DIY Bottle Brush Trees

Wow, I really am no good at updating my blog. Time just goes by way too fast and I just realized it's been almost 2 months since I've even looked at my blog. I'm awesome.
Moving on, it is now the end up of November which means...Christmas crafting is in full force. The past week I made a mini light up marquee sign which turned out being the biggest pain. Trying to string the lights was a disaster, hence why there are punched holes, and no lights poking through. So now I have uneven lights and open holes...whatever, I suppose it's still cute. And for $6, I can't complain.

 I've also made these adorable little bottle brush trees.  My color scheme is gold and cream and decided this year to add a little color. I'm head over heels in love with the pink vintage Christmas decor, so I thought why not dye some little trees pink? I'm super excited to start decorating on Friday, even though I'm going without a mantle this year :(  I did have big plans to construct a fake fireplace but somehow I've just not been motivated to follow through. Maybe after the new year.
Anyways, I had a few people ask me how I made them so I figured I'd just do a tutorial on the blog. The whole project cost me just under $15 and took about an hour from start to finish, minus drying and decorating. If you shop at Michaels make sure you use your 40% or 50% coupon to buy your Rit Dye. It might only save you $2, but hey, that pays for a large Diet Coke from Wendy's right there :) Although, it might end up costing a little more if you don't have any of the supplies on hand, but everything is pretty inexpensive to buy.:

Supplies:
1 pack of Lemax bottle brush trees (found mine at Michaels for 50% off)
Rit Dye in the color of your choice (I used fuchsia)
1 TBS salt
1 jug of bleach
Rubber Gloves
Plastic bin

Start by pulling out all of your trees from their plastic wrapping.

Now take you plastic bin and fill it with bleach. Someone said they only used 3 capfulls, I used half a bottle. I was doing 10 trees at a time and had zero amount of patience. I figured the more bleach I used, the faster the process? I also added enough warm water to almost submerge all of my trees (laying down). The trees will almost immediately start to lift color.

 Make sure you  flip the trees over so every spot gets bleached. While my trees were soaking, I put my rubber gloves on and start rubbing the trees, making sure the bleach was really getting in there. I was also rubbing off the fake snow that's on the trees. After my trees were pretty white (about 15-20 min) I rinsed my bin out and filled it with warm soapy water.  I added my bleached trees to it and gave them a good scrubbing.

Then rinsed them off really good and placed them on towels, use ones you don't care about. I then repeated that process with the rest of the trees.

Once all of your trees have been bleached, washed and set aside, you can start making your Rit dye concoction. Follow the directions on how to mix it and add a tbs of salt. Here is where you'll want to wear your gloves again so you don't dye your fingers. I dipped my tree in just long enough to make sure it was evenly covered, pulled it out and rinsed it under water. If the color was too light, I'd dip it again and rinse, and repeat until desired color is achieved. I really love the look of the lighter colored trees and wish I would have done the majority of my trees lighter rather than darker.

 None the less, they're still pretty cute. Once you're done dying your trees, place them on your towels to dry. It'll take about a day to dry completely, and once they're dry you can fluff them because they'll look all clumpy and sad. Now you can keep them as is, or you can spray a little glue on them and sprinkle them with glitter. Or you can buy some cute little pearls and glue them on to their branches. Or whatever else you fancy. And then you get to stare at them, fall in love with them and display them.

I still need to glitter mine, I'm just dreading it. Too much of a mess to handle at the moment. 

Hope this helps those who had questions. It's pretty easy. Basically just bleach, wash, dye, rinse, dry. Enjoy!

