gettin' up there

ten months

when I need a good milestone picture with a smile I can't get one, but when his clothes are messy or the background or lighting is crummy he gives it all he's got! it's okay. these will remind me that he wouldn't look up because he was so curious of the things around him when he was outside. he had his first taste of mulch... and liked it. silly boy. we watched a dragonfly circle us for a while. pulled some weeds. listened to the cars go by and the dogs play. then got hot and fussy and decided to get a bath.

Leo's been taking his baths in the backyard lately. he's always done well with them and seems to enjoy himself inside or outside, but he can make as big a mess as he wants outside and I can just leave it... which is nice! probably have a few more months left to do it this way.

he gets a little too excited and I have to make sure to stay out of the splash zone. he's figured out what I'm doing, though, and tries harder to get me when I move away. or so it seems ;)

cool find

I was out shopping for specific things yesterday and I ended up buying a bunch of other stuff I wasn't looking for! O:) way it goes. I came across these cool little things(be sure to watch the video on the site - it's kinda funny :P) at Big Lots for $2 each.

they seem to work as far as I can tell. can't be any worse than a twist tie, anyway! I got one in each color (green, orange, and red) but I don't have many bagged things in the kitchen to use them on, so one might end up being used for craft supplies or something("screws and bolts" ;) who keeps that stuff in a bag?? no one.) or maybe this would be a good topper for a fabric bag for kiddos to put marbles or coins in. I dunno, it seemed too nifty to pass up.

mixed

I tried to mix my nail polish (I know... back with this again) to make a better shade of yellow. I thought maybe a lighter shade would work better. it didn't. it looked really funny, actually. BUT, I think it was the flat color - it had no shimmer, and something that light needs some shimmer. it was a little grey looking (I mixed it with silver) so I made it a little more orange and finally after dumping all sorts of stuff together I got a color I can live with. it reminds me of a banana moon pie, or lemon taffy... which both were options I was considering naming it, but I think I'll go with "this day is bananas" since that's all I could sing to myself while painting my toes the final shade :)

no-bake cookies

since we've had 30-something (36? 37? I dunno, too hot to keep track!) days of 100°F+ weather I can't bear to use the oven, but I REALLY wanted some cookies last night :( I didn't want to leave the house to go get some or get ingredients to make cookies, so I remembered back to the days I lived at home and the no-bake cookie my mom made. it was chocolate, peanut butter, oatmeal... and it was pretty quick and tasty. I looked for a recipe online and it's EVERYWHERE. I only had about 3/4 of a cup of oats so I chopped 1/4 cup of pecans and scaled down a recipe to 1/3 of the ingredients. I mainly did it by eyeballing and it's so dummy proof they came out just fine! it took more time to clean up my mess than to cook them on the stove and wait for them to cool. it made about 12 cookies, which is just enough for the weekend cause I'm still trying to shed the last 10lbs I packed on carrying Leo O:) but after a week of healthy food and only drinking juice and having a tomato for dinner I'm ready for something that's terrible for me!

so basically you boil sugar, milk, cocoa and butter in a pan on the stove, remove from heat and add some peanut butter, oats and vanilla. plop little balls out on a sheet of foil and let them cool and harden. way too easy. for a real recipe with measurements and everything just click on a picture of a yummy cookie - here's just 5 different recipes (MANY more online if you do a search) and they're all pretty much the same. I added nuts to mine to compensate for missing oats, so I'm sure you can substitute with other stuff too. maybe coconut if you're not an oats person. I think I might try that next weekend!

UPDATE:

I made these again using the full recipe and it took a looong time for them to set up. then someone sent me a message and said the same thing! I left mine out on the table to set up and a long time later they finally did. probably has something to do with how much butter is in them and how long it gets boiled for. some recipes say you have to boil for a minute, others don't specify. a whole stick of butter is a LOT and there's going to be a lot of liquid once that butter melts, so it makes sense that it needs to cook some of that out for them to set up. I think I'll just cut the butter down to half next time and maybe add more peanut butter (I think it could use a stronger flavor) in addition to boiling longer.

toenails

I've always painted my toenails. it's very rare for me to not have polish on them. I hardly ever paint my finger nails, though. looks odd to me for some reason to have colored nails. I've been doing a lot of clear lately, though. but I've tired of the same old polish I have in my Kaboodle - yup, I still use mine from 1990! I saw a bottle of yellow at the Dollar Tree the other day and just had to get it. I can only do certain colors - blues and purple mainly - yellow is NOT a color that looks good on my feet :( what's funny, though... all the Googling I do on yellow nail polish is appealing to me, and it doesn't look different on me (the color I got is like this one), but for some reason I don't like it when it's on :\ might just need some getting used to.

then I just Googled nail polish videos to see if I could get an idea for something new to do. someone was mixing together their own glow in the dark polish - what a great idea! so I Googled the glow in the dark powder... jeez! it's expensive. being that it's not Halloween it's a little harder to find glow in the dark nail polish, but Deal Extreme had some! so I ordered that. it had one good review (by a girl) and a bad one (by a guy).. so we'll see how it goes... in 5-16 weeks! only drawback to Deal Extreme :(

so while I wait, I thought I'd try this other nail technique for transferring news print to your nails. it looked really cute, so I hope it works for me!