An After Flood, House Renovation Tour

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Now that we are expecting our third child, there is one question that I get asked, surprisingly, more often than "do you know what you are having? Do you have a name picked out?" and "are you going to have anymore?"

And that question is "are you going to move into a bigger house now?"

Our townhouse isn't large, so when we got married, The Guy and I naturally talked about moving into a bigger space. But in the end we decided against it because we didn't want to shake the kids lives up too much at once.

People were surprisingly opinionated about it, but most accepted our reasoning and stopped asking.

But when I got pregnant, it was amazing how many people began to ask not "if" we were now moving, but "when" we were now moving.

Breakfast Cookie UPDATE!

Hey, remember those SUPER easy breakfast cookies that I gave you the recipe for? The ones that were so easy to make that it was practically lying to say that I had baked them, but yet the kids absolutely loved them?

Well, I made a few the other day (along with about 60 Pancake Muffins)....

.....and in the process, I found a way to make them better!!

For those of you who missed the original recipe post, I am going to start by posting it below before I move on to the update, which will be at the bottom of this brief repost:

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Breakfast Cookies 

What You Will Need:

Two SUPER EASY Meal Ideas (For Busy People!)

I don't know about you, but I'm busy as hell and don't typically have time to prepare gourmet meals.

Or, when I'm not busy, I'm lazy because I'm exhausted from being so busy.

And I like TV.

I like TV more than I like cooking.

#TrueStory  #NoShame #MaybeALittleShameButNoFilter

Anyway, as most of you know, even though I like TV more than I like cooking, nutrition is still very important to me. And because of that, I'm always on a quest to find simple yet healthy meals to feed my kids.

Today I bring you one of their all-time favorites, and it's so easy that this post serves more as a "hey, here's an idea that you've probably heard of but totally forgot about" reminder, rather than an actual recipe.

Sweet Potato Cinnamon Bites (And More!)

Today was a long day and not just because I gave the entire house a good scrub down, did five loads of laundry, wrote two articles, met with a nonprofit client, went to the gym, and took both kids grocery shopping, but it was a long day simply because it was freezer meal stock-up day (full disclosure, I wrote this on Saturday).

Blah.

I am not a fan of freezer meal stock-up day, but what I am a fan of is eating and we like to do that around here at least several times a day. As I've mentioned in past posts, since I don't want the kids eating cereal for dinner every night of the week, I try to set aside one day a month to get as many meals made as possible and stick them in the freezer for the weeknights. Also, because we are on the food assistance program (food stamps), it helps me budget what I have to spend by making a majority of our meals as soon as our assistance becomes available each month. 

This time around I started with 6lbs of chili.

How To Live Within The Space You Have

It has been a while since I've done any house topic posts, so... how about closets?

Do you ever feel like the closet space you have, or lack thereof, just isn’t working for you? Just because a space is not laid out in a way that is suitable to your style of living doesn’t mean that with a few easy changes you can’t make it into a space that better suits your lifestyle.

Small Closet:

Didn’t get that walk in closet that you were dreaming of? Yea, me either. I got the standard “one bar hanging rack with overhead shelf that is 12 inches above my head" closet.

But, builder standard doesn’t mean that for less than $50 you can’t have your own custom made closet!

By moving the top shelf down 18 inches and mounting a standard wall bracket that attaches to adjustable shelving below it, I was able to give myself ample storage space. I added a few bins from the $1 store to hold things like bras and socks and I now have a cheap,  yet custom, closet system that works much better for not only my lifestyle, but for my height as well.

Closet #1

Guess What I'm Cooking!

Ugh, so remember how excited I was that the computer error in my child support case got fixed? 

Well as it turns out, IT'S NOT FIXED. 

They are now intercepting 40% of it and have yet to be able to tell either myself or Mr. Attorney Man where it's going. So frustrating!!! I'm all over it, but in the meantime guess who at least got their food stamps reinstated!?!

I know, I realize that makes me sound like white trash, but whatever, I'm past caring at this point. But anyway, yes, we are pretty happy. The kids and I have been cooking/baking/eating up a storm over here and so I figured that this would be as good a time as any to answer one of the questions that I get asked most often in real life and on this blog.

Well That's About As Natural As A Cheeto

Yesterday The Boy Child managed to knock a full bowl of pasta sauce off the table and onto the floor.

I cannot even describe what this looked like and of all the things I take pictures of, I can't believe I didn't even snap one of this. Actually, I guess I can believe it, seeing as how I was using every ounce of my willpower to retain my sweet mommy voice and not let out the voice that was actually screaming in my head.

She sounded like a real bitch.

It's My Weekend Yo!

Wow, it has been a BUSY day.

First off, it started at 3:30am. I had a super creepy dream about my ex, so much so that I couldn't fall back asleep because it had freaked me out so bad. By the time the kids got up I was so completely wired that I ran five miles and lifted weights. which normally wouldn't have been a big deal but I had made plans to go to a free Zumba class with a friend.

