From babies to Christmas holidays

Wow, it's been a pretty busy three weeks!

We had our baby! Almost two weeks over due! but here all the same! It's a girl (if you wondering)! Princess C came into this world Saturday evening at 11:04 pm.

A is a very proud and loving big sis!

Two weeks after her birth, The Lord opened up a door for us to move to a better, and healthier house. We are very grateful to all those that came to help. J insisted I was not to do any work with moving, but I did manage to get my fingers into it a bit.

And now we are planning to go to Ontario for Christmas to celebrate with family and friends! I'm so excited. 

Now before you think I must be running myself into the ground after just having a baby (I shall pretend you are deeply concerned about my well being), I will let you all know I feel amazing! No seriously, I do! I've been taking it easy-ish. I have not been pushing myself to the limits, I've only done what I feel good enough doing and no more. It helps to have a baby that sleeps through most of the night waking only once or twice to feed, and usually lets us sleep through the rest of the night. 

Today hopefully we can finish our Christmas shopping. Besides the usual I need to create a homemade/Pinterest inspired Christmas gift for a ladies get-together. I have an idea, I just need to pull it together. For safety sake, I shall let you know after the event, and I shall try to take pictures to share later of the process and the finished product.

Preservation from Insanity!

so I have come to the end of my pregnancy and I think that can be one of the hardest points so far. My nesting energy is gone, braxton hicks become more frequent and stronger, and I don't know about you but for me I get very antsy when the waiting games start!

Some things I do to keep me busy and occupied is create a small to do list to keep me busy enough so that I am not bored and something that requires effort, but not to full that I completely run out of energy juice.
Sunday Was kinda hard, because I was very antsy and struggled with getting impatient. I just want this baby out already!!!!

Yesterday was my due date, but I was not expecting the baby to make an appearance on D day. So, like I said I started making a to do list. Yesterrday I made bread, and homemade laundry detergent. today I plan on making this...

Source: jujugoodnews.com via Karen on Pinterest

I also plan on getting some laundry done (with my new homemade laundry detergent :0D!). We'll see what else gets done today. Tomorrow, who knows maybe this baby will want out by then!!!

Blessings!
Karen E.

I love finding and trying new recipes, I always have! what i love is when I find one the whole family falls in love with! I love finding recipe books that are practical and that use ingredients that are familiar to the regular person. I am also a sucker for finding new recipes online, my husband has had to remind me sometimes to check my books that I have instead of always going to the internet. My favorite go-to website for looking up recipes is 

I found this great recipe the other day, which I tried yesterday and everyone loved!

Chinese Chicken Fried Rice IV

1 egg

1 tablespoon water

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 onion, chopped

2 cups cooked white rice, cold

2 tablespoons soy sauce

 ground black pepper to taste

1 cup cooked, chopped chicken meat

Beat the eggs and water together. melt the butter in the frying pan and then add the egg mixture and fry for 1-2 minutes. Remove from frying pan and cut into shreds.

In the same pan add the oil and onions. saute till the onions are soft. add the cold rice, soy sauce, chicken, and pepper. stir-fry for about five minutes and then add egg.

Note: I added cooked frozen veggies to the recipe like you have when you order the rice in a restaurant. add to your own liking!

Well I hope You enjoy this as much as we did!

Blessings!

Karen E.

New direction!

Ive been thinking about the whole direction of my blog lately and I don't want it to be a whole lot of randomness. I wanted to gear to towards interior decorating, but where we are at right now, yeah, it doesn't really work. We are at a temporary house (and its not worth improving anything), and I'm not sure when we will find something more permanent. 

While living in this house there has been something that I've learned with my dear husbands help. You can make a house a home and feel like a home no matter how horrible you think it is. We hated this house for the first several months we lived here, and we never thought we would stay here this long, let alone learn to actually like this house. 

Turning a house into a home for those you love is far more important than making it look stylish and picture perfect. 

That is my goal here!

Wow that was a round about way of saying that!

I'm still learning about interior decorating, but I feel the home has more dimensions like I said above. I want to expound more on my love for working in the kitchen, and my 

attempts at making this house a home.

Sorry it's taken me so long to post this, but being in my last trimester, I've been busy getting things ready, filling my freezer, canning, and getting the house ready (ish).

This is just some of what I've done!

Hopefully I'll be posting more soon. So till next time!

Blessings!

Karen E.

Long time no post!

Wow, ok so our internet has been down these past couple of weeks and so here is a recap of this past month. 

We spent the July 1st weekend in PEI camping with some friends of ours. So here is a pictury post (upposed to a wordy post)

We took the ferry across,and even though it took longer it was so worth it!

While on board they had live music, and it was amazing!

We haven not been camping in a few years, and it was so much fun! 

There was an amazing beach right at the camp ground.

 

And the kids play ground was just right there.

While we were in PEI we went to the Avonlea village.

Sorry about the blur, but I had to take the picture fast to capture the moment (for all you Anne fans, you probably know which seine this is!).

The "Tea party!"

On the 1st of July we went to Charlottetown where they had the best fireworks show this side of Montreal!

Unfortunately my camera was down for several weeks as well.  But thankfully life didn't stop! 

I don't have pictures of the Tall Boats/taste of Halifax festivals, but it was amazing! Maybe later on I can post some of the pictures from the hubby's iPhone. 

Amelia's birthday was this past weekend and here are some pics of her cakes. 

I was fortunate enough to have a good friend come over nf help me. My daughter (who turned 3 btw) loves fruit just as much as sweets,so I thought fruit cakes would be more practical and appreciated than a regular one! 

She loved it!

Well that's it for now! 

Blessings! 

Karen E.

Place your title here! Lol!

