Quick and easy table makeover

The best texts and emails I receive are the ones that include blurry, ill-lit photos of a piece of old furniture with the caption “Do you want this?”

The answer is almost always “Yes! Thanks!” Taking a neglected chair or table and turning it into something awesome just never gets old.

So when a family friend offered me a table that had been in their basement for years, I pounced on it, even though I didn’t know where I was going to put it. It had probably been expensive at some point, since it was large and brass with a heavy circle of glass.

I knew it would be the perfect piece to hack into a mirror-topped oil-rubbed bronze table I’d spotted on Overstock.com for $722. But how was I going to turn a piece of glass into a mirror? Oh, just wait and see!

Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …

 

Three ways to get more veggies into your kids

I don’t think ALL veggies should be hidden or disguised, of course, because then we’d end up with a society of people who are convinced they don’t like any vegetables.

My approach is to serve them a good amount of vegetables — front and centre, no hiding — but also to sneak some more into their diets because of growing minds and bodies and yadda yadda healthy choices, you know?

(I draw the line at beans in brownies. I know it’s a thing. I refuse to believe it’s a thing.)

Ready? Here are my current favourite ways for getting veggies (and not-their-favourite fruits) into my kids:

1. Pretty ’em.

Our dinner plates usually contain pretty ho-hum servings of steamed broccoli, cauliflower, beans, carrots or some combination of them.

But when I serve veggies at LUNCH, I try to make them more fun because, IDK, lunch seems to require fun. It’s dinner’s cooler little sister.

2. Freeze ’em.

I know a lot of parents have great luck getting their kids to eat pureed fruits and veggies in those convenient little cups or pouches. But my kids have NEVER been fans of anything applesauce-y (it’s a texture thing, they’re weird like me) so we could never go that route.

However! I found a hack for it.

By tossing the squeezy packs into the freezer and marketing them to the kids as “Breakfast Slushies,” or I squeeze the contents into a popsicle mould and call them “Breakfast Popsicles.”

They think they’re getting a special treat but I’m able to load them up with goodness they wouldn’t normally touch (i.e. mango, butternut squash, pomegranate, kiwi, beets, acai, and Greek yogurt). A full serving of fruits and veggies? Heck yeah!

The toddler-friendly Squoosh Snacks have simpler flavour combinations but my kids dug the “big kid” graffiti-esque packaging of the Slammers SuperFood pouches.

3. Sneak ’em.

This one’s the oldest trick in the book but I’m still surprised at the number of friends who don’t do it. My kids are pasta freaks. They could eat it every day if I let them — and, actually, D almost does because he takes a frozen spaghetti lunch puck to school just about every weekday.

Because they’ll dive into a plate of “pasta and red sauce” with no questions asked, I sneak all kinds of vegetables into the meat sauce. Sometimes I’ll puree leftover cauliflower and dump it in, and other times I just finely chop a ton of peppers, carrots, onions, and anything produce-y I find in the fridge.

***

What are your best tips for getting veggies into your kids?

Disclosure: I received free product from Slammers Snacks for my family to review. All opinions, as always, are my own. 

Here Wii Go! Introducing your kids to video games

“I have a surprise!” I told the kids mysteriously as I dug out our dusty Wii console and basket of games. “I’m going to let you play … a video game!”

They squealed happily. They’d only ever played once or twice, about a year ago, and I got a terrible headache from the Rock Band drumset and banished it to a tall shelf in the utility room. They forgot video games existed and I was fine with that.

But desperate times call for Koopas and Goombas (or “turtles” and “mushroom men,” as I call them).

At first, I couldn’t even be in the same room while they played because they were terrible. Absolutely terrible, and that’s coming from someone who has been pretty awful at video games for more than 25 years now. They couldn’t press two buttons at once. They ran straight into bad guys and died. They ran straight into ditches and died. It was like watching my mom try to play (sorry, Mom).

Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …

Turn one end table into two DIY nightstands

Our youngest had been without a nightstand for all of her three and a half years, and she felt she really needed one for her lamp (which isn’t plugged in) and her light-up spinning Elsa jewellery box (which blasts “Let It Go” when we’re all trying to sleep).

I’ve been on the nightstand hunt before, and it’s never an easy one. New nightstands are surprisingly overpriced and it’s next to impossible to snag a matching set at a yard sale or thrift store. (If you see a set, buy it — seriously.) And so, she waited.

Then we scored a curvy-but-solid wooden end table from a family member and I knew exactly what we’d do with it: Double it! No, wait .. halve it?

We’d chop it down the middle and make two identical nightstands, making our daughter the only person in the entire house to have a matching set. Oh, the luxury!

After I drew a (rough) line down the middle of the table, my handy husband obligingly cut it with his circular saw (after questioning exactly why I wanted him to chop a perfectly good table in half, of course).

Our daughter had the BEST time picking out the paint for her new nightstands. I tried to steer her toward pink or yellow, but she was firm that they needed to be bright, bold purple — a colour that was not anywhere in her bedroom’s scheme. She made friends with the lady at the paint counter, who even printed custom labels that read “Purple Lottie.” It was very sweet of her, but now I’m not totally sure of the actual shade (Behr’s Romantic Moment is my best guess).

And so we painted them purple, and … it wasn’t bad. I’m a pink girl through and through, but the colour grew on me once I’d sewn pillow covers to tie in the new shade. We didn’t prime first (or poly afterward) because honestly the nightstands will probably be repainted before the paint has time to wear off. Two coats (plus a solo third coat to smooth out my little helper’s brushstrokes) and we were good to go.

We planned to secure the nightstands with L-brackets but so far they’ve been fine just butted up against the wall. We’re making some other changes to the room, so we won’t install them until we’re sure of their final placement. I love how they look like they’re jutting out of the wall and they take up far less space than two full-sized nightstands.

So what are you waiting for? Go find a table and chop it in half! It’ll be twice as nice, I promise.

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Save money on groceries without clipping a single coupon

I don’t share many of my articles here on the blog — unless they involve mah kids or mah crafty lil’ house — but I wanted to stop by and link over to this one on coupon apps because there’s some really useful info!

Click over to the full article
Click over to the full article

I’m horrible for overspending on groceries (when I actually to the store, mind you) because I don’t know prices like Darling Husband does.

I’m like “Ten dollars for grapes? OK? LOL?”
*tosses them in the overflowing cart*

I need to get some of these apps on his phone because he’d certainly use them if it just takes a few clicks to save $$$.