Nephew's Quiet Book

I'm posting this over on my Quiet Book Blog today, so I thought I should share it here, too!

Back in April and May when my brother Banks and my sister Alyse and their families were visiting California, my nephew had his first birthday! For his birthday present, I made him a quiet book.

Something I did with this quiet book - and I really really love how it turned out - is I sewed it a cover. I cut a big piece of fabric out of a soft, old t-shirt, then sewed the first and last pages directly on to that fabric (turning in the edges so that it's a nice clean line). I sewed the two middle pages back to back, then sewed the edge of that back-to-back page to the middle of the inside of the cover. So, the whole book is all connected and one piece, and the cover is nice and soft!

Anyway, I'll quiet rambling. Here's Nephew's quiet book!

The individual pages:

The binding and cover:

If you'd like to see my other quiet books, you can click here: The Quiet Book Round-up!, the Butterfly Book, and Two New Quiet Book Pages.

My other nephew's birthday is this week, too...I guess I have to get busy, haha! ;)

Small Bathroom Redo

Okay, so  you know all those pictures of the house I've been promising? Well, they're finally coming. I took them yesterday, and they'll be posting today and tomorrow. So you can finally see our new house. :)

The first thing I wanted to show you, before the whole rest of the house (which will be in one post tomorrow) is the bathroom that we repainted when we moved in. This is that bathroom on move-in day:

It's the girls' bathroom, and it's across from their bedroom.

The walls were yellow, just like the rest of the house. But whereas in the rest of the house the yellow is pretty and nice, in this bathroom it just looked kind of sickly. (Also, the shower curtain in the picture was left by the previous homeowner, and isn't our style.)

Additionally, the bathroom had this cheapy particle-board cabinet above the toilet, which I hated. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but it made the room feel really small by sticking out of the wall so far, and it just looked really cheap. The part in between its bottom shelf and its cupboards was backed by this cardboard-type stuff that had a line across it, and the doors didn't close all the way, and I just hated the whole thing.

After debating with myself for a little bit, I decided to take the cabinet down. I knew that if I did, we would have to repaint (you could tell just by looking at it that they didn't paint behind the cabinet). And I am so glad we took it down and repainted. This is the bathroom now:

It's so much better!!! I love it. It makes me happy every time I walk into it.

I chose the color for the room by going on my pinterest "House Idea" board to see what kind of bathrooms I liked. It might sound silly, but my pinterest boards know my style better than I know my style. Whenever I see something on pinterest I like, I pin it on one of my boards. Then, later, if I need to figure out what I like, I go to that board and see if there's a pattern. That's how I figured out I like white kitchens - I was looking at my board one day, and realized that every single kitchen I had pinned had white cupboards. And this time, when I looked at the bathrooms I had pinned, I saw a pattern too - fresh blue or teal walls. Several of the bathrooms (and laundry rooms) I had pinned had lovely, fresh blue walls.

So now that I knew I wanted some type of blue or teal, I put the shower curtain up (it's one that we've since we got married, but never got to use until now because we had two and used the other one), saw that it had blue in it, and got a ton of paint chips from Home Depot that I thought might match. By comparing them to the shower curtain once we got home, I narrowed it down to just a couple colors that went really well with it, and Jason and I together decided on Behr color #510A-2 "Salty Tear." (And now that it's up, I looove how the color looks in the bathroom.)

After another trip to Home Depot to get the paint and all supplies we needed, my mom and I prepped the room and painted it the next day. My mom was incredibly helpful - she's painted so many rooms in her life she's pretty much a professional, and she knew everything we needed and what to do. Thank you Mom! :D

Here's another before and after:

So that's the glamour shot. Here's what it looks like as a functional bathroom for a toddler and a baby:

This is our bath toy set-up:

I got the idea from here. It was really convenient because our bathtub already had a bar in it, and we had extra shower rings and a little tub for the toys. We already had everything we needed, and just put it together. It works great!

And here's Toddler's potty:

She's been potty trained for a while, but everything got thrown off with the road trip and the move, so these last couple weeks have kind of been re-potty training for her. Jason printed off and colored this awesome "Potty Progress" chart for her:

and she loves it. She gets a sticker every time she goes potty in her toilet or the big toilet. There are little boxes for the stickers to go in, and I think you're supposed to line them up, but she started putting them in boxes all over the chart and if it makes her happy then that's what we'll do.

Another thing we did, that's not visible in the before or after pictures but really makes a difference, is replace the cover to the bathroom vent fan on the ceiling.

This is the new one. The old vent cover was really yellowed with age, and looked very dated. We got this new cover for like $8, swapped it out, and now everything looks new and up to date. We switched out the old gunky metal doorstop for a clean new white one as well.

Oh yeah! One last thing. We put a new toilet seat on. The old one was so cheap and flimsy - it was made of this floppy plastic. If you sat down on it when the lid was closed, it would bend underneath you. It was so cheap they don't even sell that kind at Home Depot or Lowes as the "cheap" lid. I have no idea where the previous homeowners got it.

Anyway, we bought a new one of Amazon for like $15 and switched the old one out for the new one. And it's so much better. Way sturdier and looks nice.

So those are all the things we did to our bathroom!

How we prepared for our Cross-Country Road Trip

Well, we are currently on our way across the country to reach our new house! Today was both long and fun and hard, and I'm posting a recap of it tomorrow. But what I want to talk to you about right now is how we prepared for this road trip!

