Browsing the blog archives for September, 2010.

Making Your Home a Haven

Churchy, Domestic, Kids, Marriage

This summer, I came across a blog called Women Living Well, and it quickly became one of my favourites. I have been striving to be a better than average wife and mother for the last five years and though there are a lot of lessons to learn along the way, it is clear that I am getting better all the time – and not from sitting on my butt hoping! πŸ˜‰ The first post on Women Living Well that I read was about her summer marriage challenge, which I fell in love with and participated in. I know my husband was thankful and I really enjoyed it. Even if the challenges were things I was already doing or working on, it was nice to have an entire community of women all doing the same things right along with me!

This challenge, which focuses on making your home a nice welcoming place to come home to, could not happen at a better time because (as I endlessly keep posting about), we have just moved to a sweet house in the middle of nowhere and I am here literally all of the time – hoping to make it a welcoming home for my family.

As with the last challenge, tips and ideas are posted every Monday to be applied the following week. I am still doing most of what we started doing during the marriage challenge, so hopefully whatever I pick up from this will stay with me as well! Great idea Courtney!!

Week 1 we are to light an extra large candle every day, and to say a prayer for peace in our homes every time it catches our eye. Courtney mentioned she’ll be placing hers in a high traffic area in her home so it will catch her eye often and I think that’s the best way to go about it.

Week 2 focuses on setting the tone of the home with peaceful music and to remind our families to avoid harsh words, tattling, and general back talk. I listen to a lot of loud and maybe if I’m totally honest, aggressive music. Since we moved to the country, I have been collecting more ‘fitting’ music, but so far the only switch I’ve made has been to classic rock because that’s the radio station that comes in the best and I have a thing for radio. I will make the change to Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby, both remind me of my grandparents. πŸ™‚

Week 3 turns attention to decluttering problem areas in our home and also in our spiritual lives. When we moved a few weeks ago, my husband had the genius idea to leave absolutely everything we do not use in a storage area in the basement, to avoid clutter in the living area. So far, so good.

Week 4 encourages us to keep up the activities of the first three weeks and to add in some tender family time and gives some ideas. Our family watches a lot of movies together, we go for walks to the shore a lot since moving to cottage country and baking has always been a serious family event around here. We are to ask our families what they think about this challenge so far during these tender times.

The last week of this challenge is to focus on the kitchen and cook meals that smell great, to involve the whole family in cooking. This one is very us as it is, lol. Anyone who reads this blog know my kids love to help in the kitchen and my husband is always around to lend a hand. In our new house his office is just around the corner from the kitchen so he passes through it all day!

I am really looking forward to this challenge. I’ve been reading Sugar Pie Farmhouse a lot. I love that site so much. The point that is always driven home on that site is to play some uplifting music, put on an apron and pop a pie in the oven. It’s all about creating a happy home, so I’m ready to jump into this with both feet!

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Window Shopping Wednesday, Part 5

Domestic, Window Shopping

This Window Shopping Wednesday is all about my kitchen. My new country kitchen feels like it could fit into any era, with the knotty pine cabinets and white walls and floor. However, when it comes to all things domestic, I am hopelessly trapped in decades past – except my kitchen power tools! I do love to pick up my mixing bowls and attack them with a wooden spoon from time to time, and I always make pie crust the old school, but I need my Kitchen Aid, just sayin.

I’m posting items from two Etsy shops here, Our Retro Toybox and Betty’s Kitschen, I want every item from both stores, just FYI. πŸ˜›

 

If this cake carrier found it’s way into my kitchen, I’d proudly leave it out all the time in the counter between the microwave and my Kitchen Aid. I also bet I’d cheat and after a few weeks of cake, there would be a pie in it – or tarts! It is beautiful in its vintage charm and clearly useful in that living in the country now, I totally have flies in my house (not gross ones though!)

 

If this set happened to be set out on my kitchen table one day, I’d make Greek coffee (or instant Starbucks Italian roast in a pinch) and invite a neighbour over. Or at the very least, since we live in cottage country and most of our neighbours are back in their Sept-May lives somewhere far away from here, I’d make some coffee cake and hang out with my husband. <3

 

And even though they’re not kitcheny, I really adore this vintage sewing basket, this copy of the Wizard of Oz and this trinket box.

This cup makes me very, very happy. Happier than a photo of a cup should, but it’s so cute! I also love that it’s not a set, and if I had it it’d be my morning espresso cup (I don’t do cappuccino when the cup allows for espresso).

 

 

Cuuuuuute. This pitcher set makes me squeal with delight. Gah! It’s so sweet!

 

This shop has fun non-kitcheny stuff too. Top loves; white rose pins, milk glass vases, and this ceramic planter.

I love Window Shopping Wednesdays! I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve done one!!

