4 in 14

Ok, so I started off the year with the best of intentions regarding my grand 4 in 14 idea. FAIL. It has gone off the rails, as life has just been crazy. In fact, hubby and I now literally refer to this as the worst year of our lives. Anyone who is privy to all we have been through this year agrees.

Regardless, we are still here plugging along one day at a time.

So, this month I got at least a little back on track and set up my pretty shelf.

The only new item I purchased this year was the pumpkin. The wood was left over from a decorating project at work, so I covered it in chalkboard paint (LOVE!) and decided this was the perfect thing to use it for. The orange tea light with the dancing skeleton design we have had forever and is one of my favorites. We use battery operated candles for safety.

4 in 14 May

As the month was turning yet again, I was trying to think of a cute theme for my May "pretty shelf". May brings to mind Mother's Day, but somehow decorating a shelf saying I was great seemed a little too far. (Although perhaps the kiddo gets a guest starring role next year!) So, I went a little on the lame side with the whole "April Showers, May Flowers" route and tried to find things I already had that reminded me of Spring and flowers.

May Flowers

Here is the shelf as a whole. If you have seen my other months, the bird and rabbit are March recycles, and the vase is a February recycle. This was a bit of a harder month for me, since I was really trying not to spend money on anything new.

February Recycle

 Next to the vase, I added this colorful little bucket that I picked up in the Target Special Finds bin for a dollar around Easter time either last year or the year before. They have them all the time in different designs at different holidays / seasons.

Kid Creations

If you have ever celebrated even one holiday with a kid in Pre-School or Elementary school, you know what these are. Yes, mine are now about 8 years old. No, I have never lit the candle inside. Yes, they did melt in the moving boxes at one point. Don't care. Still keeping them. In fact, hoping to get more when I get grand-babies ( a LONG time from now).

Silliness

The last little fun flower I added was this chipboard album I made a couple years ago. Since it is sturdy and on a ring, it stands up like an easel all on it's own. This is one of my favorite pictures of her - we are at the World's Largest Gift Shop in Las Vegas and the giant hat is made of foam, the poker chips are pillows. We were there waiting on family to gift shop, so we decided to get silly with some of the SWAG.

4 in 14 April - Project

Back around Christmas time I saw this fun idea on Pinterest to leave little gifts on your neighbors doors. For some reason I decided it would be fun to do it again for Easter. I thought it would be fun to leave little egg on the doorsteps for our neighbors with treats inside.

Printed "tags"

I started by printing a few sheets of these little "labels" on some pastel computer paper. 

All Trimmed

Thank you straight trimmer for making cutting these little guys a breeze. So far I think this project is about five minutes in and I am almost done. Loving that. Now for the treats....

Yum!!

I bought the assorted bag of non-melting candy. We already have temperatures in excess of ninety so chocolate was out of the question. We sorted it out so that no one person would get all the same thing. 

Pink!

Each of these little eggs held five little candy treats in them. The left over was my daughter's favorite part, as she is a fan of the Bottlecap candies. The last piece of the puzzle was to put the little strips in the eggs. 

Egged!

We folded it a little bit so that the "From the" part was tucked inside and all that showed was the "You have been egged" part. Our original plan was to leave them for people to wake up to Good Friday morning, but life got away from us. So instead the next morning they were found. My husband and daughter really enjoy their "ninja" skills slinking through the neighborhood delivery these.

4 in 14 February - Project

For our Valentine's this year we did some searching on Pinterest. There were lots and lots of ideas. Obviously we could only pick one. Bummer! We were armed with a couple different ideas when we went to the store.
Lil' Miss was super pleased to discover this little gem of information - Kool-Aid doesn't have sodium.

Red is her favorite, but we got an assortment

 These six packs were only $1 each. So, for $4 I bought everything I needed for a class full of Valentine's. Not too shabby if you ask me. Once we got back home, it was super quick and easy to make them.

Made on my computer, printed & cut out. 

These only took a second to make, and Lil' Miss picked the colors, words, and border clipart.
Then came assembly:

Love curling ribbon!!

The transportation was a concern, because this was heavier than it looked. So I just happened to have an old file box sitting under my work table from a previous cleaning adventure.

Perfect Fit!

Easy tote handle!

The box was still heavy, and she had to take in her treats for the party. Luckily enough we had parent-teacher conference the night before. So, we took the tote and left it on her desk. Valentine mission accomplished.

4 in 14 February - Recipe

My daughter has been asking, and asking, and asking for Shepard's Pie. Now, I will say that I myself find Shepard's Pie to be delicious. In order to keep it from getting dry, I start with a base of cream corn. Or at least I used to. Did you know there is 400mg of sodium in 1/2 cup?!?!? What!!

The other issue is the cheese. Did you know there is 170mg in just one ounce (Approx 1 slice) of cheddar? For someone who loves to pile on the cheese, this was a problem for sure. So, I did measure out one ounce using a food scale. That was not very much cheese at all. So, our Swiss had only 60mg per ounce. Hence the cheese blend was born.

Current total 240mg

Meat & Potatoes....good to go here.

Current total still 240mg

Now, back to this pesky cream corn.

Thank you Google for being helpful and finding me this cream corn recipe.

 I gathered together the ingredients and did some calculations.

