Not Just Baby Brain

Wordless Wednesday – Who wore it better?

Stacey — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:00:19 +0000

Same dress, 28 years apart.

^{Ashlyn’s picture taken by Elizabeth Fulton Photography}

Dressing up is fun all year long

Stacey — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:19:29 +0000

I’ve officially hit the ‘I’m sick of winter’ phase and there are still a good 2 months left. It can be so hard to find new ways to entertain a little one when it’s too cold to play outside - or snowy, or rainy and icy as it has been for so much of our winter so far. One thing that Ashlyn always enjoys doing when we’re cooped up inside is playing dress-up! She has a fairly recent obsession with Disney Fairies and her favourite thing to do these days is to grab a blanket to use as ‘wings’ and dance around the family room.

While it might seem like a strange time to be looking at a costume website, Costume Discounters isn’t just for Halloween! In fact, there can be some great deals that wouldn’t be available during the peak season. I choose a fairy costume that came with lots of accessories for Ashlyn; the Plum Pixie costume comes with a dress, wings, headpiece and wand which will be great used together or shared amongst her little friends. I haven’t shown it to her yet because I know she won’t take it off and I’m saving it for a particularly boring day when we need a little something different to cheer us up.

I love watching her imagination grow as she plays dress-up and I know it’s just a matter of time before Rowan gets dragged into it. Ashlyn is already convinced that Rowan needs her very own set of fairy wings.

So far we’ve managed to avoid the dreaded “Mommy, can I wear my beautiful princess dress to the store?” but I know it’s just a matter of time! Do you let your little girl (or boy) wear their dress-up costumes outside of the house?

Valentine’s Day Cards

Stacey — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:45:31 +0000

It seems like as soon as one holiday is over, there is another to look forward to! With Valentine’s Day just a few weeks away I’m starting to think of fun activities to do with Ashlyn and her little friends.

There will be baking for sure – perhaps some sort of heart-shaped rice crispie treat since Ashlyn likes making those so much? – and crafts. We ordered some classroom Valentine’s Day cards from Minted.com for Ashlyn and Rowan to hand out to their friends and send to our family members who live too far away to visit. At just 2.5″x3.5″ they’re perfect for classroom parties or play dates; if you plan to mail them you’ll need a larger envelope!

picture taken by Elizabeth Fulton Photography

I was drawn to the paper heart classroom Valentine’s Day cards because any time I can incorporate a picture of my girls in something we’re sending out I do! I’m still getting compliments on our Christmas cards by Minted so I know these will be a hit too. There are also non-photo cards available that can still be personalized with your child’s name on them.

I had no problem uploading my pictures and getting the card just the way I wanted it. I changed the font from white to pink and made sure that both girls’ names were on it. The proof was sent on Friday (the day after I placed my order), I was notified that it had been shipped out on Monday and I had it at my door on Wednesday! I’m very impressed with how quickly Minted can get their product to me in Canada since I’ve had many instances with other companies of products being held up at the border for weeks.

Order your classroom Valentine’s Day cards by February 7^th to receive them in time for your little ones to hand out on February 14^th!

Wordless Wednesday – Snow Fun

Stacey — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:29:02 +0000

It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of winter, but Ashlyn’s enthusiasm for playing in the snow gets even me in snowpants to play outside every now and again!

I thought it was called ‘spring’ cleaning?

Stacey — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:50:19 +0000

You always hear about spring cleaning, but for me the cleaning bug always seems to hit mid-winter. I think it’s because when the weather is nice we’re not spending much time inside, but now that it’s cold and icy/slushy/snowy outside we’re inside most of the time and the clutter has more opportunity to make me crazy enough to actually do something about it!

My first order of business was to organize Ashlyn’s craft stuff better. I had it all in 2 plastic totes on top of our pantry and it wasn’t working at all: things didn’t fit, the boxes were heavy and hard for me to get down, and everything got lost inside. I had a storage unit that I used to use for scrapbooking that was free, so I brought it into the kitchen.