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Snazzy Sugar Cookies – Daring Baker Challenge Sept 2010

Domestic, Kids, Small Town

In this post, I’m participating in The Daring Kitchen, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Tuesdays at the Table

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of β€œWhat the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

This was my first official Daring Baker challenge and I was so excited to do it, and now I am so excited to show it off!! The theme for this challenge was ‘September’, it was pretty easy for me to figure out which way to go with that when I am surrounded by these beautiful September colours! The first photo was taken in my backyard (it’s part of the view from my kitchen window), the second photo was taken in my front yard. With these colours as daily inspiration, I used brown, green, orange and red on my cookies.

I’m jumping ahead here, I actually baked them on Sunday afternoon and spent wee one #3’s nap on Monday decorating them. I prepared them exactly as Mandy instructed. Sugar cookies are pretty basic, but it’s the most basic recipes that are the easiest to mess up. In this case, whatever you do, DO NOT overmix! As soon as you’re combined, stop.

 

This recipe was a total winner and was explained so well, I can’t wait to make more. And more and more and more. Amazing. Kneading the dough into three balls and then rolling between parchment paper to reduce both chilling time, and the necessity to re-roll was genius. I have made a zillion sugar cookies, and these are by far the best.

Also, this is just the second time I’ve used my Granny’s rolling pin. It’s so weird and sometimes feels so wrong that I reference her so much more since she’s passed than I did when she was alive. It makes me feel both like a terrible granddaughter, and somehow really connected to her. Ever since we traded city for country I’ve been thinking of her a lot – she was certainty an old fashioned country girl making the city work for her. Anyhoo, her rolling pin is very, very heavy – it’s marble with wooden handles and I love, love, love it. In this case specifically, where I’m rolling out soft dough on parchment paper, it makes the job come together in a snap.

 

I really think the rolling, chilling, cutting, chilling, baking procedure makes the cookies hold their shape so well and make them so easy to handle. Which doesn’t matter much if you’re just going to eat them plain. However, if you’re, oh I don’t know, about to attack them with a kilo of royal icing, it would be so nice if they were sturdy cookies that didn’t fall apart when handling!

Ahem. Excuse my baggies, I need new piping bags desperately. My birthday is less than a month away and pretty much everyone knows I’d love a refresh of my baking gear. πŸ˜‰

Decorating these cookies was so much fun! Wee one #1 was at school, wee one #2 was home from school with a cold (as much as she wanted to go the poor thing) so she was in the other room playing Mario Kart and wee one #3 was blissfully napping. A quiet, (mostly) uninterrupted stretch of time?? Really? I took it! LOL

 

I had intended to also pipe out our initials (we planned when we named everyone to not repeat any initials!) but I got so wrapped up in the magic of dragging a toothpick through the icing, I had attacked all three dozen! Next time I make these, that’s the plan, but in brighter colours I think.

These cookies are destined to be in our neighbour’s tummies tomorrow afternoon. As I mentioned earlier, I have been here for 3 weeks and have only met two neighbours, so I will rectify that situation after wee one #1 gets home from school. Hmm. Maybe we should give some to the school bus driver as well!

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Good Morning Girls & My Wonderful, Sleeping Husband

Churchy, Domestic, Kids, Marriage, Small Town

In this post, I’m participating in Marriage Mondays.

This morning I had what I often refer to as a ‘God moment’. To my non-Christian readers, I am not about to start thumping my Bible no worries, and to my Christian readers I’m not trying to play down a connection to God by being flippant about it. It’s just that as connected as I feel throughout the day, there are some moments when I just feel like he’s working overtime for me, you know?

In our new neighbourhood, garbage pickup is at 7am, and really most of the time it’s more like 6:45am. No one in this area can leave the garbage out the night before because the foxes will get to it and make an awful mess. So, everyone around here must drag their tired behinds out of bed in the dark to get the garbage out in time to be collected. Small price to pay for living somewhere so beautiful and peaceful.

Anyhoo, this morning as my alarm went off my husband nudged me to get up at 6:20, and I said (much grumpier than I should have) ‘I have another alarm going off in 10 minutes, I’ll get up then’. He replied that I should just get it over with and do it now. Very grumpily I sat up and was filled with contempt for my still sleeping, snuggled under the covers husband. I recognized the feeling and after seeking out (and finding!!) a Good Morning Girls group to be a part of- I could not let myself be annoyed with my dear, sweet husband. So I asked God to help me be thankful I woke up on time for the garbage truck, thankful that I have a healthy, wonderful husband in bed beside me, thankful I’d have time to read a bit in my Bible and reply to some Good Morning Girls and even hammer out his blog post. What a reminder for me on Marriage Monday!!

