MoMo is turning 4!

My sweet littlest girl, my Hawaiian born baby, is turning 4 tomorrow!
Lilia entered the world at breakneck speed, and has rarely slowed down since.
She was born on our 3rd anniversary. (Luckily we have 2, so we celebrate our on the other one now!)
In the past year, she has switched her obsession with robots to a fascination with all things kitten. Pink is still out and Yellow reigns supreme in the Kingdom of Princess Lili Momo. She adores riding carousels and bouncing at Monkey Joe's. Donuts are still her favorite food. Lollipops are the candy of choice.

So here are some pics of Momo  - at the hospital, one year, two years and three years.
We're not doing anything big for her birthday. Just a visit from her favorite cousins for a birthday play date today and family celebration tomorrow.

The Return!

These are pics of my youngest daughter taken a few months ago -

Notice the glorious curls! I am not ashamed to admit I adored those curls! We even had a name for her hair - Crazy MoMo Hair. The curls were perfect and lovely and needed not a speck of attention. People stopped us almost daily to exclaim over her hair. Also notice my use of the past tense. Because there was "An Incident". After "The Incident" we had this-

"The Incident" involved her big sister with a pair of tiny scissors from my knitting kit and a request from MoMo. My reaction? Well, lets just say the neighbors probably thought someone had died or something equally horrible had happened when they heard my scream.
"The Incident" was traumatic for me (much more so than for MoMo).
Of my 5 children, only one had curls like I had when I was little. When my curls were cut by a friend playing Beauty Shop, they never returned. My hair is wavy and full, it even curls a bit when it is long with coaxing, but it never again was curly. I pretty much resigned myself to the idea that my MoMo's curls were gone for good.
Fast forward to this morning, I gave the kids a bath. Usually hubby does baths in the evening and brushes their hair after, but the kids were up late last night watching Alladin, so I did the bath this morning. They were brushing their teeth and I was getting ready to brush their hair and I noticed this -

THEY'RE COMING BACK!!!!! (insert me doing a dance of joy, here)
I feel a little guilty for being so attached to these curly locks. I can't help it. I love 'em.
Apparently when Jeff brushes her hair after the bath he has been straightening the curls. No more brushes allowed!

Defining My Style - the Pinterest Method

I am somewhat addicted (ok, seriously addicted) to Pinterest. I can get lost forever looking at other people's boards and pinning and repinning cool stuff from all over the web, lots of it is stuff I would never have come across on my own. It can be a real time-sucker sometimes, but it does have it's benefits.
For me, the biggest benefit is giving me a more solid idea of my style in decorating, fabric, and clothing. I am one of those people who has a difficult time when decorating or putting together a wardrobe. I tend to like a lot of styles and I buy things on a whim, rather than with a plan. It works on occasion, but most of the time it means I end up with a hodge-podge of stuff that doesn't relate or I end up making a decision based on the mood I'm in at the moment, not my real sense of style.
A great example of this is my blue dining room and yellow living room. I bought the paints on a whim. They don't work. I looked to my boards. Here are a few of my favorite decor and color inspirations

From the boards I can see that I love white. I also like aqua/turquoise blue and yellow.But they are not working in my home right now.

So what's a girl to do? I analyzed my boards for solutions.

My dining room will stay blue. It's a great blue that I am drawn to over and over. It doesn't work because the furniture in the room is all mismatched wood. I plan to lighten it up with painted furniture and rustic accents. I'm also going to throw in a bit of red. It shows up often with the blue. (should be easy with Valentine's Day coming up.) A touch of yellow may appear as well.

My living room is another story. The yellow has to go. I like yellow, but in my boards it shows up as an accent with white and gray. Not the main event.
We are planning on moving the tv out of the room and since when the tv goes downstairs, the ancient tv cabinet is going to go as well. that will expose even more of the color, and it's just too much, so it will be painted white or gray. I am debating keeping a little of the yellow on a focal wall by taping off a design when I paint. We'll have to see how that idea develops. (hmmm... A pale gray room with a yellow/gray/white chevron accent wall... Is chevron over?  IDK, but I love zig zag quilts so it's not over in my book... I just might try it.)