Side note: funny story, but shortly after I had The Boy Child, this same friend and I signed up for a hip-hop dance class. We were SO out of place it was downright mortifying. I still had all my baby weight, was completely out of shape, and we were easily ten years older than every girl there.

It was a moment I wish I could forget.

Back to the story.

Lucky her, she got more sleep than I did and missed the class.

I however, did not, and I have to tell you that it was an intense class. I'd say we started with maybe 30 people and ended with half that many. I guess I envisioned it more like a fitness dance class, but in all actuality it was a repetitive jumping and lunge class.

Do You Wanna Build A Snowman?

The Girl Child wanted to build a gingerbread house this year, but with our dietary restrictions the only place I could find a gluten and dairy free kit was online and it was $29, plus shipping, plus a several week delivery time.

Yea that's not happening. I don't really have the time to be baking gingerbread walls either, so...sorry kid.

A couple days later I was in the grocery store and just happened to walk past the largest marshmallows I have ever seen in my life. I stood there for a minute and started thinking about the ridiculous amount of cookies the food pantry had given us and the left over frosting and chocolate chips that I had from another project. I grabbed a bag of the ginormous marshmallows, a jar of marshmallow fluff, and headed home.

I decided that while we couldn't make a gingerbread house, we could make snowmen!

Be aware this was made by a 3 yr old so it's imperfectly perfect.

I have to say, not only do I think the project went well but the kids had a blast!!

Do you want to try it too? Of course you do! (I'm feeling a little over confident here)

What you will need:

Easy Bake Pancake Muffins

Winter is coming.

Ugh, I hate winter.

I live in the wrong state.

My friends are all "yay! Winter!! Yay!! We can stop working out, eat brownies, and wear big sweaters!! Yay winter!!" and I'm all "I still have to stand in front of a group of women several times a week in my underwear. Screw winter."

With that being said, winter is upon us and I feel myself slipping into the baking and cooking frenzy that seems to accompany fall in this household. By the time I get the kids home at night, lug everyone in, peel off 3 layers of slush covered winter wear, and turn the heat on that I turned off when I left for work that morning, the last thing I want to do is make dinner.

But....we are all most likely frozen from the inside out and starving; thus enters the cooking frenzy of fall.

As a single working mom I simply do not have time to make three meals a day. Combined with the fact that my financial situation doesn't allow for much wiggle room in the food-budget department, I really need to plan ahead. What this means is that I usually designate a couple hours in the beginning of the month to making meals in bulk and then freezing them. Last week I made 6 pounds of chili. SIX POUNDS of chili you guys.

I then split it up into family sized servings and froze it. After that I made four pounds of taco meat and ten pounds of baked sweet potato cinnamon bites. None of the meals took me longer than twenty minutes to prep and when everything was done cooking, I had quite a bit of food ready to pull out of the freezer as needed.

How To Buy What You Love When You Can't Afford It (Take A Tour Of My House!)

Today we are going to be taking a little detour from the normal topics of this blog and talk a bit about my house.

*I'm going to interject here for a minute and say that it feels weird to say "normal blog posts" when I write about things such as burning the hell out of my lady bits and taking my clothes off in a parking lot among the other more regular topics of rape and abuse. There really isn't anything "normal" about any of my posts.*

Anyways...after the post's "Make Money Makeover" and "I'm Not Paying For That" I got a surprising number of messages asking me home decor questions and money saving tips. While I certainly don't claim to be a specialist in the home design department, I can share with you guys the tips and tricks I used to haggle a good deal, find a great dumpster, and re-purpose what I could to get the decor I was looking for at a price I was able to afford.

On account of the fact that I'm not really a home improvement blogger, I'll sort of just take you through a tour of my house and point out where and how I was able to save money and still get what I wanted. Also, since I don't want to leave the rest of you out I'll end this post with something a little more "blog typical" so make sure you stick with the post to the end!

Make Money Makeover

In my post "When Everything Is Just Not Ok" I explained that in order to start gathering the money that I would need to pay for my daughter's broken window, a window that my ex shot, I had sold my bed and the chair in my bedroom.

I slept like that for ooooh...about a week before I realized how unhealthy that was going to be for my mental state. My daughter and I were sleeping on the floor because the man who was supposed to have taken care of us, was ruining us.

That is seriously depressing.

Good-bye bedroom

Taking the bed apart for the new owners to pick up

Hello very empty room

As I laid there on my mattress, on the floor, and looked around at my room, I realized how angry I was. I hate that room, always have. My ex was rarely home when he lived here and therefore not much of the house ever had his mark on it, but when he was home, when we were "together," it was most often in the bedroom. When my ex left, one of my best friends and I wasted no time in painting the walls; walls that I had spent years staring at as I lay in bed desperately trying to mentally escape the things that were happening to my body. Painting helped, but the furniture, the feel of the room, it never changed.

Still lying there on a stack of mattresses, I decided that this would not be another situation for him to get the better of me; this would be a situation that I would use to make life better FOR me.