Nursery

Okay we have been incredibly blessed during our pregnancy to have so many friends getting rid of baby stuff! Nothing for our baby is new. It's all hand-me-down stuff. But hey, we saved hundreds of bucks and the kid won't know the difference! One of our friends gave us this simple white rocking chair and we decided to deck it out with a nice memory foam cushion. Russ was very creative and clever when he designed this little cushy seat cover. So now I have a great place to feed the baby and WE have a great place to rock him to sleep. SWEET.

So to make this bad boy we took some chunks of memory foam, which happened to be left over from when we made that massage table back in the day, and cut it up into the perfect sized pieces for both the bottom and back of the rocking chair (that is a major run on sentence but I can't fathom how to fix it at the moment...) He then took this cute little giraffe fabric we bought and made it kind of like a pillow case... Like the pillow shams you put on your bed to make it look pretty? They have over-lapping flaps on the bottom where you can slide the cushion inside. He also attached little strips of fabric to tie it to the chair with. Simple, but it works! And it's REALLY comfortable. So there you go! Nice hard rocking chair turned into a memory foam induced comfy chair.

Family Tree

Everyone keeps asking me what we are doing in the nursery. And honestly? I have no idea. We painted it green LONG before we knew what we were having. I'm not super girlie, so neither would my girl be. We are having a boy however so it really doesn't matter. Anyway. So the one and only thing we have done to decorate is make a giant, vinyl family tree. It is actually insanely cool. Russ got me a silhouette for Christmas (these things seriously rock) so we used a program called Inkscape (FREE by the way) and designed our tree. I had found a tutorial here that explains exactly how to use Inkscape to make a family tree. YAY. She made some sort of wall plaque while we cut out giant strips of vinyl. We did about 5 generations and made the tree about 4 ft by 4 ft. It's quite largeand AWESOME. It was quite the project, it took several hours over many days and effort on both mine and Russell's part. But it was TOTALLY worth it. It really is cool. Someday we will finish it by writing where everyone was born on the leaves, but as of right now, we're done. So now you can admire our handiwork.

 These are the largest names we printed out.

 Strip number one! We had two strips of vinyl this length.

 Print out of what Russell had done on Inkscape. We used it to make sure we put all the names in the correct place and lined everything up perfectly.

 The skeleton of our tree...

ALMOST finished. Like I said, we need to add where everyone was born. And our child's name... Which is currently undecided. Which is totally fine right? We have what, 5 weeks? :)

Valentine's Day gift for Russell

So I was trying to decide what to do for Russell for Valentine's Day this year... The day of. One, because I am pregnant and forgot that it even WAS Valentine's Day... And two, because it is so stinking hard to come up with gifts for men for such a girlie holiday. It is definitely a holiday for women. The men are in trouble if they don't do something for their significant other, but do we as women REALLY have to do anything? No. I don't think Russ would have been surprised OR disappointed had I done nothing. But I still felt I should do SOMETHING. It was our last Valentine's Day just the two of us! So. I searched the internet high and low for some kind of idea. And I found out that you can use sharpies to write on mugs. I thought "that's cool! I can use that!" So I bought a cool mug (only white one I could find) and wrote a bunch of reasons why I loved my hubbie all over it. I put it in the oven to bake as the instructions said and felt quite proud of my accomplishment. Only to have Russell pick it up a couple hours later and smudge my love across the mug... IT DIDN'T WORK. I was a bit distraught that after all my hard work Russ still didn't have a gift. I tried to come up with some way to salvage my beautiful piece of artwork. Each idea was worse than the last. I began to despair until Russell, my sweet, loving, wonderful husband found a solution. Or it may have been me. Don't really remember :). But we found a solution. Albeit a slightly expensive one. Oil-based sharpies.

Apparently when THEY are used on ceramic and baked THEY are the ones that stick. So we washed my words of love down the drain and bought some slightly expensive markers... So that I could make my once only 8 dollar gift into a 15 dollar gift... That took much more time and effort than originally anticipated. Although if you had the right markers from the get-go, this really would be a fun and simple gift. So pitch in the extra couple bucks and DO IT RIGHT the first time. :)

Throw some of your hubbies favorite red candies and a V-day card on in that mug and you have a fun gift. Remember: OIL-BASED SHARPIES. Okay. I'm done now.

I loved this soup when I was first pregnant SO MUCH I had to have the recipe. YUM.

Olive Garden Zuppa Toscana

source: Roberta Hawks (Not sure where she found it!)

Ingredients

• 1 lb. Italian sausage
• 3 strips bacon cooked and crumbled 
• 2 large russet baking potatoes, sliced in half and then in ¼ inch slices
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 4 chicken bouillon cubes
• 8 c water
• salt and pepper to taste
• 2 c kale or swiss chard chopped
• 1 c heavy whipping cream

Directions

1. In a pot brown sausage. Remove from pot and set aside. Add bacon to pan and cook until crisp. Remove from pot and set aside. Once bacon is cooled crumble it up into nice little pieces.
2. Place onions, potatoes, chicken broth, water and garlic in same pot and cook on medium heat until potatoes are done. 
3. Add sausage and bacon to soup. Salt and pepper to taste.
4. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Turn to low heat. 
5. Add kale and cream. Heat through and serve.