Favorite Things

Here are a few of my favorite things right now:

Sweet potato pie

No, not the blue grass band (found here and also very good!), but the actual pie. We got a boatload of sweet potatoes in our produce box and I've struggled with using them all up, so I decided to make pie. I used this recipe from Allrecipes.com and it is fantastic! I doubled the recipe because I had almost 3 pounds of sweet potatoes and thought it couldn't hurt to put more sweet potato in each pie. It turned out great! So much better than pumpkin pie (to me, at least!) and I could use some of my NC goodness.

Adele

Photo courtesy of www.adele.tv

I love this woman's voice! But I don't like her live. I've heard a few live recordings and the woman has some serious pitch and support issues that makes it hard to listen to. I also recently saw one of her videos on youtube and she was smoking. SMOKING!! Why is she trying to ruin her beautiful voice? I don't quite understand it, but I truly think she has a beautiful, rich quality to her voice that is so pleasant to listen to.

Pan Am

Photo courtesy of worldscrews.blogspot.com

What can I say? I'm a sucker for anything set in the 60's! I just love the fashion and the hairstyles! I also love that it follows the lives of the stewardesses. I've always loved flying and secretly wanted to be a flight attendant for a long time (until I realized they keep crappy hours/sleep schedules and are away from their families for long periods of time). The acting is passable, at best, and the plot is the same every episode, more or less, but I still love it. I can't help myself!

T-minus one month, and counting...

As of today, I have exactly one month left in my projected pregnancy time-line. Now I realize that this baby could come earlier (if I could be so lucky!) or later (unfortunately, what is most likely) depending on this baby's sense of timing. I just can't help feeling excited but completely neurotically crazy at the same time.

In other news, we got our pack 'n play yesterday from my mom (thanks, mom!!) and in my excitement, I set it up immediately!

Sorry about the quality! My BGC battery was dead!

I was so proud of myself, having set it up all by my lonesome. So needless to say I was surprised when Matt came home kind of grumpy. After some prodding, he finally admitted that he kind of wanted to be there when I set it up and he felt like he missed out! What can I say! My excitement ran away with me! I'm so sorry, sweetheart!!

Also, I got the best compliment yesterday in yoga! My teacher came up to me while we were doing a modified moon salutation and she whispered in my ear, "You have great body positioning and awareness! Your poses always look just like they do in the books!" I was so happy to get this compliment especially because I try VERY hard to self correct and know where my body is in space, and at practically 9 months pregnant to boot! I felt like that was a win for me, especially when I feel like I must look ridiculous trying to modify the poses to get around the soccer ball in my belly. Have any of you felt like you've had a "win" moment recently?

Nesting

I think I'm finally feeling my nesting instincts kicking in. All I want to do is move furniture around. I don't necessarily want to clean anything. Just move things around. We've also been struggling with how to make the nursery/craft room and guest room work for us upstairs and I think I've finally figured it out. I honestly cannot believe it didn't occur to me sooner!

I really want to keep a guest room available for friends and family to stay at any time (because I know how much I love to sleep on a bed, rather than an air mattress). But I don't want to give up having a craft area. And since the baby will be here soon, we were basically trying to fit three rooms into two.

But I have realized that there is an unused room in our house with lots of storage built in and we won't have to sacrifice closet storage!!

We have since painted those cabinet doors white. It looks much better now. :)

Ta Da! I'm moving my craft stuff into the green room. Currently the most action it sees in a day is when I go get something from my "pantry". I don't even walk into that room that often!! So, when we were trying to figure out where to move my craft stuff, it dawned on me to utilize that space and all the shelves built into it! :) Here's the plan:

• Reorganize the shelves so that the bottom shelves are empty for craft things
• Add a DIY drop down table where the orange cabinets are in this picture, replacing the current cabinet doors. This is be my new desk
• Make curtains to cover the bottom few shelves and revamp the current curtains that are covering the pantry
• Move everything downstairs

I think it will be fantastic once it's done! Now I need to get to the really awful part and start organizing and cleaning out. Blech!

Homemade Laundry Soap

We were about to run out of laundry detergent when I came across some startling news about it: you can make your own for MUCH cheaper. AND it supposedly works just as well.

What the what?! How have I not known this! Any way, I was immediately intrigued and set about researching different recipes and the one I went with is this (it happens to be the simplest as well):

Ingredients:

• 2 cup washing soda (NOT baking soda. They are different, chemically speaking)
• 2 cup borax
• 1 - 5 oz bar of soap (you can use any really. Doesn't seem to matter which, but I used a castile soap with a lovely lavender scent. Others have also used Fels-Naptha or Zote which are marketed as laundry soaps in bar form. I didn't see these at Target when I bought everything, but your grocery store or Wal-mart may carry them)

Instructions:

• Grate or otherwise mangle your bar of soap into small, small pieces
• Mix together with washing soda and borax
• Put in a container

And done.

It seems much simpler and easier than the liquid detergent recipes. Any way, other recipes seem to say you should use about 2 tablespoons of the dry detergent per load (or a little more if it's really dirty). When you break down the costs, it's just unreal when compared to the liquid Tide I've been using.

Tide (Free and Gentle liquid) =  ~ .28 cents per load

Homemade = ~.07 cents per load

I've seen some people's calculations as low as .05 per load because they used regular ivory soap, but I really liked the lavender scent. But one of the best parts is you can even use this in high efficiency washing machines because it is a low sudsing (is that even a word?) detergent. Cool, huh?

I've still got a few drops of Tide left in the bottle, so I'll use that up before I'll breaking into my new batch of homemade soap, but I'll be sure to let you all know how it goes!