Check it out!

Just quickie photo post, this is my friend wearing a custom hairpiece I made her last year! Photo taken by another talented friend - Aimee Power.


Source


Doesn't she just look *so* gorgeous in the field? AhhH!!

a day in my life...

this is just s list of my day in order..sorry for the boring text only post

- wake up, get dressed. grab jude, change him, grab baby and change him too. Take both boys downstairs, make a bottle and breakfast. Sometimes Matt wakes up with Jude a bit earlier and makes him breakfast if he is working a later shift.

- feed baby, Jude watches cartoons and drinks a sippy cup/eats breakfast and lays on his pillow. He likes to lay around when he first wakes up. I post something on twitter/facebook like a good morning, or something like that. I do my blogging while I feed the baby. I try to have the content for blog posts at least somewhat lines up before hand or it just takes too long, especially one handed html coding.

- I have google reader open all day and so I get going on that.. read some posts while blogging, tweet links. I HTML code 5-6 blog posts. Then after I code the blog posts I upload a photo to flickr for each of them. I have it set so that my blog feeds automatically to both facebook and twitter each time something is posted so that saves me time. As I'm doing this I am up about every 5 minutes tidying things or doing things with Jude like playing trucks or cutting and pasting things. Jude runs around a lot or plays with toys. He likes trucks and cars and things that he can push or ride. He also likes to go on our deck if it's warm enough outside.

- After my blogs are posted, I check emails. Well, technically, I'm checking emails all day. I have tweetdeck, flickr, facebook, etsy, and hotmail open at all times. I don't have a phone so most people contact me to make plans through twitter or facebook. Anyways, I use this time to respond to things, make any changes to the website. It's a lot of work to stay on top of everything, so it has to be constant. I make it work by checking 2-3 things in between a chore or giving either child attention. When feeding the baby I have to be sitting so I take advantage of that time to do "internet stuff", with one hand.

- I make lunch for Jude and I and we eat together and usually watch videos of yo gabba gabba on the computer or he runs around, lol. Sometimes my mom stops over on her work lunch break to eat with us.

- This usually takes us to nap time, for Jude. He sleeps for about 3 hours. I change him and put him down and we read a story and spend a little time together. If Jett is asleep I will either take or edit product photos, make product, pack and ship, or anything else little hands should not get into. I also do the bulk of my chores at this time like doing the dishes and picking up the house in general. I also try to squeeze in a shower if possible. I'm still tweeting and checking google reader and facebook during this. If I'm feeling naughty sometimes I take a nap. Sometimes friends pop in during the day.

- Jude wakes up, I change him, lays down on his pillow with a sippy again. I start cooking supper. Jude usually watches me or plays around me. I somtimes fit a bath into here. Baths come when they are needed during the day.

- Matt comes home, eats supper. I clean up after that. He takes over with Jude and plays with him and puts him to bed. I take care of the baby for most of the night while watching tv/responding to more emails/doing things I can get done from the couch. We talk about our days and spend time together. Matt watches sports or plays xbox. After Jett falls asleep around 11pm I am finally free to do something like more chores, read, or work on product photos/listing. Still tweeting, still facebooking. I try to fit in some me time after the kids are asleep, but it's hard because there is always still so much to do. I'm usually up until 2-3am.

- Wake up between 9-10 am and start all over again.

Curry with Leftovers from Yesterday!

Easy, peasy. You need;

Chickpeas
Crushed Tomatoes
Curry Powder
Tumeric
Cinnamon
Garlic Salt
Onion Powder
Onion
Canned Mushrooms
Butter
A little milk

I had 1/2 cans each chick peas and crushed tomatoes left from yesterday's supper, so I threw them together in one can and added my curry powder and let it sit until lunch today.

I mixed all ingredients together in a wok, and cooked for about 10 minutes. Served on top of some minute rice. So easy, 2 yr old loved it too. You could put in whatever veggies you like too.

Another yummy recipe!

We eat a lot of "noodle caboodle" here... which is basically any pasta dish. Here's the recipe for Wednesdays noodle caboodle.

