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!

Books I love - It's All Too Much

As we've been going through, organizing, and getting rid of stuff for this move, I've been rereading one of my favorite books - It's All Too Much by Peter Walsh. It's helped me get rid of a ton of extra stuff we don't really need. I first read this book a couple years ago, and have reread it several times since. I love it.

Peter Walsh, the author, is a professional organizer. He used to be on the TLC show Clean Sweep. Did you ever watch that show? It was one of me and Alyse's favorites.  They would come help people deeply declutter their houses. Not hoarders - just normal people whose houses had normal stuff in them. They'd pull everything out and sort everything into three piles: trash, yard sale, and keep. A lot more stuff went into the yard sale and trash piles than into the keep pile. And at the end of the show, you'd get to see the nice, new, decluttered rooms. It was super satisfying.

In It's All Too Much, Walsh helps you do the same thing with your own stuff. He doesn't just tell you how to organize. He helps you understand your relationship to each of the things you own, and helps you overcome all of the excuses you have for holding on to unnecessary things. He helps you own your stuff, rather than your stuff owning you.

Each time I've read this book, I've been so motivated afterwards and been able to get rid of a lot of stuff that had built up over the years.  And each time I've used the advice from the book to really purge our house of unnecessary stuff, I've felt so good afterwards and like a literal weight has been lifted off my shoulders. With all that unnecessary stuff gone, I feel lighter and freer.

I really recommend this book, especially if you have any kind of cleaning/organization inkling right now. It's amazingly helpful.

What We Believe - the Book of Mormon

Good morning! I know it's been a while since I've done a post explaining more about what we believe, but I really want to start doing that again, so here we go! Today I wanted to talk to you about the Book of Mormon.

I've already explained what we believe about God, and Jesus Christ, and God's plan for us. I've talked about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and how living prophets teach us today. I explained how God established his full gospel on the earth again after centuries of pieces of it missing, by calling Joseph Smith as a prophet and restoring his (God's) priesthood authority upon the earth. And I've given a short history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

So where does the Book of Mormon fit in? Why is our church so well known for this book? If you've heard of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you have almost certainly heard of The Book of Mormon. It is, after all, where we get our nickname - "Mormons."

All pictures in this post are from the image library on lds.org.

So what is The Book of Mormon? What's in it? How do we have it? Why do we believe it?

In a nutshell, The Book of Mormon is the historical record of a people that lived in ancient America. It is another testament of Jesus Christ, just like the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Book of Mormon and the Bible go hand in hand. One is the record of God's dealings with the people in ancient Israel, and one is the record of God's dealings with the people in ancient America.

The Book of Mormon was written and recorded by ancient prophets, just like the Bible. It follows the stories of a group of people who God led out of Jerusalem before the city was destroyed in 600 BC. He led them to America, and the Book of Mormon covers their history from about 600 BC to 400 AD. And it's awesome.

It's got Nephi, who was seriously rock solid. He followed God's commandments even when it meant living in the desert on raw meat. And building a boat and sailing across an OCEAN. And having his brothers try to kill him a bunch of times.

And Abinidi, who stood up to a wicked king and his corrupt priests.

And these people, who all secretly got baptized while hiding from the king and his soldiers.

And Ammon, who saved a bunch of sheep and cut off a bunch of people's arms.

And Captain Moroni! Who was awesome!

And the two thousand stripling warriors! Who were also awesome! ("Stripling" means young, by the way. And I LOVE these guys! They're my favorite!!!)

And Samuel the prophet, who stood on the wall of a wicked city to tell them that Christ would be born in five years.

By far the biggest moment of the Book of Mormon is when Christ personally visits the people. After his death and resurrection in Jerusalem, he came to the people of the Americas. He taught them personally and ministered to them.

For several hundred years after his coming, the people lived in righteousness. But then they fell into wickedness again, and then they became really wicked. The two great nations of the Book of Mormon - the Lamanites and Nephites - had a huge war until almost all of the Nephites were destroyed.

Finally there were only a handful of Nephites left, including Mormon and Moroni, two righteous men whom God had protected. Mormon was in charge of the record of their people, which had been handed down from prophet to prophet to prophet over hundreds of years. He abridged and edited all the records together. The resulting book is named after him - The Book of Mormon. He gave those records to his son Moroni to finish writing and to protect.

After Mormon died, Moroni wandered around as the very last of his people. He finished the record and sealed it up, burying it in the earth so that it could come forth at the right time according to God's purposes. 

When Joseph Smith prayed to God in the early 1800s asking him which church to join (you can read my blog post about that here), the time had come. Joseph was instructed where to find the records abridged by Mormon, and was able to translate the book with God's help.

The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ, that was written specifically for us - the people living now at this time.

It was written to help us understand Christ's mission, and to gain testimonies of him. It was written, as Moroni said, "[to convince] the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations."

The only way you can know for yourself whether the Book of Mormon is true or not is to read it, and then ask God if it is true. Moroni, the prophet who finished the Book of Mormon, promised this:

"And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things."

So see for yourself. Request a free copy of the Book of Mormon here. Read it. Read all about Nephi, and Mosiah, and Helaman and his two thousand warriors, and Alma and Ammon and Captain Moroni and Mormon, and most importantly - read their testimonies. Read their witnesses of Christ. And then "with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ," ask if it is true.


Further Resources:
1. This page, Mormon.org: The Book of Mormon, has very clear explanations of where the Book of Mormon came from and what it is. 
2. This video rocks.

Because of Him

Because of him I get to live with my loved ones forever.

Because of him I can be forgiven of the mistakes I have made and will make in the future.

Because of him I have hope.

Because of him I have joy.

Because of him I know that my life has meaning.

I know that Christ lives. I know that he really is the son of God. He lived a perfect life and suffered for our sins so that we can be forgiven through his sacrifice.

He loves us. He loves you. And I know that with absolutely everything that I am.

Melting Crayons

Last week I did a little craft project. I melted down Toddler's broken crayons into new, unbroken shapes.

This is what they looked like before:

They were actually even worse because in this picture I'd already taken out all of the smallest, most broken pieces.

I then chopped them up even more so they would fit in the silicone mold better:

I then put them in the silicone mold I got from the dollar store (which was from Halloween and was a mold of pumpkin shapes. Toddler saw it and said "Balloons!" though, so they're balloons. Which is better than pumpkins.) and put it in the oven at 275 degrees for about ten minutes:

Took them out, swirled the colors with a toothpick, and let them cool on the stove top. Once they'd cooled for about 25 minutes, I put them in the fridge to cool them even faster. (If they cool too fast in the beginning they might crack.) Then I popped them out. And we have balloon crayons!

All of Toddler's crayons filled three batches of the silicone mold. I don't know if it was just cause it was a cheapy silicone mold from the dollar store, or if it was something about the crayons, but after I was finished it was kind of twisted and warped and I just tossed it. But it totally worked for this craft! A dollar well spent.

Toddler really likes her new balloon crayons. She played with them for like an hour on the day that I did this.