Pokemon Party: Nate's 5th Birthday

I am obviously SO BAD at updating, since this post is all about Nate's fifth birthday party!  I really need to get better about blogging.  LOL

Anyway, Nate is hardcore into Pokemon.  (In fact, on his birthday he said, "I evolved into 5!  Next year I evolve into 6!  And then I evolve into Denny (the neighbor kid who is older)!"  Adorbs.)  We decided to go with a Pokemon theme for his 5th birthday party.  Months ago I turned to my trusty Pinterest account to start getting cheap DIY party ideas, and as usual, it didn't fail me.  So many ideas, so little time!

Here's what I came up with:

Week 1: Pantry Organization Part II

I'm still running a bit behind the suggested schedule of the 91 Day De-Clutter Challenge, but slow and steady wins the race, right?  (Besides, I don't have all the rooms they budget time for.  My house is tiny!  I'll catch up!)

Yesterday I got my "pantry cabinets" all cleared up, and today I managed to get the big hall pantry!  Hoo boy, look at that before mess:

Pinspiration: Toothpaste

This will be the first of my "Pinspiration" posts - where I start going through and trying out some of my (unbelievably copious) Pinterest pins.  (If you're interested in poking through my boards or following, here is my Pinterest account.)

I spend way way too much time on Pinterest.  It's one of those thoroughly enjoyable bottomless-pit time-sucks for me.  I have probably pinned more DIY projects than any one person can complete in a lifetime.

It's funny, because I totally didn't get it at first.  I signed up pretty early on, but didn't understand why someone would want to bother pinning something, so I never did anything with my account.  Some time later, it finally clicked - this was a million times better than bookmarking a page on the Internet that I wanted to remember because I could not only categorize things, but I could also choose a photo to represent it.  I'm big on visual organization - I'm way more likely to go back and do something when I have a pretty and inspirational photo to remind me why I wanted to go back in the first place!

So, I stumbled across this pin today:

Week 1: Pantry Organization Part I

Today's goal for the 91 Day De-Clutter Challenge was to clean out the pantry.  I wasn't able to do my big pantry today (the two-year-old has been trying his level best to absolutely destroy the house the instant you're not looking directly at him, and he'd have to be out of my line of sight while I worked on the big pantry), but I did manage to get my "pantry cabinets" done.  Big pantry is scheduled for tomorrow!

Today was a "big grocery shopping" day.  You know, the kind where you have a huge cart-full of food at the end and requires more than four trips to the car to bring it all in?  Well, some of the things I got were pantry items, so I put them in my before picture on the counter just so I could later appreciate how I was going to fit everything in there.  (I didn't.)

Week 1: Fridge & Freezer Clean-up

Today's zone for the 91 Day De-Clutter Challenge was the fridge and freezer!

OK.  I know I've said it before, but we haven't been here all that long, so I didn't think I was really going to have to do much of anything for today's challenge.

However, I was surprised - when I took a really good look, I found something had spilled under the cheese and vegetable crisper drawers at the bottom of the fridge.  Since I was pulling things out anyway, I hit that while I was in there.  It worked out nicely because whatever it was didn't have time to get all fuzzy and horrible-smelling.  (Don't you hate that?  Eww.)  Here's an overview, followed by closer shots of what I did (I know, it doesn't look like a huge difference.  Trust me, it looks better than it did, and it will be way easier to find things now!  Also, please excuse how dark the top half of my fridge is - the light bulbs have been burned out since we moved in, but we haven't gotten around to buying replacements yet.  I'll try to do that during Kitchen Week!)

Adventures in Breadmaking and a Declutter Challenge!

I've been wanting to try making my own bread for a long time.  My mom was never particularly "domestic" when it came to baking (we got occasional cookies from scratch, but mostly everything else was from a mix, and never any breads beyond banana bread), so it wasn't something I learned as a child.  I started reading the blog The Simple Dollar for financial tips, and he had a very popular post (based on the number of comments) about baking your own bread.  It's inexpensive, surprisingly not that difficult, and yielded surprisingly good results for my first go!

Yummy!

Minion Party: Nate's 4th Birthday

My oldest son turned four this week! (How did that happen?!) I usually do the boys' birthday parties pretty much all myself at home, but this time we decided to do a party at BounceU, home of the biggest inflatable bouncy-equipment I've ever seen. I still wanted to do something homemade for his party, so I opted to skip the cake they provide (they gave us an extra pizza instead), and make cupcakes.

He has been obsessed with Minions for awhile now. We even went to see Despicable Me 2 as his very first movie in the theater (he did awesome). So naturally, I decided to do his party with a Minion theme. I made Minion invitations, picked up some inexpensive Minion Mylar and latex balloons on Amazon, and a couple little party favors. All that was left was the cake. I have a fondness for cupcakes (easy to make, fun to decorate, and easy to send leftovers home with party guests). Here's what I came up with!

Want to make your own Minion cupcakes? Here's what I did.