making a pillow:

After I sewed mostly straight lines up the sides I turned the fabric inside out and binder clipped it together on the stripes. I couldn't find my pins, can you tell how often I sew? :) After making sure that I was keeping the ends together and straight (which I'd give myself a B average at) I finished the last stitch... the pink flowered duvet was officially hidden and I loved how it looked... although I was worried about the duvet bunching in the fabric and Drew getting suffocated with it, so I binder clipped the duvet's four corners and then stitched them up on the diagonal so that the duvet and the blanket were attached to each other.

There she is, all stretched out. It's a very strippy room, if I do say so... but once Drew is in a toddler bed the duvet will just be at the end of his bed and he'll have a solid colored blanket so it'll break up the stripes.

As soon as AJ and Drew got home from running (I did this project as quick as I could before church yesterday when they went for an hour run) I put Drew into the crib so he could enjoy his new duvet. For some reason he didn't seem to understand that he was supposed to snuggle with it and love it. :)

But here he is last night, all snuggled up. I'd say the project was a success!

Are any of you doing something fun today? Drew and I are heading up to New Hampshire to go to the closest Hobby Lobby to get drawer pulls for new weeks makeover project... and while there we are meeting my friend Laura at Starbucks! Whoo Hooo for fun afternoons!

I am submitting this to Between Naps on the Porch.

Butternut Squash and Carmelized Onion Pizza

This is a major variation on a recipe I found years ago in Real Simple. That recipe took forever and didn't taste that great, so after some tweaks from the lovely Kim Thorburn (mi hermana) and myself, here is what we came up with, it's pretty healthy and I love it!

INGREDIENTS
Bag of frozen butternut squash
1 onion
1 large pizza crust or 3 individually sized ones
Feta cheese (eyeball it)
Parmesan cheese (eyeball it, but not too much)
Olive oil, salt, pepper

DIRECTIONS
Place the butternut squash on a cookie sheet, coat lightly olive oil, season with salt and pepper. Roast until you can pierce it with a fork.
Slice up your onion and cook till tender in the frying pan.
Toss butternut squash, onions and cheeses together.
Put a tad of olive oil on the pizza crust and put the topping mixture on top. Cook according to the directions on your pizza crust.
Top with a little bit of sea salt right before eating... just to bring out the flavor, not to send you to the ER.

Wishing I was the Perfect Mother / A Day in the Life

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I've had some people say to me "how do you do it all?" and I'm not totally sure what they mean... do they really think my house is as clean all the time as it appears in my photos on the blog? Trust me, I say this sitting looking at a bunch of crumbs on the floor, its not. I clean it constantly but it is not perfect. After all, I've got a baby that throws everything out of every cabinet constantly. Or how do I get projects done? Frantically, would be the easiest answer. :)

Well, I figure I'll give you a sampling of this week so far so you get a real picture of how it works around here. I'm warning you, there aren't a lot photos... Maybe you'll be bored out of your gourd reading this... but I figured I'd better answer a question that was asked. :)

A Day in the Life: Wednesday
6:10am Woke up (no alarm), went downstairs and turned up heat (first priority!). Read the Bible for a little bit... am reading through the book of Mark now. When I finished reading I worked on the blog because I was way too exhausted to do it last night.

8:10am Met the electrician at at a rental we own in Gloucester. Hoped he didn't think I was too stupid for never having been in the basement before because I was feeling like an idiot that I didn't know exactly where things were.

8:30am Drove to Beverly to get my blood taken for my annual physical (a week from today). Fed Drew a banana to keep him happy sitting in his stroller. Fasted for twelve hours up until this point hence wanting to get this done first thing in the morning.

9:15am Get back home and get a call that the fridge we ordered will be delivered to the same place in Gloucester. Drive back up with Drew. He was a complete champ... I credit a couple of things: one, an amazing baby and two: his little green ball that makes him wildly happy. Especially when I put it in my mouth, for some reason he loves that.

Went home after it took the moving guys a while to fit the fridge up the stairs and after they amazingly took out the old gas range without me even asking them too! Drew and I cleaned, ate a snack and vacuumed. I gave him a bath and he went down for a nap at about noon. Basically the second he went down I ran downstairs and popped some Butternut Squash Pizzas in the oven (made the toppings for it yesterday), made some hot chocolate and got to work writing this post. Once the pizzas were done I photographed them for the blog entry on Friday for my new recipes section. Drew woke up almost exactly at 1pm.

