Staying Home...

Tomorrow is supposed to be my first official day back to work after being out these last 12 weeks.... 12 weeks!! I canNOT believe that it has already been 12 weeks. My sweet baby was 12 weeks old yesterday and will be 3 months old next Sunday!! AHHHH!! Where has the time gone?! Well, on the plus side - I am getting to stay home with my babies. Yay! At least, we're definitely giving it a go. I turned in my badge and key to work 2 days before B's birthday. I wanted to leave in a way that would be okay for me to come back if the $$ didn't work out for me to stay home anymore. 

So, I started selling Avon (and if you know anyone who uses it or would use it - hook a sista up :) haha!) and I've made a few sales with it. Some ladies who work over off Wall Street with hubby may hopefully turn out to be pretty good customers. I do not expect to sell enough to completely replace the money I was making at work, but I figure any money that I can bring in would be great. 


I started doing some crafty type things that I've been seeing on Pinterest during some of my time off. During Christmas, I made some really cute ice cream cone Christmas trees with the kids. I don't have a picture on here I can post, but they were very fun to make and tasted good too! I made a couple of Valentine's Day wreaths for my mom. I've made wreaths before and I would love to make more of them, but it costs a good bit of money for the supplies and I can't just make them if I don't have anyone that would buy them. The Valentine's Day wreaths I made were made with stuff I still had on hand at home. 

The first Valentine's Day wreath

The second Valentine's Day wreath

I also did some furniture stuff. Unfortunately, I have no "before" pictures so you can't see how in need of this refurbishing they were. The girls had a white dresser in their room that has been in my family for a long time. There was nothing really special about it or anything, but mom used it for all of us when we were little and it's a great little dresser. I took some off-white paint and repainted it, then I put a metallic glaze on it to make it look a little antiqued. Got new hardware from Hobby Lobby (I'm in love with that place!!) and Voila!

The finished product!

 

D had a desk in his room and I cannot for the life of me remember where it came from. It was a really awful yellow color, but it was pretty sturdy and it's a good size. I decided I wanted to do it in a brown color so it would match the stuff in his room. I sanded it down good and went ahead and put a coat of the off-white paint on it. Then I used another metallic glaze in a burnt brownish-copper color.

Dylan's finished desk

M had her birthday the day after B turned 3, so I made her a present from an idea I found on Pinterest (my new fave place!). It is a picture frame that I spray painted navy blue and then glitter spray painted. I stapled/hot-glued a piece of burlap fabric on which I had painted an "M" to the back of the frame. I made a felt flower (so cute) and glued it to the corner. It's an earring hanger! I would love one myself, but I don't have any really artsy looking earrings to hang on it. M has a lot of really pretty, artsy, eclectic looking jewelry and I thought it would look really great with her earrings on it as not just a functional piece but a stand-alone art piece as well. I hope she liked it!

Earring holder!

I have some other craft stuff I want to do (one is making birds nest jewelry!) but I don't know that I have the time and $$ to invest in them right now. Pinterest has been a great friend to me lately! 

Speaking of Pinterest, I have also found some great new recipes for my crock-pot on there! I have been wanting to use my crock pot more, and get out of having to cook for 3 hours or so in the evenings. Now, I can throw my entree in the crock pot around noon-1ish and have it cooking for the afternoon and just make a couple of sides and dinner is done! And hubby gets to take some for lunch to work the next day, so that saves a little $$ here and there. 

My next big project is getting B potty trained. She has been showing signs of readiness for about 9 months now and about 6 months ago, we started working on it with her. We never forced anything and she used the potty a few times. After E was born, we stopped. We knew that it would take her some time to get adjusted to having a new sibling and having less mommy-all-to-herself time, and potty training would have just been harder. She is still adjusting to the new changes, but she's doing well and the only potty readiness sign that she is not displaying is the whole "not liking to be in wet/dirty diapers" sign. She could care less if you changed her diaper. She'll tell you if she's wet or poopy, but she has no problem staying in it all day. It's gross, but that just means we're going to have to work really hard to get it going. I plan to spend the majority of the day tomorrow working on potty training. After taking D to school, we'll come home and I'll put a pair of cotton training pants on her and bring her potty chair into the kitchen and just have her be in the kitchen all day. I'm thinking about giving her a penny every time she pees and 2 pennies if she poops. She likes to put money in her piggy bank, so we're going to see how that works.

I'm very grateful that God is providing for us and allowing me to stay home right now. To be completely honest, since I had changed positions at work, I was enjoying my job a lot more than I used to. Yeah, it was still hectic, and I still didn't like that it was so stressful, but I actually felt like what I did made a difference. I even got employee of the month for August! I was really good at it and it's something that I could enjoy doing. But, the cost of childcare for 3 kids was just going to be too much right now and I really wanted to be here for my babies as much as I could. I hope that I can be the mom I need to be and we can still make it work with me being home. 

Anyway, it's getting a little late now, so I'd better hit the sack :)