Menu Plan Monday, a glimpse into the summer blur

Menu Plan Monday with Laura at Org Junkie

Summer Blur

This week has been HECTIC. Not only has work itself been go go go, but so has life outside of work. And on top of that Saturday morning at 6:30am I leave to volunteer at a teen camp (Anvil, woot woot) for a week. Getting prepped for that is always hectic. Costumes, clothes, extra's. Making sure I leave food and meal plans for the household while I'm gone. Plus working my regular work week plus one extra day, means it's been interesting to fit everything in. BUT I'm mostly packed - just washing some extra stuff, 90% of my costumes are finished/bought/found and I've finished all the camp related admin tasks I needed to accomplish. Which is how Wednesday night came to find me wearing a black pantsuit romper and a miss america style sash. Ahh camp. 

Last week was great but BUSY. We had dinner guests, house visits from perspective tenants (praise the lord we have a full house come the fall - deposits in, contracts signed!), dinners with friends, birthday dinners, dinners with friends, baby shower, church meetings and regular "feed 5 people every day and work 8.5 hours" every day life. Phew! But at least many of those things were fun! The baby shower I went to for my dear friend Emily and sweet Madeline was LOVELY.

7 Quick Takes Friday (Volume 12)

--- 1 --- 

It's been three weeks of No Wheat, No Rice, No Alcohol and very limited (like once a week) moments of potatoes and corn. I'm feeling amazing. Less sluggish - even tiredness that remains is from doing way too much with my life. I've lost 8 pounds, which is super awesome and I know I'm making healthy eating choices.  I'm a fan of all this. And it's still not that hard!!!!! 

--- 2 --- 

Last night I headed out with Paul to Tsawwassen to visit my dear friend Rebekah and FINALLY meet her baby girl, Amariah (pronounced amar-eeah). On top of those two great things, we were also going to be having dinner with Rebekah's long time friends Naomi and Chris. I grew to love Naomi during Rebekah's wedding and was stoked to get to see them all. I got to know Naomi really well during the pre-wedding prep - as we chopped and diced and helped make a buttload of food.

There's Naomi and I in the center photo

DIY Headboard under $20

This new blog post THRILLS my heart. I have been dreaming of making a headboard since we moved in. I was going to make one for our bedroom upstairs – actually it probably would have used very similar fabric to the one I ended up making. However Paul and I ended up being given a huge painting that worked really well over our bed and took the place of a headboard so I didn’t get to do that DIY. As I’ve mentioned in some posts we have to furnish three rooms come this month. We had bed frames for two rooms (one beautiful sleigh bed from Lyndsay for our wood room and one frame (no headboard) for middle room)  but only a mattress/box spring combo for the third. We tried it in the room and it looked pretty pathetic without a frame. We looked around for free first (as I always do) or for cheap on CL but weren’t coming up with anything, especially since the mattress/box spring is a weird quarter size – smaller than a double but larger than a single. Annoying! Armed with the exact measurements we set off – nothing at Ikea, nothing at a whole wack of furniture places on Bridgeport BUT when we made our way to Sleep Country Canada (did anyone else sing along with that when they read it?) they let us know that the single/double frame was adjustable and would easily fit our measurements! The frame was only $50. Score! In that moment I knew, this was my moment to DIY a headboard…and I had JUST the material to make it happen.

First up, Paul needed to build the frame. While he did that I ironed the material we would be using. When we were done putting the frame together (parts of it needed two people) we then started to put together the headboard. It was so easy!

Menu Plan Monday: August begins

Menu Plan Monday with Laura at Org Junkie

Upcoming week: 

Tuesday: Crispy Black Bean Taco's

Tonight I need to catch up on cleaning and tidying after my lake day yesterday but other than that I don't have plans - seemed like a good night to try something new. And I'll use corn tortilla's so I can eat them!

Wednesday: Pizza Bubble Up
Wednesday we will be working around the house. Bubble Up's are always crowd pleasers. I'm needing to take a meal to some friends with a new baby so I'm going to double this recipe for them. Also I'll be serving mine with Zucchini, rather than bread bubbles.

Thursday: Slow Cooker Chicken & Rice

Thursday Paul and I have dinner out with friends, so I can leave this meal in the crockpot with some rice (made the night before) and voila! Easy for our students. 

Friday: YOYO
Friday night Paul has a games night and I have a friends birthday party

Saturday: YOYO
Saturday night we have dinner out with friends.

Sunday: Creamy Swiss Chicken Bake

Sunday it will be nice to eat at home together - I'm hoping to get a bunch of painting done in the day, then proceed to church. 

Goldilocks & the search for the perfect chair

As most of you know we have students that live with us. We do this for a few reasons (finances, community, etc) and we LOVE it. It’s so fun to have people in our home and to help others experience Canada.  We offer furnished, partially furnished or unfurnished rooms. Each time we switch up our students (about once a year) we tend to need to flip rooms. We just went from having only 1 furnished room and 2 unfurnished rooms, to needing 3 furnished rooms for August! So we’ve been stockpiling furniture in the garage for the past few weeks and have everything we need.
We recently inherited a bunch of furniture from my Grandpa’s house. One of the things we got was a small gold chair – I could picture it being used at a women’s vanity, for applying makeup and brushing out hair. It had a pretty ugly green felt on it but I was pretty sure I’d be able to change that out.