My two beloved guys are starting to feel a little outnumbered at home. An increasing number of storage ottomans is taking over their living space and are getting more attention than probably justified. I can’t help it. I’m in love with storage ottomans. They are really great. They hide a good amount of regularly used stuff, but always keep it handy for when you need it – the perfect middle ground between having stuff like bags, toys, etc. lying around and putting them too far away from where they are being used. You can rest your feet on them, or sit down, or lean your heavy Milo head on them when you get tired from playing but no way! wanna go to bed.  They come in all shapes, colors, and sizes – you just gotta find the right one for you. The only downside is that most of them are really pricey. No way am I gonna pay more than $50 bucks for an upholstered box.

Yay! Time to get creative. Well, ottoman number one wasn’t really a product of high creativity, just a lucky find at Ross for $50. This faux leather guy is standing in the foyer and holds all our bags, Milo’s supplies for on the go, and serves as a seat for putting on shoes:

(Seriously, how many jackets do 2.5 people need!!!)

But wait, it gets better. Storage ottoman number two was a much cheaper purchase of $16 and more of a craft project.

He was supposed to hold the overflow of tools next to my desk, but definitely needed a little more wow to spice up my work nook. Since my favorite golden yellow hadn’t trickled into the dining room area yet, I decided to go hunting for a patterned yellow fabric at Joann. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything with a bold pattern that would match color-wise, so I went with a plain striped fabric. And here’s how it goes:

1. Cut off the piping around the top because it would look bulgy under the new fabric.
2. Measure the fabric with a few inches of allowance for stapling. When measuring the allowance, fold the rough edge of the fabric in because you don’t want it to be visible later. Then wrap the fabric around the top and bottom and make sure that the end lays on top of wooden structure that you can actually staple into otherwise the fabric will not hold onto anything.
3. Lay the square for the top wrong side out and centered onto the lid. Then pinch the corners together and pin them where you want your corner seam to be.
4. For the body we will sew a tube. So just wrap the long piece of fabric around the whole box (wrong side out as well) and pin it together for the seam. Make sure to make the tube tight enough to look fitting later, but so that you can still take it off now. Alternatively you might just want to mark the bottom and top of both fabric layers with a fabric pen, then lay the fabric down and pin a seam.
5. Sew your corner seams and side seams as pinned. Cut off all excess fabric.
6. Pull the slip covers over the lid and body so that the seams match up with the corners.
7. Now it’s time for stapling. Whichever piece you start with, always follow this rule: Punch in just a few staples at one side, then pull fabric tight to the opposite side and staple there. Never do one entire side first and then the other entire side. The fabric won’t come out straight and tight that way. In this manner, work your way through all sides, but leave out 2 inches from each corner for now.
8. Lastly, staple the corners. Lay down the fabric on the corner, then fold over the fabric on one side like you would gift-wrapping a box. Same on the other side, and then maybe two staples onto the corner to flatten things down.

Voila!

Down the line I am planning to stencil some modern floral pattern in white on it. As soon as I find a cool stencil anyway. Looks already much better than the mess before, right?

But now let’s get to the biggest ottoman makeover yet. What was once one of the most controversial piece of furniture that I brought home from a yard sale, turned into our great new coffee table / ottoman / toy storage trunk in the living room.

Read the whole story here.

So, are you an ottoman believer yet? Or do you have a fully grown fetish for them like me? Come on, it’s really hard to deny how incredibly practical those guys are.

See the title above for how excited I am about Christmas this year. If you happen to know how excited I was last year to go to Germany and introduce my baby to friends and family, then double that. Wait, triple it. Minus the fact that I won’t get to see my family this year. But – this is gonna be my boy’s first Christmas that he will consciously experience with our little family’s first tree ever in our first house ever. Thinking back to my own childhood and how excited I got every year for Christmas I can only imagine how much fun he will have with all the lights and am on a mission to make it the most memorable first Christmas in history.

Christmas to me is all about family, friends, and love. Call me a helpless romantic, but I get all sentimental and lovey-dovey in December when it’s dark and cold outside, warm and fuzzy inside of the home, the radio stations play cheesy Christmas classics, people put up lights, cozy up with their loved ones … sigh! This is the time of the year when my pragmatically wired brain gets a rest and the rarely expressed emotional side of Nicola has free reign. Nobody knows about this, but it is pretty likely for me to spontaneously get teary-eyed from fuzzy feelings when driving in my car and listening to Christmas classics.

