Tackle It Tuesday

This is my very first Tackle It Tuesday post and I'm so excited because it means that I actually got something organized in my house. My pantry needed major re-organization. It is way too small for my needs so we decided to turn our coat closet into a makeshift food storage area. As I was sick a few weeks ago my hubby cleaned out the closet and set up shelves for me to put extra food on that didn't necessarily need to be in the pantry. (Maybe I should be sick more often because my husband hates to stay at home all day and get nothing done so he usually tackles some sort of project. ) :)

The before:



I started taking things off the shelf before I took a picture so just imagine the stuff in the pictures below on that third shelf from the bottom.
What I did: I bought some organizational containers at The Container Store (love that place!) to put packaged snacks in so that I wouldn't have a bunch of boxes. I also got the 3-tiered shelf there to put bottles and jars on. The most important and most effective thing that I got was the can roller shelf. I still need to get one more for the other cans. I also put my rice and pasta stuff in plastic containers. Doing this actually took up more room, but I like it a lot better still. The first two pictures are my pantry shelves, the third picture is the coat closet turned food storage and the last picture is the floor of the pantry where I bought some bins, at The Container Store where I put unopened flour and sugar bags, potatoes and onions and the third is for bags of chips because those are really annoying to store on the shelf because they take up too much room.

The after:

Menu Plan Monday

This is my first time joining up with Menu Plan Monday. I'm really excited about doing this and getting better at doing it and following through on making the meals I plan. For right now I will just be putting main dishes down for dinner because I have a really hard time putting together side dishes beforehand...*sigh*. I will get better though, that's why I'm doing this. (Recipes to follow.)

Monday: Cheese-filled Jumbo Shells

Tuesday: Orange Chicken with bacon

Wednesday: Baked potatoes

Thursday: Tater Tot Casserole

Friday: Pizza

Cheese-filled Jumbo Shells
12 oz. Jumbo Shells
4 cups ricotta or cottage cheese
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
3/4 cup parmesan cheese
3 eggs
1 Tbsp. chopped parsley
3/4 tsp. oregano
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
3 1/2 cups spaghetti sauce

Cook jumbo shells according to pkg. directions for about 10 minutes; drain well. Cool in a single layer on wax paper to prevent sticking together. Mix together cheeses, eggs, parsley, oregano, salt and pepper. Fill each shell with about 2 Tbsp. of cheese mixture. Spread thin layer of sauce on bottom of 9x13-inch baking pan. Place the shells, open side down, in a single layer in the pan; over with remaining sauce. Sprinkle with additional parmesan cheese, if desired. Cover with aluminum foil; bake at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes or until hot and bubbly. Fills about 36 shells.

Orange Chicken with bacon
8 unskinned chicken breasts
Grated rind of 1 orange
3 Tbsp. white vinegar
3 Tbsp. soy sauce
3 cloves fresh garlic, pressed
1/3 c. fresh orange juice
1 finely chopped onion
16 slices of bacon

Marinate chicken in all ingredients except for the bacon overnight. Before cooking wrap two slices of bacon around each breast and secure with a toothpick. Grill over medium hot coals for approximately 35 minutes or until moist but firm. Chicken can also be baked in the oven at 375 degrees for 40 minutes.
Source: www.funcraftsandrecipes.com

Tater Tot Casserole
1 lb. ground beef
1 onion, diced
1 can of cream of mushroom (or celery) soup
1/4 cup sour cream or 1/4 cup milk
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 bag of frozen tater tots

In a skillet, brown ground beef. When beef is nearly done, toss in diced onion and cook until meat is done. Remove from heat, stir in soup and sour cream/milk. Taste, and add salt and pepper if needed. Spread in square (8 or 9-inch) casserole dish. Top with grated cheese and as many tater tots as can possibly fit (in one layer). Bake at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes, until bubbly and hot in the center.
Source: www.dinnersonme.blogspot.com

Muffin Tin Monday

This is my first time joining up with Muffin Tin Monday. There is no theme this week so I just put together a quick lunch with what I had on hand.


