Bliss & Miscellaneous

Who thought it was a good idea to list our house for sale at 8 months pregnant?

…oh yeah…that was me.

I mentioned before we’d put our house up for sale but since we weren’t really in a hurry to sell, we’d just stuck a “For Sale By Owner” sign in the yard and listed it on Zillow. We’re still not really in a hurry but we’d been getting more calls about it and knowing that people were starting to look again we figured we’d give it a shot.

I feel like all I’ve been doing is cleaning…and it’s only been a week! On the plus side, I’ve gotten kind of good at the 30 minute “power-clean” (also known as shoving toys and tiny clothing in the ottoman & drawers or any other place potential buyers won’t be looking and banishing diapers to the garage trash). I guess if nothing else it’s motivation to keep the house neat so I have less to do each time I get a text that we have a showing. Luckily we told our realtor that we weren’t leaving for every showing because trying to drag a toddler out of the house and keep him entertained is more than I could mentally handle now that I’ve reached the point in this pregnancy that pretty much everything hurts after walking around for more than 45 minutes. I’ve been relying heavily on Sesame Street and games on my phone to keep him from throwing toys everywhere while people are actually viewing the house.

So there is that.

What else?

I also made a few more pages for the busy book including Imagine Our Life’s Sock Matching page (oh eem gee – that was a lot of pieces).

The second one I made was a shape matching page.

We took Baby E to the library recently and he picked out this book. Not a whole lot of text here…but he loved it and ran around for days afterwards saying “Go go go…shapes!”

Shapes have become a HUGE deal. He loves playing shape games on my phone and matching the felt shapes on this page.

Lastly we celebrated my grandmother’s 90th birthday this past weekend, which meant having my entire family to our house (I didn’t know we’d be listing our house when I offered to have it here). Here’s some prettiness from the party…

Oh yeah, and I’m nearly full term so I did manage to pull some of Baby E’s clothes out of storage for Baby 2B and I’m sooo glad I was organized – all I had to do was put them in a drawer.

Poor kid, he doesn’t even have a nursery (because really he won’t need it for a few months and we could use the guest room for visitors once he’s born).

So that’s what I’ve been up to.

 

I’m already starting to think about Baby E’s 2nd birthday despite it being FOUR months away. Mostly, I don’t want it to get lost in the new baby shuffle mid-April. I’m afraid that by the time I get the whole “two babies” thing under control it’ll be the week before his birthday and I won’t have anything done.

I already decided that I like these colors:

Which incidentally are the same ones that I used for his first birthday last year (hey, at least I’m consistent if not original). Regardless, picking the colors at least allows me to buy things like balloons and paper goods (like stripy straws – just because I love them).

I haven’t decided on a theme (which means I’ll probably end up with “birthday” being the theme again) but there are a couple that I like that go with these colors…either Monsters or Dinosaurs.

I’m definitely not into having a specific-character themed party but I’m leaning towards Monsters because right now E’s favorite characters on Sesame Street are “Cookie” & “Melmo” and we read the book Tickle Monster nearly every night. Perhaps a “Monster Cookie” party – featuring generic monstery creatures and a cookie bar for dessert (since last year E totally ignored his cake for the cookies).

Here’s as far as I’ve gotten so far on Pinterest…there are a lot of fun printables for a Monster Party (monster mouths, and those ad1orable PlayDoh Monster favors), plus look how cute that monster cake is!

More to come soon…better get to designing his invitation!

I usually like taking treats to our neighbors at Christmas. So after my holiday party and Hot Cocoa Bar I was able to put together these cute boxes pretty easily.

I found these boxes at Micheal’s (they actually came with inserts for cupcakes – so I’ve stashed those away for another time). Good luck finding them now though, I went looking for some ribbon to finish up my wrapping and our local store looked like it had been cleaned out (they are the brand “Celebrate It”).

One of our neighbors has three children so filling a box full of cookies for them was no problem, however since our other neighbor is an older lady who lives alone I didn’t really want to load her up with a dozen cookies.

Instead I included a cup from the party with a bag of cocoa mix and another bag of toppings along with her cookies (since the cups came with lids it made it a great way to package it all together).

I really like these individual servings especially since there are usually a plethora of treats this time of year. It would make a great gift for an officemate since the cocoa could be made in an office microwave.