Little Brother

Exactly one week ago today we welcomed the fifth member of our household - a LITTLE BROTHER!!!!   I know this comes as no surprise to any of you as this baby has been the only thing I have been able to blog about over the past few weeks:)  I am happy to say that all is well and he is a healthy little boy.  The family is adjusting well and he is very loved by his parents and his big sisters!

This one loves her little brother!

It took this one a few days to warm up to the idea:)

I plan on taking a few weeks off from blogland but am sure I will still be checking in from time-to-time.

Breakfast with Peyton

Sometimes I tend to over think things and today I had one of those moments.  Peyton (The Youngest) has seemed to be a bit more sensitive than usual over the past few days and I made the assumption that it was probably because there has been a lot of focus on the arrival of The Baby.  You see Peyton doesn't really handle anticipation very well (as I am sure every other 4 year old is) so I thought that she may be a little nervous about what is going to happy over the next few days and what it will be like at home after The Baby arrives.
So, I decided to take her out to breakfast at one of her favorite establishments, Tim Horton's, for a little girl time.

Once she had settled in with her Vanilla Dip Donut I got serious with her and tried to talk to her about how she was feeling. I asked her if she was excited for the baby to come and she answered "Yes".  I asked her if maybe she was a little nervous too and she answered "No". I asked her if she was concerned about Mommy being in the hospital and she answered "No".  So finally I explained to her that she seemed a little sad over the weekend and I was wondering why.  Her answer - "um, Mom I was just a little bit sad because Lainey was home and I couldn't play with her toys."

Seriously!!!!  Here I am all concerned that Peyton is feeling a little unsteady because a new baby will be coming into the house and all she was upset about was that her sister was off from school for 3 whole days and that she didn't have reign over all of the toys.  That's sisters for you:)

Homemade Granola Bars?

So I am totally considering jumping on the Whole Foods/Real Food bandwagon but having two (soon to be three) young children makes it a little more difficult. But one thing I am going to try is to cut down on the amount of pre-packaged snacks we eat. One of our staples are chocolate chip granola bars, we average about a box a week. I thought these would be a pretty easy thing to make at home but after scouring the Internet, most recipes I found resulted in a more crunchy bar and I knew The Girls would have no part in that. So I decided to try my hand at modifying a recipe for oatmeal cookies and see if I could create something from that. I was actually quite happy with how they turned out and Lainey liked them too. Matt tolerated them and Peyton didn't like them but she wasn't a very big fan of granola bars to begin with.

So, here is my recipe:

3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup chocolate chips

1)Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl beat applesauce, brown sugar, granulated sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Beat until combined, scraping sides of bowl.
2) Beat in vanilla and eggs
3) Beat in as much of the flour as you can.
4) Stir in remaining flour.
5) Stir in rolled oats.
6) Pour into a greased cake pan and bake for 30 minutes.
7) Remove from oven and sprinkle with chocolate chips.
8) Allow to sit for 5 minutes or long enough for chips to melt. Spread chocolate evenly over the top.
9). Cool completely before cutting.

*I started by cutting ours into bars but decided that 1-inch squares were a better answer.
**modifications I made from the original recipe were to replace butter with unsweetened applesauce, I used 1/2 the amount of brown and granulated sugar, and I use whole wheat flour instead of all purpose flour.

I'm not sure where these would stack up against the packaged bars in terms of sugars but I do feel better bout cutting out some of hos preservatives.

Next step-homemade nutrigrain bars. Anybody have a good recipe?

Bathrooms

I am sure that you have all heard me complain talk about our bathroom situation before.  It is not necessarily ideal but we are making it work for now.  Technically our house has one full and two half baths.  One of the half baths is in the basement and, frankly, I am afraid to walk into it let alone to anything else.  The second half bath is upstairs and as much as I love that guests get a full house tour every time they have to use the bathroom, a downstairs guest bath would be nice.  The full bath is actually a master bath which is really nice and works well for us while the kids are young but could get a little inconvenient when the kids get a little older - not to mention that we do not have a bath tub anywhere in The House which has pushed us to get a little creative for when we will be bathing the baby:)

So I am going to ask you to cut me some slack here and let me dream a little bit....because we do plan to put an addition on The House.