You Need:

Hamburger
Pasta
Pasta Sauce in a Jar
Fennel
Garlic
Any other spice you like
Onions
Chickpeas
Cheese

First, I toasted my fennel, chilis, garlic, and pepper in a pan for a minute. Then I mixed the spices in with the hamburger and made meatballs.

Put pasta on to boil.

Cooked Meatballs and Onions in a pan. Poured grease off halfway through (keep a little) and add the chickpeas. Cook 5 min or so longer. Add your Jar sauce, cook until boiled.

Drain your pasta and mix with meatballs/sauce. Pat down into caserole dish, top with cheese. Bake.

Voila!

Christmas Lovely..

I splurged and bought this for my door.



The Christmas Potluck is going to be at my place this year, so I need to do shit right. I'm going to have 3 trees.

Let's Get Real

I've started to notice lately that the blogging trend these days is "It's a Wonderful Life" .. what do I mean by that?? Well, some of the blogs I'm reading just seem so fake, or impersonal. Well, yes, that is your impeccably styled home (and hair-do!) but is that *really* you? How long did that take to put together? Is it really an accurate picture of your life?

I don't know about you guys.. but as much as I enjoy eye candy, I just can't get invested in these "perfect" blogs. To me, the internet (and life) is all about relationships, and that kind of thing is just relationship-less! How can I relate on a personal level to perfect hair? I can't.. (I'm sitting here typing this with hair that I last washed... uh... when?) can you? I might just end up beating myself up over the fact that I can't achieve it.

Don't get me wrong - I love a beautifully styled blog and I strive for a beautifully styled life as well, but how much is realistic? I LIKE to know that other people struggle to keep their home clean, or that other mamas don't have time to curl their hair and put on makeup (there's poop on my shirt right now). I bet a whole bunch of you have dishes sitting in your sink RIGHT NOW. I love the imperfectness of humanity. We are naturally imperfect. I'm not sure where all this idealism came from.. I know it's not new.. but geez, aren't we tired of it yet?

The internet makes it easy for us to hide our shortcomings, but it also makes it far easier to connect with people on a level that we can't always reach in real life. We can share our thoughts and feelings so easily. Why can't we be more real? This isn't a show we're putting on, people! :P For a long time I was scared to show so many people my "real" self, but now that I am not, my relationship with the internet has become especially fulfilling. I strive to be an approachable and easy-to-talk-to person.. and becoming comfortable enough to just "be" has really helped with that!

I'm often asked how I got so many followers on twitter.. for a long time I never really knew what to say, but over the two years I have used it, it became clear - I am good at keeping up a relationship with people. I interact, ask questions, and listen. I remember (for the most part, it's hard with over 14,000 peeps!) who people are and what they are about. I care what they have to say, and am interested in the mundane parts of their life as well as the exciting. I get the same in return from people. It's true that you get what you put in, to everything.

Anyways, basically what I wanted to say here was... bring your real self to the internet, because you would be surprised how many people will appreciate it. I sure do :)

xo

Three Delicious Recipes!

Ahh, I have been bad at keeping up with this blog. I've really been trying to increase content on THE OTHER BLOG so I have been doing 5-6 posts there DAILY. What a work out for my HTML coding skills. Anyways, here are some recipes for some delicious foods I have made lately. Excuse the webcam photos (lost my canon charger) and my lack of using a "proper recipe" (psssh).



So, this is my awesome cheapo stroganoff and braised cabbage with bacon. To make it you need:

2 cans of cream soup, mushroom is best celery is nice too.
Hamburger for meatballs
1/2 a bag of egg noodles

And then you...

Make meatballs, cook in a frying pan.
Put Egg noodles on to boil.
Add soup cans to pan once meatballs are cooked through, cook for another few min.
Drain pasta, add meatballs and soup mixture to pasta.

This is super yummy, and super cheap, and fills up my dudes.

To make the braised cabbage and bacon you need:

Bacon
Cabbage
Onions

And then you..

Boil cabbage in medium sized pieces, until almost cooked.
Cut bacon into small pieces and half cook.
Add cabbage into pan, and chopped onions.
Cook until bacon fully done.

