My Super Sweet Birthdy Gift

I recently celebrated my 31st birthday. Man I love birthdays! I love spending time with my family, and eating cake. This year on my Birthday my parents were out of town so we celebrated a couple of days early. We had an awesome steak dinner and my favorite cake in the entire world. I was also given a Joann's gift card and an Olive Garden gift card. Neither of these gifts were in my possession for more than 24 hours. The photo above is what I purchased with that wonderful Joann's gift card. These things are so awesome, and they even make the same noise that scissors make in scary movies. They cut through fabric like a warm knife cutting through butter!

Beach Trip

For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know breaks and gaps in my postings are nothing unusual. Usually these breaks come with no warning or explanation. However, this time I thought I would share. We took the kids to the beach for our first family vacation. We went to Galveston, Texas, and met up with family. My Aunt Rondia and DJ's brother Buddy both live outside of Houston, and we thought it was be a great opportunity to gather members from both of our families.

DJ, the kids, my parents, and myself decided to drive. It took us about 16 hours, and was an experience! WOW!

It was fun to spend time at the beach, and with family. The week was spent relaxing, eating yummy food, and sight seeing. It was hot in Texas and the humidity was ridiculous! We had a great time, but it feels so good to be back home and back to our routine. Miss O is excited about school and seeing her friends today.



On My Needles: A Knitting Update

I know, I know. This is the same project I was working on when I did my last knitting update. I must be the slowest knitter in the world! However, I have made a lot of progress. I was super excited when I reached the half way point and could start decreasing my stitches. The baby who is going to receive this pretty blanket is now three months old! I am only a little behind. My goal is to have it finished before her first birthday, but I hope it does not take that long. I have a bunch of projects waiting in line. Ok off to knit some more.

Sausage

 

Back in August my family and two others slaughtered a few pigs. DJ and the other dads went out to the farm to "take care" of the pigs. The pigs were then brought back to the house where they were skinned and butchered. I really wanted to share pictures of this with you guys, but was concerned they might be a little to much for some of my readers. If you guys are interested in a blog post about this let me know.
So now we have a freezer full of pork, and we decided our first project with it would be sausage. DJ and I started this kinda late in the evening, so we only ground it instead of using casings. We made about 15 pounds of sausage total. We now have sweet Italian, spicy Italian, and garlic sausage. We are a little afraid to try the spicy sausage, because when measuring out the meat, I misread the scale!! OOPS! I thought I had 10 pound but it was really only 5 pounds, so the seasoning is going to be a little heavy!
We waited to start this project until the kiddos were in bed, but Miss O kept coming up with excuses to get out of her room. She really wanted to help us, so I promised that she could have some of the sausage for breakfast the next morning. She liked that idea.
The next morning I cooked up some of the garlic sausage an sprinkled it in with our scrambled eggs and then I chopped up some tomatoes from our garden and added those as well. It was so yummy.

 

Living Room Science

I can't believe I forgot to blog about this. I was looking back at pictures from the Summer and I ran into these!

During the summer months we have these creepy looking black and red caterpillars all over our front yard. Miss O is always so excited about them, and has to point everyone she sees out to me. I have always discouraged her from picking them up and disturbing them. Well, one day we had a bucket on our front porch, and Miss O was really into the caterpillars that day. I had to get on to her a couple of times for messing with them. When I would tell her to leave them alone and not touch them, she would say "I'm not, I'm just touching them with this stick" Well, I later walked by the bucket and noticed that there was a caterpillar in the bucket, and assumed Miss O had put him in there to observe him. We watched him for a couple of days and noticed that he was not moving, then he turned into his cocoon. We brought it inside the house and placed it on the bookshelf. I then found a little cage to put him in. However, we were in for a big surprise, because when we went to put him in the cage, we noticed that the cocoon was empty!!! We found the new butterfly hanging out on a basket full of puzzles and flash cards! Miss O 's friend TJ was over at the house, so he got to see and hold the butterfly as well.

This gave us the perfect opportunity for a teachable moment. After DJ and the kids released the butterfly outside, he pulled up some videos on-line about caterpillars turning into butterflies.



Lemons

I recently got a box of lemons from Bountiful Baskets. Now, I have a weakness for the add-on's that are offered with Bountiful baskets and I sometimes buy things without knowing what I am going to do with them. This 25 pound box of lemons is a perfect example of this. The box sat in my kitchen floor for two weeks or so before I finally decided to do something with them.

I juiced a bunch of those pretty yellow lemons. Thank goodness for my Kitchen Aid mixer attachment!! Then, I decided to preserve some. This was a fun project. I sliced the lemons to open like flowers in my hand, and put some sea salt in the center of each before layering and squishing them into a jar. Now they have to ferment for 8 weeks. I am so excited to try these.

Then after all that sticky work of  juicing and slicing, Miss O and I decided to sit back and enjoy a fizzy water with Lemon slices

Vanilla Mint Lotion

 

So DJ and I did something very exciting the other day that I can't wait to share with you. We made lotion for the first time ever! This is a project we have been meaning to try for a long time now. We have been talking more and more about making many of the products we use instead of buying them.  We are interested in simplify our lives and our budget by relying less on stores for the things we use.We decided to use this project as an experiment to see if we are really ready for that kind of change in our lives.  We already make our own cleaning supplies, so we had some essential oils already on hand.

This recipe came from The Rhythm of Family, by Amanda Blake Soule. We decided on this recipe because we already had all the ingredients.

15oz. distilled water

2.5oz beeswax

6oz. coconut oil

12oz olive oil

2T fresh mint

40 drops of vanilla essential oil

I was so surprise to find out how easy it was to make my own lotion! Of course I had to try it out that day. It is super thick so it only requires you to use less, and it smells so good. This recipe makes so much that we were able to have one for use now and one for the closet for later.

We have decided that as we run out of our chemical filled store bought products, we will definitely be replacing them with our own products! How exciting! I have already been thumbing through my books and Pinterest to find recipes to try.