Modge Podge is my Best Friend

We have finally unpacked enough that I'm to the point I can start crafting again.  It has been like two and a half months!  Do you remember these letters I made for Lucas's nursery?

Well, since Lucas is growing up and out of his crib, I decided his room needed a make over with more boyish stuff - less baby stuff.  I was debating if I should save his letters in a box somewhere to remember how they were for his nursery forever and ever, or if I should re-cover them with some different paper to go with his new room colors.  Apparently Lucas decided for me.  He got a hold of the letters and tore the paper off, and broke one of them in the process.

 No big deal, I just glued the "S" back together, and then I made my first craft in our new home.  When I first did these I didn't show you how, so I decided to take pictures this time around.  It is SUPER easy.

You need to go buy some letters from the store, pick out a cute paper to use, or a variety of paper like I did the first time, and the last item you will need is modge podge or some other decoupage medium.  Trace the letters on the back of your paper, be sure to place your letters backwards so that when you cut out the paper the pattern side will be facing out.

 Next, take the modge podge and glue the paper to the letter.  I actually used photo sticks the first time I did this, and you could probably even use double sided tape if you wanted.

 And now you have cute letters to put anywhere you want.  Stay tuned for more pictures of Lucas's room when I actually get around to finishing everything.

The next craft I did also included modge podge.  It's one that has been very popular on the internet for a while, but I'm just now getting around to trying.  I made my own coasters.  Our cups get a lot of condensation on them now that we don't live in the desert anymore, so we decided we needed coasters.

And my last craft I worked on this week does not use modge podge, but it does use my favorite of my crafting supplies, my silhouette!  We had a big empty wall that I wanted to hang one of our pictures on, but the picture that once was huge in our small apartment, appeared to have shrunk down to a 5x7 during the move and looked tiny on our wall.  So I had to create a photo grouping, and had to get new pictures and frames to go in the grouping.  I wanted one with our name for the top, so I just decided to whip one up with my silhouette.  I know it's not quite as fancy as some of the other ones I've seen, but it was basically free, so you can't beat that.

I have a whole list of crafts and decorating that I need to get done, so I'll continue posting as I get to them.  Next up will probably be curtains for Lucas's room.  Hopefully I will also have everything else done for the room so I can show pictures of the whole room.  It's looking pretty cute in my head, I just hope it looks good in real life.

Toddler Bed

Lucas slept in this last night.

We turned his crib into the toddler bed version.  So far he loves it.  He thinks it's fun to climb in and out of.  He could already climb in and out of his crib when ever he wanted, so we just decided to go ahead and take the front off so that at least now he won't break his neck trying to do it.  He got his foot stuck on his way over the edge one time last week and I ran in to him screaming his head off.

We'll see how he does with nap time today.  He slept just fine through the night, but nap time is always a different story.  It's light enough to see all the fun stuff he's missing out on.

Update: He just went down for his nap with no problems.  He climbed right into bed and rolled over to go to sleep.  I love this kid!  I think he's finally gotten back onto a normal schedule after moving and everything.  It was a rough few weeks for a while there.

Cake Bites

Look what my mother-in-law gave me!

There are so many amazing recipes in there.  Cakes bites are really good, and they are actually pretty easy too.  Dipping them is the hard part, and that's probably because I'm really bad at it.  I want to try these rosemary lavender ones just because they look beautiful, although I'm sure mine wouldn't actually look that good.

I made these raspberry cheesecake ones this weekend.  They are delicious!

A few of the recipes from the cook book are online here if you want to try them.  Or you can come visit me and I'll make you some.  :)

Fruit!!

I love fruit.  It is so yummy, healthy, and pretty.  The other day I made some fruit pizza, and it was delicious.  The only problem with fruit pizza is you want to get a variety of fruit to go on the pizza, but then you only use a bit of each so there's leftover fruit.  I'm really bad about using up fruit before it goes bad so I've been thinking up a lot of ways to eat all the fruit this time around.

I had this bowl of fruit with my lunch the other day.  It was very tasty, and since I felt so healthy eating the fruit, I didn't mind having some ice cream for dessert.

We had french toast for dinner last week, and I served a bowl of fruit with that as well.  And now on to the real reason for the post (since I'm sure you guys have seen a bowl of fruit before), I made mini fruit pizzas.  Just like a regular fruit pizza, but miniature.  Aren't they adorable?