In the cups: whipped yogurt with sprinkles, sliced cheese stick, ham roll-ups, broken up granola bar, ranch dressing, carrot sticks.

The ham roll-ups are a slice of ham with cream cheese spread on them, rolled-up and then cut with a toothpick in them. M&M loved these! She wouldn't eat the yogurt. The first year and a half of M&M's life she had a milk allergy so the only "dairy" she got was from soy milk. She grew out of this allergy, but will not drink milk or eat yogurt. I've tried different ways to present it to her to entice her to eat and drink them, but nothing has worked. I've tried giving her chocolate milk, different kinds of yogurt (whipped, yogurt sticks, etc.). The good thing is she does like cheese. She didn't like the granola bar either, but gobbled up the carrot sticks as usual.

Having the food in little pieces and in a muffin tin made it fun for M&M so I will definitely be continuing with Muffin Tin Monday!

Head on over to Her Cup Overfloweth for more fun ideas!

Tot School - Letter P week

M&M is currently 38 months old

We finally had a week of organized Tot School, well at least as organized as I can be. We did the letter P this week and I had a lot of fun things planned.

P is for Playdough. We couldn't have a letter P week without playing with playdough. M&M loves playdough. I used some ideas from a post I found called, "What can we do with playdough?"
I'll probably get this out a lot more because it's a good thing for M&M to do at the table while I am making dinner. Now that she's older she can do it by herself and be creative with what she does.



P is for Puzzle. We made a puzzle P using construction paper. I got this idea from here. We also did a P princess paper craft as well that I don't have a picture of, but I got the idea from here that has pictures of the process.



P is for Peanut Butter. I wanted to make Peanut Butter cookies, but when I told M&M we were making cookies she wouldn't get the idea out of her head that we were going to do Chocolate chip cookies. Toddlers can be pretty convincing so that's what we did. We actually ended up doing the letter P for two weeks and so we did end up making Peanut Butter cookies using this recipe.


While we made the peanut butter cookies M&M was in charge of turning the mixer on. Well she was doing great at turning it on just a little bit up until the point that I put the flour on. That's when the mixer got to speed #10 and poof! there was white everywhere. I thought it was really funny, but M&M was embarrassed and kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." I told her it was okay and once she saw me laughing she was fine.
P is for Pasta. I've been re-organizing our pantry (more on that in my Tackle it Tuesday post). While I was putting some pasta from boxes into plastic containers M&M wanted to help. It went along great with our letter P! Later on in the week I mixed a handful of different pastas (rotini, fiori, penne, macaroni, etc.) into a bowl and had M&M sort them. She loved this activity. Even though it's so easy for her she stayed with it until it was all done. That is a rarity for her.



P is for Princess. I got this miniature princess set for M&M for a $1 and she has played with it all week long. I can give her any little animal or figurine of any sort and she will sit there and play and talk for a long tim.
She also loves the wild animal figure set that I got for her at Target for $10. It came with a bunch of animals and trees. (I love our new Target that they built just down the street, Yay!)

P is for Puppets. I got these puppets on clearance from the Martha Stewart Craft section at Walmart. I really wanted to have get the puppet theater made that I have been planning on doing all summer long. I made progress, but didn't get it all done. I got the idea from here for those that would be interested in making one. I got my cardboard display board at Michaels for like $6.00.




P is for Pom Pom. I got these little mini silicone muffin tin things fro IKEA and M&M used tongs to put the pom poms into each of the cups. I got this idea from here.



More playdough fun. This is M&M's crocodile (I think). I love how she's starting to try and "sculpt" things out of playdough now. I love to see her creations.



P is for Puffy Paint. A few weeks ago Puffy paint was going around the mommy blog world like wildfire and I'm on the slow side of things so we just did it this last week. I've seen this on many blogs, but I used the recipe from here. I can't find the exact post, but the recipe I used is: 1 cup flour, 1 cup salt, 1 cup water. Basically equal parts of all three ingredients. We used Purple and Pink colors. And green, but for some reason that bottle wouldn't squeeze so we didn't use it. When we do projects like this M&M always wants me to do it too so our creations are pictured below.