All of the things I don’t want her to have free reign over are in the box (paints and play dough, mostly) and everything else is sorted by drawer: crayons, stickers, colouring books (2 drawers), paper (2 drawers), paint with water books, random craft stuff like pompoms and googly eyes, her beads (we like to sort them by colour in mini-muffin tins, or string them on pipe cleaners to make headbands or necklaces), and then her smock and paint trays (re-purposed dollar store ice cube trays).

A far bigger project has been my scrapbook desk in the basement! Jordan picked up the storage cubes (there are 6 of them) at Michaels, then built a desktop over them. The bookcase is Ikea, we have at least 4 of them in various places in our home!

I cannot wait to get scrapping and use my brand new Cricut! I have all of my papers sorted and I even went through all of my scraps to sort them – that was interesting. Not sure what I was thinking keeping some of those teeny pieces of paper.

I feel so much better having a better organized kitchen and craft area. My next project will be tackling that mess of a bookcase on the right!

Easy DIY Picture Frame

Stacey — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:30:20 +0000

I am constantly putting up new pictures in our home, and I love ‘themed’ picture frames – seasons, holidays, you name it and I want it. The problem is that they can be really expensive, and where do you store all of the Santa/Christmas/Easter/Valentine’s Day/Halloween/etc frames for 50 or so weeks a year you don’t have them on display? Not to mention that I never know if the picture that I’m going to want to display will be landscape or portrait!

I decided to get a teeny bit crafty and use some scrapbook papers to change up a simple frame that I found at Michaels (on sale, of course). The frame is 8×10 so I can use it with 4×6 or 5×7 pictures and still have some of the paper showing. For their Santa picture, I picked out some die-cut snowflake paper.

While I had intended to use the snowflake frame for the rest of the winter, when I saw this damask paper I had to take it home! It’s actually a transparency, not die-cut.

(picture in the frame taken by Elizabeth Fulton Photography – I apologize for the colouring on my picture but I was having a heck of a time getting the white balance right and the flash was making the pattern look crazy so this was the best I could do)

I’ve started a file to keep the papers that aren’t being used in; this way I can keep them to reuse whenever I get the whim. I may even try adding coloured paper behind the die-cuts or transparencies to mix things up a bit. Cheap, easy, and immediately gratifying – just how I like my crafts!

Voluntary Recall on President’s Choice Organics infant cereal

Stacey — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:15:41 +0000

Canadian mommies take note: the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Loblaw Companies Limited are warning the public not to use the following President’s Choice Organics infant cereal due to a potential ”unpleasant rancid odour, or taste”:

Product	Size	UPC	Code
Mixed Grains with Apple (add water) 8+baby	227 g	060383 005511	All codes
Oat cereal (add breast milk or infant formula) 6+baby	227 g	060383 005535	All codes
Oat Cereal (add water) 6+baby	227 g	060383 005528	All codes
Rice Cereal with Banana (add water) 7+ baby	227 g	060383 005542	All codes
Rice Cereal (add breast milk or infant formula) 6+baby	227 g	060383 005566	All codes
Rice Cereal (add water) 6+ baby	227 g	060383 005559	All codes
Wheat Cereal (add water) 6+ baby	227 g	060383 005573	All codes
Wheat Cereal with Mixed Fruit (add water) 7+ baby	227 g	060383 005580	All codes

Thankfully, there has only been one illness reported so far, but if you have any of these cereals in your pantry please don’t use them any more and keep an eye out for any symptoms (nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea) in your baby. These cereals were sold across Canada. You can find more information about the voluntary recall here.

Wordless Wednesday – a look back at 2011

Stacey — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:00:41 +0000

So much happened in 2011! We started the year off with a bang by going to see Disney Live! Mickey’s Rockin’ Road Show.

February took us to Winterlude here in Ottawa, where we had a great time out in the cold

and I had some lovely maternity pictures taken by Elizabeth Fulton Photography (you’ll see much, much more of her work further down in this post).