In between the dining room and the living room is the hall and kitchen. I want to bridge the rooms with white accented with punches of color. I have to get creative in the kitchen since we are renting and can't make any permanent alterations, but I am thinking about chalkboard vinyl and fabric to make some fun but easily removable changes.

Hiya Luv, You Changed my Blog, I Luv Ya For It

Bei Lexian- Owl Lover 2011 calendar

Recently I received an email notification that  I needed to moderate a comment I had received on a blog post I wrote about a year ago on a blog I no longer use.
The subject of my post - "Why I Am A Blogging Failure". I read and approved the comment, then I went back and read the post. Here is a bit of it~

I really would love to have a sweet blog and a few readers. I have ideas, really I do! But I never seem to be able to create time to blog on a regular basis. Why? You may ask, well, here is what I have come up with-

My excuses why I am a failure at blogging-

1. I do not wear a camera around my neck 24 hours a day, nor do I have an area of my home set aside for perfectly lit photos. Apparently lots of beautiful photos of every moment of my blissfully creative and beautiful days is a prerequisite for blogging.  (Ok, there is so much contrary to my life in that last sentence it is laughable)

2. I have active inquisitive children who have a passion for pushing the envelope and on frequent occasion, ripping the darn thing to shreds whenever the occasion (ie: mom’s not watching!) presents itself.

3. I am not perfect. I am incredibly imperfect, and not in a quirky bohemian way that makes people smile, but in a my kids watch too much tv, eat too much fast food, talk loudly in church and I end up yelling more than I should and my house is a cluttered mess of toys, dirty dishes, scattered shoes and laundry begging to be put away kind of way. (yes, clean and folded clothes, you are my nemesis…) Mrs. Cleaver I am not.

4. I do not crank out gorgeous handmaid items with blinding speed and astonishing creativity.  I look a lot, too much in fact.  I start a few. I finish even fewer. I forget to take photos along the way. Add that to I am slow and a perfectionist. = Not a lot to show.

5. I am tired – a lot. My 1 year old does not sleep through the night. My 3year old’s nap does not coincide with her baby brother’s naps. My 5 year old is vehemently opposed to napping. My husband works crazy hours.  I have a teenager who thinks 10pm is tragically early to go to bed.

So, that’s about the size of it. I’m sure I will think up more excuses. Maybe someday I will actually have a blog people will read, but most likely not. 

I realized that it pointed to a lot of the things that were still holding me back from blogging. Mostly things that are up to me to change or just not worry about.
I also realized that the voice in the posts sounded much more like me. I was not writing for anyone else (since my blog had no readers) so it was just written from the heart - to me, from me.
The comment I received, the one that headed me in this new direction, was from the very amazing, lovely, and incredibly wise Gina, who is the creative and talented woman behind the awesome blog, Hiya Luv .
She said~

hang in there luv. blogging takes time. don’t put pressure on yourself-I did that at first and it was a major fail for me. Let topics flow. If you are experiencing something with your child-good or challenging-could you blog about it? probably. do you have adorable pics of your family-probably. start off with a post or two like that. something you find joy in. Then visit other blogs-comment and keep going back to comment. Get engaged and people will visit you-keep writing. It will come…:)gina

Man, she was so right.
For some reason I thought having a focus would help me with blogging. I thought "My favorite blogs are craft blogs. I love to craft! I'll have a craft blog!" And so I went about creating what I thought would be a craft blog. But then I felt pressured to do it. To craft. And I am one of those ornery types who just HATES to feel pressured to do things. I will dig in my heels and resist doing it. So I was not feeling inspired or excited. I was just getting cranky with my lack of progress.
So here goes.
This is a blog about stuff I love.
Some of it will be really cool (I promise) some of it will be funny, some of it will be just for me.
You can read it. or not.
It doesn't really matter.
It's for me.
(though friends are nice!)

P.S. Thanks Gina! You are amazing! And wise - very, very wise.

Laundry Takeover

My kids have way too many clothes. 

