Pup-cakes

Happy birthday to our cutest and most annoying puppy!

April 2015

April 2016 - 1 year old!

To celebrate, I decided to make pupcakes! It was totally last minute, so I found a Pinterest recipe with all the stuff I already had and whipped them up to cook during dinner. After bath time - time for pupcakes!

 

All the pupcakes got a simple peanut butter cream cheese frosting. The puppies' got some sausage and a dog treat. The humans' got chocolate kisses.

Kaden almost tried the wrong pupcake - but the chocolate are human approved!

It's snout-licking good!

Animal Wrangling

J goes out of town for work a lot.

Usually he's back within the day or two, but it's become a tradition to get K a stuffed animal while he's gone - most often, a Ty "Beanie Boo" - essentially what took the place of those Beanie Babies that were all the rage in the early aughts. But with big, glittery eyes.

Imagine at least one trip a month (sometimes more!) over the past 3 years. That adds up to a lot of Beanie Boos! Add to that the other stuffed animals kids get as gifts or prizes, and we've got quite a menagerie on our hands. K is never without the Boo of the Moment, and for awhile we would cart the whole crew back and forth every few days from mom's to dad's house. As the group grew, it became more difficult to manage, so we stuck to just one at a time, and the others were split between houses.

Even with the Great Beanie Divide of 2014, we still have a TON of stuffed animals. Maybe it's lingering trauma from the time I found all my stuffed animals in the donate pile, or maybe the fact that she legitimately loves each one of these things, but we can't bring ourselves to cull the herd yet.

So I needed some tricks to keep them all off the floor (and out of the puppy's mouth). We started with a big, pink bucket. It worked well to keep the majority of the toys in an area the approximate size of a big, pink bucket. It did not work so well to find Jinx or Ollie on the night she wanted to sleep with a black cat or pink polka dotted octopus. So I tried Pinterest and found the perfect solution:

Shoe hangers. They worked perfectly as "Beanie Boo Apartments", and she loves deciding who gets to sleep next to whom. It also lets her see everyone, so she can rotate through some of her old favorites as well as new friends. It filled up quickly, and I've added another beside it since I took this photo (there's a bit of an overlap to accommodate the handle, so we're currently 7 x 6 with a few spaces left to fill). 

I went for the classic hammock-in-the-corner for the larger, more sentimental animals - easily pulled down if requested, but out of the way when not being used. The Power Ponies are lined up on the dresser and ready to have their hair brushed, and the big, pink bucket is still in use for big stuffies that get more action.

Gosh, this kid has a lot of toys. 

So far, it's worked. Since October, her room has been the only one in the house that is consistently clean. She gets a quarter for making her bed each morning - if her toys are picked up. But honestly, the combination of having a place for everything to land with a puppy that will chew on toys / shoes if you're not careful has really made that plan stick. 

Any other tips to control the clutter? We did do a gentle culling during the move, and we'll do another at birthday time (I'm going to try one-in-one-out method) but there are still way more toys out than I'd like.

 

Headband Hanger

When K was a baby, her aunt made her this adorable bow hanger: 

It worked fine for most of her bows, but unfortunately we had no way to keep her many, many headbands together. I tried (photo above) to fold over the ends of the ribbons and secure them with bows. Unfortunately, a) she has more headbands and b) as soon as she wanted one of those bows, the whole thing fell apart. 

Since we love the hanger, I wanted to do something that would enhance its usefulness, without being a permanent change (just in case I screwed it up royally). So I went to my ribbon stash and found a pretty good match for the existing green polka dots! 

Option 1 was to put a third strip between the other two. This seems like a more natural fix, since the ribbons aren't exactly the same. Unfortunately, it also means the headbands will be covering the left and right ribbons. 

Option 2 is to add the new ribbon in front of the original. The ribbons wouldn't match, but it would leave more space for hanging headbands. 

I got started looping the ribbon, using hot glue to hold the headband loops in place, and figured I'd make the decision between option 1 and 2 once all was said and done. 

In the end I went with... option 1. It seemed like the easiest way to attach the ribbon without making a permanent change. Just a little hot glue to the back...

And here is the finished product! I may change my mind in the future about the 3 ribbons, but for now at least her headband collection has a home!

A Bit of Polish

We've had a problem recently. With hair brushes. 

K hates to have her hair brushed or combed in any way. Unfortunately, curly hair left to its own devices tends to become dreadlocks if you don't get a brush through it now and again. I blame this for the reason that brushes keep managing to disappear in our house (she swears that she's not hiding them)... 

So when I went on a new brush run earlier, I thought I'd try something to make hers a little more personal - maybe it will stay around longer.

I was afraid to use my paint pens, since I was pretty sure it would chip off. When I was a kid, my mom wrote my name on everything in nail polish. So why shouldn't I try the same? I looked up a My Little Pony font and copied it onto her brush with some purple polish (and glittery top coat). I did try some paint pen highlights to clean up the edges. With a leaky pen, leaving it alone might have been a better idea, but here's the finished product: 

She loved it, and wanted to make one for me. Unfortunately, my new brush is black - so I gave her my old brush (the gel handle is leaking) and some sharpies. Here's her masterpiece - she wanted to point to our name for the picture: 

I guess now that means I can't get rid of my old brush, either... 

Since last time...

Hey, guess what takes up a lot of time when you could be writing blog posts?

Getting married... honeymooning... moving in together... holidays... busy season at work...

... but since I don't really have that many readers, I guess it doesn't matter that I've skipped a few (or 6 months).

I'm finally starting to settle back in to regular life, so hopefully I'll be back here soon!

Mental Note:

When you move, the first thing you should do is change your address on the wedding registry. 

Sincerely, 

The Girl Who's Been on the Phone with Macy's for 30 Minutes and Counting

Three angles

There are approximately 3 angles from which this house looks clean / unpacked:

Sitting in the front room, looking to the back. 

We don't have a dining room table yet, so bonus clean!

The living room. 

This was supposed to be the dining room (according to the floor plan), but then we bought the biggest sofa known to man and needed more wall space. 

The kitchen.

All the stuff is in cabinets, so this was the first "clean" room in the house!