I got these grow on your own princess and castle things. M&M likes to watch these grow, but I think they feel too slimey.

More ideas:
Popsicle Stick picture frames
Princess castle
Eat pudding, popcorn, pizza, pancakes.
Have a pillow fight
Put pennies in a piggy bank
Have a pajama party

Our potty-training journey

Well, back in June I did this post and mentioned that we were in the middle of potty-training M&M. Well it's been about two months now and M&M is doing AWESOME!! I am so excited with her progress. As of the last three days she has been in underwear 24/7, even at night, and no accidents!

I first started thinking about potty-training last summer when I was pregnant with Bubba. I had three goals for M&M being: 1)getting her totally off of her binky/pacifier (at 18 months she only got it at night and for naps) 2) get her in a big-girl bed, and 3) potty-train. Even though I wanted to do all of them right then, I knew that wasn't feasible so I started with the binky. Surprisingly one day I told her she was a big girl and didn't need it anymore, she agreed and threw it away herself. Whew! That was easy. Then I waited for a while to get her into a bed because I was enoying being able to put her in her crib for naps so that I could take a nap during the day being very pregnant and tired. We had a twin bed that we put into her room and let her choose where she wanted to sleep. After one night on the bed she chose the crib. I think it made her feel safe. My mom suggested getting a toddler bed so we did. This worked. My mom really helped in this transition while she was here prior to my having the baby in December.

Sorry, got side-tracked, onto potty-training. People had told me to wait until after the baby came to potty-train M&M because even if she made progress she would probably regress. I think they would have been right because she DID NOT take the change with Bubba being born very well. It was a horrendous transition, actually, but that's another story. I was also breast-feeding and I didn't want to be potty-training at the same time because there would have been those times that I was feeding Bubba and M&M would need my help to go to the bathroom. So I waited until I had weaned Bubba and she turned 3. That was in June.

I started out just telling her to try throughout the day and eventually had to set a timer for every hour to remind myself because I would forget. I gave her M&M's for a reward and would put a sticker on a chart. When she got a certain amount of stickers on the chart she would get a prize from the prize bag, which I just filled with $1 toys, etc. that I got from Michaels, Target and Walmart. We went to see my family for a week last month and again my mom worked with her a ton and she made a lot of progress. We got to the point where she was pooping in the potty every time so she was just in pull-ups for a few weeks. I don't really know how we got from that point to now because I really didn't have to do much. She just took charge and said she wanted to wear big girl underwear. Of course we had accidents and messes, luckily no poopy messes though! I think that's all part of it because she needed to realize what would happen if she didn't go on the potty. In the last week or so she has been going all by herself without even telling me. For a while public bathrooms were a problem, but she got over that too.

All I can say now is, HURRAY!!! All of these things that I thought were going to be horrible turned out not to be that bad. I'm glad we waited until she was 3 to do the potty-training because after only two months, it's done! She didn't seem ready before anyways because she is VERY stubborn (she gets that from her dad, hehe) and with Bubba being born it would have been too much for her to handle all at once.

So, there's our journey. I figured if I said something about M&M being potty-trained I might have some questions about how I did it, so I decided to just do a whole post about it.

As for the memes that I posted about earlier, they won't be happening this week because I came down with the flu this past weekend and didn't do squat for three days. We started the letter P for Tot school last week, didn't get everything done so we will continue on this week. I have a lot of fun things planned!

My plans

So this is my 50th post. Not a real big milestone, but it has me thinking about where I want this blog to go. Most of my blog thus far has centered on Tot School, recipes and Picnic table talk. So far this has kept me pretty busy. I have had a lot of goals in mind as I look at other amazing blogs. Some of these being:

• Learn how to design my own layout or have someone make it for me
  
• Learn how to make a button or have someone make it for me
  
• Host a meme/carnival (are those the same things? I'm still learning a lot)
• Host a Giveaway
• Win a giveaway
• Someone will want me to review their products and get my expert motherly opinion. haha.

