I know I have been gone for quite some time. But as you can imagine taking care of a baby is a huge task. But add in dealing with a high maintenance 11 yr old, homeschooling the 2 boys, the baby having a 3 day hospital stay when she was two weeks old, hubby totaling the car around the same time {he was fine thankfully!}, taking a week long road trip when she was about a month old, overhauling our eating habits thanks to a milk protein allergy the baby has and you have a glimpse of our craziness. =)

I have to say I have been struggling with this no dairy diet since we discovered the lil girl has a milk protein allergy. She breaks out in a rash when I eat even a miniscule amount of a milk proterin. I LOVE pizza. I LOVE cheese, cheesecake, strawberry shortcake, strawberry milkshakes, cookies, cakes, puddings, macNcheese, lasanga, garlic bread, BUTTER...ok so I could go on and on. But they are all on the "Do Not Touch" list now. But I think I am finally making headway and discovering options. Thanks to places like godairyfree.org I am beginning to function in the kitchen again. And thank goodness for milk alternatives like rice and almond milk as well as Earth Balance's alternative but natural butter. Oh and these definitely help with the sweet tooth cravings. I would not have known I wasn't eating ice cream.

Eating out is very challenging but with the "Cheat Sheets" that godairyfree has it really helps to know what I can and cannot have. Of course I always double check before consuming. You would not believe the amount of things that have some form of milk protein. Things you wouldn't think like fried rice seasoning packets and vegan cheese just to name a couple of things. But on the positive side of things I have been losing weight.

Ok now onto news about the house. Previously I posted how we remodeled the hallway to house the washing machine and dryer. Well the day before we were to go into the hospital to have our little girl we found a way to rearrange the living room for optimal space. You see our living room is small. Very small. But since we no longer had a hallway to have to get back to using the living room we could now move the armoir to that side of the room and really open up the living room. And thats what we did. We have loved the result every since.

Hubby also built in some shelving for a mini pantry next to the wash area. He will eventually put a door on it and put some shelving under the stairs for more pantry space. I am slowly getting some space into my itty bitty kitchen.

And on a totally unrelated note I have been making my own laundry soap. I had been buying it from Crunchy Clean and I do love it. But shipping was killing my budget. So I found a recipe online to make my own. I used the following recipe:

1 cup Washing soda
1 cup Borax
1/2 cup Oxy clean
1 bar grated Dr.Bonners Tea Tree Organic Bar Soap (5oz bar)

I then grated the soap, combined all ingredients and ran thru the blender on crumble setting. It was quick and easy peasy. I still have the really cute wooden scoops from Crunchy Clean so I used that to scoop. Usually I use 1 scoop for a load - sometimes 2 if its a heavily soiled load. And if I had wanted to I could have added some essential or fragrance oils to the soap when I was making the mix but for now I'm sticking with the plain jane soap. Since adding the oils only makes the soap smell nice...not the clothes.

Well slowly but surely we are returning from our baby induced "stupor" lol. We are also beginning to return to working on the house again. Thankfully spring is on the horizon. So that means it will also be warm enough to get some outdoor projects completed.

Our little girl arrived at 1:43pm on Monday December 27th, 2010. She weighed 6lbs and 7oz and was 20 inches long. We are very much in love with our little girl. =))

December 4 we had a doctor appointment and a baby shower to goto. That day we woke up at 5 am to check and see if the snow had started falling. It was just lightly snowing at that point. We did discover our momma cat, 'Taka, had gotten into a package of donuts that had been reserved for the boys. That certainly didn't make my 5am very cheerful. Since the roads weren't bad yet we went back to bed and got back up sometime around 6ish. We then peeked out the window and the snow was glistening as it fell. I knew it was going to be a very wet snow from that. So on the road we went for our appointment. It was a slow and steady snow through the morning and into the afternoon. By time we got back home from our appointment and errands it was already almost 3 inches of snowfall.

The big cedar in the back yard.

Snowfall on a baby cedar.

Tufts of snow.

Our indoor cat Huckleberry not sure what to think of the snow.

It continued to snow all night Saturday, Sunday, Monday and into Tuesday morn when it finally let up. It was very light snow so accumulation wasn't too much but wow that still was a lot of snow considering it's not even winter here yet. All told we saw over 3 inches of snow with this round.