Cinnamon Sugar Cookies

I have this obsession with cinnamon...and cookies. So it was kind of obvious that I'd be a total lover of something that combined both. I used to have this totally killer recipe but lost it a few years ago while I was moving. So Kelli or Carly, if you're reading this, I need you to find it for me :) But in the mean time, I stumbled across this recipe and it definitely fulfills my cinnamon sugar cookie craving. The downside, or maybe good side, is that it makes 24 cookies or less. My son alone devours half of them, easily. I would simply tell him no more cookies, and what would he do? He'd go over to the counter and grab one from the cooling racks, bring it over to me, split it in half and give me the other half, all while having the cutest little innocent smile. How could one say "no" to that? It's not possible. We ate a lot of cookies :)

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of butter, softened
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/4 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt

Cinnamon sugar (for rolling)

• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 tsp ground cinnamon

In a mixing bowl, combine butter and sugars. Add egg and vanilla, mix well.  Add dry ingredients and mix. Now, cover your bowl with some plastic wrap and stick your bowl of cookie dough in the fridge for 30-60min. Preheat your oven to 350 and make your cinnamon sugar. Line your cookie sheets with a silpat or parchment paper. Next scoop out 1" cookie dough balls and roll it in your hand to make a perfect round ball. Now roll it in your cinnamon sugar mixture and place on your prepared cookie sheet. Bake 10-14 minutes. Mine were perfect at 12 minutes. Cool for a few minutes before transferring your cookies onto a cooling rack...or in my case, my mouth.

Crock pot coconut curry chicken w/ lime

That's a long name and a whole lot of "C's." I've recently rekindled my love with the crock pot. I love how I can just throw everything in there and then forget about it until dinner time. It's awesome. I try to use it at least 3 times a week. And the husband has been loving it as well, he even told me, with a giant grin on his face..."I LOVE when you cook with the crock pot." So, with that positive re-enforcement, my crock pot and I have become the best of friends.
And this recipe totally won my husband and myself over. So if you're a coconut milk lover and curry lover, you'll be a lover of this.

Ingredients

• 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 cup vegetable or chicken broth
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 3 tsp curry powder
• 3 tbs soy sauce (I use low sodium)
• 2 tbs sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• the zest of one lime
• Lime cut into wedges
• cilantro

Combine coconut milk, broth, cumin, coriander, curry powder, soy sauce, sugar, salt and lime zest in your crock pot. Whisk until smooth. Add (raw) chicken breasts, cover and cook on low for 4-5 hrs. 

Once your chicken is tender enough to shred, have at it and shred into whatever size pieces you prefer. Dump back into the crock pot and mix it around in your delicious sauce. Serve over rice of your choice, top with cilantro and fresh lime juice.

*Updated suggestion: Add cubed pieces of potato or the last 30 minutes of cooking, pinch about a half cup of the sauce from the crock pot and add a few tablespoons of flour and whisk together until all clumps are gone. Do one of these to help thicken the sauce a bit. 

My little fish

Mr. E loves the water. And lucky for him, we have 2 pools, a splash pad, and beach surrounding us in less than miles distance. After spending almost every day down at the pool, I finally decided I HAD to get him some floaties. All of his little buddies can either swim or have some sort of flotation device on them, while he had none. He screamed bloody murder for the first 5 minutes when I put them on, but once he got that out of his system he adjusted and loved them. After one day of me helping him swim with the floaties, he decided he was ready to go out on his own. With me still supervising, he leaped from the pool step and off he went. He kicked those little legs, swallowed a small amount of water, and never turned back...to me, his mom. He's just growing up so fast and becoming so independent. He would actually get mad at me if I tried to help him, even if I was trying to save him from swallowing mass amounts of water. Whatever, I'm just the mom that always gets in the way :)

Check out those little legs kick. Love it.

Don't worry, as soon as I noticed him struggling to keep his body vertical, I jumped in and saved him :)

And he loves to say "cheeeeeese" for the camera. But because he still can't really talk, he just says, "Deeeeeeeeeeeeeee."

4th of July

Now that we're half way through summer, thank goodness, I should probably post a picture or 2 of what we've been up to.
We've finally settled into our new area and are enjoying ourselves out here...quite a lot actually. Minus this disgusting humidity and heat that comes along with it, it's been great. We've made some really good friends and enjoy our park dates with them. The beach has been a little non-existent because of the bad weather we've been having. It seems every Saturday, it's cloudy, windy, and rainy. Which makes for a bad beach day. living 2 minutes from the beach, you'd think we were there almost every day, where in fact, we've been once in the past month and a half.
Our 4th of July was filled with friends, food and fireworks. We started off our morning at the beach, where it was partly sunny, partly cloudy, partly rainy. We had a few friends from the ward meet us there and turned out to be a lot of fun. Until, I got (bird) pooped on, and Conryd went swimming with his phone. That was totally awesome.

