Addition Update

Posted on February 6, 2007 by Abbie

Okay, word from Mark is that Mr. Bill is going to pass on the line item estimate to me tonight at Bible Study (the men’s and women’s Bible study is at the same time). He’s also talking to a friend to see if he can come up with a cheaper estimate. Mark is at the realization that it’s going to cost a little more than he anticipated…but still be worth it (at least not to hear me get frustrated because I can’t find my clothes in my pile). The main cost is coming from all the stuff that actually has to go in the room…the bathtub/shower, vanity, toilet…things you really can’t live without in a bathroom.

So, Mark and I will review the estimate, see where we will be able to pitch in to cut the costs down and then go from there. More later…

Laundry Detergent

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Abbie

WARNING: This may be boring to those who care nothing about homemaking or saving money. So just skip this if the above warning pertains to you. But, if you are curious about what exactly it means to make your own laundry detergent and how crazy we are…read on!

Okay, now that that is out of the way…I haven’t made any laundry detergent in about six months. Right when I ran out, I was going to make some more, but then I got pregnant and the first trimester was a blur of nausea and exhaustion and taking care of my little Characters. So, I’ve just been using the detergent I purchase for diapers as my clothing detergent. Note: I can’t use my homemade detergent for diapers because the Borax will mess up the diapers, supposedly.

Finally, today on our weekly trip to Wal-Mart I went in search for an appropriate container for laundry detergent. Previously, I used a 13 gallon trash can. The largest batch of laundry detergent I’ve ever made is 6 gallons. Plus the trash can didn’t have a secure lid (it was a flip lid) so “stuff” kept getting into it which I thought was really gross. On my last sweep in the container/organizer aisle, I spotted a trash can that was 24 quarts (aka 6 gallons). Eureka! Not only that, it also had a locking lid to keep yucky stuff out. I was super excited (okay probably way too excited as any one person should be over an inanimate household product).

We made up our laundry detergent tonight. It smells so yummy! We used Dove soap this time. Previously, we’ve used Ivory Soap. I hope the smell sticks around with this one. The Ivory smell didn’t stay long.

Here is the recipe for our laundry detergent:
18 c water
1 bar soap, grated (Fels Naptha is a laundry soap but any bar soap would work)
1 1/2 c Washing Soda
1 1/2 c Borax
24 quart bucket (6 gallons)
12 c hot water
hot water

Mix soap in a suacepan with 18 cups of water, and heat on low until dissolved. Stir in Washing Soda and Borax. Stir until thickened, and remove from heat. Add 12 cups hot water to bucket. Add soap mixture, and mix well. Fill bucket with hot water and mix well. Set aside for 24 hours, or until thickened. Use 1/2 cup of mixture per load.

Soaps Goen Buy is the only place I’ve found that carries Washing Soda. Some grocery stores are rumored to have it but we don’t have grocery stores here that carry it.

Real quick and then I’ll show pics of our laundry process. I found out that homemade laundry detergent could be made a little over a year ago from a friend who knew someone who used to make their own. Curiousity got the best of me, and I googled it! I found the recipe above at The Frugal Shopper along with several other recipes. Mark, being such a great husband, agreed to embark on this new adventure. We tried it…it worked…the end. My brother in law actually figured out how much money the detergent cost per load. It was somewhere around .02 cents per load, I believe. Not bad!

Here are the pics from our laundry detergent adventure.

Getting a little help from Liam as we grate soap!

Zoe was fine tuning her grating skills.

Still grating…this is the most time consuming part of the process.

Grated soap…finally! Looks kind of like powdered sugar or snow in the picture.

Zoe stirring the soap and water until it dissolves.

Mark filling up the bucket before we added the soap, borax, washing soda concotion.

My new and cool laundry bucket! I printed off the recipe on sticker paper and then attached it to the bucket as well as covering that with contact paper. A lot easier than searching for my recipe each time.

This is what the detergent looks like when it’s first made. Very watery. It’ll gel up into a goopy substance after about 24 hours and then it’ll be ready to use. One thing about homemade detergent is that it doesn’t suds like store bought kind…but that’s okay. Our clothes are still getting clean!

Tea Time

Posted on February 5, 2007 by Abbie

Trying to finish up my chores while Liam took a nap today, I discovered that Zoe and Ace were being awefully quiet in her room. I found them in a corner of her room with three bears having “a tea party.” It looked quite interesting, so I grabbed the camera and took a few pics!

