The Dreaded Sniffles.

It's 5:29am, Friday morning .Why am I awake? Because I can't breathe. Before I go much further, let's start at the beginning of this story.....
Spring semester started on Monday of this week. Why is this important? Because this is the first time in 4 weeks that I've been around other people. Other, germy, sniffly, sneezy people. Gross. With a new baby in the house, the thing that I'm most worried about is getting Sofia sick, so you can imagine how much I freaked out when my husband called during my biology lab on Wednesday night to tell me that she was vomiting uncontrollably at my parents' house. I rushed home to get her medicine and Pedialyte, and then drove as fast as I could without attracting attention to their place to help her, thinking all along that I must have picked up some nasty bug and given it to her. An hour later, the medicine kicking in and the Pedialyte staying down, I realized that she was probably fine and that it must have just been an upset stomach, but nonetheless it was unnerving.
Cut to: Int. My house. Yesterday morning. I woke up with a stuffy nose and blamed the poor little kitty who had been sleeping in our bed. I took some allergy medicine, ate lunch (okay, it was early afternoon. I had stayed up until 3am watching Desperate Housewives and checking on the baby every twenty minutes the night before.), and wrote it off. As the day progressed and I delved deeper and deeper into the mysterious women of Wisteria Lane, I realized my nose was getting stuffier and I was sneezing. A lot. So much so that the baby kept looking at me and bursting into tears whenever it happened... I sneeze loud. Most compare it to the bark of a loud dog (but that's for another time.). Cut to: 9:15pm. Husband comes in to see me balled up on the couch, moaning in the agony of my cold, dinner not started for fear of me sneezing on the chicken. We ate, watched Parks and Recreation followed by The Big Bang Theory and then I went off to bed to nurse Sofia to sleep. And then, apparently, I fell asleep, too! Damn. We were going to go get cold medicine and Gatorade.... Cut to: now. I woke up with a naked (other than her diaper) baby next to me, crying because she was hungry again and my sniffles are still in full force. I want to go lay back down, but I know it's pointless, as I'll just lay there, stuffy, sneezing, and waking up (and possibly spreading my germs to) my family. Gyah. Part of me is counting down the days until I start University in May, thinking that it's likely that they're less germy because the school has a better reputation than my little community college, but I'm sure that's not true - just the strange rationalization of a sleepy, sick, mommy. Okay, going to at least try to sleep again. Wish me luck! <3

Hot Chocolate Italiano!

A first! My own recipe, and it's amazing! Sorry for the crappy picture - Tinkerbell was the last clean coffee mug in the kitchen after my mug cake experimentation this week (full dishwasher=empty cupboard!) and I'd already started sipping on it ;)

So, this recipe is pretty simple. It's based on the hot cocoa recipe on the side of the Hershey's cocoa powder package, but so much tastier!

Ingredients:
2 tbsp Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tbsp sugar
1 cup skim milk
Pinch of salt
2 tbsp Coffee Mate Italian Sweet Cream coffee creamer

First step: mix the dry ingredients in a mug. Step 2: Heat milk and coffee creamer approx. 2 minutes or until hot. Step 3: Slowly add in the dry mix to your milk/creamer combo. I mixed mine pretty quickly to make sure that there were no cocoa clumps. Step 4: Enjoy! Buon appetito!! :)

Chocolate Mug Cake!

 Project #2 - success! Messy, but successful. I used the recipe from instructables.com for the 5 minute chocolate mug cake with a few substitutions. Instead of 2tbsp of whisked egg, I used a whole egg and, since I didn't have any vanilla extract, I ended up using 3 tbsp of vanilla soy milk instead. I've used this recipe before, but had apparently not followed the instruction! It came out way too dry, and I think that it's because I didn't mix all of the dry ingredients together first - I kind of just threw everything in there. Way to go with following directions! Anyway, the cake rose. A lot. 

It had never done that to me before, and I was kind of worried that the look of the cake spelled disaster. Luckily, taste is not in the eye of the beholder, only beauty. Taste is in the ability of your taste buds and cooking ability! The cake was a success. A warm, gooey, tasty victory served up with a glass of cold skim milk!

Fail.

So, my first pinterest project if 2012 was a whole bunch of fail. I tried to do swirly nail polish like I'd seen on a style board, but didnt have any success. At. All. Here's what I started with:

I used a combo of Orly bonder, Sally Hansen for my base coat, and then finger paints. Apparently, if you mix purple and green nail polish and stick your finger nails in it they turn brown. Yuck. Besides that, the polish just didn't go on smoothly at all. I think its the brand and/or age of the nail polish that kept it from working properly. I tried after my swirl attempt to just paint them purple and green (alternating).

So yeah, the alternating colors didn't work out so great, either. Apparently, painting your fingernails is a lot harder once there's a screaming, teething baby to pick up every five seconds! Needless to say, my nails are au natural for the new year. And maybe that's not just a bad thing. They always seem to chip in five seconds flat, anyway ;)

<3

2012!

So, in one year's time, the world will either have ended or everyone will be scratching their heads wondering how/why the Mayans got it wrong. I, for one, think we're safe, but in the event that we're not, I fully intend on making the most of this year. Scratch that. I'm going to make the most of this year no matter what. Last year, other than the birth of my daughter, was not my year. It just wasn't. There was too much drama and I'm over it now. Bigger. Better. That's my motto for this year.
My resolutions? Be the best mom and wife that I can be, lose this weight (finally!), get organized, craft as often as I can, and learn French. Oh, and become a vegetarian, but the jury is still out on that one ;)
So far, I'm working on the baby's room. We had a roommate up until about a month before S was born and by that point I was far too tired and pregnant to decorate her room. Now that we've stayed in the same apartment and I've got some time on my hands (one more week before Spring semester starts!), I'm going to make the most bad ass baby room. Ever. DH and I are big gamers and I LOVE LittleBigPlanet. Maybe it's all of the knitted stuff, or just the cutesy kitsch of it, but I think it's the perfect theme for a baby's room. Here's my starting point:

 As you can see, it's a mess. We started with a Tiddliwinks bedding set from Target ($15 on clearance last year!) that didn't come with a bed skirt or window valance. As you can see down there, there is a bed skirt. Because I made one :) I went to Joann's and got some cute, green and white polka dot cotton fabric and sewed a simple, flat bed skirt. No ruffles, no pleats, no frills. I need to go back in and hem it, but that's another story, the moral of which is to measure twice, cut once!

Anyway, what I love about LBP is that nothing ever has to match. That's why we have butterfly sheets, a polka dot crib skirt, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar stickers on the wall, lol. Oh, and her mobile is made up of a polar bear, crocodile, lion, and whale. :)  I'm currently in the middle of collecting ideas for her room on Pinterest. So far, I think that I'm going to get some poster board and paint some of the 'stickers' from LBP onto them to slap them up around the room, as one would do in their 'pod' in the game. The other thing I want to make is two big cut outs of Sackpeople - a traditional brown, knit Sackboy, and maybe a funky Sackgirl with a pink wig :) I'll definitely keep everyone updated on the process and I really can't wait to post the final results. It's going to be awesome ^_^

<3 T