 After the beach we headed home for a few hours until we had to leave for our friend's pot luck party. I decided to make these cute little desserts my Aunt Carol made for my baby shower.

I think they're cute and show beautifully, and they're so easy which is a total bonus.
If I haven't said it before, my friends in the ward are awesome. They're all super down to earth, nice, and easy to talk to. I'm really enjoying actually getting to know people we go to church with. Complete opposite of our Utah ward.  It was great to have uninterrupted conversations, all of our kids were consumed with the mass amounts of toys this family has :) It was crowded, loud and wonderful. The plan was to go out with a few families to light fireworks but Mr.E hadn't napped and needed to go to bed. But before we sent him to bed, I insisted that our friends that live in our building, let us come up to their place to watch a few minutes of the city firework show. They live on the 21st level, and have a great view overlooking the golf course where the show takes place. They were so kind to let us bombard them and take over their balcony :) Don't worry, they watched with us, along with their son, Mr. E's BFF. The firework show was okay, but didn't really AMAZE any of us. But because we were so high we could see 5 or 6 different firework shows from all over. Some as far as 30-40 minutes away. Perks of living at the penthouse level.

As for now, not much is going on. We go to the park almost every day. Have play dates almost every day. Go to the pool a few times a week. And play with cars...all day, every day.

This little guy now likes the swings. He's hated them since the day he was born. He's a changed man.

The tour

I've finally snapped a few pictures from around our area. They're not great, they're all taken from the car window and they might be a bit boring. I really don't travel much further than a mile from our place to get anyways  which is great for my gas tank. I cannot figure out NESW for the life of me and I'm still getting used to having the ocean to the East and not to the West. My geographical bearings are so off, no matter how hard I try. If you'd like to stick around, I will attempt to give you the grand tour of our new home.
Here goes:

This is our "view." We look into a retirement building, and to the left of us just over those hedges, is the park where we spend a lot of our time.

This is our building. If you are a non-resident of our building, you have to have your car valet. One awesome thing about the valet is, if you have a crapload of stuff and can't carry it all yourself, you can drop it off to them and they will bring it up for you. It's pretty sweet. Especially when you have a car full of Ikea crap.

This is our pool. If we're not at the park or Target, we're here. And I love that everyone here works because that means it's empty all day, every (week)day.

This is our lobby. We have a security/front desk man to the right. You have to check in with them before you can come up and they have to call us every time to make sure we authorize it. It's kind of a pain after a while but I do like the safety of it.

Now that you've seen our place, let's take you to the beach. Literally a few yards after exiting our building, you enter onto the causeway..what the crap is a causeway, I still have no idea. I just call it a giant bridge. So you're driving on the causeway for about 30 seconds and now you're driving over a boat canal, and you can now see the ocean. I'm not even being a little sarcastic when I say the beach is a stones throw away. It takes all of 2 minutes to get there. Once you exit the causeway, you've now hit Sunny Isles. Sunny Isles is a few miles strip long of housing and hotels that run parallel with the coast. If we can afford it, we want to move there and hopefully, if not live on the beach, be right across the street. If you keep heading south on this street (Collins Ave) it will take you all the way down to South Beach/Miami beach (I think). I'm still trying to figure out where everything is.

(Sunny Isles/Collins Ave)

Downtown Miami, it's at least 30min from us. Not close at all.

So there you have it, a quick tour of our current living situation. I'd take you around the rest of our town, but it's not quite as exciting. It's just a bunch of palm trees, apartment buildings, and shops. If you really want to get into it, which I don't know who would? but you can google maps and street view it. Thanks for sticking around, peace out.

Our new home

Jealous?

