Simple & delicious dinner

So I have had a can of biscuits and some ground beef that had to be used today. I had no idea what to make with it and decided to ponder while my husband cooked the ground beef. I was going to make enchiladas, but we JUST had them on Monday. So I decided on what I am calling, burger bombs. :) What you need: -1 lb ground beef (really half a pound would be enough) -4 slices of american cheese -1 can of 8 Biscuits (I used Pillsbury homestyle) -1 cookie sheet (next time I will be adding bacon, tomatoes and a few other veggies)

First you are going to brown your ground beef, unless you are me and then just have your husband do it! :) After it is fully cooked you are going to flatten out all the biscuits, place half of one slice of cheese in the middle and spoon on two- three spoonfuls of the ground beef, like shown below.

After everything is in them, fold all the sides up and pinch them together like this...

Then flip it over so the seam is on the bottom, like so...

Put them in the oven to bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Serve with beans, chips, fries or whatever else your little hear desires! We just ate them on their own. Your finished product will look something like this...

Oh, baby gate.

Lots of us have kids or dogs, unless you are like me and have both! I hate for our kids to be in kitchen area. There is way too much that can go wrong. I also did not want them in our breakfast nook either. (I use it as my sewing room) The problem with that is, it is at a weir angle and pretty big in length. We looked at a few different baby gates, but I was just not going to pay $100 or more for a baby gate. SO when I came across a tutorial for a fabric baby gate made out of PVC, (at http://sewmanyways.blogspot.com) I was excited, until I realized it would not work how she did it. (I do not have stairs) So I have altered it a little bit to mount it to our walls! What you need: Sewing machine or no sew adhesive Fabric (I used a curtain I had laying around) PVC- Will depend on your length (we bought 5 pcs of 5ft & the joints to connect them, 4 corner joints & 2 T joints) PVC adhesive Brackets, screws & anchors Handsaw First I measured, on the outside corners of the walls and divided it in half. (I divided it because I wanted a bar in the middle for extra support from our kiddos) Then I measured how tall I wanted the gate to be. (I wanted mine to be stationary and not more, so I made it a comfy height for me to just step over)I marked all the pieces where they needed to be cut and then cut them. After that I jointed them together with the PVC adhesive.

This is what they look like all put together...

I measured how big I would need the fabric round it to be and then added 1" for my seams and little extra room.

I pinned and started to sew. I sewed three of the seams together, left one of the short sides open and slid the gate into it. I had my husband hold the gate up while I sewed the last side shut. (thinking on it now, I should have used Velcro on the last side so you can take it on and off for washing, but oh well.) I then cut slits in the fabric in three spots on each side for the brackets to slide through. Mounted it to the wall and LOVING it!!! It cost us a total of about $20 and 30 minutes time! What a deal! Good thing about PVC is it can be any shape you need it to be as well!

DIY Soap Bottle

Okay, so I love the Dial hand soap and I love the container the soap comes in. Problem is, they are not very pretty to look at. I decided to go ahead and try and spruce it up some. (since I just refill it anyway) You will need a few things: The soap bottle, Scrapbooking paper, scissors, mod podge and a pen.

I laid the bottle down on the paper and traced the bottle. (just to get the shape) Then I cut it out a little smaller, but big enough to cover the old Dial sticker. After that I just mod podged it onto the soap bottle and then put a coat of mod podge over it to seal it. (this will keep the water from getting in it and ruining it. Anyway, it came out SUPER cute, but I will let you judge that for yourself :) It is a super easy and cheap way to spruce up a little bit!

My husband even noticed it and asked where I got it. He was stoked when he found out I made it with stuff laying around the house ;)

Time flies when you are having... fun?

Okay, okay. I know I have not blogged anything in FOREVER. We have had a busy past 6 months or so! First thing first. We welcomed another BEAUTIFUL baby boy into our family! Our "little bear" came about 4 weeks early and spent some time in the ICU. You would never know looking at him now that he EVER spent any extra time in the hospital. He has been such a blessing to us all. We thought that our 2 year old would have some trouble adjusting but well... Look and see for yourself...

He is smitten with his baby bear. He always wants to hold him and talk to him. It is seriously the sweetest thing I have ever seen. As for our oldest, he loves little bear as well, but this is not new to him, he has done it all once before. Now that I have had the baby and things are getting back to normal around here, I will have more time to blog again... Maybe. I will be posting a few new things tonight... and they are EXCITING :)

A kick that can bring such joy!

Well, Daddy felt Baby C kick for the first time tonight. The joy on his face made me smile. It is always exciting when I can first feel it, but I think for Daddies it is just as great. I think it lets them know that there REALLY is a baby in there and we are not just getting fat ;) I can't wait for the boys to feel it. B is at the age that he will be really excited. I found a picture of one of his ultrasounds and showed him and he was pretty excited. W is still to young to really get it, but none the less he will be excited I am sure.