Voila! yum! Easy! Cheap! Filling!



Now this... she is a thing of beauty. I made this for hangover brunch for my buds after a big house party here... we all ate in silence for like fifteen minutes. You know food is good when all is quiet. For this you need:

Bacon
Canned Ham (Optional)
Butter
Cheese
Milk
Flour
Rotini


And then you...

Put your rotini on to boil.

Make a basic cheese sauce. I never use a recipe for this.. I start with a big pat of butter. In this case, I used a combo of bacon grease and butter which I highly recommend for both deliciousness and hangover curing properties. Then, I add the flour until I reach my desired thickness. Then I add the milk and cheese. I am very bad at using exact measurements, so for this recipe, you need to have knowledge of how to make cheese sauce. Make a lot of it, because some will cook off when you bake the dish in the oven.

Cook your bacon. I also had some canned ham diced up left over, so I cooked it in with the bacon grease. It was lovely.

Next, mix your meats, your drained rotini, and your cheese sauce together in a pot. Then once mixed, pour it into a serving dish, and squish it down a little. Then top with cheese and even some crispy topping if you'd like, and bake at 400 for 10 minutes or so.

Then eat it. This was the most fantastic use of half a block of cheese I have ever experienced. I fed my husband and three friends and still had a whole bunch of leftovers.

#Ilovebacon

Shitshow.

Whoa, hey. I'm back?

Guess what happened to me? Sit down, and buckle in, cuz this is a long one...

Let's go back to early August. I'm super pregnant and super pissed about it, specifically, 4 days overdue. I can barely walk, can't sleep, can't eat, can't form rational thoughts... mamas, you know the drill.

Hubby is unloading something from the car, and he has some chit chat with one of the neighbors. He comes to me and says "So I guess the reason why all that furniture was left on the deck next door under that tarp is that they had bed bugs in there". I'm like.. eww.. gross.. and start googling. After reading a little while, panic sets in. I saw one of the bugs in our house a few weeks earlier. After reading even further I determine that I had gotten 3 bites around the same time that I saw the bug. After doing this research I am seriously freaked out, knowing what a problem bed bugs can be if you get them. I am about to have a baby and god knows I do NOT want to bring him home to this.

Now, this place we had been living in, it had always been a bit of a shithole. We are a young family with one income and it is hard to find places to rent in our budget, so we put up with it. We lived in a townhome attached to a row of 5 other townhomes, with an identical building next to it. Every unit had families in it, and while I am not making a judgement on them, it was a low income neighborhood and we all know what that can be like sometimes. The landlord had never been attentive, issues abounded. The heat was cut off at least 10 times in the 2.5 years we lived there, and once the water. He would never answer his phone. Every unit had some sort of issue, like broken stuff or mold.

Over the summer they had decided to move every one's waste bins from next to their doors to the outer wall of the building. Consequently, the outer wall of my home. Accountability was gone and garbage began to pile up. It was HOT HOT HOT, so you can imagine the stink. The stink was coming through my walls, and my unit was filling with flies. Said inattentive landlord had of course also built a really crappy set of buildings, and they were not very sealed off to bugs. Wait - bugs? Oh shit.. bugs. And guess what had happened to all of the garbage left by the next door neighbors when they jumped ship? It was left all along my outer wall, front wall, and on their deck. When I found out about the bed bugs it was two weeks after they had left, that stuff had been there for TWO.WHOLE.WEEKS.

So now, I'm really panicking. I send a facebook message to another neighbor (on the other side of the bedbug unit) and ask her if she knew what was going on. She comes over and fills me in - boy did she ever fill me in! It turned out that the infestation next door was so bad that an exterminator had been in three times (oh and I was pregnant next door and they didn't tell me) and the bugs were still not gone, so the people moved out and abandoned all of their belongings. So now I know the full story, and I'm super pissed/freaking out. I started calling IRAC and environmental health and filing complaints and trying to find out what my options were.

