Shed a Little Light on the Subject

I've always been a big fan of decorating my house using the least amount of money possible.  Johnny and I are definitely not above, say, pulling three patio chairs out of someone's trash pile, or stopping the car and backing up awkwardly to pull a bench off the side of the road.  My newest and best find, though, came from our very own basement.

We found this chandelier in a trash bag behind the heater in our basement.  We have the exact same one in our front hallway, and I'm not totally sure where this extra one was hanging before it made its way to the basement.



I've always wanted a chandelier in my bedroom, and the fan/light combo that we currently had in our bedroom wasn't working, so I convinced Johnny to hang this chandelier for me this morning.  I really like how it turned out, and the best part is that it was completely free.

Projects left to do in our room: Build and upholster a headboard, Paint walls, Paint trim, Sew curtains.
When this will happen: No Idea.

Baby Hutson's Room Before and After

After much fuss and tado, Baby Hutson's room is officially complete! And by complete I mean it has everything except a crib, a rocking chair, and the book illustrations on the wall that I talked about here.  Oh yeah, and a baby.

Here's the room before:



And now:

The rocking chair is going to go in this corner along with the children's book illustrations that I am in the process of thinking about framing.

Where all of Baby Hutson's clothes live:

So tiny! He/she already has quite a collection.

And finally, the crib is going to go to the right of the bed, kind of where that cow is hanging out.

Just a little update: Baby Hutson is currently at 29.5 weeks.  Thirty-seven weeks is officially considered full term where bags have to be packed and ready to go, so we're only seven and a half short weeks away from that. If he/she comes early, Baby Hutson could possibly be a leap day baby.

I had to go get more maternity clothes yesterday because I've grown out of all the maternity shirts that I originally purchased.  I'm thinking I'll just stay inside for the next two months.

And a Happy New Year

So here was Christmas in a nutshell:

1. Johnny and Mitchell both liked the pajama pants that I made them.
2. Johnny surprised me by giving me my favorite perfume that I left in France last year.
3. Jessie took a trip back to the 80s by asking for and receiving and then using a hair crimper. Note her lion's mane in the photo.

4. I won the pickle, a game which got slightly violent this year when Johnny and Mitchell made a pact to physically hold Jessie back while they found the pickle and split the winnings.  All it really did was make it easier for me to find it.

6. Baby Hutson got lots of awesome gifts, including a large box of clothes and shoes that Johnny's mom, Jeanne, found at a garage sale.  Included in that box were some baby Keens!  Baby Hutson is just like Mommy Hutson now.

7. Only 74 days until Baby Hutson's due date!  I hope this baby likes plaid.

Happy Hanukkah!

My Christmas decorations decided to celebrate Hanukkah today.  Oy vey.

Saturday

Here's a few recipes and a story or two to go with 'em.



So Johnny was gone this Saturday morning at bible study, and I decided to make some crepes for myself while I waited for him to come home.  The first thing I made was a berry compote...super super easy.

1 Bag of frozen berries (mixture, single kind, whatever)
3 Tablespoons of sugar (more or less depending on your sweet tooth)
Juice of half a lemon
Cinnamon, nutmeg, other favorite spices
1 Tablespoon of cornstarch

Pour the berries into a sauce pan with about a 1/3 cup of water, the sugar, and lemon juice.  Allow this to simmer on medium/low while you go do other things.  Once the berries are no longer frozen and are starting to pop (10ish minutes), add a sprinkling of cinnamon and nutmeg (or whatever else you have lying around like cloves or allspice).  In a separate bowl, mix the cornstarch with about a teaspoon of water.  Once the cornstarch dissolves, pour that mixture into your berries and bring to a boil.  This should help the berries thicken; feel free to add more cornstarch if it's not thick enough. and voila!  You're done.

Next, the crepes had to be made.  I found this recipe, which worked wonderfully except make sure that you mix all the wet ingredients FIRST and THEN add the dry ingredients.  The way the recipe tells you to do it is weird and gives you lumpy batter.  I followed the reviews and had much better luck...the second time around.

And here's my fancy breakfast that I ate by myself.  I tried to be artistic with the swoosh of compote, but now I'm thinking it just looks like I smashed a really big bug on my plate.

Once Johnny got home, I started blowing leaves in the yard, but the leaf blower started smoking. Johnny came out and fixed it and then just finished the whole yard.  I thought the bags looked like little haystacks; foreshadowing of my home farm perhaps?  

And while we were on the way home from getting more leaf bags, we stopped at the grocery store.  There was a Salvation Army volunteer ringing the bell, and as Johnny and I walked in, the man looked at me and asked, "Having triplets?"  I didn't give him any money.