So why do I put out the garbage? Why doesn’t he do it? I’ve always been able to get by on less sleep and I have no idea how. When I was a teenager, I’d happily sleep for 12 hours if I didn’t have work or school! Now my usual is 5 or 6 hours a night with the occasional 8 hour night. Maybe in a different season of life when my kids are older I will get more sleep, but for now in order to do what I want to do (which includes spending time at night with my honey), that’s the sleep I get, and I’m happy to have it.

And right on cue, this little wee one has woken up and wants to start her day! I will do my best to keep this feeling of thankfulness in my heart today. Thank you Good Morning Girls!

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The City Mice Move to the Country

Churchy, Kids, Marriage, Small Town

Where have I been for the last six weeks? I was moving out of my cute old house in the city and into my lovely new house in the middle of nowhere. Well, not nowhere really – cottage country. Most of our new neighbours are seasonal, though there are a few other tough cookies who live here year round. ‘Cottage country’ in Ontario can mean different things, depending on where you are. In our little town (so small the population is actually added to the population of all the other towns that make up the county – and it’s still just about as many people as our old neighbourhood in Toronto), there are two pockets. One is very ‘small town’ where the houses all look the way you’d expect them to look in a 50s flick, you can walk to the post office, grocery and church. The other pocket (our pocket) is lake front, where all the snazzy cottages are, we are removed from the actual town by a nice long road no one would ever bother driving down.

I will post more photos in the coming days, but for now here is the outside of our sweet country house.

The feeling in this little pocket is very neighbourhoody, everyone is super polite and goes for bike rides in the afternoon and walks after dinner – really, so many people here do this! Our house specifically is surrounded by trees and off the main road by a tiny bit so it’s not even visible when driving by, but it’s easy to spot once you know it’s there. When we’re waiting for the school bus in the mornings, and when the littlest one and I are waiting for the other two to hop off the bus in the afternoons, we have to walk to the end of the driveway, and that’s when we see most of our neighbours. It’s so quaint it hardly even seems real somedays!

This week, I’m baking up this month’s Daring Baker challenge and I will bring some to a few of our closest neighbours to formally introduce ourselves. We haven’t even been to church yet!! When I deliver cookies on our street, I will take photos of the water and the view from our driveway!

We have, however, been to the Meet the Staff BBQ at the wee one’s school and it was a lot of fun. The entire school has 41 kids. Unless you’re from a town as tiny as this one, that number should be alarming. I am amazed at the way this school functions, I love it. First of all, it has a gym about a big as the one I grew up with and my school had 800 kids in it! The student population is divided into three ‘spirit teams’ and each member of each team racks up points by being a ‘good person’! I almost fell over when this was explained to me, essentially the staff at school ‘catches’ the kids being good and gives them points for it, (helping out a smaller kid without anyone asking you to, picking up after yourself, bringing in a litterless lunch…) The team with the most points each term gets a special treat, and the one with the most points overall wins a special class party in June. So sweet!

This is wee one #2’s class room. She is one of 6 students in this class (!), it’s a split JK/SK and her teacher is adorable! Hilariously, she reminds me of me because she’s silly but hyper organized. Remind you of anyone? πŸ˜‰

Wee one #1 has the biggest class in the whole school – 15 kids! I am extremely happy about this class size for him because the one on one time is unmatched! It’s the same as many standard tutoring places.

All that matters to me about the school really is that it’s safe, we all feel comfortable and the kids are happy – and boy are the kids happy. I feel so blessed that we went from what we all felt was a good school situation to an even better school situation! Phew! I was so nervous for them I could hardly think about anything else. I was nervous about getting involved with the parent council as well, since you never really know what the other moms are going to be like but they’re all so warm and inviting. I just have to get my criminal background check done this week and bring it in!

I’ve said this since our second or third day here – I feel certain that we are supposed to be here. Everything about this house feels right and while of course there are things for all of us to adjust to, those things are minor in comparison to all the good around us.

Sidebar; I’ve been sending letters and cards to my friends and (hooray) a few of them are being amazing at writing back! I think everyone knows how much I love mail (postcards, letters & packages, no bills please) so I’m very, very happy to the amassing a collection of letters and postcards (my friend Jade Van Rando went on a road trip across Canada this summer with her fiancee, and they sent me a postcard from every province and Gill & Andrew went to Ireland recently and sent a really cute one!) Soon, I will need a cute box to keep them all in. <3 I have also been looking for a group to join on Good Morning Girls, fingers crossed I found one this evening! Essentially, these groups are formed from like minded women to check in with each other about their Bible study and prayer. I am very fortunate that three very close girlfriends, my sister and I send group emails to each other all the time, but there are only two of us who are churchy and that sort of convo doesn’t come up much in our emails. πŸ˜› If you’d like to join / help form a group like this, let me know!

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