The Very Hungry Caterpillar (x13)

So, as you all know, we have a garden. As such, a garden invites wanted and unwanted insects, bugs, etc. When our lettuce was doing well, we found a couple of caterpillars. Anna's grandma gave her the book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar a few months back and Anna really loved the book and had parts of it memorized. So, when this little guy showed up, Dan wanted to show it to her.

See how cute and innocent looking he is?

Anna had fun looking at him.

Caterpillars can be so much fun.

Until you find one this size on your tomato plants!!!!!!!!

I watered the garden today and found this guy and it really freaked me out. I first thought it was like a pea pod or something and was really confused. I went to touch it and found out it was a huge, disgusting caterpillar! For some reason, any cuteness associated with caterpillars suddenly vanished. This thing was like 3 inches long and so big. He was a VERY hungry caterpillar. Well, I found another one close by. I didn't want to touch them, so I got some gloves on and tried to get him off, but they were stuck on there pretty good. So I went and got some scissors and just cut the branch off. I know, I turned into a complete wuss, but seriously did not want to handle them anymore than I had to. It just creeped me out.

Well, I decided I should keep checking, just in case there were more. Oh boy were there more. I found 13 total!!! We have 7 tomato plants, so there was plenty of leaves for these little suckers. The only consolation was I found one that was already dead.

They really ate a lot of leaves on this plant.

Above is the top of the plant, and here is the rest of the plant. See the difference?

Leaves and then no leaves.

So word to the wise, if you have a garden, watch out for The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

All about my lil' Anna!

Time to talk about little miss Anna. She's getting bigger, smarter and cuter than ever! :) I just love this little girl. She is so funny and silly and loves to laugh and have fun. She's still in her independent stage, but I think we're used to it and know how to cater to it.

Here she is painting for the first time. This was probably a month ago. She had so much fun. Dan put one of his shirts on her, so her clothes wouldn't get dirty. I got this little easel over a year ago for $10 off of craigslist. There is a chalkboard on the other side. She painted another time afterwards and made a stroke mark that looked like a moon. And she said, I make moon! It's hanging on our fridge now and when she sees it, she points out the moon that she painted.

Such concentration!

A few weeks ago, we ventured out to try potty training her. Let's just say she's not ready. She went through 9 pairs of underwear the first day. She liked sitting on the potty and "thought" she was going potty. But when she had to go pee, she would just stand there and say, I go pee-pee and Mommy, clean up! We tried, but we'll just have to postpone it for a bit. But doesn't she look so cute, reading her book?

Sometimes, she just likes to be silly. She purposely puts the bucket around her neck and then wants us to come and get it off.

She does like corn on the cob! We had it for dinner and she wanted Dan's, so he gave it to her and she ended up eating about half of it.

Last Saturday, we hit up a bunch of garage sales and got some really good deals. Dan found these kind of plastic links for 25 cents. I really didn't want them, because I knew they would end up everywhere, but oh well. Here Dan made her some necklaces, bracelets, arm bracelet things, and some anklets. She loved it.

Our best find was this playhouse for only $15! I overheard the owner tell another lady she would take fifteen for it. I quickly said, we'll take it!!! You gotta be quick with some of these garage sales. :) Anna LOVES her little house. We also got a little tykes chair at another sale for $1. I looked it up online and this house is usually like $200 new!

Anna's other new love is this plastic food. This is almost all she wants to play with lately. It's so cute to see her pretend to eat it, cut it, drink it, etc.

She may or may not be picking her nose here. :) I tried to get the picture of her playing with them, but as soon as she saw the camera, she got up.

Lately Anna has become more attached to me. She'll only want me to do something for her and not Dan. Or she wants me to sit down and play with her, when normally she doesn't care if I'm there or not. It's kind of weird and hard sometimes, because I'm pregnant and honestly sitting on the carpet is not that comfortable for me. I feel bad telling her no sometimes, but it's just hard. Or she wants me to pick her up a lot. The last two times I've taken her to nursery, she wants me to come in and play with her, when normally she just forgets about me and starts playing. So, I'm reeeeeally hoping this wears off before the baby is born, but it probably won't and hopefully we'll all be okay. Luckily, she's okay if I go somewhere and doesn't cry or freak out, because that would be hard.

Bedroom additions...

Our bedroom is still a work in progress, but doesn't that always seem to be the case? It sure does with me. The last little while, we've been able to do a few things, I've just been slow about blogging about them. First of all, we FINALLY put up the molding around the bathroom door. We had it for probably 2 months and it was just sitting there, waiting to be put up. I would have done it myself, but I needed Dan's help, so I had to wait for him. :)

Here's a little before shot of the door, without trim or a door handle.

(And before I got our dresser).

And now with molding! Much better, don't you think?

