Meg vs. Food: Cat in the Hat Cupcakes

My baby turned one a couple weeks ago, and I was feeling guilty for not planning much of anything as the house is still not put together and we were leaving to visit my grandma in Tokyo the next day. I knew I at least had to make his birthday cake even if I didn't throw a themed party complete with costume like I did for my oldest...

Little Fellow recently picked the Cat in the Hat as his favorite stuffed pal, so I went with that to create some Cat-themed cupcakes.

I snagged the cups on Pick Your Plum a while back (sort of on accident, but that is another story). Following some advice I found on Pinterest, I altered the add-ins for a box of cake mix to make cupcakes that were extra moist and tasty. You add in one extra egg (or two if you want it extra moist), replace the oil with butter and double the amount, and use milk instead of water. Of course I filled the cups too full so they spilled over, but I thought that ended looking even more Seuss-ish than I had planned so it was all dandy.

For the frosting I used this recipe for whipped cream cream cheese frosting. It is so perfect! The taste of cream cheese frosting with the lightness of whipped cream frosting; definitely my new favorite.

I was also making up some carrot muffins, so I used some of the batter to make an individual cake for baby boy to dig into.

Happy first birthday to my littlest guy!

Meg vs. Myself: Things I should have learned already

I thought I'd start imparting my housekeeping wisdom to myself, since I seem to need it. One husband and three boys in, it's about time I learned.

Meg vs. 30: Thoughts on failure and success

It happened. I turned 30. And as you can observe if you click on my tab, I came up short on my 30 goals for myself, and only finished about 2/3 of them. My normal self would say, "Why, that is 66%, which is a D." But with all the other stress going on (I have been on the phone all morning trying to get people over to the house to get things fixed for the tenants, while in the meantime my children run amok and my house is still 1/3 in boxes), I am rethinking how I will define success on my goals.

It was a success for me to put my goals out for other people to see when I came up short.

It was a success that I often chose to throw my efforts into supporting my husband and spending time with my kids instead of compulsively following through on everything I had wanted to get done.

It was a success that I survived a year where we had a baby, finished renovating a house, and moved several hundred miles, and still made sushi and rode not one but two horses.

And it was a success that I realized that next time I should try to make myself have more fun instead of pushing myself to "achieve" more. I already stress out over what I am an am not accomplishing. In my 20's I served a mission for a year and a half. I learned Japanese and spent summers with my grandmother just like I wanted to. I got two degrees and my husband got one and is in the midst of another. We got married, had three kids (who, I might add, are still surviving our parenting), and bought a house which we renovated and turned into a rental. Why should I feel like what I'm doing isn't enough? I need to push myself to do more to enjoy life! So my 40x40 list (which I already started compiling a while back, because that's how I am) will hopefully be a lot more fun and less stressful.

So here is to failure, and more successes like this:

Meg vs. The Walls: Removing Wood Paneling

I did this to the front bedroom today:

Before. This doesn't quite portray the ugliness of the painted-over,

falling-off-the-wall wood paneling.

After: Yikes! It always gets worse before it gets better, right?

Right?

So before Thursday when two more girls come to see the house, we hope to patch the walls, sand everything down, do a coat of primer, spray texture on the walls, and do a second coat of primer.  Then paint and moulding... Phew! I am tired already, and I need to clean out the garage before the contractor comes to measure for the new door on Wednesday.

As I was attacking the paneling, I was thinking about how nice it would have been to have done this earlier and been able to enjoy living in the finished house. But then I thought about how busy and preoccupied I have been these last couple of weeks trying to get everything done, and I am glad that I wasn't crazy focused on the house so that I could focus on these guys, who were relegated to the tent today:

Meg vs. The Car: One long day.

We got our alignment fixed and tires replaced today. It only took:
1 walk to and from McDonalds with 4 boys 5 and under (my nephew was with us),
20 chicken nuggets and 3 yogurt parfaits,
1 face plant into the play place mat,
1 pants change,
1 unexpected trip to Costco,
2 frozen yogurts,
1 heinously large bag of veggie straws,
3 toddler meltdowns,
1 poopsplosion,
1 call to Grammy, and
1 nursing session in a corner outside Costco while the big boys fought in the cart.

I wanted to hug the tire guy when he pulled our van right up on the sidewalk for us to jump right in.

I got home and John took a study break because big brother wanted to wash the cars with him, so they are sparkly clean too.

Good thing I had this super easy taco soup planned for dinner. Took 10 minuted to make and was pretty tasty! I am currently ignoring the fact that I have hardly touched my goals from 2 weeks ago, let alone set more for this week. We'll just be happy we got through Wednesday!

Meg vs. Babies: Cloth Diapers and DIY Cloth Wipes

I have thought on and off about trying cloth diapering ever since we had our first boy. And now that we are on number three and the diapers keep piling up, I finally decided I needed to go for it. It haunted me that we paid so much, threw so much out, and didn't have something sustainable in case of an emergency.

