January | 2012 | elineuponline.com

Archive | January, 2012

Fully Potty Trained!!!

Yay! Today was a celebration.My youngest went to bed with “big girl panties” and woke up dry!!! I consider my kids fully potty trained when a) They can tell me when they have to go 2) we can go places without a diaper AND 3) sleep through the night without a diaper and wake up dry.

She graduated to an advanced degree in potty training as she also did TWO public restrooms in two days…yuck!!! And here she is all cocky and proud of herself.It was fun looking through coupons tonight and seeing $1.00 off of Pampers and wanting to “clip it,” and then remembering that I didn’t have too!!! Yay!!!

Tags: babies, kids, life, parenting

Comments 8 Comments
Categories Life

Gifts I Made This Past Christmas: Toddler Backpack

6 Jan

toddler backpack pattern elephant applique

Here, another pattern I bought a LONG time ago, but never made. Finally, I had a need! With so many people in our family, we pick names for Christmas. I was so excited that I got a little girl! My niece who is almost two. So, I put that great pattern to use. Thanks to Pinterest, I made the applique piece based off of an item that her Mommy pinned. Here’s backpack number one.And for the back…Being the non-tv family that we’ve been for seven years now, Netflix has really compromised the rules in our home. It’s been pretty bad. My youngest has become obsessed with Dora the Explorer. I hate to admit it, but if it wasn’t for Dora and Netflix, I wouldn’t have finished most of my projects this past Christmas.

With the exception of the gift from Santa, I decided to go hand-made on my gifts to the kids this year. Partly for fun and partly to save money. It was lots of fun. I think it will be a tradition.

Since we now have a Dora obsession in our home, it was almost too perfect that Dora’s main accessory is, “Backpack! Backpack!“ So, My youngest got “Backpack!” for Christmas. Thankfully, she loves it at least as much as I’d hoped. She takes it everywhere and even woke up two mornings shouting, “Where’s Backpack?!” Here’s Backpack! (You have to use “!” because my sister-in-law pointed out to me that Dora “yells at you.” I can’t listen to Dora anymore without feeling like she’s yelling at me.)I have to say, it was maybe the most fun project that I did. And since it was my second run on this pattern in a week, it went really quickly. Thank goodness because I finished it at about 3am on 12/25! (Later I’ll post what I was doing from 3am to 4am). I found the best face for Backpack that I could off of an image search and just used my light table to create the applique pieces.Did I mention that I absolutely loved this pattern? It was the first time I’ve ever used piping and now I want to put it on everything!! I purchased this pattern from Made-by-Rae. Click HERE for a link to her pattern. She also created the free pattern to the purse I talked about in this post.

***Note about the pattern: It calls for canvas or a sturdy home decor fabric. I ended up using cotton, so I actually lined everything because I wanted it to be sturdy. I had a layer of fusible fleece and fusible webbing on the back of the fleece to attach the front and back piece. I do NOT recommend doing it this way if you can help it. It’s a LOT more work. But, if you have to make a purple backpack, sometimes you have to go standard cotton!

Tags: create, gifts, kids, sewing, tutorials

Comments 6 Comments
Categories Create

Gifts I Made This Past Christmas: Baby Ugg Boots

4 Jan

Technically, this is not a Christmas gift, but rather a baby shower gift. I’ve been wanting to make these for a while now but never made time for it.A baby shower gift for a baby girl whose mom is from Hawai’i, but will be born in freezing cold Germany!
There’s not much to say about this except that this is one of my favorite patterns.

It was really easy and I thought they turned out darn cute. I’m hoping to make some for my 2 year old soon. I’ll have to alter the pattern a bit to make it bigger, but I don’t think it will be too hard.

I like them best tall like this. Don’t they look cozy? Especially in this freezing Hawai’i weather we’ve been having!

I purchased the pattern from Sweet Pea Patterns on Etsy.

**Update: Sweet Pea Patterns just informed me that you can also purchase the toddler version of her pattern!

Tags: babies, create, fav, gifts, sewing, tutorials

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Create

Hello GOALS 2012

2 Jan

Wow! It’s been two months!!!The only reason that I have for not blogging is simply that I didn’t have time. As much as I love blogging for me, it’s just not high on the priority list of things that I HAVE TO get done. So, it took the back seat during all the Christmas programs and school activities, crafts that had to be made, gifts that needed to be sewn and parties that needed to be attended to. I have so many things I want to blog about (coming in the next few posts), but for now, we’ll start off the year with goals.For Family Home Evening tonight, we set our goals for 2012. If I’ve learned anything about goal setting, it’s that they are no good without a plan. So, as we set our goals, we also made our plan (download at the bottom). And new this year, I added a “check-in” date. That’s a date that we put on the calendar to see how we’re doing. If we’re doing great or we’ve mastered a goal, that would be a good time to set a new goal. If our action plan isn’t working out, adjustments can be made at that time. I think this new “check-in” date will be good for incentivizing us too. The kids had a great time as we put each person’s date on the calendar. They were different for different events.

Each person had a spiritual goal and two personal goals. I have a few more than that floating around in my head, but for the family, this was a good amount. For my spiritual goal, I will be following along with my Sunday School lessons and my Relief Society lessons on my own. I teach nursery (18 months to 3 years) during these lessons, so I do not get to attend. For my action plan, I will study one lesson book from Sunday to Tuesday and the other from Wednesday to Friday.My personal goal #1 is to flatten that belly! For January, I’ll be doing CrossFit twice a week. February will be three times a week and in March I’ll jump to five days a week. March 31st is my check-in date. The hubby is a certified CrossFit guy, so I highly doubt I’ll miss my mark on this one. He’s kind of ~~pushy~~ encouraging when it comes to working out.

Personal goal #2 is to BE BETTER. This includes being more organized, talking kinder, yelling less, etc. I was inspired by this church message. A lot of being better for me requires more sleep and more organization. So, for 2012, it’s to bed by 12 (I know this is really late for some people, but it would be a dramatic improvement for me!) and shower by 10. It seems like when I shower earlier, I go to bed earlier. Then, I will operate with an organizational plan for the kids which includes some new responsibilities for them and less for me. I will also operate with a monthly plan, broken down to a weekly and daily “to do” list. I’ve done this before and it works beautifully. I just need to stick to it this time.

The kids came up with some great stuff. (The yellow just hides his sister’s name Some of it will really challenge them, but it’s totally do-able. My five year old wants to be obedient! I was so happy!!! His action plan consists of picking up his dirty laundry, taking his dishes to the sink without being told, and always FLUSHING THE TOILET!!! My daughter who will be baptized in April wants to read the Book of Mormon from cover to cover before her baptism. She has a chart that she will follow to keep her on track. My oldest boy wants to be the best basketball player he can be. He and my husband came up with his action plan. It makes little sense to me, but they seem to get it. I love how enthusiastic everyone was. Now we just need to stick to the plan.