1pm : Got Drew ready to go and we drove to Savers and Salvation Army to scout out some deals for makeovers. We got nuthin'. Zip. I could find cheaper deals at IKEA than I could at Salvation Army, and I'm not being sarcastic.  I brought milk and an organic fruit pack for Drew and they held him over until we got home.

3:00ish: Woke Drew up so that I could give him a snack and take him running. He loves the jogging stroller because he is Mr. Curiosity and it allows him to spy on everything. We ran downtown and I mailed my phone back to Verizon (good riddance) and deposited a check for the church offering that I forgot about the other day (oops). Kept running to the beach, totally gorg. Drew fell asleep as we were almost home, AJ ran to meet us and then took Drew running for a while longer.

4:10pm Left for Gloucester (again!) to show an apartment we are renting out. Met a nice guy and then was stood up by my next appointment.

5pm Came home and made Chicken and Wild Rice Soup with AJ while Drew played in the kitchen with us.

6:30pm After eating dinner AJ left for the hospital to visit Meredith and came home at 9:30.

Drew with Mern the day she went into the hospital, 19 days ago.

7pm I finished cleaning up and played with Drew for 40 minutes then changed his diaper, gave him a small bottle and put him to bed at 8.

I've been on Pinterest since then (it's 9:41pm now) cataloging ideas for Nancy Mering's house spruce up initiative (Nancy was my former boss). She hired me as her consultant yesterday. I was basically jumping for joy. :)

You must think that I make Drew go and go and go. Today was not what every day is like, for sure. Some days, like Monday, we barely leave the house.

I was struggling after AJ left for the hospital and just feeling so overwhelmed. I felt like the house needed a cleaning overhaul, like I needed to get to work finding ideas for Nancy, like I needed to refinish some furniture to sell and then work on the blog. And then AJ called and talked some sense into me. He told me to play with Drew till he went to bed and then sit on the couch with the iPad and relax because nothing needed to be done today. He's right. So I'm sitting here with my laptop and am watching NCIS and getting scared out of my mind. But before that I just played with Drew, I told myself to not try and get anything done until he was in bed... it's so hard for me to be a person who is "being" instead of "doing". I want to not worry about the dishes, the crumbs on the floor or making a piece of furniture over. I want to be able to show Drew at all times that I'm wild about him. I don't want regrets when he's older. I never want him to think that my projects or a clean house were more important than him. I want to make sure that I'm loving on Drew even while doing dishes and sweeping the floor. And I definitely DO try to do that, but I want to be more conscious of it and even more than that, I want to make a conscious effort to just play with Drew. Even when I have a lot to do. Especially when I have a lot to do.

I wish I was a perfect mother who could do it all, but I suppose there is no such thing.

Wednesday Loves: Cape Cod House and Gardens

I've got probably the shortest Wednesday Loves post ever today... just a few pictures. But they represent a lot of what we hope our house will eventually look like... I was looking for photos to "pin" the other day that would help AJ and I picture what our house would look like with a front porch. I wanted to make sure we would like how it turned out...did we even want to do it or would it look odd on a little Cape Cod house? Here is the little Cape Cod house... although it doesn't look quite like this with frost on the dead grass now.



Then I found this amazing photo. It represents so much of what AJ and I have talked about. Granted this house is far nicer than ours... we need to finish our windows so ours don't look miniature on the front of the house and we love the idea of doing an addition to either the side or the back of the house.



This is what the first floor looks like, it is really similar in the set up to ours with a center mini foyer and then a room off each side. We would love to have a garage eventually, although not in our back yard. We love the idea of a terrace like this and think the mudroom / laundry facilities are amazing connecting the house and the garage.


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Would I love to have big fat hydrangea bushes lining our one-day porch? Why yes, I would.




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AJ has a goal of making our backyard "manicured". Wonder what that means? Let me show you our inspiration... :)



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Doesn't this one look fun and kid-friendly? :) We'd never have the backyard look like this but we love the simplicity of the few colors:



That's all for today... Drew just woke up and we've got to go meet the electrician! Have a great day!

pink dessert party

Did you know that March is International Women's Month? I'm doing double duty with this tablescape because it is both springy and feminine. I've been looking forward to staging this for a while but it's a little hard to stage a spring tablescape when all I have are twigs and pine branches. And then enter the Carlsons, an amazing couple at our church who brought AJ and I dinner, dessert, wine and these gorgeous white tulips because they knew we had a lot on our plates last weekend (with AJ's mom and stepdad coming out to visit Meredith and church responsibilities).