My next little project was made with Goodwill finds. $3 for the board thing, and $1 for the letters. I turned this, into....

This!

Yeah, so um, the bow is kind of messed up. I still need to fix it, but it's kind of hard with the way it hangs. All I did was wrap the cloth around the board and hot glued it. Then I hot glued the letters on, stapled the ribbon in the back and there you have it.

Next, I finally got our wedding picture up. I had it up before I painted our bedroom, last November and haven't put it back since. This wall was bare and now it finally has some stuff on it. The red plaque says Together Forever. It's a vinyl decal I got at Michaels for $1 on clearance. The board it's on, was a Goodwill find (shocker, I know) and I think I paid $1. It was originally blue and said Boy on it. I just had Dan spray paint it red for me and put on the vinyl. Of course I put the vinyl on upside down, so the thing to hang it on, was on the bottom. Dan kindly drilled a hole in the back so I could put it up with a nail. I cut out our initials with vinyl and put them on little mini canvas things. They were on sale for like 88 cents each at Joanns. I still need to add something to them, either a border or some swirls or something, because they are a little plain. But I'm finding in my pregnant state, that some things are good enough for now. :)

This was taken before I put the vinyl on the canvases. Still looks kind of bare, but better than nothing!

Our room is coming along. There are still little things I want to do, but it just takes time and finding the right thing to put up.

Here are a few cute pictures of Anna. The last two Sundays, I actually fixed her hair! I put it in little pigtails and she looked so adorable. Her eyes are closed here, but it's one of the better shots I could get of her hair. She wouldn't stay still.

She's just too precious!

I kind of wished I had tried sooner to fix her hair, but it's taken a while to get long. She wasn't born with a ton of hair, so it's been a slow process.

Faux Wainscoting anyone?

Well, this week, we've been working on our kitchen. I've been wanting to do a few things to make our kitchen look nicer. One of them is the faux wainscoting. This seems to be the new big thing to do out in blogland and I really like it. One of the blogs I follow did it in her kitchen and that gave me the idea to do it in ours. Here is the link that I based this project of off.

Here are some before pictures, that I took last summer when I painted the kitchen.

I loved the paint job at the time and still do, but the bottom part has always seemed kind of bare, like something was missing.

So, let's introduce a little bit of faux wainscoting, shall we?

It's basically just painting the bottom half of the wall white, adding molding in the middle and then putting up square molding.

I love it! I love how it just instantly makes the dining area look more classy, more put together, etc.

If you looked at the link, where I got the idea from, she explains how to space the squares and stuff. We bought the trim at Lowes. Dan's parents were very kind to us and gave us a Lowes gift card for both of our birthdays. So we really didn't have to pay for this project, which is always nice. :) I did something I've never done before and bought the paint at Wal-Mart. I got the cheapo walmart brand. The paint in the kitchen is flat and a gallon of flat paint is $7.77 at walmart, as compared to $15 at Lowes. I decided to try it out and it wasn't bad at all. They color matched the white, to the white that is on our floorboards, so it would be similar in shade. I also got another gallon of red paint and painted another wall red, that I'll show you later. I did notice that the red paint seemed kind of runny. I don't know if it was because it was cheaper paint, or because they had to put more tint in it to make it red. I didn't really notice this with the white paint.

I started off by measuring where I wanted the middle piece of trim to go and taping it. Then I painted the wall white. Dan cut the trim for me. The thicker trim came primed, but the trim for the squares wasn't, so he primed them with spray paint, then I painted them. And it wasn't very fun. Probably because I'm pregnant and had to sit on the tile floor and paint them and I did it later in the evening and was tired. There were also small crevices that on the trim, so I had to make sure the paint got in there. Also, I wore a mask when I painted, in case anyone is thinking I'm crazy for exposing my unborn child to paint fumes. :)

Here is all that trim that I painted.

Then we put up the middle line of trim. I'm very grateful for Dan's help and know how when it comes to cutting and measuring the trim. We then measured how far apart the squares would go and Dan got his nail gun out and we put up the squares. That took a while and little Anna was up and wanting to be part of the action. At one point, we were both kneeling down in front of a square, trying to level a piece of trim. Dan had the nail gun in his hand, I was trying to hold a piece of trim on the wall in place and she comes up, puts her arms on our shoulders and starts swinging herself! It was so cute, but annoying and just one of those moments where you have to laugh about the whole thing.

So, after all the trim was up, I filled in the nail holes with putty. Another annoying and not fun project, but it had to be done. I then sanded the covered nail holes and painted over them and then it was DONE! Overall, this wasn't a terribly difficult project. It probably cost about $70 or so. All we bought for it was trim, paint and some new outlet covers which are 44 cents each. This price will obviously vary depending on the size of wall you're doing.

I love it and am so glad we did it!

