My kitchen scraps are growing!

For the past 2 weeks or so here it has been unbelievably beautiful outside. Seriously feeling more like July than March and we were sure taking advantage of it knowing it wasn't going to last long. Sure enough it's -12 with the windchill this morning and I'm hoping the garden isn't going to suffer too much. Meanwhile I still have my indoor plants to visit. Hubby thinks I've gone insane because I've been saving bits of food and trying to re-grow them...but hey if it's "free" I'm there! Unfortunately the beans and garlic have bit the dust but everything else I've tried is doing well. Actually got to use some of the green onions for cooking already and threw them back in the water to grow again :)

Green Onions

Celery

Green Pepper

Sweet Potato

Livingroom floor....what's that?

When we bought our house 9 years ago we bought it because it was a fixer-upper with a great yard. Thankfully the last 3 years there has been room in the budget for some pretty major house repairs/renovations. Our latest project has been our living room floor. When we moved in it was a blueish grey carpet that wasn't in the greatest shape even then. One day this past Fall our eldest daughter was pretty sick and upchucked right in the centre of the room. Okay not a great thing but I was thinking I'll just bust out our carpet cleaner and get this cleaned up in no time. Haul it up from the basement only to discover that the darn thing doesn't want to work. That's when I lost it and demanded that hubby help me rip the carpet up and get it the H-E-double hockey sticks out of the house. I was sick of looking at it, smelling it, walking on it and most of all cleaning it! So long story (sort of) short we've been living on subfloor and a crappy area rug in the living room since that day. Totally my fault so I have nicely been keeping quiet about my hatred of the subfloor :) But for the past week we've been slowly (does anything get done quickly with kids around?) installing our new laminate flooring. This is a first for us so we've had to rip back and fix a few mistakes but we're getting there....

I'll be soooo glad when my dining room no longer looks like this:

Update: Sweet Potato Houseplant

Our sweet potato has grown quite a lot since putting it in some potting soil and giving it a home in front of a west facing patio door. I took this picture of it a few days ago...

It is turning out to be quite a nice looking plant, I think anyway. Abby and Syd love checking on it and are super excited if it's opened a new leaf or started a new vine nub.

When we put it in the pot it had no roots started at all and now we can see a few white roots around the edge of the potato where it meets the dirt so we know it's got a good system growing in there :) It was a bit of a slow start when we switched it's environment but now there's noticeable new growth every day.

Finger Paints and Slime

We have some crayola "washable" finger paints for the kids but I rarely let them use these paints in the house. Not only do I find that these paints aren't very washable I can't stand the smell of them. It's an overpowering soapy smell that makes me sneeze if I even open the cupboard that they're in let alone when the containers are actually open. But Abby and Syd have been getting a bit bored of the watercolour paints that I will let them use in the house so I went on a search to find some homemade paints and I sure found lots of recipes. Decided to give this one here a try. I have to say it worked out great although I still think the kids would have had more fun with it outside on their easel (come on Spring!) and they needed a good bath afterwards, LOL.

This weekend it was once again bitterly cold and we decided to stay indoors. Chose to pass some of the time by making some more Slime. This time we used a different recipe and it made a different kind of slime than our first one. The cornstarch/water slime was a little easier to clean up off their clothes but this one was an easier clean up off of everything else...I'm a little torn as to which I prefer but the kids seemed to like this one better because it didn't "melt" as quickly. Randomly picked this recipe here