The $6 Command Center

Command centers are wildly popular and are definately all over Pinterest!  Although our family isn't extremely busy (yet), we did have a small need for a little organization. Many of the examples I found online were a little too fancy for our needs.  So, check out my simple, $6 solution to a family command center.  

Here are my supplies:

Picture frames ($1 store)x3.........$3

Dry erase markers ($1 store).......$1

Stickers (Michaels, w/coupon).....$1

Paper (Michaels, on sale).............$1

Paint chip strips ..FREE (sorry,Walmart)

My command center was super easy to put together, I had it on the wall in less than 15 minutes!  The wonderful thing about scrapbook paper is that it should be pretty easy to find some colors and patterns to coordinate with your kitchen colors.  Or, you can change the colors for different holidays or seasons! 

 

I used the stickers for the "Notes" and the "Menu" boards.  If you have great handwriting you really don't need stickers and could save that $1! Then I arranged my paint strips on the 3rd paper with tape.  Remove the sample photos from the frames and replace with the scrapbook paper. Voila! Simple command center!

Here are picture of the individual boards:

Hopefully you have a couple of small nails to hang your boards.  If you are against holes in the wall, use some command strips.  Here's the finished product:

Have fun creating your own command center!

The Olsen's Big Move!

After 5 years at our first home on the corner of 2nd and Union, we are excited to announce we are making a big move! Yep, 3 whole blocks!  We looked at an adorable 1935 Bungalow on a total whim one Sunday afternoon right around Thanksgiving, and less than a month later we have rented our current home to a nice couple and will be in our new home by Christmas! It has happened very quickly and has been a bit overwhelming, but we are thrilled about our new home.

Here is our new home on 5th street:

The home lacks a garage, and the bedrooms are smaller than we are used to, but we are willing to sacrifice those things for about twice as much space overall, thanks to a nice finished basement.

Here are some of our very favorite things about our new home:

Original hardwood floors!

Nothing says cozy like a wood stove!! And a nice big mantle for my Pinterest decorating ideas!

We love how this exposed brick adds so much character to the kitchen and dining room.

We love the built in shelves in the living room:

There's also an amazing Christmas tree window in the living room, you know, you have to have the perfect window to place your Christmas tree in front of:

Mike is probably most excited about his man cave/workshop:

And for me, it's the little things, like this glass doorknob:

We are anxious and excited to move into our new home! We are also very thankful for the amazing people we have met on the crazy whirlwind of a ride, including the people moving into our home, and the current owners of the home we are moving into.  Working with such wonderful people will make moving around the holidays a bit more bearable!

We invite you to come visit us at our new home very soon!

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season!

Fall with The Olsen's!

Oh how I love the fall season!! The crisp air, the beautiful colors, football, and the holidays make me happy, happy, happy!  I found this fall bucket list online somewhere and printed it immediately because it was adorable and it seemed like a good way to guide our family memory making.  After printing the list, I just put it in a simple picture frame to display on the kitchen counter as a reminder of some fun ideas.  Here's the list: 

Here's a little recap of our fall fun:

1. Picking apples! We are lucky enough to live within walking distance of a small apple orchard where u-pick apples are about 25 cents per pound.  Not a bad deal, and it's fun for the whole family! We went 2 or 3 times this fall until there were hardly any apples left!

2. Drink hot apple cider! Not only did we drink the cider, we made the cider! The same u-pick orchard also has a few cider presses where we crushed and juiced apples for some delicious cider.  It smells amazing while making it, and again, fun for the whole family.  My dad was hooked on making cider after our first time last fall, so they came back to do it again.  My sister was also lucky enough to visit during cider weekend so she joined the festivities also. 

First, we pick the apples out if the bins. That was Emmalyn and Mimi's job:

 Then into the press they go!

 

Here is the fruit of our labor:

Fun was had by all!

3. Trick or Treat! Miss Emmalyn was old enough this year to understand the whole trick or treating thing, except the part that its only one night a year!  Halloween has come and gone, but my little lady bug continues to ask to go trick or treating.  Next year, sweet girl!  

4. Carve a pumpkin! It's just not Halloween without a couple of carved pumpkins on the porch, which made this one a must do on our list.  Emmalyn just dug right in for the pumpkin guts and seeds, and also enjoyed eating the seeds!  She's not quite old enough to carve her own yet, but still a good time!

5.  Make fall cookies! Emmalyn loves to bake and help in the kitchen.  This time she got to make some snickerdoodles while visiting Mimi and Papa (my parents) for the weekend.  

Of course she had to try a little of the dough first...

We still have a few things to check off our list before the snow hits. Oh wait, it already has!  It doesn't look like we will get around to everything this fall, but I am going to keep this fall bucket list handy for many autumn seasons to come!  Happy fall, y'all! 

