crafting for hope (and a giveaway!)
Charity can come in many different forms: money, time, word of mouth, items, etc. It can come from the manpower it takes to assemble a home for someone in need or in the generosity of gathering winter coats from your closet for someone who is cold. And it can come in the form of passing along your love through the creation of something you’ve crafted yourself… and the book Craft Hope provides just that exact outlet!
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The book is just an extension of the amazing blog of the same name, and it provides patterns and designs for many amazing craft ideas along with charities to donate those wares to! There are examples and templates in the book to make cheerful quilts for hospitalized children, soft dolls for Nicaraguan
orphans, tug toys for animal shelters, knit gloves for homeless shelters, a cloth backpack for schoolchildren in Africa, a stylish purse for women moving out of abusive relationships, and knit scarves for fostercare teens heading off to college. It basically gives you amazing ideas of how to craft with a charitable purpose… and guides you along the way!
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So why am I mentioning this awesome book? Well, because I have a copy to give away to a lucky reader! Just leave a comment here (perhaps you could mention a charity you’d like to craft for?) and I’ll pick a winner on Monday morning!
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And if you’d like to get involved with Craft Hope outside of buying their book ($1 from the sale of each book goes to Global Impact!), check out Project 9 that’s running right now. They’re asking people to donate bright and cheery handmade pillowcases to terminally ill children in the hospital through ConKerr Cancer. If you’ve ever had to stay in the hospital for days at a time, you may know just how amazing the spot of color of a pillowcase can be! The project ends on September 15th, 2010, but if you miss it, I’m sure Project 10 will be up and running very shortly!
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your ideal bookshelf
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What would your ideal bookshelf look like? Jane Mount captures your “ideal bookshelf” on canvas as a way to immortalize your all-time favorites or perhaps just your favorites right now. I would love to do something like this for Baby M… and update it every few years. If you’re not up for commissioning your own work, you can always grab the 20×200 version of someone else’s ideal bookshelf as well.
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A few books on my shelf (to name off-hand): The Little Bug that went Ka-Choo, Runaway Mouse, Pride and Prejudice, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Much Ado about Nothing, Bleak House, A Separate Peace, John Adams, High Fidelity…
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What would be on your ideal bookshelf?
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simple decorations get me every time…
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I adore simple decorations. Things that look so elegant in their minimal state of being. But I loathe paying lots of money for it. I actually bought some sea glass the other day only because it was on sale… which is silly, because I adore sea glass and wish it was sitting in vases and trays all over the house.
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Luckily things like this wooden flag are both simple and cheap to make. Too bad we don’t have a beachside cottage in Carmel where we could hang this. Bollocks.
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In other home decorating news, I’m really coming around to the idea of an ORANGE front door. A group of neighborhood bandit kids have taken a liking to picking all of our colorful frontyard flowers… so our landscaping is drab and just various shades of green. And people will think we’re being extra festive for fall, until they realize it’s hanging around through Christmas and Easter! Mr. M is always down for anything orange, so it looks like I’ll need to spruce up my photoshopping skills and pick out the most “well-suited” orange I can find to match the rest of our exterior paint.
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Ah yes… 2 years later and we’re still finding ways to decorate and change things up in our house…
weekend adventures in grilling
The weather decided to cooperate this weekend and NOT be 100+ degrees, so we ventured out to the backyard and fired up the grill for two wonderful meals.
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Now, I’d been excited to try it out ever since I first heard of it through the blogosphere on Doubly Happy. Then Nodakademic decided to give it a try as well last week. So when I saw our market’s grocery ad with free-range super-happy California chickens on the front page, I decided I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it out. (I’ll send you to check out their blogs rather than putting up lots of photos that mimic their lovely posts) I have had the pleasure of drinking beer out of a can for quite some time now, so we modified the recipe by popping open a bottle of Pacifico and filled up half of an empty Coke can. I slathered up the oh-so-happy chicken with a spice rub and olive oil, then put him under the grill for an hour in indirect heat.
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Now, even though I thought I only saw white liquid come out of the breast meat after an hour, I should have kept him there for another 15 minutes. Because while beer can chicken is super awesome and moist and yummy, microwaved beer can chicken is just “pretty decent” chicken. Yeah, I took it off too early and it was still a little too rare for Mr. M (or any sane individual’s) taste. But the leg meat that I noshed on pre-nuking was amazingly yummy… so I encourage anyone to go run and try some beer can chicken for themselves ASAP!
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I did succeed in cooking something properly though, and man was it 1) EASY and 2) oh so yummy in the tummy! Ina Garten’s amazing garlic bread is just amazing, trust me! You need fresh ciabatta, garlic, fresh parsley & oregano and olive oil. So simple, but really just insanely good. And it’s so green that you think you’re eating something healthy! It caused this spontaneous movie quote exchange as well:
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Kim: This is good garlic bread.
Mr. M:Yeah, I think garlic bread would have to be my favorite all-time food. I could eat it for every meal. Or just constantly, without stopping.