It's beautiful, right? Sometimes I can't believe I only live 2 minutes from this. The beaches here are nothing like the beaches back home. I'm sorry to say, but the beach here kicks CA beaches butt. I think I've converted :) The ocean is blue, blue, blue and the sand is almost white. It's like egg shell white ha. The water is still a little chilly, but definitely bearable.
When we first stepped on to sand, Mr. E was not a fan. Once he saw his daddy walking on it, he got in to it and loved it. By the end of the day he was pouring buckets of it on himself.

A very short clip of Mr. E at the beach the other day

If any of you want to come visit, you've got a place to stay :)

Oh, I also re-painted this table I found on Craigslist for $80. And I'm quite happy with the results.

Before

After

Baby boy turned 2!

My little, tiny, squishy baby, is now two years old! I cannot believe my baby is no longer a baby. He's this stubborn, sweet, non-talking, always on the go, car loving, couch climbing, always jumping, toddler boy. This boy knows how to make me smile from ear to ear and and laugh my head off. He's not much of a cuddle-r, but when he does, it makes the world stop and I melt just a little bit.
His birthday was soooo- low key, almost non existent. It fell on Easter, so I guess that helped with making it feel like it was a special day. Our day started off with a small Easter egg hunt, getting ready for church and going, going to the park with a few new church friends, and coming home to tacos and cake. I don't think this kid had any idea what was going on, but he did enjoy his frosting :)

Woke up to this...

Moved onto the Easter eggs, he was pretty stoked for his "Cars" basket

Got ready for church

(few hours passed) blew out some candles and had some cake

Happy birthday, sweet baby boy! Mommy and daddy love you so much and know you'll do great things in life. 

Bye, Utah.

March 19 was our official goodbye to our home for the last 5 years. It was a very bittersweet leaving, but because our flight was so early and I was so stressed, it didn't really phase me too much the day we left. I was more relieved to have the whole ordeal put behind me and to move forward with our life. Our life...at the beach :)

Mr. E did really well with our flights. I always stress myself out over flying with him, when he's never given me any reason to stress out about. He's a great little traveler and has never given me a hard time...knock on wood.
Our first flight left at 7am, which meant we had to be at the airport by 6, which meant we had to leave the house at 5, which meant waking up at 4. Ouch. Mr. E. passed out within seconds of take off, and only woke up for the final descent, which was awesome. Then we had to rush to our connecting flight which was going to be a wonderful 4 hr flight. The first half of the flight he was a little difficult. He just wanted to run around when we weren't allowed to. The stewardess had to keep getting on her intercom to tell "everyone" that they needed to stay in their seats while the fasten seat belt sign was illuminated. Whoops. The last part of the flight, Mr.E passed out until we landed. After we landed we made our through the airport, to the baggage claim, and to the hubbster/dad. Ev was pretty stoked to see him. Everyone said that he'd probably ignore him and want nothing to do with him, but his reaction was the EXACT opposite. I loved seeing my two boys reunite. It was one of the sweetest moments I've seen.
Our journey home wasn't long and when we arrived, it felt very weird. I had only seen a short 30 second video clip of our place and that was it. It was empty, minus our bags of clothes and boxes of kitchen crap. I hated the feeling of not knowing where I was and coming "home" to a non-homey feeling...home. But we're getting settled and it's started to feel like home to me now :)

The last bit of our flight, we were both ready to be on the ground and reunited as a family

"Re-united and it feels so good..."

And just a little sneak peak of what's down the street from us (2 minutes drive, less than a mile away). High risers, we live in one (not one of these ones), they're everywhere! These are all lining the coast, so you can't see the beach unless you park and walk, which kind of sucks, unless you live in one of these very expensive high risers. One day maybe :) This is Collins Ave. It runs parallel with the beach and is one of the main roads. There's tons of food places, shopping and resorts that run all long this street for miles and miles and miles and miles.

