My preferred morning jump start method involves the following….

Yesterday we went to pick strawberries with a friend and her daughter.  I take my kids every year at least once.  Freshly picked strawberries are the best, and for $7/ gallon, I feel pretty pleased with the purchase.

I’m making strawberry shortcake tonight to take to another friend who just had a baby.  I’ll post the recipe that I use for that tomorrow, along with a recipe for a killer flank steak and roasted potatoes.  But that is tomorrow.

Back to today….

SO… something to remember when you go somewhere in your car with a friend and don’t normally have a small child sitting in the back seat of your car, is that things go differently.  And by differently I mean, the child might turn on the overhead light sometime during the 30 minute drive to or from the strawberry farm.

And perhaps your 5 year old will notice it and turn the light off.

But perhaps…just perhaps… the light will be turned on again.

As cute as these 2 are here above, one of them turned that light back on.

I didn’t find out until this morning…when I went out with both of my children to take Tid Bit to school and Little Bit to his 15 month doctor’s appointment.

The light in the back seat wasn’t on anymore then either.  And for that matter, nothing was on in the car.  As soon as I clicked the remote door entry and only heard a “click” instead of the sound of a door sliding open, I had this sneaking suspicion that we might be in for a little side-tracking this morning.

As it turns out….we were.

Thankfully my friend next door was home and came to my rescue (sans shower and all!)  You know someone loves you when they’ll come jump your car first thing in the morning…even before they’ve had a chance to take a shower!  I promised I wouldn’t post a picture of her, my morning salvation, though.

She had the cables, but didn’t remember how to use them.  I do in fact know how to use them, probably because the last time we went somewhere with my friend and her adorable daughter in the backseat, we jumped the car the next morning again.  Hmmm….I’m beginning to see a pattern here.  And it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to begin a pattern to respond to this pattern.  Check the back seat lights every time perhaps?!

I thought this would be a handy time to offer some instruction on how to use jumper cables in the instance that any of you ever find yourself picking strawberries and end up with a dead car battery the next day.

It’s a wonder that I’m not the dead one this morning though, because while I know how to use jumper cables, I missed one part, but apparently did it correctly as a total fluke.

I found the following helpful information on the DriversEdGuru:

I didn’t watch the Royal Wedding.

I know…gasp, right?!  I would have, but we don’t have cable.  When you turn on the tv’s in our house, you get this  ——->

We got rid of our satellite a couple of months ago when we realized that we were paying $80 per month to watch about an hour’s worth of cartoons and some late night HGTV on any given day.  It’s been a good thing for us, but missing the Royal Wedding was the first time I personally really started feeling the pain of the loss. 

So I did what everyone else who missed it has probably been doing…    I got online in search of pictures.  Loads of pictures!!!

And as I poured over the pictures of a beautiful bride and her handsome prince, the thing that I really kept noticing in all of the photographs were the amazing hats of all the guests.  So i dug a little deeper to find out more about this fascination with fancy hats…and much to my delight, it’s not only a fascination, but it’s actually called a Fascinator (even better?!)

Here were a few that jumped right off of the screen at me!

<—This cross between a bow gone wild and an octopus belongs to the frontally affixed fascinator of Princess Beatrice

<—the blue feathery buggy fascinator beside her is her sister Princess Eugenie

Heaven help the Brittish throne if the 5 people in line before these gals don’t make it.  Or maybe in that unfortunate case, a stylist can in fact help the throne!

Here are a few more for your viewing pleasure that I thought were absolutely fabulous though!

So, to make this Fascinator Fascination more fun for everyone, I’m teaming up with the uber talented Joanne Castillo of Fascinate Me who creates the most gorgeous Fascinators!  We’re giving away the fascinator of your choice from her Etsy store (valued up to $100!)

1. Go to Fascinate Me and choose the Fascinator that you want, then come back here and leave a comment with the name of the fascinator of your choice
2. Follow LifeforDessert on Google Friend Connect and comment here saying you did so
3. Subscribe to LifeforDessert in a reader or by email and comment here saying you did so
4. Follow LifeforDessert on Twitter and comment here saying you did so
5. Retweet this post to your Twitter followers and comment here to let me know
6. Like LifeforDessert on Facebook and comment here saying you did so
7. Like Fascinate Me on Facebook and comment here saying you did so

The Facinator Fascination winner will be announced on Tuesday May 10th here on LifeforDessert!  ***(addendum as of 5/5/11) Some people have had trouble with the blog allowing them to leave comments, so if you leave your entry comments on Life for Dessert on facebook I’ll count those entries as well.  I think I’ll throw in another way you can enter to win the Fascinator…for every one of your friends you get to do each of the entry steps, I’ll credit you with that step entry as well…basically I just made your entry potential jump up big time!  The friend must comment either on here or the facebook page letting me know you are their reference person when they enter.

