Cleaning Tips

First, a link to 66 All-Natural Cleaning Solutions (found via my wonderful sister E). This list of ways to clean using basic household ingredients included several ideas that were new to me.

Then, a few favorites from our house not included in the above list:

• Use a regular rubber eraser to get crayon off of floor tiles and walls.
• Baking soda (coupled with some elbow grease) to get soap scum off of the bathtub.
• When kids want to play with toys that come with many small pieces (blocks, beads, legos), put a blanket or sheet on the carpet and have them play on top of that. At the end, gather up the corners of the blanket and all the tiny pieces go into a pile in the middle for quick and easy pickup. I mentioned this idea to my mother and she pointed out that for even quicker cleanup you can designate a sheet for each toy and put the entire sheet (with the toys inside) in the bin at the end of playtime. Or you can get crafty and make special play mats for all the toys with nice ties to close them up. Maybe I’ll do that someday, but for now Emma knows that toys with small pieces may only be played with on the fleece Monkey blanket.

On the topic of crayon on walls, yesterday Johnny stopped coloring on his coloring page and started coloring on the wall. I told him he couldn't color on the wall and took him back to his coloring page, where I started commenting on how pretty his coloring was. He took my hand, walked me back to the wall, pointed proudly, and said, "Pretty wall!" Looks like we have a ways to go before he gets the whole coloring boundaries thing...

What are your favorite tried and true cleaning tips?

Picnic Table Talk: Staycation

In our eight years of marriage, Mike and I have gone on only two vacations that didn’t involve visiting family, attending weddings/reunions, or some type of work commitment (I wish we could go along on Mike’s work trips, particularly last summer when he “had” to go to Hawai’i for a week). The vacations? A three-day visit to a small Scottish town to celebrate our three-year-anniversary (we were living in Scotland at the time) and our less-than-48-hour honeymoon way back in 2001.

Fortunately, we always have a wonderful time visiting family, and we’re pretty good at staycations. We love finding local ways to have a good time, especially when these things are free. We spent several years as (by Western standards sometimes nearly literally) starving students and now live as a family of nearly-five with many student loans and a house that (lately) has been exceptionally fond of falling apart, so free is good. Here are a few staycation activities we’ve enjoyed so far this summer:

• A free family outing to the Boston Museum of Science last Friday, courtesy of the Highland Street Foundation’s Free Fun Fridays.
• A day out at Davis’ Farmland – not free, but we got discounted tickets through a friend and the kids had a fantastic time.
• Several trips to the Discovery Museums in Acton. We bought a membership last year and have gotten more than our money’s worth over the past twelve months. I do wish I had started bringing my kids to the science museum earlier – I assumed they were too young but took them there last week and it turns out they PREFER the science museum over the children’s museum (much to their super-geeky father’s delight, and well-timed since he had been expressing concern over their lack of geekiness relative to himself).
• A potluck BBQ for Mike’s coworkers and their families in our backyard (they don’t fit in our house)
• Our town’s 4th of July parade
• Celebrating my birthday with family
• Celebrating our 8-year anniversary (dinner out without children – quite the treat in our home!)
• Play dates and get-togethers with friends
• Playing outdoors

And some activities we’re looking forward to:

• More play dates – including a trip to the zoo with friends this Friday (free, thanks to the friends’ zoo membership!)
• Visits from family members throughout the summer (thanks in large part to the pending arrival of Baby #3)
• Mike’s birthday
• Playing outdoors
• Visiting local farms and our town’s new Farmer’s Market
• Birthday parties for a couple of Emma’s friends

Last, (hopefully) quite small, but most definitely not least, the arrival of Baby #3 – ideally within the next 30 days! I even washed the baby clothes and packed a hospital bag last night…

Wordless Wednesday: We Love Aunt K.

From worn-out jeans to toddler shorts

MATERIALS:

• One pair of old jeans
• scissors
• elastic (for waistband)
• thread
• sewing machine (optional, but highly desirable)

Place pattern pieces (or, alternately, an existing pair of shorts to use as a pattern) over jeans, avoiding the more worn-out portions of the garment.

Cut, allowing for seam allowances and the increased/decreased stretchiness of new material if using an existing outfit (the shorts I used were made of a woven material, while the jeans I was cutting up were the stretchy type). I’m keeping the outer seam of the jeans for these shorts, and so I didn’t allow for any seam allowance there.

