DIY: Our first garden (Step by Step)

It's been a couple of days (or weeks?) and the plants are still alive!
I've always wondered how is it that my kids don't die. I have NEVER been able to grow anything without killing it. I tried having a plant (tree) when I was in college and it died about a week after I bought it, then I forgot about it and when I remembered it was just a dried branch lol.

Since we have gone vegan we started eating a lot of veggies and I think one of my jobs as a stay at home mom is find ways to save money, since I'm not making any might as well help my hubby feel less stressed about our income.

What you will need...

• Wet dirt
• A cup (I used a clear plastic solo cup) or styrofoam egg carton 
• Cotton balls
• Plastic wrap (Mine is red because is leftover from christmas)
• Knife and scissors
• Little plastic hair ties
• Label maker or labels and a marker

Step 1 Make a few holes at the bottom of the cup so the excess water drains

Step 2 Put a cotton ball at the bottom of the cup and then some wet dirt

Step 3 Plant your seeds (mine has grown already) and cover the cup with plastic wrap

Step 4 Here is were you will need the hair ties or some elastic bands.

That's it

To start it all I used the egg carton (styrofoam) and the same idea. When they were peaking I moved them to the cups. I didnt really think they were going to grow...

Kids: Dollar Reward Chart

We tried explaining her that to have things you need to have money, and for that, you need to work. Sometimes she says she is tired and we explained that if she is tired and choses not to work she won't get paid. We let her make her own choices (up to a certain point). I thought it would take months for her to get all of her stars but now she volunteers to help and do homework and all of her jobs. She does not get paid for everything, only for what she was "hired" for and she can get fired if she looses too many stars.

She gets a star every time she does one of her jobs. Eat her food, do her homework, clean her mess and go to bed on time all without whining.

If she doesn't do it or if she whines, she doesn't get a start.

If we have to tell her 3 times she loses a star.

I think she also needs visual cues, and I found something that I think might help her (and us)

widkidsblog.blogspot.com

That good behavior chard. Is color coded. Green, yellow, red, black.

I have to adapt it for my kid but I think it's an awesome idea. She starts the day in green and every bad action will get her closet to the yellow.

Since I give Sofia 3 warnings I thought about having 3 spaces in each color. But that would give her way too many chances. I still have to figure it out. Once she gets to black, I take a start away.

We try to stay away from giving too much attention to bad behavior. Not that we ignore it when she is "making bad choices" but is simple, If you are grumpy you must be tired, go take a nap. When she is making good choices she pretty much get everything she wants. (Things that don't involve me spending money). You don't get what you want when you make bad choices.

I was so afraid to go to the store when I heard all the horror stories from other moms. I did not want to go out with her because I was afraid, but when you are a stay at home mom you have to go out with the kids to do everything.

She doesn't throw temper tantrums and doesn't freak out if I don't buy her something. She knows she can get only one thing at the store but if she makes bad choices she has to put it back. She does get grumpy sometimes but she tells me that is because she is tired <3


She is an awesome kid :)

DIY: Kitchen Command Center

We are finally organized! I can't believe how much paper you start getting when your kids go to school.
We had an awkward wall in our kitchen and as soon as I saw it I wanted it to be a place to help us keep things off the fridge, I painted it with Magnetic paint... that was a complete fail. Back to the drawing board.

I saw a few things online to give me ideas and I came up with something that would work for us.

So we have some different areas that help us stay organized.

The top of it is a calendar for this month (I did realize that we need a calendar for next month too) A cork  board for a school calendar that we get every two months. I have an envelope with coupons and the YMCA schedule.
Theres a little tray with blank envelopes and stamps but I am thinking about putting that in a household binder, not sure yet.

The second part of this is Mom's and Dad's clipboard, for all the junk we have.

Since we are not very good at doing our chores and I feel like I don't get anything back for working 24/7 I made a little chore chart. I did print it on the wrong color paper so for now my husband's chore chart is pink LOL

Then we have House stuff. There's a clipboard for the house papers, notes for the babysitter and other things. There's also a wall file for all the junk we get in the mail.

