As I was making this card for my aunt today I was thinking that there was a time that I would make a card every week. I would really love to get back to that...and my card storage box definitely is in need of a new stash.
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G3: April
This month...
- We went miniature golfing.
- Mac went to Hawaii for ten days.
- We went on a hike.
- Sean and I spring break-ed.
- Mac successfully started wearing contacts occasionally.
- Sean came in fifth in his age group when he ran the Redlands Half Marathon.
- We made invitations for the cheerleading banquet.
- I was voted the cheer booster club president.
- Sean painted a piece of furniture bright yellow for me...and another piece of furniture the perfect green for me too.
- I rewrote my resume and was asked to interview at a school I dream of teaching at (this just happened late this week and my interview date isn't set yet).
- And Sean ran 120.48 miles.
Weekending...
This weekend there was the tiniest bit of scrapbooking. There was a fair amount of rearranging (including my indoor garden). There was some cauliflower cooked and tasted for the first time (Mac and I like broccoli better). And there was some $25 Craigslist file cabinet and John Deere Green spray painting.
Mail the darn things...
When the topic of cheer banquet invitations came up at a board meeting a couple of months ago, of course I volunteered to make them. How could I resist? I had an idea for them...and then the days and weeks quickly started ticking by. A 6:30am email from the booster board president last Friday arrived kindly checking on how the invitations were going and asking if I needed any help.
Which is the really nice way of asking, "When the heck will they be in the mail?".
We took my idea of making little fabric pouches in shool colors and started on Saturday night...I wrote a list of all the things we had to do for the three dozen invitations. There were twenty-one steps, but to be fair that last one was, "Mail the darn things".
And, thankfully, the whole list is checked off.
Cook//Make//Wish: 05
Cookies with potato chips in them? Yes, Please
I wish my little craft room was cleaned up and looking extra cute like this one.
I want to make stuff with lots of layers of paper.
Cook//Make//Wish posts include three recent favorites discovered via Pinterest.
A little something...
It's administrative professional's day and I just had to do a little something for the two women in the Sociology department office. So Sean baked a batch of cookies for me and I wrapped them up in fabric bags and layered together a little tag for each.
I wanted to say thanks for helping me get everything ready to teach my first class, taking the time to kindly answer any question, ordering me a pile of textbooks to choose from, running to put a note on my classroom door the day I got stuck in awful traffic, telling me about the secret routes to get around traffic and many, many more helpful things.
Ideas...
I mentioned my recent obsession with notebooks a couple of weeks ago. One of them happens to have the cutest sentiment on the cover...encouragement to keep thinking up new stuff.
Thankfully the first few pages are already full...mostly for school, but ideas nonetheless. Summer is coming up fast though and I am dreaming up of all kinds of ideas. I want to catch up on over a year of scrapbooking. I want to finish the three crochet projects that have been abandoned. I want to make a 100 of the recipes I've found on Pinterest. I want to rearrange a little, clean out a lot, and plan ahead. Oh and maybe exercise too.
I pretty much do this every time...come up with lofty summer goals and then accomplish almost none of them.
This summer is going to be different though. After all, it's written down in a cute notebook.
You can download a 4x6 copy of this print...Ideas Grow Here
What I'll be doing this week...
Using butterfly fabric to put together little administrative professional's day gifts for the Sociology department. Rearranging various household supplies since we finally painted an old locker from Mac's room that has a new home in our entryway...so happy to have cute new storage. And then cranking out three dozen cheerleading banquet invitations as fast as we possible can.
It'll be a little extra busy around here, but a week that includes reorganizing and crafting doesn't sound too bad to me.
What did we ever do?
Sean was asked to bring fruit salad to the baby shower he attended at school on Monday. I had a recipe for "Secret Fruit Salad" (which I happened to mention last week) from Rachel Schultz's blog saved on my breakfast board on Pinterest. The secret is two tablespoons of vanilla pudding mix which adds the perfect little extra amazing deliciousness to the fruit salad.
Something so simple made me marvel once again about the magic sharing collective that is the internet. I will never, ever tire of being inspiringly inundated with ideas whenever I want them.
Just write...