Ok so I'm gonna be brutally honest with you all today. I do not like our house! It's old, the upstairs smells and is falling apart, it is too small, its totally outdated, spiders and large ugly beatles love to hang out in our house, the water is really hard, although it does come with a washing machine, there is no dryer (there isnt even room for one!), did I mention that the upstairs is unuseable except for the bathroom, and the room off of it. The bathroom use to have moth balls, our house is in the middle of the mennonite community so we are the object of curiosity for some ppl as they drive by reeeeeeally slowly. When we moved in we knew this would only be temporary but we didn't know how long temporary would be. 

Having said all that, I want to share some things I am learning while living at this house. There have been days I just wanna scream, and leave this house behind forever, and of course there are days where I can handle it and it's actually not that bad!yesterday was one of those days. I organized some surfaces and even made this coke bottle decor. 

Maybe it helped because it was raining all day, 

and the husband was home! 

RABBIT TRAIL HERE, sorry. Anyhoo, the other day when I was having a rather hard day after some bad news, I decided to come up with a list of things that I was grateful for in this rat hole. Here it is in no perticular order.

1. It's a roof over our head

2. The bathroom is upstairs (which gives me a work out several times a day)

3. The rent is cheep 

4. It has a wash line out side

5. It has a big yard

6. It has a rhubarb plant so I can have rhubarb to my hearts content!

7. No carpet! 

8. It's close to our friends

Ok it may sound a little cheesy but it helps (some days) to think about these things that make life a little easier and morebearable. I guess God has a reason for having us here longer than we want to be. I choose to believe that he is holding us and has a better plan than we have.

A huge thanks to my husband for buying me a new camera! More picture posts to come!

Blessings!

Karen E.

Peacock inspiration

Wow, I can't believe today is Friday!!! Where has my week gone?! I was going through my blogs I follow when I saw the weekly title of Conspicuous Style's blog called "50 favorites for Friday". I mentally freaked out, and thought, what in the world, its Friday?! So at this moment I have resigned my self to the fact that it is indeed Friday.

Do you ever create blog posts in your head or even Facebook updates? I do. For blogs, at least parts, startings or at least come up with the idea. They sound great in my head, but for the most part they never make it to the blog. Tisk, tisk.

There is this amazing picture I took the other week while we were at a wild life park with my BIL and SIL. 

I am absolutely in love with the colors! It being spring, most of the makes we're in full glory whenever any female was around, and I mean full glory (wink, wink)! I was amazed at the brilliance of the colors, and how the viberant blue would show a shimmer of bright green. 

If you've been on pinterest at all, you've probably seen all the peacock themed designs for Rooms and clothing.

But I can't resist showing you some of them.

Source: design-seeds.com via Karen on Pinterest

Source: polyvore.com via Karen on Pinterest

Source: cococakecupcakes.blogspot.com via Emma on Pinterest

Source: overstock.com via Brittany on Pinterest

Source: posheventplanning.com via Grace L. on Pinterest

Source: Uploaded by user via Ashley on Pinterest

Source: google.com via Stacy on Pinterest

Source: 2.bp.blogspot.com via Crystal on Pinterest

Source: media-cache6.pinterest.com via Kalina on

Well anyway, you get the idea. The females were gorgeous too, but I couldn't get a really good picture that would do it justice, and google didn't have a good one either. So if you want to know what they look like maybe you can look it up somewhere.

I better get going on things I need to do yet for the weekend.

Blessings! 

Karen E.

The great move

Wow a lot has changed since I last posted! I disappeared for my blog page for a while because I felt like I didn't have a lot to say and I find it hard to do posts without pictures. One other reason I felt held back from blogging is because as a home renter and not a home owner, I feel limited in decorating a house in my style when it is not my own, and I don't know how long we will be there. We have been trying to buy a house for the past two years and it has never worked out. 

Ok now onto other things. Like I said at the beginning, a lot has changed! Well for one thing, after over two years of trying we are now expecting our second child! 

On top of that we have made a huge leap in fulfilling a dream of ours, and we have moved to Nova scotia from Ontario.

Grrrr! The picture isn't clear, but you get the idea of how far it is.

We love it here!

You have got to see the houses out here! They are colorful, some are new and some are old and well taken care of!

I have a lot more on my mind but I guess I will have to save it for the next time.

Blessings!

Karen E.

the business of life

I have been neglecting this blog I know, and I am sorry. Kinda. Its hard to keep the blog updated when next to no one reads it anyway. I love the blogging world and would love to be a part of it.

These past two weeks have been busy and tiring. the last two weekends we have had in-laws over for night, and started working out at 6 am. Yes it has been a very busy week. 

I have been working on our home though. I think that the first thing about creating a beautiful home, home and not just a beautiful house is having a clean and tidy home. Its what makes a good impression, and its what makes coming to your house a pleasant and relaxing experience. But its not just  for company, but for you and your family. I find that when my house is clean that I feel more inspired, and it makes us all happier. 

It is something my mom has taught us all our lives, and I saw it play out in our home. My husband installs windows and doors for a living, and the stories he can tell about the houses he has been in would make any health inspector have nightmares!

Am I saying that my house is always neat and clean? No way, but its something I am working on, and have been doing a pretty good job so far this week.

in other news I have been finding all kinds of goodies on pinterest that I have trying. 

Source: gimmesomeoven.com via Karen on Pinterest

These amazing Energy Bites

Source: underthehighchair.com via Karen on Pinterest

I have fallen in love with these super easy Pita Bread

Source: remodelaholic.com via Karen on Pinterest

These Cinnamon roll Pancakes are sinfully sweet, and delicious

Source: decorandthedog.blogspot.com via Karen on Pinterest

I found this recipe on a blog I follow and I had to make them almost immediately!

well its late and I shall sign out.
good night void.

Blessings!
Karen E.