I’m pea green with envy for the lucky dog who wins this!  GOR-GE-OUS!!!!


 – Logan

 above pictures from WWD.com and Fascinate Me

This morning I had the super fun surprise of talking on the phone to an old friend from high school.  She asked me how on earth I was hosting 2 parties in one week (the Egg Hunt on Saturday, and Tid Bit’s 5th birthday party today,) so I thought I’d share about how I’m making it all happen in a quick list.

• Don’t sleep as much as you should, which we all know isn’t good for me in particular because oftentimes I end up acting infantile and doing things like throwing raw eggs at the wall when I’m tired.

• You serve Pillsbury Funfetti boxed mix cupcakes instead of the homemade ones that sunk in the middle and will only look good to the K4 class at school.

• You reuse as many of your Easter Egg Hunt decorations as possible and convince your Birthday Boy that the pendant banners look really “bluegrassy” and festive for a boy’s birthday too despite having pink in them….after all, it “matches our dining room.” Make as much use also of the flower arrangements from the Easter party too…just pull out the dead  flowers and change the water that looks like a perfect breeding grounds for sea monkeys and tadpoles.

• Get creative and use the astroturf (that you originally bought for your Easter party but didn’t use because it looked tacky) as table coverings…because it kind of looks like grass and Daddy wasn’t pleased to have $30 worth of unused astroturf anyways.  Then you loan it to your neighbor for her son’s sports themed birthday party…because plenty of sports are played on astroturf.

• Serve hummus and pita chips that you already had and tell your Birthday Boy what a great idea that is because “that’s being a good steward and plus, it’s one of his favorite things to eat.”

• Have Capri Sun drink pouches for the kids, because it only takes 2 seconds to open a box and dump into a drink tub, and then you don’t have to clean out your glass drink containers later.

• Eat lunch and dinner out every night of the week because apparently it’s only possible to actually cook 1 healthy meal and throw two parties in a span of 6 days.

• Make fruit salad to use up all of the bits of fruit that you have in your house and won’t eat since you’re going out of town for the weekend.  People will think you’re just healthy and went to extra trouble.  The Birthday Boy will remind you that this, in addition to the hummus use, is demonstrating good “stewardship.”

• Don’t do the laundry, and continue to ignore the 2 baskets of clean laundry that you haven’t had time to fold or put away.

• Don’t pack for your out of town trip even though you’re leaving at noon tomorrow.

• Only clean the parts that people will actually see (and even more so with kids parties) you NEVER mop.

• And, as always, at the last minute, throw things in the beloved junk drawer.

Ok, it’s finally here.  The Easter Egg Hunt post.  I hope it doesn’t disappoint since I’d been working on the actual party for so long.  It was a blast.  I was worried that it could have been rained out, but the weather dried up and even though the ground was damp beneath the grass, it turned out to be just fine.

I could probably do a post on just the flowers alone…and maybe I will at some point.  One of my MOST favorite things to do is to arrange flowers.  I bought about $50 worth of flowers from Whole Foods and the rest I got from my neighbor’s garden…way more from my neighbor’s garden.  Amazing stuff.  Here’s a peek at a few of the arrangements.

All of the flowers were in things like antique mason jars, tin cans, and old timey milk bottles.

Everyone came around 10am and brought brunch items with them.  We had quite the yummy spread.  By 10:30 everyone was eating and around 11am we sent all the menfolk out to hide the eggs.  We have found to maximize fun for all ages, it’s best to divide up hunting areas by age.  Ages 3 and under hunt in one space (where eggs are obviously hidden), 4-6 in another area (getting trickier hiding here), and ages 7 and up all hunt in my neighbor’s yard where the dads really have fun hiding!  Works out well and all the little kids aren’t having to fight bigger kids for obvious eggs.  Plus, each child hunts til they find 12 and then are encouraged to help one another.  Was a good time had by all I think.

I really love having new people I’ve never even met come to the party…family and friends in town of our friends.  And even better than them just coming is when it’s obvious that they honestly had a good time!  Of all the compliments I could receive about my home or hostessing…that is definitely the best one for me.  And I think that’s a compliment to our friends as well!

This was the set-up in the dining room where the food and coffee station were.  And I’m shooting myself for somehow not getting pictures of my favorite drink station outside.  I’ve been refinishing a china cabinet and a dresser lately, but they were just junking up the garage unfinished, so I moved them outside and had drink dispensers in the cabinet and cups, napkins, etc on the dresser.  It was so cute!  (So if anyone who came has a picture of this…I’d love a copy!)  The perils of hostessing…last minute finishes didn’t make it to the photo memory card!