Thankfully, cloth diapers aren't what they used to be. After looking all over for affordable used cloth diapers on Craigslist and elsewhere, I found Alva Baby, which is a Chinese pocket diaper manufacturer (I know, bad American. But I am a poor American, so this is what I can do). Their new diapers are cheaper than almost any used ones I could find here in the bay area, and they had pretty decent reviews. For about $135, I got 20 diapers (they actually ended up sending me 22 for some reason), 40 inserts (20 that came with the diapers, and another 20 more heavy duty liners with bamboo), a roll of liners, and a wet bag for the diaper pail.

They arrived after about a week, and I washed all the covers and inserts with bumGenius Diaper Detergent that I ordered from Amazon (washed the bamboo ones seperately 3 times in hot water to prep them), and was ready to try them on the boys. Since they have snaps to adjust the size, I can use the same batch for both of my boys in diapers.

I was worried about Mr. 2-year-old being resistant to switching up his Huggies, but he thought these bad boys were pretty fancy.

Then I got to thinking, "Why should I keep buying wipes, too?" So I pulled out my stash of flannel receiving blankets, most of which I received as gifts but haven't used because I have big babies and can't keep a good swaddle with them. I cut three of them up into squares (16 squares per blanket), and folded them tissue-style so they would pop out of my wipes container. Here's a quick how-to on that in case you're curious.

1. Lay out a square, like so:

2. Lay another square overlapping half of the first.

3. Fold the first over the second, like so:

4. Lay down a third where the first one was.

5. Fold the second one over the third one (see where this is going?).

6. Repeat until you get a stack like this:

I put a stack of 48 wipes (three blankets' worth) into an extra wipes container, and then went to work on some wipes solution.

I had pinned this solution a long time ago, but on reviewing it, it seemed like it used a LOT of soap for the amount of water it required. Plus in includes baby oil in it, and I read mixed reviews online about whether you should use baby oil with cloth diapers. I also read reviews from people who said just to use water and forget about adding anything. So I took my own approach, boiled two cups of water, added a squirt of the baby wash I had on hand (I think Johnson & Johnson's shea butter something-or-other), and dumped all over my lovely new wipes. Done!

Note: Due to gravity, more solution will sink to the bottom of the stack, making the bottom wipes soggy and the top wipes dry. I would just flip your stack over once a day to redistribute the solution. I do this with my store-bought disposable wipes on occasion as well.

So far they work fine, and it is kind of nice to have something sturdier than my regular wipes between me and whatever mess I am cleaning up (even if I am then throwing it in a laundry bag instead of the trash).

*Update: I realized after a couple of washes that these wipes would fray, since they are flannel (duh, for anyone who sews regularly; I sew not-so-regularly). So as I have pulled them out of the dryer I have been doing a quick zigzag stitch around the edges to prevent more fraying. Otherwise, a few weeks in and I am still happy with them!

One day in, and I would say that the cloth diapers are only marginally more work than disposables (granted, I haven't washed a load yet, but I have a machine that will do all that work for me!). And here is my take on the eww factor: If you are on your first baby and still kind of grossed out by poo, this can seem a little gross, since you may have to do some rinsing (like for my 4-month-old), and you have to pull wet inserts out of covers, dump big poos into the toilet (for my 2-year-old), etc. But after three boys and potty training, the poo part doesn't really bother me, and it is no grosser than cleaning out the training potty we used for my oldest (seriously, for some reason poop is so much grosser in that little potty than in the diaper. Not sure why.). The cloth diapers have done better at containing the newborn poop (we had a blowout pretty much every time he pooped before), which means that I don't have as many clothes to scrub and soak. And the liners in my 2-year-old's diaper minimize the poo interaction there. But to make things easier, I got this Diaper Sprayer on Amazon for $15 (though it looks like it has gone up in price since then), and am planning to hook it up today.

If I change my mind about this whole cloth diapering thing after a couple of weeks I will let you know, but so far I am pretty happy with it!

Meg vs. Dinner: Pinned it, Did it Pumpkin Pancakes

I realized that I have to do a whole lot of Pinterest projects if I want to meet my 30 x 30 goal of trying at least half of my pins. So I am going to start posting and reviewing them for you!

Let's start tonight with some pumpkin pancakes. I love pumpkin, and so these pancakes from How to: Simplify looked irresistable:

I used half whole wheat flour, and  our special Christmas pan.

Not as nice-looking, but tasty nonetheless. They are like pumpkin pie in pancake form, and amazing with butter and maple syrup. The batter is a little dense, so I had a hard time finding just the right temperature to get them to cook through without being overdone on the outside. But they got rave reviews from my toddlers and my 12-year-old niece, so we will be having them again!