A Zoe & Ace Funny

Posted on February 1, 2007 by Abbie

I know I keep writing and most anyone who actually looks at this wants pictures…but my kids say such funny things.

Zoe and Ace wash the breakfast dishes every morning (well, the mornings we have cereal or oatmeal…we use plastic dishes then). So, of course, as they wash, they also make a pretty nice wet mess. I’ll walk in when they’re all done and Ace and Zoe both look up and shake their heads and say, “You don’t want to see this Mommy! You weally weally don’t want to see this.” This is as they are cleaning up their mess. I think it’s just too funny. I’ll have to get the video camera and film this little routine they have.

January Pics

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Abbie

Here are some of the pictures from January! Enjoy!!

Liam doesn’t get how to play our Elefun game but he has figured out it makes a great hat!!

Just chillin’ in our new kids rockin’ chair!

All I can say is, poor daddy! The kids favorite game is “pile on daddy!”

We visited with Mark’s grandmother, Mama Maude, in January. The kids really enjoyed playing with toys that both Mark and his dad had played with when they were kids. Mark and I loved the baked apple pies th

Ch ch ch changes!

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Abbie

But what will they be…other than a new baby!

Well, the first of the year brought me getting things cleaned out and ready for our home to house 4 kids. Zoe has about three closests in her room. The reason being is that the original owners (in the 70’s) had twin girls and built a wall out making a small closet and a larger sort of walk in closet as well (I’ll post pictures later). The smaller closet has served as Zoe’s closet for the past year and the larger closet has served as my closet and my junk closet. We cleaned otu Zoe’s closets (all of them) and made the big closet her closet. The plan is, whether we are having a boy or girl, to place them in the larger bedroom (Zoe’s current bedroom). So either all the boys will be moving in there and Zoe to the smaller room or Zoe gets to stay with a new sister. The smaller closet in Zoe’s current room is going to be a changing table/closet for the baby. Of course, if we have to swap bedrooms, paint will be flying to match the appropriate gender of rooms.

You see, while they built a large closet for twin girls (in Zoe’s room), the original owners apparently didn’t really see any reason to get by with anything but the standard size (read: very small) closet. So now, all the clothes that were hiding in Zoe’s closet, have found their way to the floor of our very small master bedroom. At least, most of these clothes I don’t wear right now thanks to the little peanut growing my belly bigger and bigger.

Last week, we met with a contractor from our church, Mr. Bill, about building an addition on to our house to include a walk-in closet and bathroom for the master suite. Our initial discussion, left me very very excited…but then the price for everything that I got today left me very disheartened. We’ll be scaling it back, but that’s fine…we don’t need a huge bathroom. I asked Mark if we could please try not to sacrifice any of the closet space and he was very sympathetic to my pleas! Essentially, the value of our house has risen enough over the past five years that anything we build on we could get back if we had to sale right away. However, we are planning (with this addition) to stay in our house as long as we live in this area. We’ll meet with Mr. Bill later this week or the first of next to discuss the addition in more detail and try to scale back on the cost some more.

And what to do with our current master bath and itty bitty closet?! We’ll close in our closet and save it for when the bedroom next to us needs more closet space (giving two decent size closets for one to two children). The two bathrooms (ours and the hall/kids) are right next to each other. Our original plans were to make the two into one, requiring lots of replumbing…however, Mr. Bill suggested we just knock out into the hallway (into my hall closet…bye bye storage 🙁 ). And have two extra bathrooms. At first, I was very iffy on giving up my storage space, but then the thought of the kids having two baths sounded very appealing, especially when the only costs involved are going to be redoing one bathtub/shower combo and painting/redecorating (which is easy for me to do on a budget).

So here’s the breakdown of what we pray will be done:

Remodel/paint two spare bathrooms (a girls and a boys):

Decor for Boys: Crimson Tide!

Decor for Girls: Lavende Toile (very girly but not little girly and no pink!!!)