I found these cute aqua sandwich boards at an antique store probably 2 years ago and got them for $15 each.  I finally got around to painting them with chalkboard paint last week and I’m super pleased with how they turned out.  I’ve put them out in the past and just taped a sign to them, but I LOVE the way they look with the chalkboard on them.  We even used one later in the day for a lemonade stand (with the leftover lemonade from the party.) 

One day I want to screen in that porch….ahh the list of things to do…

It was raining the night before the party and I had several things that needed to be put outside the next morning, so here’s a little entertaining trick that I pulled out to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  A quick little sketch of my front and back porches with notes and pictures of everything I needed to remember.  Never a bad idea to draw out what you want to get the idea of what you’re putting.  And even though I forgot to take a picture of the drinks on the back porch, you can at least see the general idea of what went on back there!

Sorry it’s taken me forever to get this posted!  Tid Bit turns 5 this Friday, so in addition to getting the Egg Hunt undone in our house,  I’m re-doing things now for a bluegrass themed birthday party tomorrow.  This is just the month of parties around our house! 

I’ll go ahead and tell you not to be expecting anything as elaborate as Little Bit’s 1st Birthday because I have a a kryptonite around here called sanity and sleep.  And I couldn’t be more thankful that Tid Bit actually requested cupcakes!  I’m still making a more elaborate cake that he wants to take with us to a Bluegrass festival in NC this weekend, but I’ll tell you more about all of that later on too!

In the meantime though I have some musical note sugar cookies to churn out this morning and a bluegrass table to set for tomorrow’s birthday party!

I’m playing some serious catch-up around my house today from things ignored while we planned and executed a party this weekend.  Don’t you know the laundry was the first thing to get tossed on the back burner?!  I have washed 1 load, but re-fluffed and folded 4 loads.  All the laundry was clean, but not folded or put away, so it was Wrinkle City around here!  Got to love the de-wrinkle dryer cycle.  All to say, I’m busting it to be productive and get back on track today.  I’m going to do a post tonight about the Party, so you’ll have to wait til then to catch up on that.

In the meantime, I have to quickly share with you a few hilarious things that I found while perusing my email last night.  I get daily emails from several of those discount websites like Zulily, OneKingsLane, Ruelala, and HauteLook and if something looks interesting to me then I’ll click on over and check things out.  Last night I was looking around and had a few finds that made me laugh out loud…so you know I have to share.  Ridiculous stuff I found, almost a home decor version of my J. Crew posts.  Some of it I’ll be honest has some cool factor, but the pricetags combined with the oddities made for some interesting mental room designs for me.  In the following, I’m about to say what you’d be thinking but might not say out loud….sorry if I offend.

<—A horse is a horse of course of course…

This screams “Mr Ed” to me.  All I could think about was reading a book beside this thing and having a horsey commentary going on over my shoulder.  For a mere $5800, I could probably buy a real horse and a lamp from Ikea for a similar effect.

 I think this chair is incredibly cool actually, and have seen similar versions in some magazines and online, but I cannot get past some level of arachnaphobia when I look at this.  All I can think is that this chair creates the perfect place for spiderwebs to accumulate…and where there are webs, there are spiders.  And now that I’m thinking about it, I’m sure I feel something crawling up my leg.  No thank you for $1700.

 <—So shoot me for being vulgar, but this chair looks to me like a giant beanbag penis…and I wouldn’t even pick it up off the side of the road, much less pay the value sale price of $1100 for it.  Imagine the message of this chair beside the horse lamp though…it’s too much…too much.

Moving on….

This $3700 gem on the right is called the Rag Chair.  It looks to me like someone raided an upholsterer’s scrap pile and bound it up with zip ties.  This has Etsy idea written all over it.  I should also let you know that this item sold out the first day.  Someone or someones out there have too much money and not enough sense if you ask me.

 <—Am I the only person who thinks this lamp looks like a toilet scrubber?  It’s really reasonable though at $1800.  This could also be a welcome addition to the above beanbag chair.  If you sprinkle when you tinkle….

Well, there you have it friends.  The makings of a really weird room for the small investment of around $15K. 

I am all about finding a cool piece and building a room around it, but honestly, these are not the ones to do it for me.

Happy day to you all!

Last night I was cleaning the kitchen, picking up small toys around the house, and throwing away random junk in preparation for our Easter party tomorrow.  And I finally stopped about 11pm, at which point I felt that it was wildly necessary or iron and put in place a new dustruffle that I got for our bed about a month ago.  So important, I know right?!  I was busy last night…really busy.  I’ve got to get this show moving!

One thing I should tell you about me is that once my kids are in bed, I’m done for the day.  If I have something big going on, then I’ll spend that time of quiet accomplishing things, but on any regular ol’ night….I’m in my jammies and crawling into bed to read, or write, or watch a movie.  And yes, my kids go to bed early.  This means that while I don’t go to sleep til probably 11, I’m winding down from about 8 o’clock on.  But not yesterday.

