Decorating for Fall on a Shoestring

Fall is probably my favorite season of the year. Cooler temperatures, colorful leaves, and a perfect mix of cozy, rainy days and bright blue skies and sunshine--but without the sweltering temperatures of sunny summer days. Hot mugs of tea or coffee, sweaters, and my heavier weight denim skirts become more appropriate, as do warm, hearty meals, days filled with baking, and fall scented candles.

And pumpkin spiced everything.

Yeah, I admit it. I'm one of THOSE people. The older I get, the less I feel inclined to apologize for the things I enjoy, whether they're things few people enjoy, or things that are so overdone you get mocked for enjoying them, even though lots of people seem to.

My husband enjoys pumpkin pie. That's it. Poor man. Such a world of pumpkin goodness, and he's missing out on it. But, I digress.

This year, I had a little bit of wiggle room in our usually tight budget, and so I squeezed out a few dollars to enjoy one of my favorite activities--decorating our home for the season.

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One of my favorite little luxuries that we've built into our lives is this coffee station. It actually sits in our bedroom, so we don't have to walk all the way to the other end of the house while still half asleep to make or get coffee (depending on if someone thought to program it to brew the night before or not). We can enjoy our first cup of coffee without ever having to leave the bedroom if we play our cards right and nobody leaves their mug in the living room. 😏 I saw this cute little pumpkin at Wal-Mart the other day, and this seemed like the perfect spot for it.

 That light-up glass (I think it's glass, anyway) pumpkin was my splurge from last year. It came from Dollar General for $10, but I have no idea if it's available this year or not. The little candle in a jar and the frame both came from Dollar Tree (newly opened in our town; I'm so excited!), and the printable was free from Teepee Girl. I love it, so pretty!

 This little bookshelf top in our living room is one of my favorite spaces to decorate, as it's one of the few that the kids will leave relatively alone. Although I did have to clean it off for this photo, because they drop stuff there constantly. 😒 The orange pumpkin came from Wal-Mart last year, but they are still available this year, and in a great selection of different designs. I want a few more before the season is over, and at 98 cents apiece, that should be affordable.The pumpkin kisses sign, ceramic pumpkins, and the tiny candle are all from Dollar Tree. I was so excited to find those pumpkins; I've admired some just like them that my aunt has, so it's great to have a set of my own. The larger candles came from Wal-Mart (I have a bit of a candle addiction), and the little lantern was a gift several years ago, so I couldn't tell you where to find one like it. The little angel lives on this shelf regardless of the season, and was also a gift, also many years old. My mother bought her for me about 10 years ago, and though I was with her at the time, I don't remember where the angels (there are 2 more, on a different shelf) came from.

 Meet the new shoe cubby bench and coat hooks I mentioned in yesterday's post. The "fall decorating" part, of course, is the wreath above the coat hooks, which came from Goodwill last year for about $3.

 This table runner is one of my favorite additions this year, made from Dollar Tree felt. . . I'll level with you; I have no idea if they're supposed to be wall hangings or placemats. But they're cute, and they were $1 each. I just laid them out in a design that suited me and used a hot glue gun to tack them together. A word of warning, though--my cats like to sleep on this table, and I've quickly discovered that cat hair likes felt. Now I need one of those sticky rollers to get the fur off my table runner. 😏

 Not "Fall," per se, but we also recently (finally!) figured out how to add some lighting over this table. The ceiling is a styrofoam-ish drop ceiling, and I was unable to find a stud behind it to hang an actual light fixture from (my first idea was to buy one of those hanging lamps that plugs in), so the light I bought quite some time ago was never hung because it was too heavy. Then, recently, I thought some of those little cafe lights from lawn and garden would be ideal. They could be hung from the ceiling in a zigzag, giving it a sort of bistro-y feel, and they wouldn't be too heavy for our weird ceiling. I got lucky and caught these on clearance online from Wal-Mart for $6 and change, with free shipping. One cheap extension cord and a pack of coaxial staples later, and our kitchen finally has light, just in time for the earlier evenings of fall and winter. 😊

And since we've recently started having a weekly family game night, this is an excellent addition. Overlook the apparent lack of chairs. For some reason, my two-year-old daughter was busily moving them away from the table. 😂

I think I've spent about $25 so far this year on fall decorations for the house (not counting the white candles, because those are my "everyday" scent, and I'd have bought them anyway), and I couldn't be happier with the results. With that, I've also bought a couple leaf garlands from Dollar Tree that have yet to find their place in the house. Since most posts out there about decorating seem to assume you have lots of money to blow, I hope this inspires you by showing you can get nice results, even if you can't drop a ton of cash.

Birthday Cakes--A Year in Review

Because I stink at blogging (but one of the things I enjoy is sharing my family's birthday cakes with you guys), this post will be a review of all the birthday cakes I made over the last year while I was failing at being a blogger. Enjoy. 😂

First off, in November, we had Michael's pokeball themed cake.