Anyways I have not been on here in a while, so I have not blogged about the sex of baby #3 yet... We are happy to say we are having another little boy! Wish me luck guys. Our boys are such boys too. They love sports and wrestling and dirt and bugs and all that good stuff! Honestly though I can't wait for them all to be about 5. That is when the real fun will start. Dirt bikes and four wheelers! Ahh that is my kinda fun :) I know it will be a tough few years in the beginning, but I am still so excited for it. I am well out numbered now but I know all four of my boys will take wonderful care of me and make sure I am always safe! That in itself makes me smile :)

That is all for now, this Mommy is tired!

New Ottoman?

Okay, so I recently saw a picture of a coffee table that someone turned into an ottoman. I thought it looked simple enough and I have been wanting one for a long time but was not willing to spend the money that they cost on one. I decided to give it a try and it came out wonderful! The kids are loving it and the corners do not hurt as much when they bump into it anymore! You will want two people to do this, it helps get everything tight and done faster. I have a wonderful sister in law that came over and helped me with this project. You will need a few things for this project...

- a coffee table
- 2 1/2- 3 yards of whatever fabric you want to use
- a glue gun with glue sticks
- foam (I used 2 1/2 inch, and got just over 2 yards of it)
- quilting batting
- fabric scissors
- heavy duty stapler with staples

Okay so, I did a good job and took a before picture, aren't you proud?! So here is what our coffee table looked like when I started.


First I took the foam and cut it to fit on the table everywhere that I wanted it to be softer and glued it down with the hot glue gun.


After all the foam was attached I rolled out the batting and stapled it in place. Make sure you pull it tight to give the ottoman a nice clean look.


The final step is to measure out your fabric and staple it on just like you did the batting. Make sure you pull the fabric tight as well. You don't want any lose fabric that can get snagged. Plus you want it to have a nice tight finished look. We thought it would look even better if you added the buttons like most ottomans have, but since I have small kids I did not want them to pull them off. So this is what our finished product looks like. We love it and so do our kids!

Chalkboard paint oh my!

So during our kitchen remodel and the way we are changing the bar our baby gates will not fit anymore. That being said I decided to make our kitchen more kid friendly. I painted our fridge with chalkboard paint and plan on doing the same to our dishwasher. First, let me show you a before picture. (I am horrible at remembering to do before pictures)

The paint for it was priced reasonably at Lowes. It came in a can big enough to cover 100sf of space. I prepped the fridge by scrubbing it with hot water with a little Dawn dish soap in it. I wiped it dry and taped off all the places I did not want to be painted. It took 3 light coats of the paint with drying in between each of the coats. I got some black spray paint to put on the spots I wanted black but were not going to be used for writing on, like the inside rubber sealer. All in all it took less than a whole day from start to finish. I let it set over night before I wrote on it as well. Now you can see my "tuxedo fridge" :)

It's a roller coaster of emotion...

Words from the emotional pregnant lady, DO NOT remodel your kitchen while you are pregnant. I feel like it would be an emotional ride when things go wrong for anyone, multiply that by 100 and that is what the situation was in our house today. I would like to think thus far in the kitchen remodel, I have been pretty good about keeping my emotions to a minimum. I believe they all caught up with me today! As I sit here and think about it now, I still feel like crying was the way to go. My breaking moment was at about 16:30 when we tried to put one of our drawers in with the new sliding track we bought and had spent over an hour putting in and they ended up not fitting. (not for all of you doing a remodel, test one before you do them all) It made the drawers to wide to go in the cabinets. My heart just sank. At that moment I just felt so overwhelmed. I knew I had to pick the kids up soon and that the reality was, my counters would not be going in. I also had to call and make sure Lowes would even take them back since they had all been opened and installed. Good thing, they did :) I really thought I was going to be a blubbering mess of a pregnant lady at the return counter, so I was glad when they gladly took them back! The one good think that came out of that, is the ones we needed were $5.50 cheaper and we needed 10 of them! So that was a little money that could be put somewhere else. It seems to be one small thing after another, either going wrong or just not matching up the way it should, and yes I am aware that this happens during remodels. Still does not make me feel any better as I am still washing dishing in the kids bathroom sink. I also know that this will be well worth it in the end, as of now, I am questioning that. I feel like an emotional train wreck at the moment. We have some amazing friends that helped us with what has been done so far, so I really don't want them to think I am not thankful for them being here or anything like that, because lord know we would not even half half of what is done right now finished. So thank you to those wonderful friends, they know who they are ;) So as of right now, we have no idea when these counter tops will be going in. They are decently heavy and Phillip will not let me help him with them so we will just have to wait until a few guys can come over and help him do them. On a better side note, our chalkboard fridge came out wonderful! I will be blogging about that and how easy it was, also how much fun the kids are having with it now :)

The difference paint can make!