I have a big glass jar that holds blank note cards. I rarely send these, because most people know that I am pretty crafted obsessed and I always worried that they would think, "Why didn't she make me a card?"
Finally today I realized this is pretty ridiculous...who really cares if the cute card that arrives in their mailbox is homemade or not? So I dug into the jar to send off a thank you note to a friend that had us over for dinner last weekend and send a little letter to catch up with another friend.
I figured by the time I stuck on address labels, postage stamps and, of course, a little washi tape to seal the back there was an acceptable level of cuteness.
Wrapped...
My sister celebrates her eighth birthday this week, so we sent a bunch of watercolor supplies all wrapped up with rainbow yarn.
Then Sean had a baby shower to attend at school today for the teacher he shares a classroom with. Since he was the only guy attending, I made sure he walked in with an extra girly gift.
Detail oriented...
I often consider the details to be incredibly important and I usually manage to enjoy the most inane bits of whatever I am working on.
This weekend I worked on an overhaul of my resume. Or since I am in higher education I get to say "Curriculum Vitae", which sounds way more fun until you actually have to spend time on the darn thing. Font size, spacing, wording, margins, headers and footers changed pretty much thousands of times.
And I figured out that is way too much detail, even for me.
Command central...
One of the best organization items I have around this house are magnetic strips. I have one mounted under the cabinets in our kitchen to hold recipes up out of the way while we cook. I also have a couple on our "bar". This really used to be a wet bar with a never-used sink until my father-in-law took it out for us, but we still call it the bar for some reason.
This is where we hang anything we don't want to forget...coupons, receipts for something we need to return, the bracket Sean totally beat me at this year, tickets for upcoming events, my brother-in-law's heating and air business cards, invitations, and a sheet with our neighbors phone numbers.
The neighbor list gets used a lot...for instance last week I called Mr. Kelly to let him know I had some homemade split pea soup for him and we called Todd to ask if we could borrow his ax.
In case you have your own command central somewhere in your house I put together a neighborhood contact sheet to download...
That way you can quickly get in touch for super important stuff like soup and axes.
Write it down...
Last night, as Sean and I were out walking, I came up with an idea for a class activity. By the time we got home I had completely forgotten it...thankfully I was able to retrace our conversation to come up with it again.
Since I am trying to save all these thoughts and ideas, I am a little overly obsessed with notebooks and pens right now.
Which is completely a matter of practicality, right? Surely it has nothing to do with my neverending love of school supplies.
Cook//Make//Wish: 04
I wish we got enough light in our house for a fiddle leaf fig tree to thrive like it does in this awesome bedroom.
It doesn't exactly need to be cooked, but the secret ingredient in this fruit salad sounds ingenious.
I want to make something with watercolors...they have been abandoned for the last couple weeks.
Cook//Make//Wish posts include three recent favorites discovered via Pinterest.
Green Rice Casserole...
I found this recipe via Cook's Country which I learned about from my brother. A dinner side dish that included cream cheese sounded like a really good idea to me. I tried it out for dinner one night and only made half the recipe since it's just the three of us. We will definitely be making this again...and it'll be a great side dish the next time we are hosting a dinner.
Green Rice Casserole
Ingredients
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 onion chopped fine
Salt and pepper
4 garlic cloves, minced
½ teaspoon minced fresh thyme
4 cups low sodium chicken broth
2 slices hearty white sandwich bread, torn into quarters
1 ounce Parmesan cheese, grated (1/2 cup)
1 ¼ pounds frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
8 ounces cream cheese
2 cups long-grain white rice
8 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, shredded (2 cups)
Instructions
Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Melt 2 tablespoons butter in medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add onion and ½ teaspoon salt and cook until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and thyme and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add broth, increase heat to medium-high, and bring to boil. Cover and remove from heat.
Pulse bread, Parmesan, remaining 2 tablespoons butter, ½ teaspoon salt, and ½ teaspoon pepper in food processor until coarsely ground, 8 to 10 pulses; transfer to bowl and set aside. Combine spinach, cream cheese, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon pepper in now-empty food processor and process until smooth, about 10 seconds.
