Bring on the Crock Pot!

In an effort to get some meals pre-made and stocked in my freezer before baby Stybs arrives, I have been pinning many different recipes and websites with crock-pot and freezer friendly meals.  We buy meat in bulk and vacuum seal it, but I don't think I will have the time or the energy to look up a recipe, defrost the meat, and then cook the meal. So to avoid ordering in every night, pre-made meals are my plan.

So this afternoon I chopped some veggies and mixed some sauces and bagged a couple meals.

2 bags of BBQ chicken mix and a bag of honey garlic chicken mix (the chicken is already in the freezer), steak chunks for stroganoff and Chuck roast for pot roast were vacuum sealed (other ingredients are canned or not freezer friendly, so they are set aside elsewhere). Everything is crock-pot friendly so I just dump, set, and walk away.

There are some more recipes I want to get together like meatballs, lasagna, and chili. But I still have time so I can make those over a weekend and get them ready to go in the freezer later.

Any other moms plan meals before their baby arrived? How did it work out for you?

The recipes I put together were found via Pinterest or Google (and added to pinterest).

It's Beginnig to Look a Lot Like Christmas

I'm trying to stay current on posting, as well as actually completing projects I see on Pinterest (so I can link up here), but it's getting harder and harder to be motivated.  It's that time of the year I guess.

Every Black Friday, instead of going shopping, I start decorating for Christmas. This year I limited the ornaments on the tree to only black, white, and silver. And after seeing awesome pictures of christmas treeson Pinterest, I wanted to get a really good shot of it.

I love how it turned out. Now I need to keep playing around with the settings on my camera for more awesome pictures.

Pinterest Challenge #2

I know it's been a few weeks since linking up to the challenge at Dutch Being Me, but I'm determined to keep these projects coming.

I'm linking up to my nursery mobile that I just finished. I am so proud of it!

You can check out the whole post here. And you can follow me on Pinterest.

I Finally Did It!

As we all know, Pinterest is highly addictive. I have been eying-up this mobile for a while, it was one of the first pins I made.

originally from here

And of course the millions of  pictures with how-to's that followed made me believe I could make one too.

originally from here

originally from here

But it was definitely this last picture that made me want SO BAD to make one for baby Stybs.

also originally from here

Not the normal circles! So cute! I have to keep it gender neutral (b/c we won't be finding out the sex of babyS) so those cute butterflies were out. But stars, now that could definitely work. So after many busy weekends where I never made it to the store to buy materials I finally did it.

I decided to use scrapbook paper instead of the paint chips that most of the tutorials used. While the paint chips are free, they are only one sided and I knew that you would see both sides of the stars once they were hanging. Card stock is heavy weight like paint chips, but it has color on both sides of the paper.

I picked up 4 sheets of solid colors, along with a cute little duck print paper that coordinated. I got a wooden embroidery hoop (to use the inside ring) and a star punch for under $20 total (gotta love bonus coupons!). I already had string, double sided tape, and ribbon at home.

It's hard to tell, but the solid colors have a sheen to them, so they reflect a lot of light

I began by punching out hundreds of stars. I don't actually know how many I punched, and I didn't use them all, but it felt like 100.

Then I needed to decide on the way the colors would hang. I could have gone with a random look like the star mobile above, but I really liked the gradation from that original mobile I pinned so I played around with how it could look.

When I finally settled on the pattern I got to taping the stars onto the string. I was happy with it.
until I held it up and saw that it twisted around and you could see the tape. How could I forget that you would see tape? So I pulled out the double sided tape and got to sticking the same colors on the back of each star.

Now when it hangs it can twist all it wants and still looks cute.

To shorten up the process that took me 2 hrs, I'll just jump to the after picture:

I love the way it reflects light. It almost sparkles!

I painted the hoop white, made 6 strings of the original pattern, and 4 more without ducks for the inside. I tied the ribbon onto 4 points and it's now ready for the nursery!

I'm so happy I finally made this mobile, now to tackle some more pinned ideas.

Pinterest Challenge #1

 My friend Jen, from Home for Three, linked up to a Pinterest challenge. I've seen these challenges before and I have been inspired to do a lot of things I have seen on Pinterest. Most of these were for my classroom, and I do not have pictures of them. So, since I just resumed blogging this week, and since I saw the actual challenge on pinterest, I wondered if blogging about the challenge would qualify as my first pinterest inspired project.

Hey, why not? Challenge Accepted.

But to cover my butt as far as actually sharing what projects I have tried, I'll leave you with the two I had documented.

Adding Ribbon to composition books as book marks.

And my first ever Pinterest inspired project:

My failed attempt at some beautiful canvases

I feel as though I've said Pinterest about a million times in this post. So I'll leave you with one more:

Follow me on Pinterest, here.