Our addition will be off of the first floor of our house and I would like it to include a Master Bedroom, an additional bedroom which will be for The Boy, and a den which will also serve as a guest room when necessary.  What this will also do is give The Girls' the full run of the upstairs.  So what do bathrooms have to do with this?  When the addition goes on I would love for The Boy's room to have its own bathroom, for there to be a beautiful Master Bathroom as well as a third full bathroom which will serve as our guest bathroom.  Upstairs, I would love to knock down the wall between the bathrooms and create one big fabulous bathroom for The Girls.  Yes you heard be correctly 4 FULL BATHROOMS!!  And I want them to all have their own personalities so I have been collecting ideas as I come across them

Here are two of my favorites:

Inspiration for out Guest Bath down stairs. I love everything about it, especially the horizontal boards on the wall and the wall-mounted faucet.





Inspiration for the Master Bathroom, I love that the shower and toilet are separate from the sinks.  I would also love the the entrance to be two big ol' sliding barn doors - how much fun would that be?


For The Girls' bathroom I using IKEA as my inspiration - very sleek and clean lines but with lots of color.

For the Boy's bathroom I almost want it too feel like a public bathroom (is the weird?) with a very simple wall mounted sink and lots of subway tile.

In four years I will let you all know how it turns out:)

Packed Bag

Baby and I are all packed for The Hospital (just in case).  Seven more days!!!

Letters to Lainey

Brace yourselves because I am going to talk about Pinterest again!  In addition to all of the wonderful things I talked about yesterday, there are also a lot of wonderful links to articles you can find on there.  One that seems to have captured the attention of friends I am following is this wonderful article titled The Truth About Santa.  I have to say that when this situation comes up at our home, I hope that I can handle it as wonderfully as this mother did.  However, that is not what I necessarily took from this article.  What I loved about this article is that the author frequently exchanged letters with her daughter.  It made me think about when I was growing up and how much easier it was to express my feeling and emotions if I wrote them down.  This got me thinking about our oldest daughter, Lainey, and how even though she is still young she may run into situations in the future that she my have trouble talking about or finding the appropriate way to express her feelings.

So, I decided to write her a letter.  In addition to writing her a letter I decided to go out and get her her very own stationery set (gotta love the $1 bins at Michael's).

We have since exchanged a couple of notes that have been filled with light hearted 1st Grade topics and a few drawings.  I plan to hold onto these notes forever and I hope that we continue to exchange letters - maybe not every day and maybe not every week but I would like to keep the tradition alive just in case there is ever anything Lainey needs to express to me but just can't seem to find a way to express herself by talking, she always knows she can write it to me in a note.

What kind of special things do you do with your children? 

Thank You Pinterest

As far as Holidays go, I love Christmas (which most of you probably figured out if you read my blog in December) and I also love the 4th of July but, as for all the other holidays, I am pretty much a Grinch.  Totally okay with me but not so much fun for my kids.  So, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Pinterest for saving our Valentine's Day.

By the way - are you n Pinterest yet?  I am addicted!  I started using in just as a way to collect ideas for The House but now it has turned into so much more:)

So anyways, our Valentine's Day fun started when our oldest daughter's teacher sent home a note about the upcoming Valentine's Party at school and it mentioned a "mailbox" for all of the kids to collect their Valentine's in.  Up until this point, she had always made them in school so I started to worry a little bit because I couldn't even begin to think of what we would use to make a Valentine's Day Mailbox.  Until I was thumbing through different Pins and came across this great Cereal Box Valentine!  Shoe boxes we didn't have but Cereal boxes we did - perfect!
You can see the tutorial here.  I think they turned out pretty cute:)

Then it was on to making breakfast a little more special with some heart shaped cinnamon rolls.  In the tutorial you will see that the cinnamon rolls are made from scratch.  That I did not do, I just used pre-packaged cinnamon rolls and rerolled them into heart shapes.  The best part, The Girls were so excited about it!

Finally, I felt like we probably needed one more sweet treat for such a sweet day.  I used a recipe from The Pioneer Woman for Chocolate Cookies which I cut out in heart shapes, dipped in white chocolate, and covered with red sprinkles.  I think The Oldest will be so excited to find two of these in her lunch today!

So, I have to say that I am quite proud of myself today.  Not necessarily super-mom material but much better than what I had planned a week ago!