New Chapter

The Olsen's are gearing up for a new chapter in our book of life! After over 5 years of employment at Washington State University, I have put in my resignation notice and am excited (and slightly terrified) that effective April 23 I will the Director of Seedlings Child Care Center in Garfield, Washington. You are probably stumped because you have no idea where Garfield is.

It's right here:

 

Mike and I love living in super small town Garfield (population approx. 600), but the 35 minute commute to work in Pullman has gotten old. I would rather spend more time with my family than in the car. I am thrilled that my new job requires no driving at all, as the child care center is located directly accross the street from our house!

Now for my all time favorite part about this position: I get to see my beautiful daughter any time I want!  I have been struggling with the whole working mom thing every since returning to work, and being a stay at home mom is just not in the cards for us.  Luckily, the opportunity to become the Director of Seedlings has just fallen into place.  I'm so thankful that I will be able to spend more time with my sweet Emmalyn, who has been attending the child care center for about 9 months. 

This new position will be bring lots of changes as I will be taking on the resposibility of the day to day operations of the child care center, as well as enforcing laws and state codes to keep the center eligible to remain licensed (YIKES!).   Since earning my degree and teaching certificate 7 years ago, I haven't had many opportunities to work with kids.  I'm excited to get back into what I was so passionate about all those years ago, and my mind is already going crazy with art project ideas, bulletin boards, field trips, etc...  I'm not a huge fan of change, or making decisions that lead to change, and I have had to face both in the last few weeks.  I feel so blessed to have the support of my amazing family and friends as I embark on a new journey! Wish me luck!

P.S.  WSU is not going to let me keep my email address I've had since I was a student.  So, if you email my WSU address and do not hear back from me, it is because the account has been deactivated.  Find another way to contact me!

20 Ingredients (or less) = 7 dinners!

In an attempt to save time and money, and just be more organized overall, I put myself up to a little challenge: Come up with a full week of dinners using 20 ingredients or less! It took some time and serious planning to put together dinner recipes that either have very few ingredients or share ingredients, but I'm hoping the time spent will pay off as I can use this meal plan over and over again. I've seen similar ideas before, which included a shopping list, as well as a few (or 15) "staple" ingredients already found in your pantry. I'm sorry, but Hungarian smoked paprika and coconut water are not staples in my house and can never be found in my pantry, which meant more to buy. How does that help me?? There are a couple of pantry items included in my meal plan, but they really are staples that I always have on hand, like flour, or ketchup. You use so little flour and ketchup this week, you could even ask a friend or neighbor if you can bum some if you don't need flour or ketchup for anything else.  I wanted to share this meal plan because I know there are so many busy families out there who might also benefit from an easy weekly meal plan. You'll find the recipes and shopping list for 7 dinners, and pictures if I remembered to take one.  These recipes are meant to feed a family of 4, but the recipes can easily be double or halved depending on your needs.  Please note: My efforts to include the menu, shopping list, and recipes all on one easy printable page has resulted in some very bare bones directions for the recipes.   You should be able to figure it out, but if not please comment and I'll clarify :)

You can find a link to the easy weekly meal planner HERE

So, here are my indredients for this weeks meals: (bet you can't tell where I shopped!) This week's meal plan includes 19 ingredients.  In case you are interested, I spent about $35 on these ingredients without crazy couponing or anything.  I also did not have to buy the beef, as we buy ours from the local butcher in massive amounts at a time. I think that with the beef included, you should easily be able to buy the ingredients for under $50.  As you can see, I'm totally fine with, and strongly recommend, generic brands, as they make no difference in the recipes. 

And, here is this week's menu:

Mexi-Pasta

Easy Hamburger Stroganoff

Cheeseburger Meatloaf

BLT Wraps

Bacon Mac & Cheese

Crock Pot Italian Chicken

BBQ Chicken Wraps

Below, you will see some pictures of this weeks yummy dinners.  Well, the ones I remembered to take a picture of anyway.

BLT Wraps

BBQ Chicken Wraps

Mexi-Pasta

Bacon Mac & Cheese

Creamy Crockpot Italian Chicken

In case you missed the link for the meal plan, here it is again: MEAL PLAN.  I hope that you find this meal plan helpful. For side dishes, you are on your own!  A nice green salad and some french bread will go nicely with many of these meals.  I really enjoyed this challenge, and am already looking forward to my next 20 ingredient or less challenge.  I realize there's probably too much pasta this week. But hey, it's cheap, versatile, and I kind of love it.   I'm hoping to cut back on the pasta for next time :)  Stay tuned!