Hip Hip Zoombini!

Kansas City is on the map!  We now have more than one Dunkin Donuts and this one happens to be (sort of) on my way home from work.  Merry Christmas to me!

Oh and Johnny and I signed up yesterday for a birthing class in January.  Scary!  28 weeks on Sunday.

A Hutson Christmas

Johnny and I are big budgeters.  Pretty much everything we do is budgeted, including Christmas.  So this year, we made a pretty strict budget for Christmas spending, including gifts and decorations.  Here's just a few things that I found to do to decorate that didn't break the bank.



I found $2 cardboard letters at Hobby Lobby and mod podged (it's MOD not MODGE people) strips of fabric onto them.  I was decorating the "O" when Sydney asked me what I was doing.  I said, "I'm decorating letters for Christmas decorations." And she said, "Hmm 'Happy Holidays,' you are almost done!"

On our dining room table, I used left over sparkly garland from our wedding, cheap red ornaments from Michael's and cheap jingle bells from Michael's as well.  There's also my little graham cracker house sticking out in the background.

Johnny's favorite part is that I put out the leftover red and green M&Ms from decorating my graham cracker houses.  We'll see how long they last as "decoration."

Instead of spending money on wrapping paper, I turned Trader Joe's bags inside out and used fancy ribbon that I already had from other projects.  Each person gets a mod podged letter on the front, but I learned from past mistakes and wrote their names on the bottom too.  We have a lot of J and M.  I also wrote here about the Christmas tree skirt that I made.  It's a definite easy must-do if you're looking for a skirt.

 

To decorate our windows in the new living room, I wrapped some more of that garland from our wedding around the curtain rods and hung two of my large Christmas balls from Halls.  I already had all of this, so it was completely free!

All the greenery that I used around our house was the stuff that the man at the Christmas tree lot cut off of the bottom of our Christmas tree.  Even if you don't buy a tree from a lot of these places like Home Depot and Lowe's, you can still go and take all the free left over greenery that you want.



The last little bit of decorating that I did is sadly missing a mantel (2012 project).  I made the stockings for Johnny the Christmas before we got married.  All I did was cut out a template from newspaper, cut out that pattern from two pieces of felt, decorate the front with different designs using scrap felt and embroidery floss, stitch around the edges and badly embroider our monograms at the top and voila!  They each cost something like $5 to make. I still have the template, so Baby Hutson will be getting one next year!

Merry Christmas!

Graham Cracker Houses

Pretty much every year since first grade I have decorated graham cracker houses.  They are very quick to make, fun to decorate, and cute to display until Christmas.  Here's a little tutorial for how to make them in the English fashion.



The first thing you need to do is make the Royal Icing.  Royal Icing is super sticky and hardens quickly.

Royal Icing
4 Egg Whites
4 Cups of Powdered Sugar
1 Tsp of Lemon Juice

Combine the ingredients with a handheld electric mixer.  If the icing appears to be too thin, add more powdered sugar.  You want it to be nice and thick so that the candy will stay on the houses.  Once you finish mixing the icing, scoop a few spoon fulls into a plastic Ziploc bag (shown above) or into a piping bag with a small tip.  Place a wet towel over the bowl of remaining icing to keep it from hardening before you're ready.



Once your icing is done, grab a box of graham crackers.  Each house needs a total of 7 graham cracker squares.  Grab your icing, and if it's in a Ziploc bag, carefully snip the very tip of the bag.  Cut small because you can always cut bigger, but you can't cut smaller.
Now, using your bag of icing, assemble four of the graham cracker squares into a box shape that will make up the base of the house (I do this on top of a paper plate so that I can "glue" them to the plate for extra support).  Run icing along all of the sides, and hold each square in place until they can stand on their own without falling (this takes a lot of practice and patience...you can do it!).
Once the bottom set of four squares is dry, take one of the remaining three squares and cut it in half with a bread knife so that you end up with two triangles.  "Glue" the two triangles on opposite tops of the graham cracker box you've made, and then "glue" the remaining two squares on top of the two triangles (this also takes a lot of practice and patience). Ta da, you have a little house!



Once all your houses are done and dry, spoon the rest of your icing into bags, pass them out to your friends, and decorate with all kinds of candy.  I typically don't eat my house in the end because the icing has raw eggs that have been sitting out for days by the time Christmas rolls around, but some people like to live on the edge and eat it anyway.

Happy Decorating!

So Long Science

This week I worked on stripping the science wallpaper border off of the baby's room.  It's finally done and ready to be painted!  Hopefully I'll have results to post next week.

