White Noise in a Can

Visiting family for the holidays, with kids out of their normal routine and home comforts. One thing we can still bring with us is the familiar hum of white noise. Our just-about-4-year-old still loves the sound during nap time (yes, we still got it!) and bedtime. We like to think it drowns out surrounding noises too, for a longer nap.

The key ingredient here for making a White Noise in a Can is this small white "turn anything into a speaker" Rock-It 2.0 portable vibration device (yes, despite the description, it's a speaker, people) which I received as a conference promotional item. It uses two AAA batteries and plugs into a music source. (They even have a Rock-It 3.0 with built-in rechargeable battery.) The "rock-it pod" sticks to something and vibrates it to make noise, so the chocolate-covered-cherry can becomes the speaker!

You probably have an old MP3 player lying around. Smartphones seem to have made these little guys obsolete. Upload a white noise MP3 file to the player, and put it on the repeat-one play mode. Our favorite track is a vacuum cleaner sound we found somewhere on the web for free.

Ingredients:

1. Rock-It 2.0
2. MP3 player
3. Chocolate-covered-cherry can (cherries consumed)
4. White noise MP3 track.

Yes, they have smartphone apps for white noise, but during that nap or bed time might be just the time you want to use your phone. And when traveling, you may want to keep your precious smartphone battery life too.

You can also power the Rock-It 2.0 via USB cable. Shown above, an optional USB AC adapter fits nicely in the can too, so you don't need to use as many batteries!

Less Messy Baking With Kids: Peppermint Fudge Cookies

I love to bake, and I love my kids, so logic would suggest that I love to bake with my kids.

And maybe, one day, I will.  But right now, baking with Anna is usually a 10 minute activity until her attention turns to something else, leaving me with a half-finished product and a trashed kitchen.  I admire her enthusiasm and desire to do everything by herself when it comes to getting dressed in the morning or cleaning up her room, but with baking, independence usually leads to mess and more mess. Did I mention she likes to eat flour?

I have come to terms with the fact that, while imprecise and messy, baking with Anna can be fun if I focus on the process rather than the end result (a much needed lesson for me in many arenas).

When she asked me to bake Christmas cookies together last weekend, this recipe immediately came to mind.  I received this years ago from my MOPS group, and wanted to share it with others who love the idea of baking with kids more than the reality.  These cookies are quick, easy, hands-on, and relative mess-free thanks to the minimal amount of measuring.

Ingredients:
1 box of Devil's Food Cake mix
2 eggs
1/2 cup of vegetable oil
1 box of red and white peppermint crunch Andes mints
sprinkles (optional)

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine cake mix, eggs, and oil.

Roll into tablespoon-sized balls with your hands and place on ungreased cookie sheet.

Optional step:  At this point, feel free to reshape your kid's slug-shaped dough wads into round balls when she's not looking.

Bake for 8 minutes or until the tops of cookies start to look crinkled.

While the cookies are baking, unwrap Andes mints and try to keep your kid from eating them all.

Immediately after baking, place on mint on top of each cookie.

 After 5 minutes or so, swirl the melted mints with the back of a spoon.  I was hoping for a more swirly red and white frosting look, but they ended up kind of pinkish.  Oh well.  We threw some red sprinkles on there at the last minute to Christmas-ify them a bit.

That's it!  Thirty minutes max from start to finish and only one bowl, spoon and measuring glass to wash.  Merry Christmas and Happy Baking!

Redemption for the Second Born: A Room of Her Own

In the months leading up our firstborn's arrival, I pored over nursery bedding, studied paint swatches, researched cribs, and literally obsessed over getting her room just perfect.

In contrast, four months AFTER our secondborn arrived, we shoved our clothes into one side of our bedroom closet, crammed a pack 'n play into the other side, and called it good.

(first she slept in the bouncy chair)

(then in the pack n play)

Oh, to be a secondborn.

Then we moved into a new house!  To assuage the guilt of banishing Tess to sleep in a closet for the first year of her life, I wanted to create a really awesome room for her in the new place.  Without spending much money.  And with limited snatches of time.  The previous occupant was a 14-year-old boy, so it is taking some work to transform the room from a teenaged-boy-cave to baby girl sanctuary, a process that very well might take months.  Or years.

But for now, here is project #1, the refinishing of an old dresser.