Our Growing Garden

Our garden has done very well this year! When we left for vacation in Utah, it was still pretty small. When we came back two weeks later, it had exploded in growth! We were amazed. Here are some pictures I took a few days ago.

Here, we have basil, arugula, and some tomato plants. In the back we have corn. Dan decided to experiment with the corn and just plant it in the dirt that was already there. They did well, but have since stopped growing, so they're not as tall as the other ones in our other garden. They are growing corn, so it will be interesting to see how they turn out.

Here, we have corn, tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, onions, a strawberry plant, a pepper plant, and basil. The lettuce finally stopped producing. Well, it actually starting flowering and I kept picking off the flowers, but then the lettuce wasn't as big and some parts of it were bitter. So we just let it go. We had spinach too, but we just didn't eat that much of it and it started flowering too, so we just let it go. Hopefully, because we let it flower, it will come back next year.

Dan wanted to grow a pumpkin this year. It's grown a ton, but hasn't actually started any pumpkins yet. There are a lot of blossoms on it, so I'm not sure if we'll actually get a pumpkin.

One of our tomato plants is on fire and producing like mad. Unfortunately, we thought we had a big boy tomato plant, but I guess it was mislabeled, because the tomatoes are yellow. I'm not sure what kind it is exactly, but they're not quite as flavorful as red ones. They're still nice and juicy and have that nice garden taste, as opposed to grocery store tomatoes. We have 5 or 6 other tomatoes plants that have a ton of little green tomatoes on them, so soon we'll be swimming in tomatoes. I'm hoping they'll all be nice and ripe at the same time. I'm planning on canning them. We shall see how that plan goes.

Anna's 2nd Birthday!

Well, Anna turned two! I can't believe my little girl is two already. Two years ago today, we brought her home from the hospital. Aaaaahhh, so sweet...

Well, we had a birthday party for her the day before her birthday. I ventured out and made her cake out of fondant! And it actually turned out. I was very happy because I was nervous about trying fondant. There is a blog I follow that has been doing tutorials with how to make and use fondant. I made what's called marshmallow fondant and it was really easy. Here is the link for the blog where I got the recipe from. Here is the link for all the posts about cakes that have been done so far, starting with the most recent post.

I decided to go with green and pink for her colors. I was contemplating using brown, but wasn't sure if I would be able to dye the fondant brown very well. And her bedroom colors and pink and brown, so I need to get away from those colors for a while. :)

Here are the pink and green flowers I made the day before. They look kind of like stars, but they're not.

Side note: If you're making fondant decorations, I guess you're supposed to make them before hand, so they have time to dry a bit before you put them on the cake. Well, if you're putting them on the side or wanting them to stand up on the cake.

Here is the cake, just after I covered it with fondant. Surprisingly, this wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. This was the step I was most nervous about, but it was easy.

The decorated cake!

I would have liked to have done more, as for as decorations go, but seeing as how it was my first, I decided simple was better. To get the flowers to stick on the sides, all you do is get the back a little wet and stick it on there. You have to make sure it's not to wet, otherwise it will just slide down. I was a little wary doing this and was expecting to have to fix them later, but they stayed, so I guess I did it right.

A better view of the cake.

I just have to say, that I was very blessed when it came to purchasing the cake pan and cake stand for this party. I don't have a round cake pan and really didn't feel like shelling out money to buy a new one. So I went to Goodwill, hoping that would have one. It took a little searching on the shelves full of stuff, but I found a very nice one for $2! Then, a few days later, I realized I needed a cake stand. So back to Goodwill I went and walked back to the aisle where it would be and lo and behold there it was. I grabbed it as fast as I could. It was $6, a little more than I would normally pay for something like that at Goodwill, but it's a really nice one. For those of you who shop thrift stores, you know you can't got expecting to find something specific. It's really hit and miss. So, I know the good Lord was helping me out there. :)

Here is a banner I made.

The birthday girl with her cupcake. I really wanted to make her a little mini cake, but just didn't have time with everything else I needed to do.

We also had a pinata! I love this shot of her. Priceless. :)

Then this one makes it look like she's just in awe of it.

I love this one, because her dress looks so cute. (The dress I only paid $1 for).

All the kids had fun trying to hit it.

All the kids getting their loot. We never give Anna candy, so she didn't really understand the significance of what was going on. She just got some candy and held on to it, while the other kids were filling up their bags. :)

Some of our guests: Katie and her daughter McKenna.

I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked.

Anna, opening her presents. It was funny because as time went on, we had more and more kids around the coffee table, looking at what was being opened.

Anna loved all of her toys! Thank you for everyone who came.

Here is one of the toys we got her. She LOVES it! The tunnel is her favorite part. She keeps trying to get Dan and I to crawl through with her.

Overall, it was a fun party. Anna had a lot of fun and I hope everyone who came did as well!