Then we have the kids area, for now we only have one that is school age so there's a clipboard for her and a wall file her.

We have tried many different reward charts for our daughter. Something that always stays are the stars, she likes getting stars.

This is the one that has worked the most so far. She wants a pet (dog) and I am not too sure about that. There are a few pages of this since each page is only 40 paces which means $40 dollars and that is nowhere near enough to get a pet. Once all the pages are full (the one in the picture is the last one) we will double how much she made (but she doesn't know that yet).

More about that in a different post so this is not too long.

I do have a few things on the fridge :(

I am hoping this will be gone once we get the pantry installed right across from the command center.

Nom Nom: Caramel Popcorn

Ingredients:

Pop Corn Kernels
Oil

The bag should have the instructions on how to make it. My husband makes the popcorn. If I made it we would end up with caramel kernels :)

For the Caramel Part.

2 candy canes
1/2 cup Light Corn Syrup
1 Cup Sugar
1 Tbs water

First I put all the candy canes in a ziploc bag and break the candy canes until they are powdery.
The I put the sugar and the water in the pan and stir until they are mixed and add the candy cane powder. Mix until is watery and add corn syrup. Mix for another minute and turn off the heat. Pour on the popcorn and mix. DO NOT USE YOUR HANDS. The mix is very hot and it will stay hot for a while. To make more colors, repeat the process with different candy canes.

How (or Why) did we become Vegan?

Right after my son was born back in November, 2013, I got very sick. And I mean sick. I couldn't eat anything without getting a massive stomach ache, headaches and vomiting. I was hungry most of the time because I couldn't eat. I went to the doctor and he gave me a list of things I could eat. That did not work. I went again to see what else we could do, he gave me a new list. It didn't work either. So I went to the store and I just bought some things that I figured would be gentle to my stomach, I was going to be in pain anyways but I had to find something.

I bought jello, some rice crackers and water. I ate only that for about 3 weeks. I lost 35 pounds in that time, and even though I wanted to lose the weight I gained during pregnancy I did not want it to be this way.

I have 2 good reasons why I was very uncomfortable with losing this much weight this fast. I had (or have) an eating disorder but since I became a mom I have been trying hard to eat like a normal person, I dont want my daughter to think that not eating is OK. And the other reason, I had really bad PPD with my daughter and I only breastfed until she was 4 months (she also had 2 teeth by then) so I made the commitment to breastfeed my son until he turned 6 months. I think I was lucky this time, it was a rough pregnancy but I did not have PPD (Yay!). My problem with this new "diet"? My milk supply stopped. At about 4 weeks I did not have any milk left.

After my milk supply stopped completely and I cry for feeding my son with a bottle (because I felt I failed him as a mother) my hubby thought maybe I could try to eat stage 1 baby food.

I love this guy so much <3

It was the first time in weeks that I actually ate something other than jello, crackers and water. We read the ingredients and they were very normal stuff. Without all the chemicals.

So we both changed our diet. (I think he felt bad for me because every time it was time to eat I would cry)

It's been about 3 months since we haven't had any fast food, no canned food, no boxed food, no fried food, no meat (except for fish in sushi), no dairy, no harsh chemicals. We don't buy (or eat) anything that has more than 9 grams of sugar per portion. This really sucked at first, I was addicted to candy and chocolate and sweets. Now I can happily say I don't want to eat candy because it tastes nasty.

We do have one sweet thing that we eat almost every friday (for movie night) that is pop corn with caramel

We have made so far,

Nuttela (Vegan)
Cashew Ricotta Cheese (Vegan)
Lasagna (Vegan)
Soy Milk

House Makeover: Living Room

To understand how much we HATED the living that came with the house you have to see the pictures. It's the only way to understand my pain. LOL

The color of the wall is some kind of  "baby-poop green". Dropped ceiling. A built in book shelf in some kind of grey color. A carpet that smelled like there were dogs peeing on it. Washed out hardwood floors and paneling on some of the walls

It's not a fake brick wall (but is not real either) Is some kind of brick "tile". A vent in the middle of nowhere. You can't see it but one of the ceiling tiles is actually a fluorescent light. YUCK!