Spread spinach mixture in even layer in 13 by 9-inch baking dish. Sprinkle rice evenly over spinach mixture. Sprinkle cheddar over rice. Pour broth mixture into baking dish, cover tightly with double layer of aluminum foil, and bake for 25 minutes.
Remove casserole from oven, remove foil, and stir to redistribute ingredients. Return casserole to oven, increase temperature to 450 degrees, and continue baking uncovered, until all liquid is absorbed, about 15 minutes, Sprinkle bread-crumb mixture over top and bake until golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Let casserole cool for 20 minutes. Serve.
A wedding gift...
A friend from grad school got married this past weekend and we gave them a couple baking sheets off their registry. Of course I couldn't quite leave it at that, so I gathered a few of our very favorite cookie recipes and printed up a little stack of cards.
I also did this a few years ago when we gave loaf pans as a wedding gift. And just like last time, I made a PDF in case you'd like a copy of the cards... Download Cookie Recipe Cards
Fonts: Hello//The Only Exception
Recipes: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies//Sugar Cookies//Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies//Cookies and Cream Cookies
Spring Break-ed...
This week has included a hike, a late morning bagel and iced mocha breakfast in bed, using a Groupon to share a four course lunch, buying flowers for the backyard, making crab cakes at home, a trip to the beach, and eating cupcakes at almost midnight.
In other words, it was pretty much a totally wonderful week.
Sharing the wealth...
In my last order of absolutely necessary scrapbook supplies I ordered three each of several cute little paper bag styles, since they were priced individually. Instead I was sent three packs of twenty five. I called Two Peas in a Bucket to make sure they were all mine still, despite the enormous mistake made in my favor, and they said yes. So having seventy five bags of each style means I get to share a bunch with you.
I have put together twenty envelopes with 15 bags (three each of the five styles) to giveaway. If you would like to be in the drawing for an envelope please leave a "pick me" and please make sure that you have shared a current e-mail address that you check often. I will randomly select twenty people on Saturday morning and, instead of announcing everyone on the blog, I will email you directly to get your mailing address...hopefully this will help streamline the process a little.
I packed bananas into a backpack...
I don't hike. Nature scares me.
Sure, I appreciate it's beauty and all, however I also know how dangerous a simple day hike could be. I went on one at age fifteen with my dad, his girlfriend, my sister, cousin and a friend and it turned into a terrifying three day search and rescue for my dad's girlfriend and my young cousin. There was a freak early season snow storm and hundred mile an hour winds...it was the first story on the evening news, on the front page of the paper and they were not sure they would be found alive. Thankfully, they were okay, but spent months recovering from hypothermia.
Needless to say, I have barely gone out into nature since.
However, yesterday I was willing to fill a backpack with some supplies and wander down a trail (a whole half-mile away from our car) into the great open wilderness of a local regional park in order to see a grove of Redwood trees...
Honestly, I was still kind of (unreasonably) scared, but it was worth it. Since we live in the land of palm trees it was amazing to have a chance to stand in the dappled shade of actual trees. Maybe there is something to this whole hiking thing after all.
Light It Up Blue...
My sister gave us this blue light bulb a couple of weeks ago so we could participate in Light It Up Blue to bring more attention to Autism awareness in honor of our nephew Caleb.
The very first thing Caleb did when he walked into our house this past Easter Sunday was hug both Sean and I and thank us "for having them over for brunch"...he is just that heart-meltingly, wonderful kind of a person.
We are incredibly fortunate to get to walk each year in support of Caleb and everyone on the Autism spectrum. And now the sun is setting around here so it's time to turn on our blue light...
The worst photos...
Today we had exactly five hours of spring break together before Mac left with his Dad on a week-long trip to Hawaii. We decided to spend it playing miniature golf and winning tickets in the arcade.
The sun was really bright, it was super breezy, the course was pretty run down, the camera lens was way too zoomed in, the camera battery died, my phone said it was too full and I could not take more photos...it pretty much reached a comical level of impossible photo taking.
Regardless of my incessant need for documentation, we had fun together and that was the whole point anyway.
We also went miniature golfing together six years ago, the day before he left for another trip to Hawaii...I cannot get over how little Mac looked then. I guess that's why I want photos of everything...time just goes so fast.