Last Night and This Morning

Last night we had our second successful book club meeting.  December's book was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

Everyone liked it, though not at much as The Book Thief.  Part-Time Indian was about a Native American teenager growing up on a reservation and choosing to leave the reservation to go to a better high school.  It was partially auto-biographical, so I found it really interesting to gain some insight into a community that I'm not familiar with.  For January, we'll be reading The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan.  Feel free to join in.

And then this morning, Johnny and I woke up to this!  It's our first snow of the season that actually stuck.  This snow also pointed out that we apparently have a cat that comes to our back door at night.  Lovely.

Hutson Living Room Before and After

It is finally done!  And decorated for Christmas!

Hutson living room before...



Hutson living room after....

Hutson living room before...

Hutson living room after...

And here's our lovely Christmas tree that Johnny tied to the top of our car and set up for me.  Apparently in the suburbs you don't have to walk to Eastern State Penitentiary and carry your Christmas tree home.  I just finished making the Christmas tree skirt today.  It was so incredibly easy; check out the tutorial on my Pinterest under Holiday Decorating (click the button on the left side of the blog).  I will make one major change, however.  In the tutorial, the woman uses something like 50 sticks of hot glue to make her's...I just pinned it and used my sewing machine, probably saving a lot of burns and at least ten dollars worth of glue sticks.

 Living Room Information:
Wall Color - Rain SW6219 by Sherwin Williams
Trim Color - Snowbound SW7004 by Sherwin Williams
Knobs on Cabinets (that you can't really see)- Anthropologie
Curtains - Ikea
Curtain Rods - Home Depot by Martha Stewart
Tree Skirt Fabric- Jo-Ann's

**Hutson Living Room Before and After Part Two

Home Again Home Again

If you couldn't tell, Johnny and I went out of town for a week for Thanksgiving....and I did nothing about my blog that entire time.  We had a nice little break at his parents' house in North Carolina, but now it's back to the grindstone.  I do want to finish out my month of thankfuls, so here's the blitzkrieg version.

November 22: I am very thankful for safe travel.  Johnny and I had our worst flight ever going into North Carolina.  Not only can I not sit for more than 25 minutes at a time because of some muscle stretching in my back (thanks baby!), but the flight had so much turbulence that we weren't allowed to get out of our seats or get drinks.  I ended up just standing up anyway because I couldn't take it anymore.  Take that Delta.

November 23: A healthy baby is next on the list.  We just had another check up, and everything looks good.  Also, Baby Hutson has decided to move around like a crazy person.  I can lie in bed and watch my stomach move all over the place.  Sometimes I'll feel a little fist or a little foot kicking.  Johnny's side of the family is convinced it's a boy.

November 24: Next, a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We were a small but mighty group of Johnny's parents, his sisters, us, and Ms. Pat.  The day started out with a Turkey Trot that the baby and I watched...

and then later we made candy turkeys...

 and had a yummy dinner.  The turkey turned out great, and Johnny made Brussels sprouts that were all the rage.

November 25: It's definitely hard to be away from my extended family on holidays, so I am very thankful for my mom and how she has always supported us going wherever we wanted for holidays.  I'm thankful also that she took us all to see A Christmas Carol last night at the Missouri Rep.  God bless us! Everyone!

 November 26: I am thankful that I finished all of my Christmas shopping and crafting for the Hutsons before our trip so that we could bring them with us.  My wrapping this year is brown paper, plaid or striped ribbon, and cloth letters mod podged onto the packages.  Thanks Pinterest!

November 27:Even though I didn't get to see any of them this Thanksgiving, this year I am very thankful for my closest friends.  Some of us have been friends since sixth grade, and I'm so glad that we are still involved in each other's lives.

(Sarah M...I think you're usually taking the pictures...)

November 28: I can't forget, of course, to say that I am thankful for you!  When I started writing this blog, Johnny was convinced of two things: #1 That I would never keep up with it and #2 That no one would ever read it.  So thank you for keeping up with the Hutsons and sharing your lives with me through facebook comments as well as comments on here.  

November 29: This was my dad's birthday, so I am very thankful for his life and that it wasn't cut short with his heart attack years ago.  Fifty-one.  He made me promise when Johnny and I got married that he wouldn't be a grandfather until after he turned fifty.  We listened!  Happy Birthday Daddy!

November 30: Finally, I am beyond thankful for this upcoming Christmas season.  I love having time to celebrate Christ's coming to earth to free us from sin and death.  I am so thankful for our new church family at Redeemer Presbyterian and for a husband who is excited to raise our children to know Christ and the bible.