This leads to me waiting way to long to complete the laundry chores. Mine usually gets backed up at the "put it away" stage when I inevitable discover that the drawers are too packed to fit all the clothes in an organized way.

The truth is I don't buy the vast majority. We are the lucky recipients of hand-me-downs from a multitude of cousins and my oldest daughter (who is 24 and a complete fashionista) loves to buy her little siblings adorable outfits that mom would never go out and purchase (like from J Crew's Crew Cuts) It all adds up to LOADS of clothes. The pic below is what my bed looked like when I was 3/4 finished with sorting and folding the long neglected laundry that was hiding out in my closet.

Now I hate doing laundry. Mostly because it is so never ending. So in order to bring more peace and simplicity into my life I am looking for a way to cut down on the ever expanding laundry pile.

Hubby and I don't generate all that much laundry, but my kiddos, that's another story.

I am trying to determine the minimum number of outfits my kids can get away with. Yes, it will mean I have to keep up with the laundry much better than I have in the past, but it will also kill a lot of this laundry clutter that permeates the house.

So how much clothing do your kids have? Are you also drowning in kids clothing on a daily basis? If you have a system for controlling the madness, what is it?

Project Inspiration

What I'm working on -
Since I stripped my house bare of decor now that Christmas is packed up, it seems the right time to change things up and create some new decor for the house. The project I'm working on today is inspired by something in this picture -

Pottery Barn

Of course there is little I don't love about this picture - you could show up at my door with any Pottery Barn room and I would be beyond thrilled (I'll be happy to give my address to anyone willing to do this!)
I'll be back with the finished project and my cheap and easy tutorial!

So much for keeping one resolution! I Need A Do-Over!

So I had resolved try and post every day or at least every other day, but sick kiddos kept me too exhausted to think for a couple of days and I do not yet have a backlog of ready posts to whip out at a moment's notice. But a resolution is meant to be broken and remade with new resolve - right?
So~ here is my Monday weekly menu, on Tuesday.

WEEKLY MENU (1/03/11 - 1/09/11)

MONDAY - Sausage and egg burritos with orange slices

TUESDAY - (Hubby in the kitchen!) Shepherds Pie

WEDNESDAY - Zuppa Toscana (I use this version - easy and beyond yummy!) w/ salad and bread sticks

THURSDAY - Roast Chicken with rice and vegetables

FRIDAY - Friday Open House Dinner at my parent's (almost every week!)

SATURDAY - Spaghetti with meat sauce salad and garlic bread

SUNDAY - Chicken fried rice with stir fry vegetables

~ Have a great week!

Keeping Track of 2011

These are some of my favorite calendars from Etsy sellers

1st row (L to R)
1. Everyday Is Special - 2011 Calendar  by handz - Amazing color and design to brighten your space all year. I pretty much love all the prints offered here!

2. 2011 Wallhanging Letterpress Calendar  by Brooklynbookbinder - Soft and lovely to add serenity and style to any space.

3. 2011 Modern Design Calendar 8.5 x 11 size printable PDF  by Pinkroses 1220 - Each month is an amazing work of art all it's own.

2nd row (L to R)
4. Mini Wall-hung Calendar Featuring Original Illustrations  by rayofsunshine27 Charming illustrations in a small size - Adorable!

5. 2011 Weekly Planner  by Nicopapergoods - I just love the clothesline design and the color! The laundry is endless in my house! At least this would remind me to do it and make me smile daily.

6. New Year New Plan - Printable Planner  by onesixtyeight - A whole home organization system you can print out as often as necessary. I am always on the look out for a new system to keep my family running smoothly!

3rd row (L to R)
7. (ACK! I somehow lost my info on this wonderful calendar! I'm searching for it!) - The colors would cheer up any space space, the resolution reminder would keep you on track AND it's printable, so if the resolution changes, just print a new one and get going again with new resolve.

8. Digital mini January Calendar  by rochepapierciseaux - Sigh... I just love this. Tiny, portable loveliness

9. 2011 Printable Clipboard Calendar  by Fibersandtwigs - Looks great and it's practical. Plenty of space to write important info and great illustrations each month. Add in that it's printable and we have a winner!