And then right before I went to bed, I checked my email and my new twitter feed.  And then I felt kinda guilty….and more than guilty, I felt sad. 

In my inbox were feeds of blogs I subscribe to, and on twitter were some really short blurbs about how people were preparing their hearts and minds for this Easter’s real show stopper.  And that reality stopped my own show right where I was.  I’d gotten so busy messing with a party, that I wasn’t enjoying the heavy reality of what these days mean. 

We don’t do the Easter Bunny around here.  Gasp now, because we don’t do Santa either.  And while there hasn’t been a lost tooth yet….the Tooth Fairy’s chances aren’t looking good.  (I’ll explain more on all of that later on, but just know I’m not a Debbie Downer…I won’t let my kid ruin it for yours and I don’t have any issue with other people taking part in the imaginary fun in their families.)  So… while in our house, we go to lengths to make sure that a Jesus-related holiday isn’t confused with something else, I realized that my own focus on something other than Him was actually just as disappointing.  It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a big white bunny, or Cadbury eggs, or the contents of a basket. 

But I tell you what, if the way my house looks, and the decorating, and the preparing, the flower arranging…if it all clouds my view of a Servant Savior who washed his friends’ feet yesterday, and marched up a hill bearing the burden of a heavy cross laden with the sins of the world today, and spent 3 days DEAD….

I’ve been telling you about this chair for ages.  Probably because I bought the chair frame last summer and the fabric last fall.  And, pretty much since then have been alternating between chomping at the bit to finish this and procrastinating refinishing it til I had the cash to have it upholstered.

When I bought the chair frame it was raw wood…not a stitch of paint, or poly or anything on it.  Of course I didn’t think to take a picture of it back then because I wasn’t blogging and I knew what the before looked like.  And I didn’t take a picture after the first coat of very bright aqua oops paint from my neighbor either.  But lucky for you, I did take a picture after the second coat of teal-ish paint that I put over the bright aqua.  (Mind you, I liked the aqua…but i wanted a layered effect.)

So here’s what it looked like 2 coats of paint in…

I have the can of paint downstairs somewhere…and if you want to know the exact color I can tell you, but for right now that’d require me getting my tired tookis out of the bed and that’s just not happening.

I still love you all though.

So after 1 coat of crazy bright aqua, and 1 coat of delightful teal-ish, I grabbed another lighter can of paint I had (Benjamin Moore Wythe Blue) and dry brushed over all of the higher areas to get just some color variation going again.

After that it looked something like this. ——>

Sorry that the color variation is looking kinda wacked out between these 2 pictures.  Take that as a lesson in what happens with different lighting during different times of day in different spaces.  Just fyi, the picture on the right looks a bit more accurate as far as the darker teal-ish color under the drybrushing goes.

After that step, I took a sanding sponge to the thing to rough it up.

<—– So then it looked like this.

Do you see how it left some of the Wythe Blue color, but then also exposed some of the crazy aqua under the teal-ish as well as some raw wood beneath?  Woo Hoo.  That’s what I wanted.

And I’ll tell you a little tip of what NOT to do.  Don’t ever rub a candle on the piece to keep paint from adhering to certain areas.  This was one of the pieces I thought I’d try some different techniques on and I’d read a few things that said to rub a candle on before you paint to get a weathered effect.

Don’t do that.  It’s awful and messy and hard to get off of the raw wood (which means it made it harder for the wood to absorb the gorgeous walnut stain later too.  Just trust me on this one…it’s a bad idea.

So that being said…the next step was rubbing walnut stain over all of this.  I wanted it to dull the color (which is also why I used brighter colors to begin with)  I painted the stain on in very small areas and wiped it most of the way off almost immediately.  I used a paintbrush to apply the stain in this instance because this chair as you can see has a lot of relief areas and I wanted to make sure the stain would seep into the grooves.  So then it looked something like this. (in some seriously yellow afternoon light!) ——>

And after I finally finished all of that…which I didn’t do until I had the money to have it upholstered, I sent it off to a professional.  The reasons being for sending it off were…

1. I wanted it to have springs in it so it’d sit comfortably and I don’t know how to do that since it was just the empty frame.

2. I spent way too much money on fabric and didn’t want to crap it up.

3. I’d also spent way too much time aligning and taping off exactly as I wanted it to be on the chair.  Yes, I did tape giant circles on the fabric with painter’s tape to make sure the upholsterer got it right.  I marked each part and labeled them so my vision would be perfect in the completed product.

And it was.

Even the arm fabric is perfectly aligned!

Ps. The color of the frame in these pictures is pretty exact to what it looks like.  Oh yeah, I had it piped in lime green linen.