Lucas Singing

I took this video in the hotel and I've been waiting impatiently to get it onto our computer and post it to the blog.  Lucas has been trying to sing along with the opening song to Curious George, and I got it on tape. I seriously laugh every time I watch it.  I think it's hilarious!  Lucas does not like to be video taped lately, so you'll notice in the end he wasn't very happy with me.  But that makes it funny too.

Unpacking

Moving has been an adventure and I'm really excited for all the fun new things we've been doing and will be doing in the near future. But I'll be honest, it has also been pretty tiring and emotionally difficult and I'm glad we've only moved once since Ryan and I have been married.

This is the moving truck with all our stuff in it.  That door is open to one of the crates, and we had four.  We had 180 boxes.  I don't know how we fit 180 boxes worth of stuff in our apartment.

 It was like Christmas getting to open the boxes and find out what was inside.

 What could this one be? It's so big.  Maybe a cheese grater? A food processor I didn't know I had?

 Oh, it's just a cup.  Maybe the next one will be better?

Nope, just another cup.  Man this is taking forever.
Look at that huge pile of packing material.  I think at this point I had only unpacked like 4 cups.

This one is my favorite.  A before and after.  No joke, this is the same thing just wrapped up.

Now I think I know why there were 180 boxes when we had probably 50 boxes worth of stuff.
Phew, one box down, only 179 left to go.  The packing material barely fits back in the box it came in.

We decided to flatten the packing material so it takes up less space.  This is the pile we have in our family room right now with 98% of the boxes unpacked.  That's a lot of paper.

Lucas thinks it makes a good bed.

New House

Yay!  We finally have my computer back again, and it has the internet.  I mean, don't get me wrong-there really wasn't a day that went by that I didn't have access to the internet-(yes, I am spoiled)-but it's not really the same experience as having my computer and my desk.  That last post was done on the laptop and I'm pretty sure it took me like 3 hours.

But now we are out of the hotel and into a real house.  We have been crazy busy these last few days getting everything moved in and put where we want it, but for the most part I think we're done and things are starting to settle down.  So far we LOVE it here.  Our new place is twice the size of our apartment and we're having so much fun putting things away and having a spot for stuff, as opposed to the floor of Lucas's room.  We have a nice big kitchen, a backyard, and space for Lucas to run around, (and he seriously does just run around for hours on end).  I feel like I'm a kid again and I've been playing house for a week.  I've already mopped the floor multiple times.  I'm sure it will get old at some point but for now everything is fun.

Now for pictures.  These are all of the house before we moved stuff in.  I'll post more pictures with furniture and stuff later once I've decorated and made things cute.  We're still renting so there's only so much I'm allowed to do, but I'm definitely going to spruce the place up a bit.

This is it!  We love having a garage.  And it's a duplex, so it's not that big, but it's still huge compared to what we're used to.

The family room.  We love having ceiling fans and a fireplace.

The kitchen.  I love that I can look out to the family room and outside to see what's going on while I'm cooking.

The upstairs hallway.  Lucas is playing with the door stopper thing.  He loves them and we've probably lost like 4 of the caps on them already.

Lucas's room, there's another room that looks basically the same that we're using for an office right now.

The master bedroom, bath, and walk in closet.  I am in love!

And here is the park that is literally 300 feet from us.

And this is for the engineers that read the blog, check out the little structure they have.  They start teaching the kids their ABC's and circuitry early here.

And this is pretty much how we all feel about our new home.

Parks

The hotel that we're staying at right now doesn't have any parks near by, so when ever we want to go to the park we have to drive.  I figure as long as we're driving to the park anyway, we might as well check out a new park every day.  We definitely haven't made it to every park here in Livermore, but we have been to quite a few and taken a bunch of pictures too.  Lucas has gotten really good at climbing.

Look at how serious his face is in this one.  He sticks his tongue out when he's concentrating.

To top off a week of checking out different parks, we decided to take Lucas to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Park Children's Playground.  This park was awesome and Lucas had so much fun, but the best part was the huge concrete slide.  Ryan and I took turns taking the baby down.

There were some cool wave sculptures for people to climb on.

There was also this cool looking snake thing that I wanted to get a picture on but Lucas was not a fan of it. 

Lucas's favorite activity besides the slide, was to chase birds around.  He probably did this for like 30 minutes straight.

We wandered around the park for a little bit more, and then we left to get lunch.

We decided we should continue our recent unhealthy eating habits and just get some Ghirardelli sundaes for lunch.  Delicious!