 I can't seem to find a photo for our second November birthday, Preston, which concerns me. Did I forget to take a photo, or did the kid born right around Thanksgiving never end up getting a cake last year? 😕 I seriously hope it's the former. . .

I also seem to be missing photos for Lissa's cake in October, now that I look back over things.

Anyway. . . Then in January, Kaylee requested a Minecraft cake cake. No, that's not a typo. She wanted a cake that looked like a Minecraft cake.

 Then in April, we celebrated Justin's 4th, and his current obsession is PJ Masks. This one was a doozy, let me tell you. Every time I tried to add food coloring (the icing gel kind, not liquid) to the candy melts, it would seize up like I'd gotten water in it, so I was forced to make the masks in white chocolate and actually paint it with the food coloring.

 May birthday kid happens to share a birthday with his newest sibling, so he got someone else to make him his favorite birthday dessert, blueberry bars. Sorry, Austin! Then, in June, I made this cute little Pikachu for JJ while Dad took all the older kids to the river for a few hours.

Tristan, my August kid, requested strawberry cheesecake, and for whatever reason, I didn't get any photos of that. But eventually, I'll share the recipe and walk you through making a cheesecake, because I am now sort of addicted to making them. Takes a lot of time, but oh, my gosh, are they delicious! I don't think I'll ever settle for a store-bought one again, lol.

That's all I've got for you today. Hope you enjoyed this little trip down memory lane as much as I have, and overlook my messy kitchen. It always looks like a bomb went off when I'm finished making a cake in there.

Meet Jacob Kolbe!

You guys. Has it really been almost a year? 😳

Well, I have no viable excuse for that. Seriously, none.

Kids are back in school after a very challenging summer vacation, and I've been giving some thought to the blog world again (partly because my Facebook page keeps guilting me). We had a new baby in May, right before summer break began for the kiddos, so I guess the first thing to do is introduce you to our newest addition. Meet Jacob Kolbe.

He took us on quite a crazy ride, beginning with a diagnosis of gestational diabetes about three months before he was even born. I had to do Valentine's Day AND Easter without chocolate y'all. I gave up fasting for Lent. (I kid, but it seriously is harder for me to follow a proper diabetic diet than to just not bother with eating at all during the day). My numbers refused to come into line with metformin, which led us to insulin and spending the last month of my pregnancy spending one day a week at my regular OB practice, and another in St. Louis being seen by the maternal-fetal medicine specialists at St. Mary's. 

It. was. exhausting.

It was the first time I've ever been "done" being pregnant, and I don't think it was the pregnancy so much as the constant medical appointments and the brutally long drive to the city and back every week.

It was also (not coincidentally) the first time I've ever tried a home remedy to try and induce labor. (Relax, I was scheduled for medical induction just a few days later.) Midwives' Brew, you guys. It took me two tries to get more than contractions that eventually went away, but it actually does seem to work. And since I'd been induced with every baby except my first, that's no small thing to me.

Then, he refused to gain weight. By three weeks old, he still hadn't regained his birth weight, despite spending all evening every evening nursing. His pediatrician suggested that we try pumping and bottle feeding, theorizing that he was burning all his calories nursing, leaving none for him to grow on. We struggled hardcore with the pumping journey, but we persevered (thank you, supportive husband and older children), and about six weeks in, I learned Jacob had tongue and lip ties, which likely impacted his ability to transfer milk from the breast when nursing. (And also cleared up the reason why my milk supply was so "barely enough" when we first started pumping; lactation operates on a system of supply and demand, and my baby's oral anatomy wasn't allowing him to "demand" it!) A friend who'd been through tongue ties with her children referred me to Little Flower Family Medicine in O'Fallon (known as a "preferred provider" in the world of tongue tied babies), and I requested a consultation. We were seen less than a week later, and, due to the distance between our home and their office, his ties were revised that same day. I'll write more about our pumping journey in a separate post, perhaps, but Jacob took back to the breast like a fish to water, and I could not be happier about that.

There has been so much this past year that I could, and should, have blogged. We've missed birthdays, and our first wedding anniversary, and some rearranging of the house around income tax time. New shoe storage bench, coat hooks, and vacuum cleaner, yay! Seriously, adulthood is weird. One day, you're cool. The next, you're excited for a new vacuum cleaner. 😕 We went with a Shark Rotator Powered Lift-Away Deluxe, if anyone is curious, and I absolutely love it. And no, they didn't pay me to say that, but hey. . . if they wanted to, I wouldn't complain. 😂 It pops apart and back together in so many configurations, and so easily. It's seriously a breeze to go from vacuuming the carpet to sucking up cobwebs on the ceiling, or dusting crumbs off the bookshelf (just me?) I haven't bought the extra filter package yet, but I will eventually.

Now if I could just convince my kids to keep their crap picked up off the floor. . .