We welcomed Rowan (aka Sprout) in March and it was love in first sight for all of us!

We had a quiet spring while we got used to being a family of 4 and Ashlyn turned 2 in May.

We took a trip to visit family in New Brunswick in June and made sure to visit plenty of parks

and spent most of our summer in various splash pads around our home.

We had family pictures taken in October by Elizabeth Fulton Photography

and before I knew it, it was Halloween!

Rowan took her first flight when we took a trip to Alberta to visit some great friends (and do a little scrapbooking) in November.

There was lots of decorating and baking and crafts and play dates surrounding Christmas

and through it all my girls keep growing and loving each other.

I can’t wait to see what 2012 brings!

Happy New Year from a bad blogger

Stacey — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:19:46 +0000

How is it already a week into 2012? Like many of you, the chaos of the holidays is finally subsiding and I’m hoping that we can get back into our regular routine this week, and that includes more blogging by yours truly! The girls are keeping me on my toes – Rowan learned how to pull up to a stand on New Year’s Day and she’s trying her hardest to walk but lacks the balance to do it, so there are lots of bumps and near-misses around here. She’s almost 10 months old and I’m starting to think about her first birthday already!

We took Ashlyn to see her very first movie in the theater yesterday – Beauty and the Beast and the only way to describe it was “magical”. She loved every moment of it, including the popcorn, of course, and the TANGLED EVER AFTER short film at the beginning was a highlight:

I try not to make too many resolutions but I have 3 in mind for this year:

the usual ‘make exercise a priorty’;
meal plan – this year I mean it! I want to use my slowcooker a lot more and be more adventurous. I have a collection of cookbooks and I want to make good use of them;
get and stay organized! I’m usually pretty good, it’s the Virgo in me, but with 2 young girls I find the clutter gets away from me. I want to get on top of the little things that clutter up my house and start doing small cleans every day instead of a larger, but easy to get postponed, clean on weekends.

How’s 2012 treating you so far? Any resolutions made, and any broken yet? Better yet, any tips on how to achieve my resolutions? I can use all of the help I can get!

My Memories (scrapbooking software giveaway)

Stacey — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:34:39 +0000

I love traditional scrapbooking but I don’t have nearly enough time for it these days. With a little girl who wants to ‘help’ and is very interested in crafts I can’t leave my products and pages out or who knows what I’ll find! I’d heard about digital scrapbooking software before but hadn’t made the leap until I was introduced to My Memories Suite.

I’ve been playing around with My Memories Suite for a few weeks now and I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to try scrapbooking on the computer! While I don’t think I’ll ever give up traditional scrapbooking, there is something to be said for being able to make more than one copy of a project instantly and not having to worry that a breeze might ruin a layout you’ve spent hours on. I made a few Christmas gifts using My Memories Suite, which is why I wanted to wait until after Christmas to run this post – I didn’t want to ruin the surprise (hi Mom!).

I found the My Memories Suite scrapbook software to be very easy to use and I had a lot of fun creating some traditional layouts, as well as playing with the various embellishments that are available. You can do everything that you need to in this software – cropping pictures, rotating them, changing colours and creating your own layout or using a template that is provided.

My favourite project was a small calendar. I used various quick pages (ie pages that are already made up; you just put in your pictures and it’s done) that I could download for free from My Memories Suite, then added the months using the ‘calendars’ tab in the Control Panel and played around with the colours until I liked them. I printed them out as 4×6 pictures and put them into a frame and voila – a personalized calendar that’s perfect for the office or computer room.

This is the perfect time of year to start a scrapbook; the weather is cold and a whole new year is starting. Use the code STMMMS73949 and you’ll receive a $10 discount on the purchase of the MyMemories Suite V3 scrapbook software AND a $10 coupon for downloads – a total value of $20!

One lucky reader will win their own My Memories Suite scrapbook software!

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