This was a small little thing that made a HUGE difference! We just ripped out the wall paper, added some light texture and some new paint! Made a world of difference on our dining room. Here is what it looked like before...

You can just see it in the picture, but it is really the best one of the before that I have :/ Anyways, on to the how. For taking down the wallpaper I found the easiest thing was putting a cup of fabric softener in a spray bottle with a cup of warm water. I sprayed the entire thing and let it sit for about an hour, this allowed the wallpaper to just peel right off. After it all came off I lightly sanded the entire room, wiped it down with a damp cloth to get all the dust off. For my texture I used 1 cup of wall putty and 1 1/2 cups of water, mixed it together really well and used a sea sponge roller to roll it on. It is a nice a light texture, nothing to heavy. We let that dry for about a day then primed all the walls. I would recommend priming after doing texture because sometimes, depending on the color of paint, the texture can soak up the paint and you will have to do more coats. We painted about an hour after priming since the primer dries so quickly. Here is a picture of the after...

Here is a picture of what the texture looks like close up.

Dream house, or just good investment?

Most couples our age who are looking for their first home go out looking for something already finished and fairly new. If you don't know us, we are far from the "typical" couples our age. We like to joke that we are 40 years old stuck in bodies of a 25 year old. Anyway, back to the house. We went out looking for an older house that would need some work, not anything "major" (a lot of people would say what we have been doing is major) just some updating for the most part. We were at the point of giving up and just renting when we came across the house that is now ours. At first look, it was not a looker. It needed A LOT of updating. It was built in 73 and every bit of it showed that year. I knew it would take some convincing my husband because as soon as he saw wood panel walls, he would be out and there was a ton of wood paneling. This is what we stared with!

Big surprise, I talked him into it ;) Needless to say our first project was going to be taking down the wood panel and putting up sheetrock. Neither of us had ever worked with it before but knew we were not willing to pay someone $3000 to do it for us. So we researched it but still didn't feel 100% about doing it alone. Good thing my family has done professional sheetrock before! So we had some people come over and help us figure out what we were doing. We put up sheetrock, textured and painted the whole living room in about one weeks time. This is what we ended up with! Plus it only cost us about $400 in materials!!

We not only saved a lot of money but we learned something most people have NO idea how to do! We also had to replace the sheetrock in two of the bedrooms in the house due to termite damage. We did it though, for a very small price. Of course there were lots of sweat and tears involved. You always think during the process, "why didn't we just pay someone to do this?!" at the end though, we were always very happy we did it ourselves!

We also had an added room that was on the house when we bought it that we had to take down pretty quick since it was hurting the foundation. Go figure, they went cheap with it and did not do it right. We did however hire someone to do this. We felt like that was too much of a task to tackle and it dealt with the roof. However the guy underbid and decided midway he was not going to finish it, awesome right?! Luckily, my Dad has done that kind of work as well and came and showed Phill how to finish it up, including re roofing and all! So proud of him :) Here is a before and after of it!



The bottom picture is what it was before, the other two are the after shots. Sadly, we have not done anymore work to the backyard. After the kitchen remodel (what we are doing now) is finished, this WILL be the next project so the kids can play back there instead of in the front yard!

Ready or not, here comes THREE!

Three, that word never really scared me until recently. I will soon have three of my little munchkins running around my house. I am not really sure why it scares me, maybe the thought of having three boys (since we are not sure what the baby is yet) playing WWE all day everyday in my living room, the never ending bumps and bruises, or maybe all of the above. I know that once #3 gets here we will get a routine and everything will fall into place. I think more than anything it is the unknown of it all.

I am now 12 weeks along in this pregnancy. This is the point where people start telling me, "oh the morning sickness will stop soon" and other such nonsense! This is my THIRD pregnancy, I think I am aware of what goes on by now. I know it stops for most, but not all. Please don't feel the need to tell me the facts, I have heard them twice already! Another thing is when they ask how far along I am and then immediately say, "WOW, you are big for 12 weeks!" I will laugh politely but I mean really?! What pregnant lady wants to hear how huge you are?! I am aware that I am big, the fact that NONE of my clothes fit tells me that. This is my third kid and from what I am told it is like this for most, so I am taking that and running with it! :) I would also like people to stop telling me, "Whoa, you know what causes that right? HAHA" Of course I know! Stop acting like this is my 19th baby, 3 is still a "normal" and perfectly acceptable number of kids to have.

Well #2 just woke up from his nap, so the rest of my crazy pregnant lady rants will have to wait until another time!