Redo spare tub/shower
Add linen closet to one spare bathroom (the other one has one)
Close in closet and opening to current master bath.
Build on master bath to include a shower/tub combo (compromise due to price), one sink vanity, and the other essentials as well as a linen closet

Decor will be my pretty blue spa retreat color that’s in the master bath now (we have almost a whole gallon of paint leftover)

Walk-in closet (the bigger the better for me!)
New energy efficient windows (winters are getting colder and summers hotter with 30+ year old windows!
Possibly new interior doors
Repaint bedroom (bye bye faux painting that took a long time to do when we moved in!): a soft sage green

This should be an interesting project we are taking on. I hope everyone enjoys our adventures into renovations over the next several months. Mark and I are shooting for construction to begin in March. We’ll be doing a lot of it to cut costs and hopefully a majority of the kids bathrooms will be on us. I can paint using latex paint, but smells are so strong that I’m not sure I’ll be able to stand doing it. I’m praying I can. I just don’t want my primary contribution to be interior decorator. I feel I need to get hands on with it.

I will try my best to document everything for those interested!

Ace funny

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Abbie

I forgot completely about this when updating a few minutes ago!

To keep cost down (and because we are not as self-sufficient as others in making several of our own products) we purchase as much store brand products as possible. This including rice crispy cereal (we have it for breakfast and I use it to make granola bars for Mark for work). Unfortunately, we ran out of the cereal before the end of the month and I needed some more. When I went to the store the store brand was out and we had to resort to buying the name brand.

At breakfast on Friday, Ace asked for rice crispy cereal. I gave it to him as soon as I poured milk on it and he said, “Ohhh, that too loud!”

Liam’s Kisses

Posted on January 29, 2007 by Abbie

Liam is giving big ol’ sloppy kisses now. We’ll ask Liam for a big kiss and he’ll lean in with a wide mouth and plant one on our cheek. Very sweet. We have to watch out because sometimes he won’t pull away and try to take a chunk o’ cheek with him!

Zoe and I are now doing “prenatal pilates” this is, hopefully, going to be our normal routine when the boys are taking a shower. She loves being with mommy and knowing that she is exercising to help keep the baby healthy. I’m praying that it will help me with a “natural” delivery!

Ace is being 2 which means to say we are tackling some tough issues with tempers and testing his limits. Not fun but better to get it done now than waiting until he is too old to take the correction. He is the apple of Liam’s eye and can do no wrong through him. Liam loves to watch and follow big brother everywhere. Ace loves having Liam hang around.

I’ll post pictures soon as I’ll have all the pics from January off the camera and organized by the end of the week.

Modesty Survey

Posted on January 25, 2007 by Abbie

I stumbled across The Rebultion’s survey, by visiting a favorite blog called girltalk. Rebelution is a blog ran by brothers, Alex and Brett Harris (I believe their brother, Joshua Harris is the one attributed to the best selling book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye). Anyway, they received questions from over 250 women/girls nationwide addressing the area of modesty. In their attempt to answer these questions, they’ve created a survey where men may go online and answer the questions. I would strongly encourage all men to complete this survey.

This is a great subject for me! I love to discuss this, because I know the what not to reveal but not so much the whys at times. We were discussing modesty at a recent MOPS meeting in our discussion group. One of our moms has teenage daugthers (yes, as well as preschoolers) and she’s remarked about how hard it is and how much they have to address this issue with their daughters. Even now, Mark and I have to talk to Zoe about modesty because of what she sees when we are out and because of the toys that are marketed to her. There are several toys that we do not agree with (ones with short skirts, shirts, and tons of make up), and we have had several opportunities to talk to Zoe about why we don’t like the toys and how that addresses our attitude about God (i.e. is it honoring Him? are we pleasing to the eye when we dress like that?).

Zoe can now point out a belly button a mile away and talk to me about the fact that she doesn’t like it when her belly button sticks out. We are already practicing the “raise and praise” test when trying on clothes (heard on a Dobson show about teenage girls and purity). If Zoe raises her hands and praises God and her belly button shows, Mommy gets to poke it…or if Mommy raises her hands and praises God and her belly button shows, Zoe gets to poke it!

Zoe has also forced me to examine a lot of my clothing choices and whether they are honoring God and helping to keep men from sinning or not. I am grateful for that.

Does this mean that Zoe will wear skirts down to her knees and frumpy shirts? No, but I do want her to be aware that how she dresses not only says who she is but can have an effect on those around her and their view of who she is.

I’m excited to see what this survey reveals and to be able to have an outlet (waaaaaayyyy down the road) to discuss why what she chooses to wear matters!

For now, male readers, make sure you check out the link above to complete the survey!

Awesome Video