March Rewind

This was a doozy of a day. Eden has had a cold and she has been such a trooper! Unfortunately it caught up to her and she was miss grouchy pants all day. For posterity sake I photographed the beginning of what turned into a 20 minute tantrum (I think I'll spare you the photos). In the middle of playing with a book she flattened out on the carpet, buried her face, and sobbed loudly. If you tried to touch her she only sobbed harder and then gave you evil eyes. This was the pattern for the majority of the morning and afternoon. I should have known the direction the day was headed when it started with breaking a raw egg on my bare foot. Thomas spent a little extra family time with us tonight and even took me for Chai tea at Starbucks. I love this man.

Thomas is pushing through what has been a very stressful and busy week and with a huge sigh of relief will be through with the majority of this semester's work by Thursday. I get to have a little girl time on Friday night (yes I have a girl to do girl time with!- pedicures and Julie and Julia) and Thomas will hopefully get to play some disc Friday for the first time since moving.

I have a lot of finished projects to share, but I also have a lot of new projects in the works. When I can pry myself away from my sewing table I'll photograph them with my lovely new camera and share all.

For now I'll share some March rewind photos that I've had fun cooing over this month. Enjoy!

Eden- March 2009

She was hip before the rest of the indie world went nuts about mustaches:

First morning finding her in a drastically different position than we left her, we're were so goofy excited:

Ducky was and is still her best friend:

St Patty's Day with Grandpa:

She would wear headbands (that has changed). This was my favorite:

I'm glad some things change, she used to hate it when I sang:

What a sweet girl we have!:

News Update

Our blog has been a bit photo heavy and story light lately. Honestly, this is how I prefer things. I'm the kid who grabs the book with the biggest, brightest pictures and ends up skimming the text. I buy cookbooks almost 100% based on their ability to beautifully photograph food. Julia Childs, as much as I love you, your cookbook is hard for me to follow because of the lack of glossy, color photos. Writing for me does not come easy- even in a silly little blog, but we have some news and catching up to do so I'll try my best not to stumble over my words.

Last week Thomas and I celebrated our 4th anniversary. It was a Thursday, and Thursday's are days that Thomas is gone from about 9am to 10pm so we expected nothing special. We had a delightful date planned for the weekend though. At 8:30 am Eden and I kissed Thomas bye (yes, she kisses him goodbye and goodnight now, sometimes with a huge puckered face) and headed off with my friend Katerine and her boys to a mom's group. They took our kids away for two hours, fed us copious amounts of chocolate, and let us participate in a cake decorating contest - of course we TOTALLY won.

Saturday we got our trusty babysitter (who is graduating in May and moving to study Social Work- Boo!) and  headed out for dinner and a movie. Prairie Grass Cafe has been near the top of the long list of restaurants we're anxious to try out- and it was wonderful! Thomas had freshly made deer sausage with lentils and I had crusted Halibut with a barley salad and celery puree- YUMMY. My new favorite thing when at a nice restaurant is to get the fish special (lately I've also had sea bass, walleye, sea scallops). Ah- to have the skills to fetch it fresh daily from the market and cook it to perfection!

After dinner, we checked out Alice in Wonderland in 3-D. It was not my first choice because I was afraid Tim Burton would have warped it to the point of being inappropriate for children/ruin a childhood classic (albeit one that is warped and twisted on it's own). I was pleasantly surprised that it had a clear theme of good versus evil and distanced itself enough from the classic story that it did not replace all the old images I enjoyed with unfamiliar ones. Oh, and it has a wonderful dose of girl power. If you plan on taking really young children I still might proceed with caution. After the movie, we quickly ran through Whole Foods at closing time, grabbed two small delicious looking deserts (tiramisu and rhubarb custard), tipped the nice cashier with some fruit leather, and headed home to pop some bubbly and toast to 4 years.

Since then it's been nose to the grindstone for Thomas, tons of crafting for me, and a bit of the sniffles for Eden.  I'm having fun with my new camera and there will be well documented projects for your enjoyment soon!