These are on the back burner right now though as I have more important things in mind. And I realize that some of these are out of my control. These are things that might take years to accomplish, but it's always good to have goals.

There are things that I hope to achieve in the near future. I'm trying to add more things to this blog without adding more work on myself, per se. There are things that I need to add to my life to help my days/life go more smoothly anyway. I want to incorporate these things into my blog in order to motivate myself in doing them. I've just recently added weekly menu planning to my repertoire so I am thinking about doing Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com.



Another meme I want to join up with is Tackle It Tuesday.

I have so many areas of my house and life that need attention and I have the organizing bug biting me. We moved into a newly built home a year ago and even though we were able to spread out from a 900 sq. ft. apartment to a 2400 sq. ft. house things don't all have their own place. I need more containers, shelves, and time to deal with it. I also need to set aside a certain time to do it. Tuesday works out great for me because at the end of the month M&M starts back up with the Mother's Day Out program. I have 5 hours to get things done. Hopefully I will use that time at home and not just out shopping like I have been doing the past few Tuesdays. I can't help myself when a new Target just opened up right down the street! hehe.

Anywho, I also want to start with Muffin Tin Monday.
This I will hopefully use as a tool to get M&M, and myself for that matter, to eat better lunches and to entice her to eat new things by putting them in a muffin tin!

I think it would be fun to come up with my own meme/carnival, but it seems like anything I could think of has already been done. These are my thoughts for now. I may come up with some new ones as well, but for now these will do.

One other thing that I would like to incorporate into my blog is another one of my loves....photography and photo editing. I would love to showcase some of my favorite pictures that I have taken over the years because I just have them stored up on my computer doing nothing. Mmmm.....maybe that would make a good meme....

Tot School

M&M is currently 37.5 months old

As I was printing out a counting template that I found at Rockermom's blog, M&M came in, saw it and immediately wanted to use it. I was personally going to laminate it first, but who am I to miss a chance to work on numbers. I told her go to her playroom and find one of something. She came back with a princess crown. Then a pair of gloves for two and so on. I helped her a little bit in getting the same thing for each number.

We did counted some more with ocean-themed beads...

and the rest of the things in these containers
M&M played with the lentil tray for a little bit while I did some stuff in the playroom.

I've been meaning to make some popsicles for a while now like I've seen all over mommy blogworld. Before I made these I had seen somewhere to put the popsicle sticks into slices of banana so they would stay upright. Well.....it was a good idea, but it didn't work for us. The choice of juice for M&M was orange juice so we tried that. It wasn't the best popsicle I've ever had, but M&M liked it.

I have a lot of ideas stocked up on different ways to paint. I was waiting to use them for our P week, but as I started planning it I realized that it would be too much so I decided to do some of them this week. While I was getting the rest of the supplies M&M sorted out all of the paints.

We started off with bubblewrap painting. I first saw this on the Childcareland website. We also did cookie cutter name stamping, also on the Childcareland website. That's about all we got through though because M&M didn't want to do anymore. Oh well, I'll save the rest for another time.
I've seen the idea for Ice Treasures on several blogs including here and here. I did mine in three layers so that there would be things throughout the whole ice block. I put this out on the backporch and asked M&M what she thought we should use to get the things out. I gave her the spray bottle with hot water in it, but that wasn't fast enough for her. Then she tried with her fingernails, a piece of paper and a hammer. Eventually we got cups of hot water and poured it on. that worked for a while, but M&M got bored with it. I think this would be a lot of fun with someone else. We ended up leaving it in the sun and when we came back they were all free!



M&M asked to fish for letters so we did this activity again. I don't think I ever gave the link to where I found these fish, so here it is.




We tried ice cube painting these week as well. I found this idea on Chasing Cheerios. When we made them M&M put plenty of food coloring in them so we didn't have a problem getting the color to show up on the paper. I think it turned out really pretty actually. We still have some left over so we can do it again. Just refreeze it! Oh, like in the link I used cut up straws to put in them so we would have something to hold on to while painting.