Juice cleanse: Day 3

Oh day 3, I must be completely bi-polar. I woke up today feeling totally motivated and ready to get my juice on. After breakfast I totally felt like I love doing this. But when I think back to yesterday, I wanted to shoot myself. Not sure if the food at dinner time helped me out or if it was just a "day 2 of no eating" got to me thing. Breakfast and lunch have been easy and I've had NO cravings today. I'm still debating on whether or not I'm going to eat a dinner tonight. If I do, I won't feel like I've failed and if I don't, well then I'll probably just think I'm pretty bad-A for doing (or not doing) so.

For the past 4 weeks I've been battling one cold after another. It's like I alllllmost get better, and then BAM! Hit with another cold. So I need to totally boost my immune system and decided this morning for breakfast to have a strictly vitamin C juice. And it was so good. Just oranges and a handful of pineapple. So good. Soooo good.

Day 3:

Breakfast

10 oranges

1/4 pineapple

Lunch

(green juice from day 1. See here)

Add a handful of kale as well and an extra cucumber

Dinner

Protein and veggies with a side of left over green juice.

Juice cleanse: Day 2

Day 2... this is stupid. So glad I didn't designate a certain amount of time otherwise, I'd feel like a failure. But because I said no set amount of time, I feel accomplished. If I can do at least one more day, I've accomplished a 3 day cleanse. Pat on the back for this no self-control girl. I may keep going but do juices throughout the day (2 meals a day), mixed with whole fruits, and protein and veggies for dinner. That sounds like the smarter path to me.


Day 2

     Breakfast
(same as yesterday's dinner)

Lunch

3 green apples

3 stalks of celery

2 medium carrots

1/4 of a pineapple

1/2 lemon

2 inch nub of ginger (peeled)

BIG handful of spinach

Dinner

Dinner...ah dinner...Alright, I totally caved and cheated and ate an actual dinner tonight. I had protein and veggies, and it was delicious, and I'm not even a little bit mad about it. As I mentioned before, I think I'm going to juice for 2 meals, eat a lean, clean, dinner. I'm totally satisfied with that. I mean c'mon, who in their right mind skips every meal and replaces it with juice? Lez-be honest, that's just stupid. I'm not going to sugar coat a cleanse like this. It sucks. I find it extremely difficult. I'm not some super human who can ignore cravings and hunger pangs...or is it pains? Either way, they over power me. Maybe some of you have more self control, but heck, I do not. So here's to juicing at least twice a day :)

Juice cleanse: Day 1

To help me ease into my cleanse, I started replacing meals with juice a few days ago. I feel jumping right into eating nothing and drinking only juice would be difficult and challenging. I replaced Sunday dinner, and Monday breakfast. Today I only had a serving of eggs and 2 big mason jars of juice. By tomorrow I should feel comfortable enough to cut out all solid food and indulge myself in some sweet, sweet juice.
I don't know about you, but I'm new to this whole juicing thing. I haven't done much experimenting with it and am just hoping for the best as I throw my produce in the juicer. I try to use fruits and veggies that I think would compliment each other and taste good together. So far, my 2 juices have been delish. I didn't want it to have an overbearing veggie taste as I began my detox, because I know it'd put me off and I wouldn't follow through with the cleanse. So I've made my juices more on the fruity side but will slowly start adding more veggies in to make my juices 70% veg/ 30% fruit.

Here's day 1. I had a small breakfast because I wasn't at home to juice, but juiced for lunch and dinner. The juice is surprisingly very filling and I've felt satisfied this whole day.
I'm making juice for 2 people, myself and my mother-in-law. So cut the recipe in half or keep as is and just store your extra juice for "snacking." Each recipe makes about 4-6 cups of juice total. I keep my juice in large mason jars and seal them as tight as I can. Also, try to not "prep" too far in advance. You'll lose nutrients by doing so. You can wash and store, just don't peel and cut. Also, try to drink your juice daily so you can get as many of the nutrients while it's still fresh.

Day 1:

Lunch

1/2 pineapple
4 oranges
8 tangerines
4 celery stalks
2 carrots

Dinner

2 apples

2 pears

3 celery

3 baby cucumbers

2 big handfuls of spinach