Recents Crafts and Experiments

I have been inspired in my new motherhood by my two sisters-in-law, Amber and Lisa, who are both ridiculously crafty, artistic, and creative. I am generally none of these things. But their talent has inspired me to try a few crafts of my own, which I never would have done in my working non-mommy days. Here are some of my first attempts to develop my inner craftiness:

This is a French memo board I made for Adam's mom for her birthday:

 

This is a baby album I made for my friend Candice when she had a baby boy:

This is a hair-accessory-organizing-board I made to put all of Lily's (and my) hair accessories on (which is funny because Lily hardly has any hair!):

And this is the shelf in Lily's room which I decided to use for her stuffed animals. Please note that I did not make anything in this picture. The stuffed animals are all store-bought as far as I know, and Adam's aunt made the gorgeous quilt underneath them.

Besides this stuff (simple I know, but I am proud of myself anyway considering that I have never done anything crafty in my life before now!), I have also gotten into somewhat of a make-it-yourself craze. I long ago gave up using canned cream soups, and have been making my own for several years. But recently I decided I wanted to make a whole bunch of other things by myself. I started with tortillas, which proved to be very simple, although time consuming to roll out without a tortilla press. I also decided to make my own yogurt, which is AMAZINGLY easy! I seriously takes only 3 ingredients, less than 10 minutes of active time, and just has to keep warm for a while. We have been mixing homemade blackberry jam into it, or sometimes the leftover juice from canned pineapple or bottled apricots. It is so yummy, and cheaper and healthier than store-bought yogurt.

Last week I also decided to try my hand at homemade granola bars. Mmm, they are so good! The only problem is that the ingredients are kind of expensive, since they have lots of nuts, dried fruit, and honey in them. But they are so much healthier than the store-bought kind that I think it is worth it. I also make pizza dough, something Adam is very good at, but that I had not mastered, and homemade breakfast granola (quite different from the granola bars). Next, I think I will try homemade stewed tomatoes, and I heard that you can make applesauce easily my microwaving apples and then putting them in the blender with some cinnamon. Do you have any great ideas or recipes for easy homemade foods?

Mommy's Spanglish Cooking Show with Lily

Lily is a very curious little girl. She has definitely never been the kind of baby who likes to be left alone with a pacifier to keep herself happy. I am okay with this, but it does mean that I essentially have to keep her entertained all day long. I don't mind; I just drag her around the house with me and sing her songs and tell her, in great detail, about everything I am doing in ridiculously animated, silly voices.

This means that every evening when I am making dinner, I basically host our own little private cooking show. And since I am hoping to raise a bilingual(ish) little girl, I attempt to do this in Spanish. The problem with this is that my Spanish vocabulary is not very large when it comes to things like kitchen objects. I can talk about business, the gospel, or a whole number of abstract ideas in Spanish. I can conjugate and my grammar isn't too bad. But when it comes to cheese graters, pastry blenders, and spatulas, I am pretty hopeless. I am improving, though, since I keep Google translate open on my computer constantly. I now know that a cheese grater is a rallador and a spatula is an espatula, and I think a pastry blender is just called a mezclador (let me know if you have a better word for it!).

But overall, let's just say I'm glad my new neighbors are Asian and not Hispanic because if they heard my mutilated kitchen Spanish every day before dinner time, they would probably laugh their heads off. Our dinner preparation "conversations" generally go something like this:

"Look Lily! This is a potato. It is brown. I am going to use this metal thing to take the--oh, darn, what's it called . . . oh yeah--peel off this potato so I can chop it up and put it in the soup for our dinner. We can't eat the peel because it tastes very yucky. (Singing:) So we take it off, take it off, take it off. I am taking the peel off so we can eat this potato!"

"And now we are going to put the potato on this wooden thing that comes out of the, um . . . surface . . . so we can use this knife to chop it up into little tiny pieces, and then put them into the, um, container of water that is boiling on the . . . thing that is above the oven."

Anyway, let's just say that my daily Spanglish "cooking show" would not be very interesting (except to laugh at) for anyone over the age of 6 months, but hopefully it is more helpful than detrimental to Lily's language development. At least it keeps her entertained every evening so I can make dinner.