Tag Archives: mom

Bring out the barbeque!

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Ah, spring is here. The sun in shining, the air is warm, new possibilities seem to be waiting around every corner. Another thing that excites me about this warm weather is barbequing! Ok, well my husband barbequing. I’ve never done it before. I think it’s on purpose (honey, don’t read this), so that I don’t have to cook the food, I just prepare it! I can have everything ready and he seems to enjoy some alone time at the barbeque when he comes home. It’s a win-win. I think.

Anyway, here is my favourite homemade hamburger recipe. You can find the recipe that I adapted this from here.

My husband goes crazy over these burgers. I love it. When something so simple as these burgers can get you so much praise and admiration from your spouse, you can’t go wrong! Now combine this with the homemade barbecue perogies recipe I shared before, a caesar salad, my husband’s favourite drink; root beer, and I have a sure to impress summer fun supper. A nice summer dessert with this would be the S’mores Cookies I posted a while ago.

I hope these work as well on your husband as they do on mine :)

Ingredients:

1 lb lean ground beef

10 whole wheat crackers crushed, or 3/4 cup fine bread crumbs or 3/4 cup oatmeal (depending what you have on hand)

1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese, divided

3 tbsp. chopped cilantro, divided

1 egg

1/8 tsp. pepper

1 tsp. onion powder

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

2 tbsp. barbeque sauce

1 tomato, diced

Directions:

Combine the ground beef, crackers, 1/4 cup of the cheese, 2 tbsp. cilantro, pepper, onion powder and garlic powder together. Shape in to patties. Brush with barbeque sauce. Top with remaining cheese while your husband is cooking them.

Combine the diced tomato and remaining cilantro and top the burgers with it. We love ours with lots of mayonnaise, mustard and relish. Eating these on toasted buns make it even more delicious!

Variations: For spicy burgers replace half the cilantro with 2 tbsp. of salsa. If you don’t like the flavour of cilantro, green onions can be used instead.

Next time we make these I’ll get a picture to add to this post!

I hope you enjoy these. Who knows, these burgers may just make you feel like you’re eating outdoors in a place this this!

But I’m not making any promises…

Covered in Cream

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No I didn’t have an accident with my beloved container of 18% cream and lose its precious content to my floor, or my body. Thankfully. Nor is this about my favourite face care or body products that are always cream based for me.

There is something so comforting about cream. When you think of cream in your coffee it just adds richness and delight. Whipped cream on top of dessert or waffles conjures up all kinds of pleasant memories or cozy evenings or happy family breakfasts.

Cream in the decorating sense is something I am completely in to right now. The only problem with cream: it doesn’t hide dirt. That automatically is a no-no for me as we’re in the baby stage. But I can dream right?

Here is my “cream dream” blog post. I would never do all of these things in the same house, because it would just be over load!

In reality…

This is a project that we actually are working on, because we actually could have cream in this sense. We are doing a little transformation with our kitchen. We’re going to be painting our cupboards cream and our trims a latte colour, our doors espresso and our walls are already light chocolate (I kind of want to drink up our colours)!

Here is some of the inspiration we’ve been looking at with our kitchen project.

Read about this kitchen here.

Read about this kitchen here.

So by realistic I basically mean we’d have cream cupboards! These kitchens are a lot nicer and bigger than ours, and our walls will still be dark.

Semi realistic…

Cream clothes! These are just a couple little things, that probably would get wrecked, but they’d be nice to keep around for date nights, outings, etc.

Not realistic…

A cream living room! This has disaster written all over it, but it’s oh so calm and refreshing.

You can read about this living room here.

You can read about this living room here.

I absolutely love the flowers on the coffee table in the last living room. So beautiful.

I guess the most realistic cream thing for me to having in my home are flowers, which I have a picture of some gorgeous cream roses. You can see the photographer’s site here.

This is my little cream obsession. By the time I can actually have a lot of cream in my home, I’ll probably be over it!

What is one colour or shade scheme that you could crazy over?

The Small Things

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Hairstyles can trigger a lot of anxiety in women. Personally, I can nearly have a panic attack before going to get my hair cut because of too many bad previous experiences. I get to the hair stylist, sit down with plans to be adventurous, and then end up reverting to “just trim it up and style my bangs!”

Kate from the Small Things Blog has become quite the success story. Her hair tutorials went viral on Pinterest and You Tube and she has attracted a lot of people to her blog, me being one of them!

One thing I want to say about Kate is that she seems to be an extremely humble and wonderful woman. On her blog under “about me” she says very straight forward that she is a Christian and finds her worth in Jesus, even though she loves to talk about things like hair (she’s a professional stylist), make up, style and decorating, she serves Christ first.