Meg vs. Thanksgiving: Thankful Tree

For my second Thanksgiving activity this week, I wanted to do something that would help us to focus on being thankful this month. After my handprint and footprint garland, I had a couple more paper grocery bags and decided to cut out a tree on a whim, to which we could add some fall foliage with things we are thankful for. The trunk took me about a minute to cut out, and then I cut out leaves during my spare minutes throughout the day. Here it is with our first leaves:

I thought it was fun that when I asked Little Brother what he was thankful for, he simply said, "Happy!" That warmed my heart, since ultimately happiness is what I want to give my kids. I think that being thankful is a big part of being happy.

We are planning to each put up something we are thankful for every day until Thanksgiving (or maybe through the end of the month?), so our tree should fill up pretty quickly.

Once the tree was done, the wall still seemed pretty bare, so I thought I would finish it off with a banner. If you read yesterday's post, that lead to an epic hunt for printable buntings and banners that you can customize. Next time the process should be a little easier!

Here it is with the addition of the banner:

Much better! I'm no Martha Stewart, but the whole point is to help my toddlers learn about Thanksgiving and what we should be grateful for, and I think this fits the bill (not to mention that it cost me approximately $0, since I had all the supplies, and many were things I inherited from other people or my mom's work).

What are you thankful for today? I hope you can say "Happy!" too. =)

Meg vs. Thanksgiving: Fall Handprint Garland

I love handprint crafts. If you search "handprint" on Pinterest you will find seven kajillion (of course that is a number!) amazing, creative, super fun handprint crafts to do with your kiddos. My three-year-old has been dying to do a footprint with paint ever since he saw the kids on Barney make Halloween ghost footprints, so when I saw turkeys on Pinterest that had handprints AND a footprint, I knew we were golden. (Oddly, none of the links to the actual turkeys worked, so I won't link back to any originals. We started out the fun by looking at some pictures of real turkeys online, then got to work.

Now as much as I love a cute handprint, I am not really into making extraneous messes, so my kids aren't really well trained with hand painting/stamping activities. More specifically, my almost-two-year-old cannot hold still for more than about two seconds, so I didn't think that doing all the prints right onto the turkey would work for us. I decided to just have the boys do a whole bunch of prints onto a paper bag (since I am too cheap to buy real craft paper) and then assemble the turkeys later. I have these Crayola Washable Kids' Paints, and we have really liked them and haven't had any problems with staining, which is good since I neglected to strip my kids down this time before we got going.

I had them stamp their feet twice just in case, which worked out because at the last second I thought to take advantage of the extra paint on their hands and make a little tree canopy so we would have some fall foliage to add to our decor as well.

Then when the paint dried, Big Brother and I cut out the hands and feet and glued them together, added some googly eyes and a couple spots of paint, and behold:

Handprint/footprint turkeys!

We taped them on to some yard with our fall trees, then hung them up in the living room.

Big brother and I also redecorated our branches for fall, since our spring buds (cut out from paint chips) were in poor shape. Here's the before & after:

Blech.

Much more festive!

And I cut out two leaves to cover the tape we used to hang up our garland.

Super easy, the boys love it, and I think it's decor the grandparents will appreciate, as they are all coming to visit around Thanksgiving time.

I have to admit, I couldn't decorate for Thanksgiving without starting to get excited for Christmas. Growing up we always put up our tree and all of our decorations the day after Thanksgiving, so the two are intertwined for me. We may or may not have tuned in to Christmas Radio on Pandora. Don't judge me.

Here's to the start of the Holiday Season!

Meg vs. Halloween: Big Tee to Totoro (or any animal!)

I meant to post this before Halloween, but you know how those things go. In true Japanese form, my kiddos love the movie My Neighbor Totoro . If you haven't seen it, you should! It is so so very cute and fun. A timeless classic.

I thought that a Totoro costume would be easy to pull off, and Big Brother already had this Totoro Hat, so I got to work. Big brother was going to be the big grey Totoro, Little Brother would be his little blue friend, and Baby Brother would be a Soot Sprite. Little Brother's costume was the most difficult, because there was no pre-made hat to buy, and I had a hard time finding any plain blue clothing in his size. Finally I came across this boys' XL tee at Wal-Mart, and figured I could work with it.

I wanted it to be a bit big, since I wouldn't have matching pants and the character is kind of round. So I grabbed a hoodie to use for my pattern.

First I cut new, shorter sleeves from the old sleeves.

Next, I folded the hoodie and the shirt in half, laid the hoodie down, and cut around it.

 I laid it all out to make sure the sleeves would fit the curve for the arm holes.

Then I sewed the sleeves back to the shirt, sewed up the sides, and hemmed the bottom.

I had this band from the bottom hem, out of which I cut my hat.

With some felt and a few extra tee shirt scraps, I appliqued on the little Totoro's eyes, nose, and tummy, and I was done! It really was a quick project, and you could easily do any number of animals the same way.

My little fellows were happy with the results! (Even if I did make the hat too small; my kids have really big heads.)

Happy Halloween! On to Thanksgiving fun, then Christmas! Eek!