Mommy and Emmalyn visit Grandpa and Grandma Olsen

Last weekend was a big weekend for me! I put on my big girl panties and drove to and through Seattle all by myself for the first time! And with a toddler!! With a DVD playing and snacks on hand, we departed on our 5+ hour journey. As we approached the pass, I started seeing signs that there would be road closures due to blasting on Wednesday at 8pm. I thought, "that must really suck!" Then I thought, "wait...today IS Wednesday!" Check the clock. Crap, it's a little after 8. Sure enough, shortly after that we met up with a long line of cars. You know it's bad when people are taking this opportunity to walk their dogs. By this time, the excitement of a movie had long worn off and Emmalyn had been fighting sleep for about 2 hours. Being stopped for 30 minutes feels like 3 hours when there is a cranky baby in the car throwing tantrums and toys. Finally I saw people getting back into their cars and moving along, YAY!! With about an hour left on our trip, Emmalyn finally gave into sleep. Ahhhhhhh, peace and quiet :). We arrived at my in laws home, only to have Emmalyn cry hysterically for a good 10 minutes. She did calm down, and slept like a rock. She must have known we had a fun day ahead of us!

And a fun day it was! We visited Forest Park. Friends who live in the Everett area, I recommend this park! There is a small animal farm, a huge playground, and an awesome splash pad. Emmalyn loved chasing the goats around and quacking at the ducks. 

Emmalyn's favorite part: the splash pad! Such a water baby!

 Unfortunately, it's all fun and games until someone takes a swing to the forehead. That someone was my sweet Emmalyn. I couldn't catch her before she reached the swing, with a girl swinging rather high on it. She took that swing right between the eyes, flew off her feet, and instantly had two black eyes. Luckily, she recovered faster than I did from the incident! She calmed down and took a nap. The only thing that calmed me down was watching Mike's 6th grade graduation on VHS! Who knew in 1997 that this would be my future husband??

The next day, we visited a family fun center. Emmalyn was far from impressed by the tubes, tunnels, slides, and play mats. I tried numerous times to coax her in, but she wouldn't have it! This was about as far as I could get her!

Despite a swing accident and fun center that Emmalyn wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole, we had a great weekend away!

 Emmalyn enjoyed blowing bubbles with Grandma.

And stealing french fries from Grandpa.

And digging for treasure under the furniture with Uncle Matt.

And keeping an eye on the neighbors with Tuff.

Thank you, Larry and Dorie, for a wonderful weekend! We hope to do it again soon!

VACA!!!

I love summer! Although the weather hasn't been exactly what I would consider to be "summer" weather, it's still time for VACATIONS!!  Here's a recap of the Olsen's most recent adventure with my parents to the Eagle Crest Resort in Redmond, OR:


Miss Emmalyn is ready to hit the road! Sunglasses and a magnadoodle (the wonderful suggestion from a mom of 3!) are essentials for our 4 hour road trip!  After spending the night in Grandview, we load up and follow mom and dad to our vacation destination.

While the magnadoodle entertained Emmalyn for a good hour, that hardly made a dent in our road trip. So...enter, DVD player!

The movie captured Emmalyn's attention for awhile, but not long enough. 

 So...enter, Grammy!

Grammy hopped into our car and rode with us for the remainder of our drive. A plus side to traveling with grandparents: build in entertainment!

Finally, after some road construction, crazy drivers (anyone drive a red Toyota Camry??), and a few stops, we finally roll into our final destination: EAGLE CREST!

I've been coming to the Eagle Crest Resort with my parents for over 20 years! Now I'm excited that Emmalyn gets to come and enjoy what Eagle Crest and the surrounding area has to offer.

We visited the High Desert Museum in Bend, OR.  The High Desert Museum is an indoor/outdoor museum that showcases some native animals to the area in the animal exhibits, but also shows a lot of history about the area.  The otter was sleeping, and we had to leave Birds of Prey show before we were asked to leave on account of Emmalyn's squealing (apparently it startles the birds), but we did enjoy seeing a bobcat, a lynx, a porquepine, and two huge bald eagles. 

Then, of course, there is swimming!

Emmalyn's teeth chattered most of the time, but she loved it anyway!!

Mom, Emmalyn and I had a girl's day in downtown Redmond while dad and Mike golfed.  Emmalyn took time to stop and smell the flowers...and suprisingly did not rip off too many of the petals!

One of my favorite things to do in Oregon is shop...TAX FREE!!! Emmalyn, however, was not so impressed.  Talk about shop til you drop!

I'm willing to bet that my parents' favorite part of this vacation was all the quality time with Emmalyn!

My most memorable part of this vacation was all the wildlife!

There were ducks and geese...lots of geese, which Emmalyn enjoyed feeding, and chasing!

Then there were chipmunks, which Mike enjoyed feeding by hand!

Our favorite animal encounter was with Bambi!  This deer had no fear and cozied on up to us, even tried to come into our townhouse!

Mom said it would not be a good idea for us to feed the deer...we did it anyway...

I really wanted to get a picture of Emmalyn with the deer, but as I inched closer to this few hundred pound wild animal with my first born in my arms, I decided that nothing about that was a good idea. So I passed Emmalyn off and snapped a picture of mom posing with the deer, as it took a few steps closer to our front door!

Three days flew by and it was time to come home.  Our vacation was way too short, as most vacations are, but we had a wonderful time! I'm already looking forward to our next vacation!!