I can't help it! I have to throw in some pics:

We've ditched Eden's tray to let her join the table. She approves:

And she wants to learn how to use chopsticks:

Eden takes Princess Pink baths:

And loves the color green:

I promise I took some pics that are not of Eden and will share them soon!

Eden Update!

Eden doesn't seem to be changing as fast to us these days, but I know it's because we see her all the time!  Here are a few pics from March:

Eden still has trouble drinking from a cup UNLESS it's her super girlie teacup :) What a lady!

Eden is copycatting us  A LOT these days. After holding her down and mercilessly giving her raspberries Eden decided to torture her own baby:

Did I mention lots of copycatting?

Spring is finally here! We took Eden to the local park to celebrate (an 8 minute walk from our apartment!). They have an awesome small jungle gym specifically for toddlers.She LOVES the slide:

Her hair is getting pretty long and looks AWESOME after naptime:

Sweet smiles:

Baking Inspiration

Of course in the middle of a major sweets cutback I start running across the most awesome baking ideas! Since I won't be enjoying them anytime soon, I'm hoping one of you will try them out for me.

It's surprising that as many blogs I read I don't have many baking/cooking blogs. Recently I have stumbled across two that I giddily added to my reader: Joy the Baker and Sprinkle Bakes.

 Thomas and I are suckers for anything avocado. My favorite lunch is a wheat bagel hulled out, filled with diced tomato, garlic and basil, topped with avocado and mozarella, and baked for 5 minutes. We've also made avocado gelato :). I haven't told Thomas about this yet because I didn't want to tease him. Joy shows it served with blood orange and grapefruit slices topped with whipped cream. YUM!

Avocado Pound Cake from Joy the Baker

Another new blog fave is from Heather Baird at Sprinkle Bakes. Not only does she seem to have me in mind when she picks out every single recipe, but she also takes great photos. I think I could substitute this soup for dinner:

Chocolate Soup for Two from Sprinkle Bakes

The cupcake fad is still going strong and Meri Meri has designed a series of cupcake decorating kits that make me want to throw birthday parties for all the kids I know.

Cupcake kits from Meri Meri

Luckily for my healthy eating goals, all the cute cupcake bakeries seem to be far far away from Deerfield. Next time I need celebration and adventure I want to head down to Bleeding Heart Bakery- an organic bakery in Oak Park. Check out the blueberry basil cupcake below! Makes me think of Texas :).

Bleeding Heart Bakery

So come on, share your current baking crushes with me, I need to live vicariously through the sweet tooth of others!

Things I'm Loving Right Now

Eden and I packed our bags and headed to Muncie, IN yesterday in search of quality girl time. My friend Emily is on spring break this week, and even though she is in the middle of writing her dissertation proposal she made a little time and room for us in her busy life. 

Eden made it through the 5 hour trip there and back with flying colors. She listened to some funk and carried on conversations with her my little pony with a goofy smile plastered on her face almost the whole way. It's becoming apparent that our little girl likes to travel and the realization has my head spinning with plans. 

There's nothing quite as rejuvenating as staying up until 3 am with your college roommate while giggling and over-analyzing every possible detail of your lives (and of course brownie sundaes and a glass of wine are nice additions). Eden even slept until 10! In all fairness to you toddler moms who hate me right now, Indiana is an hour ahead, it was like I put her to bed at 8pm and she slept till 9am which is still pretty much awesome. Waking up to her sweet little voice and rolling over to see the 10:12am lit up on the clock was like Christmas morning, only maybe better.

I love that although family seems so far away there are still people I adore in reasonable driving range.

I love Eden's new shoes.

I love all the tiny ethnic grocery stores that now surround me (Eden and I have been exploring). Like this Italian Food Mart:

I love blood orange juice (we discovered it on our honeymoon in Italy) and the fact that Poeta's stocks it: 

I love the cute little homemade lasagna's at Poetas (this was about the size of 1.5 Katie hands) and the fact that the owner's neice sells this and a million varieties of homemade pastas:

I love this idea on Bake It Pretty's blog:

I almost love it enough to wish someone would get sick so I have an excuse to make them and wrap it up with some tea and a note about spoofuls of sugar:

I love my husband and I'm so glad to be home!

