Heidi's Birthday

Heidi turned nine this month.  Last year I made a little book that told them what they got to do on their birthdays because I am not a fan of birthday parties every year.  This year both Heidi and Kaylee get to have a family activity of their choice.  They get to bring along one friend.  Heidi picked bowling.  Her birthday also fell on Sunday this year so we had to bump her birthday activity to Saturday.  

She requested to have sugar cookies instead of a cake.  She and the girls decorated cookies that afternoon.  

Then Heidi's friend came for dinner.  They asked for tater tot casserole.  They could have had anything they wanted and they picked that.  Oh well.  

After dinner Heidi blew out the candles on her cookie.

Then we headed out for bowling.  Heidi did pretty well.  She got the top score over 90 where as no else even broke 50.  We did have the bumpers up.  This is her friend Baylee.  They are pretty nerdy together.  It was actually a long drive in the car because she got Heidi a Harry Potter wand pen and they spent the whole trip doing spells that would make their voices louder.  Ben and I were ready to drive the car into a ravine by the end of that drive.

Then Sunday morning she got to open up the rest of her presents and that was when her birthday became the most depressing day of her life.  She got a pretty dress, some puzzles and her big gifts was....an EASY BAKE OVEN!!!  Every little girl's dream-mine included.  Even though I knew it was a waste of money I bought it anyway.  Well turns out that we pulled out the oven and it was even worse than I imagined.  It was so bad that I told Heidi I was taking it back.  She cried all morning.

I told Heidi that we would instead buy a toaster oven because you can make a lot more with a toaster oven.  The thing that really bugged me about the easy bake is that they don't even have a door to open and put stuff in like a normal oven.  That was my biggest beef with it.  So, against her will, I took it back and bought a toaster oven and markers to decorate it with.

We named it her better bake oven.  It was even cheaper than the easy bake and I bought a bunch of regular cake mixes for her to cook with.  She came home from school on Monday to her new oven and promptly made some chocolate chip cookies. 

It was really cute because all the kids were excited to try out the new oven.  In the end she is happy with her gift but she did have a sad birthday.

I'm hoping that if ever you think about buying an easy bake oven you will instead buy a toaster oven for your kid.  The easy bake was so impractical.  Learn from our mistake and have a cute toaster oven ready to go instead.  

The latest upcycle

Remember these closet doors?  Remember how we moved into a house we love but are on a tight budget so everything improvement I make has to be as close to free as possible?  Remember my personality how when I want to get something done I come up with some semi-crazy plan and just do it before anyone, including myself, is really sure it will work?  Well, I'm proud to say I've done it again and I love it!

When we first moved in we took the closet doors off from Kaylee's room and, since I've never had a headboard before, put them behind my bed and made a headboard.  Pretty easy-peasy but I loved how it turned out.  Then the other day I took Heidi's closet doors off...they didn't stay in place anyway.  It didn't take me long to decide to reuse them, or upcycle them, if you will.

Ben has been wanting a dresser to put our pants in.  Right now they are all on hangers and we don't really enjoy that so much.  As soon as Ben said he wanted a dresser I started looking on craigslist.  No luck plus I'm just too cheap.  Then I thought about those closet doors.  We had a closet door headboard.  Why not a closet door dresser?  I told Ben my plan.  He didn't get it.  I did it anyway.

I cut the doors yesterday.  Last night Ben said he wished he had a chair or something to sit on while he got his shoes on (our bed is raised so you can't really use it for that).  Well it just so happened that I had three extra closet pieces that I wasn't using for the dresser!  If he have a closet door dresser and closet door headboard why not a closet door bench as well?  

So today I got started.  Screwed everything together.  Bought some boards so I could complete the look.  Our room has a lot of dark stained wood and I wanted to tie in the dresser to it.  Went to have lunch with a friend and ended up recruiting her to help with my project.  She has all the tools and is pretty smart when it comes to crafty things.  She came and sanded and stained the boards while I worked on dinner.  While the enchiladas baked we screwed everything in and viola!!  The finished projects!!