So, in getting ready for this trip we were preparing for both 1. moving all of our stuff across the country and 2. getting ourselves and the girls across the country. And we wanted to do it for the cheapest way possible.

We looked into all our options for moving our stuff - hiring professional movers, doing moving pods, or renting a self-moving truck - and figured out that renting and driving a truck ourselves was by far the cheapest option (by several thousand dollars). Jason's parents (amazingly)(seriously, they are awesome) volunteered to drive across country for us, and that settled it. We'd do the self-moving truck.

We then had to figure out about our car - did we rent a tow on the moving truck and tow it? Ship it? Or drive it ourselves? Well, it turns out that shipping it and driving it ourselves would cost about the same amount of money. And the stuff we read about shipping cars - cars being damaged, cars showing up weeks after they were supposed to - made us really leery about shipping it. So it was between driving it ourselves and renting a tow bed from the moving truck company and towing it behind the moving truck.

Well, there were two big moving truck companies to choose between - Uhaul and Penske. And Penske didn't have a big enough tow for our car. But Uhaul was a lot (like $1000) more expensive, even before you added the tow cost. And if we towed it, you'd have to add airfare costs for me and the girls as well. So, it was lot cheaper to rent a Penske moving truck and drive our car ourselves. So that was how we decided ended up doing what we're doing.

Now, here's how we saved on the Penske truck. Just by reserving the truck online, Penske gives you an automatic "discount" of a couple hundred dollars. (Does it really count as a discount if everyone gets it automatically?) But how we really saved money was by buying a AAA membership. If you had a AAA membership, you got a big discount on the truck. We made our truck reservation, and then a couple days later purchased a AAA membership online. The AAA membership was going to be $59, but we did a quick google search for promo codes and found a discount for $34.50. So the AAA membership only ended up costing us $24.50.

So, now that we had our $24.50 AAA membership, we called Penske and added that discount onto our truck reservation - and it dropped the cost of the truck by $255! So a $25 membership saved us $255. We basically "made" $230 by buying AAA. Obviously absolutely worth it.

Some of the things we've done in the last couple weeks to prepare for this road trip are:

• Cleaned the car
• Washed and adjusted the carseats
• Got an oil change
• Got our brake rotors fixed (the front rotors were warped)
• Collected figurines, coloring pads, stamps, and books for Toddler
• Picked out toys for Baby
• Got music and books on tape for Jason and I (except - as I type this up - I am realizing that I forgot to download the books on tape to my phone. Whoops!)
• Got good road trip snacks and a small cooler that could fit in between the seats
• Put an outfit for each girl, for each day, into a gallon ziploc bag with a label on it
• I sewed an ipad holder for Toddler's ipad, so she could watch movies on it

I want to expand on that last bullet point, since it was kind of a big project and turned out to be enormously useful already. 

Toddler has an ipad that was given to her by her Grandpa quite a while ago. I wanted someway to be able to mount it to the back of the seat in front of Toddler, so we could play movies on the drive and that she could watch them. But I didn't want to buy anything, because we try to be frugal. So, using fabric from some pajama pants that were too short for me, some plastic vinyl I got from the sewing store for under a $1, and some velcro I got fromt the sewing store also for under a $1, I made this:

The ipad slips into the front side (and is inside it in the first picture). It has four straps on the back that wrap around the headrest of the seat in front of Toddler and velcro in place. And for something that only cost about $1.50, Toddler can watch movies! I did buy a small portable speaker to go with it so that she could hear the movies over the road noise, and that has been worth it. Without that, she wouldn't have been able to hear the movies. But she could, and it worked, and all is well.

I also want to expand on the bullet point about the girls' outfits. I was kind of stressed about packing their clothes for them (for some reason it just seemed overwhelming to me), and mentioned it to my sister-in-law Sarah. She suggested picking out an outfit for each girl for each day, and putting each outfit in a ziploc bag so that it would be clear and organized. And that's exactly what I did, and it was perfect!

These are the bags. As you can see, each girl has seven bags for our six day road trip. They're labeled for each girl - "Toddler Day 1," "Toddler Day 2," "Toddler Day 3," etc., all the way to Day 6, plus an extra bag. In each bag there is a day outfit and a pair of pajamas. 

So in these fourteen bags there are fourteen day outfits and fourteen pairs of pajamas, all labeled and ready for each day. It totally took all the stress out of packing for the girls for me. 

Now, how we got ready for the hotels/motels. Like you'd expect, we research hotels in each city that we were staying in and picked the best options for us based on reviews and price. We then booked the hotels through the cheapest options online. Sometimes that was a travel website, like Booking.com or Expedia, and sometimes it was the hotel's own website. Then, last week I called each hotel to confirm our reservation. And it was good I did! Four of the five hotels had no problems with the reservations. But one of them - booked through Expedia - had been told the wrong day by Expedia and so had us reserved for the day after we were actually going to be there. Luckily, there was no problem with switching us to the correct day. But it was good we checked!

Finally, we've been looking up attractions and good food places for all along our route and the cities that we'll be stopping in. Even though this road trip is a necessity and not something we really would have chosen out of the blue, we want it to be fun. We broke the trip up into six days to shorten the driving each day and make it a bit easier on the girls. That gives us time to have fun (and eat good food!) along the way.

So those are the biggest ways that we've prepared for this road trip! It's been a lot of work, but we are seeing some of the payoff now as we're on the road. Keep checking back each day this week to follow us on our way across the country!