Because her blog took off so quickly she suddenly started making money off of advertising and other avenues. She posted a while back about how she chose to sponsor a child through Compassion International with some of the funds she received.

I have personally benefited from her hair tutorials so much! They are quick, concise and offer great advice for spicing up your every day hair with tricks and tips for using your straightener, curling iron or other tools.

As a stay at home mom, I can feel down if I don’t take time to get ready during the day, even if we aren’t planning on leaving the house! Of course there are those days where nothing seems to go right and I barely have time to drink my coffee, let alone style my hair! But most days I try to get ready when Caleb is napping or occupied. He usually gets a lot of entertainment out of watching me do my hair and make up!

Ok I’m being brave: here is a picture of my hair just blow dried with NO style yet. It’s scary. You will understand why I need to straighten it, curl it or put it up!

I decided to try out Kate’s latest tutorial on the double bun. You can watch it right here.

So I got three-quarters of the way through and then you can see that Caleb stopped being entertained and got very unimpressed with me wasting time on this!

So I sat him down with a snack and tried to quickly finish this off. Of course I’d never tried this one before so it took me a tiny bit longer then it usually would (or when I re did it later in the day). Here is my final picture. I hope to get a better finished product today when I try it again since I won’t wash my hair again today, so if I do I’ll post another picture! I ran out of bobby pins and that one longer curly piece wouldn’t stay back!

 You can check out her flat-iron tutorial here, and her curling iron tutorial here. These are my two other favourites as they livened up my hair a little more!

You can check out all of Kate’s hair tutorials and other fun blog posts by visiting The Small Things Blog.

Enjoy!

The Twelve Days of Purpose: Day Six “Mom’s Gift”

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My mom agreed not to read this blog post! I’m going to show you the gift that I’m working on for her. I won’t be able to put a picture of the final product yet, but I will when I can!

Last post I gave a link to The Small Things Blog. Well I have to admit I’m a little obsessed with it. However, I had no idea that the tile coasters I had taken off Pinterest was also from her blog! So I will probably add fuel to my sisters heckling fire that I am indeed enthralled with Kate’s blog. She is such a truly creative person, and has a wonderful heart for Jesus! My mom had mentioned to me that she wanted some nice coasters for her house.

So here is part one of my tile coasters.

I wrote before that my husband recently tiled our back entrance. We got an amazing deal at Home Depot on these tiles, each one was approximately 70 cents. My husband took one of our left over tiles to work and he was able to cut it into nine squares to repurpose for coasters.

This was my test tile. I took my tile and put about a teaspoon of Mod Podge on it and spread it around and then placed my cut out square of scrapbook paper on it. Then I Mod Podged over that and let it dry.

These are the colours I’m using for my mom’s coasters. There will be four of each, she can mix and match to have corresponding or matching ones.

After the Mod Podge dried I spray painted the coaster with Clear Semi Gloss Spray Paint.

This test coaster is almost done! All that needs to happen now is for me to put on the self adhesive rubber feet to stop the tile from scratching surfaces. Once all the ones I am making for my mom are done, I will stack them and tie them up in sets of four with ribbon. I’ll put up the finished product when it’s done!

Click to see Kate’s DIY Tile Coaster’s here!

My attempt to save money and add personality has had me put a lot of thought into gifts this year. I’ve had to listen really closely for little cues from people to see what is needed or desired. The Lord has also given each person specials gifts that have the ability to enrich our lives greatly.

1 Corinthians 12: 7 – 11 says

A spiritual gift is given to each of us so we can help each other. To one person the Spirit gives the ability to give wise advice; to another the same Spirit gives a message of special knowledge. The same Spirit gives great faith to another, and to someone else the one Spirit gives the gift of healing. He gives one person the power to perform miracles, and another the ability to prophesy. He gives someone else the ability to discern whether a message is from the Spirit of God or from another spirit. Still another person is given the ability to speak in unknown languages, while another is given the ability to interpret what is being said. It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts. He alone decides which gift each person should have.

It’s so awesome to think how specifically and uniquely God has assigned a gift to us! That is true thought. He knows us so perfectly inside and out and knows what gift will best suits us to bless those around us. And the purpose of the gift is stated so clearly in verse seven. It’s so that we can help each other. Still confused about part of your purpose? Well, if God is giving us a gift so that we can help each other, obviously we are designed to help each other! What does that look like for you? Ask the Lord, He’ll tell you!

Is God revealing purpose to you? Store it all up and get ready because soon we’ll be writing our purpose statements!

And…we’re half way to day twelve! Thank for reading!