Make Do and Mend

Here is a sneak peak at some of things I am doing to change up Eden's nursery. I loved how we had her room decorated in Texas, but it was very babyish. It became apparent soon after our move that our change in location corresponded with a big change in Eden, and she needed a more playful and fun space. To be honest, it's not looking so spectacular. I forgot the number one rule I have for decorating (this is at least how I function): Pick art first, then decorate. We have been trying to be financially savvy and I wanted to do as much as I could for $0. So far I have purchased $5 in tissue paper and $6 in fabric. Unfortunately it's looking like an $11 redo :(. The artwork I want to use is not blending with the free repurposed materials I had at my disposal. I'm hoping when it all comes together it looks a little more cohesive, but don't brace yourselves for a surprising before and after!

A twin sheet (we no longer have a twin bed) used to make a crib skirt:

Her old brown curtains revamped to bring some brightness into the room:

Cardboard box used as a base for a hanging mobile:

Piecing old batting scraps together for a new quilt. Sorry for the bad pic. Basically it required a lot of hand basting which totally worth the time and labor instead of spending the $25 for new batting:



The top sheet of the sheet set used for crib skirt being quilted:

Most of my time and effort has been spent sprucing up Eden's room, but I've snuck in a few projects around the apartment. These have also revolved around not spending money when possible. There's a print on etsy with the phrase "Make Do and Mend" and I feel like it's my personal mantra lately.

Curtains added to our living room. The color helps so much and so does covering up the unsightly air conditioner. I saved money by using the width of the fabric as the width of the curtain instead of making them fuller. Admittedly the $30 extra bucks for twice as much fabric might have been worth it:



A tv cover ordered by Thomas and made from fabric in my stash pile:

My first project from the Alabama Stitch Book. This is a hand-sewn headband made from old t-shirts. It was a birthday present for Katerine.
The top layer is painted:

Then layered with a darker fabric underneath by stitching around the edge of each painted section. After stitched, the center of each painted space is cut out to reveal the fabric below:

Tada!:

Spring break started for us today and it's sunny outside! Thomas and I are about to head to the library with our little one to check out some workout videos and pay my $3 fine (oops). Looking forward to family workouts and extravagant home cooked dinners with friends (which will require more family workouts) this week. Hope you all have exciting fun around the corner!

Coming up- blog inspiration and March rewind pics of Eden :)

Eden Pics

Excuse the odd layout- blogger and me are not agreeing today, but I refuse to let it get in the way of posting! Eden is napping and I am taking care of some business. Thomas won't be home today (he left at 6:45am and is headed back hopefully before midnight!) so I can really focus on tying up some loose ends. One of which is sorting through recently snapped photos and sharing the best with you guys. It's so pitiful what is considered the "best" photos. Eden won't sit still, we have bad lighting in our apartment, and the flash is atrocious. Jill is getting a new camera soon and is kindly sending me her old backup SLR. I'm so excited I can barely stand it. Photography has always been a weak spot of mine and it would be so helpful.

Also on my to do list is sorting through emails, joining the group forum, and printing tutorials for my class. That's right, I'm taking a class. It's an online course that teaches the in's and out's of running an Indie Business (either online or store front- think Etsy). I feel very silly because I currently have no product. What I have is a million ideas of things I would love to do but no clue how to pick an idea or where to go from there. The course is offered by three super women who have successful indie businesses of their own. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!


Eden is stirring from her nap, so I'm gonna throw in some quick descriptions and post this:

I snuck up and this very "grown-up" behavior of Eden. She was lounging in her nursery playing with the iphone with her legs crossed up in the air. I feel like I'll be able to compare this picture to another very similar one in about 15 years, but the room will probably be much messier:

SOCK MONSTER!!!!

She insists that her stuffed animals and baby all wear diapers

Eden sits on her stool if she wants a treat- but she got too excited and decided to stand up and steal daddy's bite.







Kisses







Now this is the life :)