Make any further adjustments. This pair of shorts was cut to be about an inch longer than the pair used as a pattern. I also made the rise slightly higher in the back and slightly lower in the front as you can see in the photo below. I considered adding pockets, but didn’t really want my son to fill them with anything so I left them off.

Stitch together and photograph the end result (optional). If you look closely, you will see that I am still learning how to properly use the blind hem on my serger, and that I lazily left on the yellow thread even though it didn’t match. That’s the beauty of making play shorts for an 18-month-old out of old clothes – you can practice sewing and be lazy about thread colors.

Johnny liked this pair of shorts first try, but got them seriously dirty, so no photographs of the model in them until I do laundry.

My first swap!

I just took part in my first blog swap! Beth from be the thread sent us this adorable dress for baby #3, and we sent off a travel felt activities kit with a felt board similar to this one, felt shapes, and some laminated geometric shapes activity templates. Emma was super excited when we got the package in the mail – she even had to help take the picture of the package contents, as you can see!

Emma Quotes

Looking out the front window:

Mama, our watching flower show, and there’s bugs everywhere!

 

On birthdays:

I want butterfly wings on my next birthday, and then I will fly.

 

Looking at a picture book featuring a feast:

Yummy foods! How do you get them out of the page?

 

Talking to Mike about a groundhog we saw that day:

Dad: Did the groundhog say hi to Emma?
Emma: No, Dada, groundhogs can’t talk, and they don’t know how to sign!
Dad: Are there any animals that do sign?
Emma: Squirrels sign “ball” when they hold their nuts.

She’s right – check out ASL for “ball” here.

Month in Review and July Goals

I had very simple goals for June, but I didn’t quite accomplish them. I did make one more maternity skirt (and was very happy with how it turned out), but I only made one pair of shorts for Johnny instead of the two I was supposed to. I do love the pair I made, and Johnny wears them all the time after an initial meltdown that I’ll attribute to trying to get him to model at bedtime. The good news is, my absolutely wonderful 14-year-old sister will be staying with us on the weekends from now until the end of the month (another sister gets her during the week). I’m excited to get to spend some time with her - and since, to quote Emma, “Kids love Aunt K.”, I’m thinking I might be able to get a little more sewing done.

The fact that my 18-month-old owns only two pairs of shorts would be more of a problem if we were having proper summer weather instead of near-non-stop rain and highs in the low 70s. I turned the heat on at least four times in June, and we never set our thermostat above 67...

Anyhow, on to annual goals:

Find places to keep all those odds and ends that get stashed in random places: Didn’t do much on this, but my house was clean for most of the month.

Potty train Emma: Another great month in this department. In fact, Johnny used the potty four times, but it seems to have been a temporary interest. I wasn’t too keen to potty train him this close to a major family event (addition of a sibling) anyhow.

Get Johnny to eat more solid food: He’s doing really well in this department, eating most of what the rest of the family eats. And his stomach issues seem to have resolved themselves, hooray!!!

Be more patient with cooking/baking that involves a rolling pin: Thoroughly ignored this month.

Take the kids outdoors more: June was a month of rain, rain, and more rain in Massachusetts. We did go outside, but my silly children dislike getting muddy for some odd reason, so they don’t like going out in the rain. We’ll have to work on that, particularly if summer weather doesn’t appear soon!

Get the kids to sleep through the night better: They are doing great at bedtime, but naptime has become rough… They only napped every other day for the past two weeks, and they didn’t nap Tuesday or Wednesday this week. Anyone have brilliant suggestions for getting toddlers to nap? They will lie down and rest, but they aren’t sleeping – and they frequently get into mischief instead of resting! I’m really missing my “at least one child is unconscious so I have a little more freedom to do what I want” time.

July goals:

• Make some newborn cloth diapers (I may have designed and sewn my own wedding dress – including the satin and lace bits – but I’m terrified of sewing cloth diapers and procrastinated that task this month by serging baby wipes instead)
• Make Johnny at least one pair of shorts
• Wash baby clothes
• Pack hospital bags

July “bonus” goals:

• Organize some activities to keep Emma and Johnny busy once the baby arrives
• Have the baby – definitely not a given, but something I would love to see happen this month!

What are your plans for July?