I picked up this cute little dresser at our neighborhood yard sale, where it was offered for $15.  After some discussion, I ended up paying . . . $20.  Seriously, I might be a cheapskate, but I am the world's worst barterer.

Anyhow, the little dresser was so cute, but someone had decided to paint it eggplant and forest green.  Seriously?  I'm not sure which decade this color combo was hot.  So we read this awesome tutorial on painting old furniture and went crazy.

First came the sanding.  This took forever with our little sander and my hands are vibrating just remembering it.

Then with a half-empty bottle of spray primer, some old ceiling paint from a prior plumbing disaster, and some new drawer pulls from Home Depot, we transformed it into this:

Now it matches her crib, and one day we'll re-do the little dresser that we use as a changing table to match as well.  Every time I walk into her room and see this dresser, my heart does a little happy dance knowing that soon my little girl will have a room as sweet as she is.  Plus it sure beats sneaking into the closet to get clothes without waking her up every morning.

Crocheted Flower Hat 2: the baby sister version

I wrote this post several months ago, but I forgot to post it with all of the craziness of buying and selling a house plus travel and work.  Then all of a sudden it was summer and fuzzy winter hats and mittens were replaced by sunhats and sunscreen!  Alas, it was hard to let go, but we are full-on into cold weather again.  Once I made it through the denial stage, I realized that I truly do love fall, with its autumn leaves, hot drinks, hearty soups, and of course, warm fuzzy clothes:




At 9 months of age, baby Tess (above) almost had as much hair as Anna had at birth (below).  Almost.



But it's not quite enough to keep that little noggin warm in these cold, breezy days.  So with the leftover yarn from Anna's hat, I whipped together a little matching beanie for Tess.  I used a spiral pattern rather than crocheting in rounds and joining with a slip stitch, since I wanted to avoid the subtle "seam" that comes with crocheting in rounds.  I modified this pattern to make a hat that had some room for Tess to grow.  The spiral pattern gets a little funky where I start and end the border, but a well-placed flower motif hides that bit.



I couldn't get a good shot of the hat before Tess would pull it off, so I borrowed Anna's bear for a close-up.  Hold still, Baby Grandma Bear:

Happy Halloween!

This picture pretty much says it all.  Tess feels somewhat disgruntled at being made to wear a bumblebee costume for no apparent reason.  Candy has not yet entered her sphere of consciousness.  Anna, on the other hand, is overjoyed at her first trick or treating experience AND is happy to have her costume on correctly after her self-dressing mishap at preschool yesterday.

Life has been busy lately so we haven't been doing as much making/crafting/creating as we'd like, but we had a little fun making spooky foods for our old PEPS group's Halloween Party last weekend.

mushroom skulls

carrot fingers

olive eyeballs

Happy Halloween!

The Stool Stool

There was a time when it would've seemed strange to me to see a toddler scoot across the floor, poop underneath the kitchen table, and ask for a cookie.

That time has long passed.

In fact, this scene unfolds pretty much every night around 5:30pm.  Just as we get that first bite of steaming food into our mouths, the resounding cry bursts forth from the littlest member of the clan demanding her potty chair: "Potty!  Poo-poo!  Potty!  Poo-poo!"

From all this dinner-time defecation sprung the idea for our next baby gear invention: the high-chair commode.  Basically an elevated potty chair with straps and a tray.  Or a high chair with a removable trap-door.  You get the idea.  We would call it "The Stool Stool."  Why not take advantage of the gastrocolic reflex to do a little double duty feeding and toileting combo?  Another weapon in the fight against the poop-ocalypse.  We have yet to work out the issue of offensive odors during mealtime (Jeff proposed a fan with charcoal filter), but perhaps in The Stool Stool version 2.0.

The Caboodle

Upon first inspection to the unsuspecting male, this might seem to be an ordinary, albeit pink, little box.  But any female born circa 1980 would beg to differ.  When I found my old Caboodle tucked away in a bathroom at my parents' house, I was instantly transported to the time of  scrunchies, crimping irons, and Aquanet hairspray.  Oh to be a girl in the 80s!  Home perm?  Oh yes.  Gravity-defying bangs?  You betcha.

I had no immediate use for my Caboodle, yet I couldn't bear the thought of throwing it out.  By happenstance, around the same time, Jeff let drop that he was looking for a storage bin for his soldering supplies.  But could he really bear to store his manly tools in a box that once held a collection of Wet n Wild nail polish?



Good thing he is secure in his manhood.  And I love him for it.