At first Matt thought I was being a bit paranoid, but he believed me soon enough, and we decided we had to leave. Our rent had yet to be cashed, so I moved the funds out of my account. I called the building manager after receiving a nasty facebook message about how dare I call environmental health, etc.. told him that I was moving and taking my rent with me. He agreed to have our unit professionally inspected and luckily we had no bugs, but it was clear that they were not making the proper effort to set the state of the buildings right and never would. I was devastated, because I had spent my pregnancy (and quite a bit of money) re-doing the boys' rooms. I was looking forward to coming home to a nest all ready for baby.






Luckily enough, the timing was very serendipitous. Matt's cousin had just bought a house and was vacating her rental property, and we were able to snag it before it was even advertised. Even better was the fact that the place was awesome... a house! With lots of space for us in a quiet neighborhood - it even had a yard. Best of all our rent would even be a bit cheaper.

Three days after finding out about the bugs, I was induced and gave birth. I already had the house 30% packed up, thanks to hard work, friends, and a wonderful husband. My labour was really smooth and we were blessed with a very sweet little bundle. I came home from the hospital to a living hell of boxes, daily harassment from the landlord/building manager, and investigating every tiny spot to make sure it wasn't a bug. I 'recovered' from delivery while not sleeping and spending every spare moment packing, sometimes with the help of friends and family. Ten days after the birth, we moved.






Because of how quickly we moved, and how much was going on, I didn't even think of my utilities until it was too late. My power took four days to be hooked up, and my internet took twenty. Because people helped us pack, I had no idea where most of my things were. I lost my etsy business completely due to things being packed instead of sent and then having no internet to communicate with my buyers.

So now, just over a month since the move, life is starting to fall back into place. We are mostly unpacked, and picking up the pieces of our life. I am back to blogging as of today, and hopefully in the next few months I can get my business together too. All in all, things are good, and if not good - on their way.

The Island Tweethearts

Last week, we were given an awesome gift!



The tweethearts are a networking group of women who have gotten together via twitter - they are all super sweet! We were so grateful to get this gift .. we were able to pick up some of the last things we needed for Jett, like a change table pad and some formula/bottles/diapers. It was such a nice surprise.... something like this means so much to our young family.

The paper and card are a bit worse for wear after spending the week in my purse... but I wanted to share a photo :) Just goes to show that Islanders really are the nicest people!

Still here... haven't melted away... yet

Belly - 37 weeks

So, it was a hot hot hoooot weekend! We went to Matt's company picnic in the park on Saturday and I got soo sunburnt / heat stroked - ew! Yesterday it was sweltering in our house and I spent the day trying not to move mixed with fainting/throwing up and crying. Jude was at Grandma's so we could get things done.. well.. we did nothing ;) Not good times! Today will hopefully be better... and it is supposed to be a rainy week. Here are our pics from the park on Saturday, look how fat my feet are ;)

A Long Overdue Update - and Baby Makes Four :)

HeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellloOO!!!!!!

It's been forever since I posted here :) I closed up last fall after thinking that this blog no longer suited me... well... I am back now with a new design and lots of news.

Our first big news:



This is Jett, my second baby boy, due August 9th (But hoooopefully in the next week or two!). I've been busy all these months cooking up a human!! We are so excited to have another baby, and Jude seems to be excited to have a brother, from what we can tell. It's hard to understand how much a 2 year old really "gets". My sister in law is also expecting a baby girl, she was due on the 14th - so the family is expanding very quickly and I couldn't be happier. I never thought as an only child about being an auntie, especially an auntie to a little girl.

This is my belly as of last week:



My etsy shop has been very busy since I re-opened in April, but I am now closed again for maternity leave. Don't worry, I'll be working on new things while I am away and preparing for the holiday season. I hope to be back in September or maybe before, depends when baby arrives and how we adjust to having a newborn again.

So anyways, look forward to more posts here about my life, my crafts, and my kids. Speaking of crafts... here's a picture of my first scrapbook layout since October 08! I have another in the works (well, it needs to be fixed... Jude got it with a glue runner.. oops) that I will share soon :)



xo, Chelsea

Coming Back

Soon - with a new design.