So the process to fixing this room started a while back. I have Arachnophobia and that light had a few of those things dead in it. So it HAD to come out soon.
There was no light aside from that in this room and it was pretty dark.

We (My hubby) got rid of the dropped ceiling and raised it, added some sheet rock and a light in the middle of the living room. Those zebra blankets are gone, they were horrible (I don't know what I was thinking when I bought them)

New walls too, the paneling was just awful, so now is just sheet rock. New hardwood floors, there was nothing wrong with the floor that was there before but it was very light, it seemed like they tried to match it to the dinning room flooring but it was not quite right. By "they" I mean the previous owners.

There's a new layout for the living room furniture now because we added a new wall... Without the wall it was VERY cold in the living room area. I had to keep the heat of the house around 74 F so it would feel fairly warm (It felt like 68F)

So that space that was the entrance now will be the mudroom and a laundry room.

 The laundry room is a future project, for now it will stay in the basement until is warm enough to make a hole in the wall for the vents and pipes.
The division of both rooms is right in the middle.

All that painters tape on the floor was to help us know exactly the sizes of the rooms and where we needed to start building walls.

It was kinda tight in there to take a picture so excuse the hand. But you get an idea of the new wiring for the laundry room lights (There's 2 of them now because there's no natural light)

The hubby painting the new wall. 

So the door opens both ways. And it allows some extra light to come in because there's only 2 windows in the living room. The big white square (that now is purple) is for a TV. The hubby want's a 60" TV and I think that after so much work he deserves it.

The shelves he built are wood from a dresser we had that we didn't need anymore (and wasn't worth selling because it was about to fall apart)

I know! Is not finished... Still working on it.

I get very distracted very fast, so I do a little here and a little there.

The shelves need to be painted white. I need to find a place for that Wii board, it always seems to be in the way. There's 2 little picture frames of the children in the family. I just need pictures of the other kids to be sent to me and printed. 

Back to talking about the room. We need to add doors to the bottom of the shelves (to hide all that junk that needs to be kept close to the TV). The cords for the TV and the devices go through some holes that we made (you can see one of them on the white side) That way there's no ugly cords all over the place (but there are a ton of them in the laundry room side)

Pretty picture of the not-finished future laundry room. The holes are from where the TV cables come through. Eventually they will be covered with shelves and stuff. (I hope)

LIVING ROOM TO DO LIST

Change Ceiling

Paint room

Change floors

Put moulding up

Finish painting the built-in TV shelf

Put door frames

Family Pictures and wall decorations

Paint book shelf white and change frame

Buy Hubby's 60" TV

Make doors for the TV shelves

Buy wooden blinds for the windows

Figure out an under-the-window-storage-shelf-thing

House Makeover. Middle Room

We bought our first home last year (2013) I was a foreclosure and it was in pretty good shape but very VERY ugly.

There's a lot to do, and it will probably take a while, but we will be staying here for a while so I guess it will help us stay busy. 

The "middle room"

Probably the ugliest room of the house. We call it the middle room because is right next to the living room and is the way to the downstairs bathroom, basement and now the master bedroom.

Basement entrance. CREEPYYY!

To the left of the picture is the doorway to the bedroom (and right next to it the bathroom door)

So after a lot of work, we have been trying to fix it. After not too long I realized it has become a major drop area for the dirty clothes (the washer and dryer are in the basement). So first step was to put walls on this thing. and add some color to it.

Is  a work in progress but we are getting there.

Middle Room To Do list.

Put walls
Install light
Install doors and door frames
Paint walls
Paint door frames
Put laundry baskets
Install linen closet
Get a better rug