Measured Out

Now, if you read the recipe you will note that salt is listed. Obviously this is not ok for us. So, I left it out. Also, grated Parmesan has 100mg for just a Tbsp and this recipe calls for 1/4 cup. Nope. Deleted. 

The milk cost me 120mg and cream a whole whopping 5mg. 

Current total 365mg 

I was a little nervous going in to this, but here we go....

Ready to Cook

Cream Added and Cooking

All Done, and Not Too Bad!

This total made a 9x9 glass pan - which is the normal size I make for my family. 

Now, let's do some more math....

365mg for the pan / 6 equal size servings cut = 61mg for dinner. 

4 in 14 February

So originally the goal was to have a different cute "pretty shelf" for every month. I am surprised by the lack of seasonal decor in my home. I went to a particular home decor / craft store in my area because it has the greatest square footage and has never let me down before. I thought for sure I would find amazing Valentine's things there to make my pretty shelf the highlight of the living room. What I found was an eight foot run of items that were of the little cute animal trinket variety. Not my style. So, I got a couple of items that I liked and ran with it. It is skimpy and not to my expectations, but here it is.

4 in 14 January - Save

Save - Money. Produce is expensive.
I know this is a little late for my final 4 in 14 January post.....but sometimes life is hard and things have to wait. This post is especially close to my heart, more so than when we started this project, because it has to do with food. Food in our house has suddenly become the focus of almost every moment of every day. We have recently learned our little girl has a very serious disease that requires a very restrictive diet. She is doing well for now, but we are still adjusting.
Last year we got the idea that having our own garden would be fun. This stems mostly from the fact that our daughter visits my mom back east every summer and she has an extensive garden. The little one helps. So for our own little green-thumb adventure we started by clearing a space on the side of the house with excellent morning sun.

side yard

My husband was super helpful and built us a beautiful garden box that is nice and deep so that we have room for a good solid root bed. He used the big empty space on the pool deck to lay it out - so don't mind the strange water shots. We didn't have a flood. 

why are all my pictures sideways??

He read a few articles online from different sources. He combined all his research to come up with the best plan. He used redwood, and found tips to build it upside down and then use the posts to anchor it in the ground. He spent all day working to make sure it was straight and level, and even that the best faces of the wood grain were faced out to make it pretty. 

Since this new bed was so deep, it is going to take a few layers of soil to fill it properly. Here are the three bags he got me started with. 

As I said, this project is now much more dear to me heart. I am excited, scared, anxious, and overwhelmed at the idea of growing my own food. I guess everyone did it once upon a time. And we do already trade citrus with all the neighbors, as it grows in abundance here in Arizona. Hopefully my thumb is green enough. 

4 in 14 January - Project

Recently we have been painting our entire house. If you know me at all you would be aware that having a room one solid color is simply unacceptable. There are at least 5 colors in the living room alone. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of paint cans in the garage. Because I use different shades on opposite walls, it can sometimes be confusing to keep track.
On a separate note, I was cleaning out my craft area and found chipboard books that I picked up at Michael's on clearance.

Twenty Five Cents

That gave me the idea to make a portable little sample book. I kept it pretty basic. On each page of the little flip book I put the sample from the paint store. 

I wrote the location in the house where each paint was used. I like that this can easily fit in my purse to go to any home decor store I might be visiting and want to coordinate things with. Just to be sure I have the correct matching colors I added the paint labels to the back of each page. 

When buying paint, simply ask the employee to print you an extra sticker. This is especially helpful if you are having them make you a paint that is a custom color match to an item you brought in. 

4 in 14 January - Recipe

This week's post is a little late, but I am still on track. I scored two bags of tomatoes at the local grocery store for $0.98 each. They were a little soft, so they had to be used right away. After chopping them, I boiled them in to a great sauce. I put two carrots through the food processor to use as the sweetener instead of sugar. Sadly, I did not keep track of the spices I threw in. I know there was some onion powder, garlic powder, thyme, oregano and black pepper. I ended up with 8 jars of sauce in my pantry, plus one smaller jar of spicy sauce - made special for the hubby - that also has some cayenne and hot pepper in it.

4 in 14 January

So I had this great idea to set goals for myself. I was going to call it "4 in 14" as in, 4 planned activities every month in 2014. So far I am off to a less than stellar start. Weekend one of each month is supposed to be seasonal decor for my home. Now, since I am new to this I was trying to start small so as not to get overwhelmed and give up. I have seen so many neat ideas on Pinterest I decided to dedicate one shelf in my living room built-in to be my makeshift "mantle" and I refer to it as my "pretty shelf".
Sadly, this past weekend I was not able to update the pretty shelf. I was hoping to have it done this week, but that doesn't look like reality either. You see, I decided it would be fun to repaint the living room, which has involved removing our outdated popcorn ceiling.
We have made great progress but this project has taken significantly longer than expected. So, today the pretty shelf looks like this:

New Grey Paint

Just so that I am not at a total loss, I should point out that I gave the pretty shelf an update for Christmas so before the paint mess it looked like this:

Dec 13 Pretty Shelf

I wish I could tell you I know where I got each of these items, but that would not be true. But since this year the Christmas tree was family themed, we busted out the "whimsy" decor. Christmas 2014 will be "Department Store". Stay tuned!!