I went back to my horrible days of working at Pleasant Valley Country Club and folded the napkins like we did every day for lunch and put them in the water glass. My napkins are from Target and I desperately need to pick up some new ones... you know how white ones show every stain...

I found these adorable plates at Target probably about six years ago for a song. They came to under $5 for a set of twelve. I love Target's clearance. Or maybe I just love it when a Target employee doesn't know what he's doing and marks everything ridiculously low by accident.

Here are the flowers Dave and Linda brought us, gorgeous, right? I just love love love white flowers. Don't you think it is such a luxury to have fresh flowers in your house? I found the urn for 50 cents at a yard sale and use it constantly.

I spent a while making these this morning, it is the first time I've ever made meringues. After the mini incident where the entire house was filled with smoke because of an ultra stupid decision where I put meringes in the toaster oven and the tops turned a ridiculous shade of black, Drew and I managed to make some pretty good meringue cookies. I like to pretend I'm a TV celebrity chef when cooking and I tell Drew exactly what I'm doing. I'm pretty sure he doesn't care a lick unless I give him a lick. :)

A couple of views from our stairway:

I'm brainstorming a Valentine's Day breakfast tablescape... are you doing anything fun for Valentine's Day? AJ told me it was too early to start thinking about it, I told him if he even knew who he was talking to and then he asked me if I already had Drew's 2nd birthday planned. I said: Mostly, I know the entire color scheme... :)

Meringue Cookies

Have you ever baked something and thought... Wow... I nailed this recipe? That was me today. But I don't think I realized that till I ate about half of the cookies. Darn. I wish I could take an iota of credit for the recipe but I followed it step by step from Joy of Baking.

Yep, these are the only ingredients you need. Easy peasy.

3 large egg whites

1/4 tsp cream of tartar

3/4 cup superfine sugar

1/4 tsp vanilla

chocolate chips

Follow the Joy of Baking link above... it gives the easiest, but most through directions ever. I did alter it slightly and put four-ish chocolate chips into each bit of batter, because, really, what isn't made a little better by chocolate? Maybe chicken. Or tacos. But that's about it. :)

Makeover Monday: A Table Sawed in Two

I was weary about this post... like every day this week "ahh I've got to start my Makeover Monday project"... but it required sawing a table in half. Yep. I found this table for $5 at the White Elephant Outlet in Essex. AJ and I are sort of obsessed with this place and make regular trips to their $5 pile or their Buck Hut (which is conveniently next to their dumpster... I guess we know where the things go if they've been in the Buck Hut a little too long).

And yes, I did paint frames and vases on top of this table... what made you ask? :)

After I measured the size I wanted, a depth that was shorter than where the door's molding starts, I hired my help. Here is my hottie husband cutting it in half. And no, he doesn't normally do his construction work in his tie and sweater. And yes, our yard looks a little trailer park right now with some construction stuff out by our chickens and spray paint marks on the grass where I did my painting for Drew's party. :)

I had to do some serious sanding and filling in holes with my trusty wood putty. This table had seen better days, let me tell you... I did all the work in the basement which meant that I could barely see what I was doing with the lighting down there. It is amazing how many little things I missed and am just seeing now in the natural light upstairs.

Eventually we would like to do proper built ins with hidden filing systems and all that jazz but that's the low man on the totem pole. Behind basically just about everything else in the house. We chose Benjamin Moore's Stonington Gray for the desks because it matched well with the stripes on our couch... although, the color looks significantly different than the paint chip... it seems to blend more into the wall than I had anticipated.

Here is the finished product with the table cut into half... making use of the awkward other end of our living room!

I've decided to make His and Hers desks so we each have a place to put our stuff. I haven't made a cleat to hold the table up yet so nothing heavy, like a laptop, is sitting on it yet. Here is my desk, with a plant conveniently hiding the plug so Drew Baby can't stick his fingers in the outlet.

I had to put risers under the table legs because the table was too short for anyone to sit there in a normal sized chair. I'm not in love with these but they were sitting in the basement so they will do for now.

Here is AJ's desk... I set up the photo so that you can see the view into the entryway and picture how it looks all put together. See how desperately our tiled entryway needs to be scrubbed after the snow we had this weekend? :)

A view from the entryway:

I created this photo so that I could "pin" it to Pinterest.

This makeover is submitted to Between Naps on the Porch for their Metamorphosis Monday.