Kim: Then you’d get fat.
Mr. M: No, why would I get fat?
Kim: Because bread makes you fat.
Mr. M: Bread makes you fat?
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For Sunday night, we opted to nosh on a happy cow instead. What’s even better… is that this cow was grass-fed, California happy, and used for educational purposes throughout both its life and death. I’m pretty certain this might give us some vegan-like powers in a meat-eating household? (sorry… I shall stop the Scott Pilgrim references now… because for some strange strange reason, pretty much NO ONE has seen this amazing movie… what is your problem people?!?) That’s right, we purchased our lovely marinated skirt steak from the Meat Lab at UC Davis, and Mr. M threw it on the grill for a massive consumption of homemade fajitas!
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Fajitas at home are so darn simple to make and eat! Just grill up some onions and peppers (I went w/red and yellow bell peppers), put out some cheese, sour cream, guacamole, corn (Mr. M’s secret ingredient), and the best fresh tortillas you can buy! Trust me… you won’t be disappointed! And you won’t have to ration your meat or toppings like you do in the restaurant-portioned servings! Next time we make these, we’ll definitely be having company over, as 3 lbs of skirt steak is a bit too much for 2 people to finish off. Guess that means I’m indulging in left-over fajitas as well… yummy!
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So there you have it! A full grilling weekend menu. Nothing too crazy, but all so so good. Anyone else fire up the grill on Saturday or Sunday?
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font of the week: Mr. Keningbeck
the legend of the “good” baby
You’ve heard the stories, but sometimes you wonder if people are just telling them to make a show of themselves. You may not believe they exist, but in the back of your mind you’re fairly certain they’re out there. And if you’re a true believe, every confirmed sighting gives you a sense of eternal hope. Well friends, I’d like to share with you that they do exist. And they’re just as wonderful and amazing as you’d imagine. There’s no reason to doubt their existence as myth. I’m talking, of course, about the elusive “good” baby.
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Now the legend of the good baby is most frequently brought up during casual mom warfare at the park, during pick-up at daycare, at a baby shower, or perhaps just in coffee shop conversation. It starts innocently with one mom mentioning how “good” her child’s sleep patterns are, or perhaps how they rarely cry. The other mother either responds in kind with a report on their good baby or, not knowing what this parent is speaking of, rolls her eyes in a fit of rage. Sometimes it’s the truth, sometimes it’s a tall tale to provide some self-satisfaction in an crazy world. No one ever knows for certain except those that live in the same household. But the end result is this: people doubt the sincerity of the story and believe the “good” baby legend to be a myth perpetuated to make you think motherhood just ain’t all that bad.
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And in turn, the other side of the story is heard loud and clear. The one about the not-so-good babies. The babies that make you question your ability to raise a child or why you became a mom in the first place. And the ones that serve as powerful birth control for those waiting in the aisles. They are the babies that make you tougher, stronger and better as a woman. And perhaps, when you’re pregnant, you’ll prepare yourself for all of those crazy and wild stories and to say goodbye to the semi-sane life that you had before. That’s what I did. But then it didn’t happen.
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You see, Baby M is a “good” baby. And it’s by no means due to any single thing that Mr. M or I have done. Everyday at daycare, they share what a “good” day she had. They raved about how “good” of a teether she was, since no one even suspected that she had teeth popping through. Our friends talk about how “good” she is when we take her out to a later dinner with us. Her grandparents say it incessantly when they’re visiting. And each time we say, “Thank you. She is really really good.” And she is legendary in that respect. When other moms ask me about her, I often recoil and try to share very little, because I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging or creating a myth. And I follow it up with a meek-ish, “She’s just a really really good baby.” Then I back away or stop talking. Or I share a sympathetic story about the one time of day when she goes absolutely mad crazy — hungry time. That’s when she loses all sanity, starts screaming and wailing and acts like we haven’t fed her in 3 weeks. That usually gets me some points in conversation, but rarely many.
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So why am I sharing this random fact of knowledge? Because I want to let you know, in pure honesty, that babies can be good. They can sleep all night just as easily as they can wake up every hour. For every horror story there’s a non-story in another household. They can be a vacation just as easily as they can be a battle. And the only way to find out is to go through it yourself. It just makes me so sad to hear comments from women who run away from children because they think that’s the only shape/form that they come in. And I think the negativity has run rampant lately in the mommy-world… and it’s not better for it.
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I know many people respect mommy bloggers for being brutally honest (hi Mandy & Jenna) about their experiences… and I wanted to be the same way with you today. I don’t blog/tweet/share a lot about the little baby things with you here, because honestly, I fear the eye-rolls from people who don’t know me. I’m not a “sunshine and lollipops” person when it comes to being a Mom, but I don’t have any horror stories to share here or battles that have been waged. Baby M has been a “good” baby and we’re thankful every day for being blessed with sleep and smiles and calm. It makes parenting much less of a job and more of a treat. And while preparing yourself for the hurricane is always a great plan, know that you might just end up with rainbows in the end.
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