The dresser just needs some cute baskets and we will have a spot for our pants.  Good thing I'm headed to Kennewick tomorrow.  I can stop at Hobby Lobby and see if they have any cheap baskets on sale.  If not it will be back to my super cheap idea of covering cardboard boxes with fabric.  I'm really rooting for baskets though.  And as a side note-don't you love the pictures?  Sam got me those for Christmas last year and I love them.  The flower picture is another yard sale steal.

The Bench.  I'll be honest.  Before it was completed I did sit on it to see if it would hold and fell right through.  I am pretty sure I fixed the problem but if not I still think it is cute even if you can't use it.

So the total cost for my new bedroom set was a whopping $15!!!  Now that it is completed I need to go back to Home Depot and get one more board.  I'm want to add it to the headboard so that it really will be a matching set.  I really love it.  I love how it all just came together and that I was able to do it for so cheap.

We've been busy around our house.  Heidi had her birthday (post about that later), school is back in, Ben works a ton and we have been making appointment after appointment for random things like windows or life insurance, or energy saving stuff.  But I do have a few random pictures I wanted to post.  This one is for Angelee.  Angelee, what does that remind you of?  I'm wondering if you will guess it.  It's from a movie we watched way back and there was a creepy kid making the same look.

And then this picture is because he is just so cute.  Reading at the library in his totally cool cars jacket.  

And this is because he is so cute.  I love being married to Ben.  He is my all-time favorite person.

New Year, New Goals

My favorite Family Home Evening of the year is when we make new goals.  Throughout the year we take time each week during FHE to quickly go over and see how we are doing.  If we are doing them we get a thumbs up.  If we aren't then it is a thumbs down with a wah-wah-wah sound effect that makes it fun.  We did not do great with last year's goals (Wah-wah-wah) but I feel really good about the goals we set for this year.  We set family goals, about 4, and then we each do 2-3 individual goals.  We write them all down and post them nice and big on our refrigerator.  I'm a big believer in having them out to remind you.

When we plan out our goals we try to find things we need to improve on and then a few that are new things to do.  As a family we are going to work on being reverent on Sundays-Daisy is the worst kid in primary-we are going to plant a garden this year, build up a food storage complete with 72 hr kits and we are going to improve our Family Home Evenings.  We don't put a lot of planning into our FHEs.  I can usually come up with a quick lesson in about five mins but the kids really want to start doing the lessons, too.  The funny thing is that Heidi suggested to help us rotate the FHE jobs we should get "one of those boards that says prayer and then has a name by it, and then lesson and has a name by it...you know what I'm talking about?  All the other families have one."  So I made a board!  Nothing fancy but they were pretty excited.

We also made our individual goals (posted on the right).  I love watching the kids think about things they could do better and then doing better simply because "it's their goal".  I feel like goal setting is a big part of my life and my kids are following right along with me.  After we finished our FHE Kaylee made up a few more goals for herself to work on.  So cute!  She even pinned it up on her wall in her room!  I love these kids!

At one point during the past week I had asked Kaylee to help Blake get some water.  She refused because I think it is her natural inclination to tell me 'no' but then she said, "Oh wait.  That's one of my goals.  I guess I'll do it."  She has yet to make breakfast in the morning and I'm still wondering what she was thinking when she made that goal.

Since the new year has begun I've been working on accomplishing my goals and am pretty excited about the garden one.  Our back yard doesn't have much room for a garden so we are sectioning off part of the grass and ripping out the landscaping to make room.  On the only sunny day we had during the Christmas break Heidi and I headed out with our yard tools and removed two huge bushes-gone-wild-trees along the fence.  It took a few hours but we got them cut down and the roots pulled out to made room for some fruit trees.  We have to incorporate the garden into the landscaping so we will have green beans on the side of the house, strawberries along one fence line, fruit trees by the deck, and then a garden area by the pool.

Look at all those branches we did!  The new year is always a fun time for me.  I love starting new things and having projects to work on.  Good luck with the goals you have made this year!