Now, I’ll be the first one to admit that I am a little bit of a Christmas opportunist. I fully indulge in the romantic spirit that comes with it, but am not too much into celebrating the religious reason for it nor into consuming tons of expensive goods. Not even for the sake of this sad economy. As far as the birth of Jesus is concerned, I think it’s totally cool that people still think back to such a significant event and celebrate it in one of the finest holidays on earth, but I’m not gonna lie and say that that’s on my mind a lot during December. If you really want to know my my humble opinion – there are so many good reasons and ways to celebrate love that it doesn’t really matter how and why you do it. Just show some loving for each other.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s talk business. Here is how Christmas goes down in the Tran’s house. Well, this is the first time we actually have our own house to celebrate Christmas in, so there will be a lot of firsts for us this year. First time impatiently waiting for Thanksgiving to be over so that Christmas decorations can be put up and almost starting to happy dance at work because Lincoln gave in and let me put up stuff 5 days before Thanksgiving. First time (in my life ever) to have an artificial Christmas tree. First time keeping Milo from taking down ornaments from the tree. The list goes on ….

But over the past few years of our young marriage we also established some original Bieringer-Tran fusion traditions that are made to last. The great thing is that we can pull traditions not only from 2 different families that we grew up in, but also from 2-3 different cultures. In Germany Christmas time starts four Sundays before December 24th. It’s called Advent and is the time of anticipating Christmas. Every of the the four Sundays people light up an additional candle on their advent wreath until all four are burning by Christmas. (Of course they are not kept burning the entire time, only when attended. Mostly for long and cozy Sunday morning breakfasts.) This is what a traditional advent wreath looks like on the first Sunday in Advent:

During Advent the Germans bake many many Christmas cookies. These are made according to special recipes that you won’t find during the rest of the year. Cinnamon, nuts, and chocolate are typical ingredients. Find a version of my favorite cookie recipe by clicking on the picture:

Next thing is the Advent calendar. It comes in many different forms and levels of creativity. The basic model is just two pieces of paper with the cover sheet having little doors cut out and the sheet behind showing picture of winter scenes. It can also have chocolates behind the doors, or really take on any 3dimensional shape like this for example:

All of them boil down to having 24 doors, socks, boxes, envelopes, or bags that hold little goodies like sweets or small toys. Every morning of December the kids are allowed to open one of them (with the number of the day’s date) until Christmas Eve is here.

Then, on December 6th we have the day of Saint Nikolaus, a guy who must be somehow related to the American Saint Nick. Basically, he was a very good man who helped people in need, gave away gifts, and died on December 6th. Read the whole story here. So, in Germany all kids polish their shoes or boots on December 5th, then put them outside of the front door and hope that they were good enough for Saint Nick to put some goodies in there. The next morning everyone gets up really excited to find some small gift, nuts, oranges, and chocolates in their boots.

Can you believe how much anticipation all of these traditions build up by the time Christmas is finally here? No wonder that with my 31 years I still get so excited about it. Christmas in Germany, by the way, is on December 24th. Christmas Eve. That’s the main big deal. It’s when families get together in their homes, sit by the real pine tree singing Christmas carols (at least my Mom was trying to keep the singing up until the bitter end), having a festive meal, and exchange gifts. So, whenever we are in the US for Christmas we are having Linc’s immediate family over on Christmas Eve for a three course meal and do the big gift exchange one night before all other Americans. And then it’s American Christmas again the next morning! I am in the process of making stockings for the three of us and will fill them with a small gift on Christmas Day. Hm, that’s only one American tradition. Can you tell that I am the big Christmas tradition initiator in our family? What other things do Americans do for Christmas that I am missing?

Yard sale season is pretty much over and I know at least one person that is not sad about it. Lincoln always gets very worried when I go out on a yard sale hunt wondering what old piece of crap furniture I will bring home this time. But hey, so far I have scored some really great finds that just needed a little bit of elbow grease in order to shine. Like my ten dollar desk. Or this ten dollar trunk:

I purchased it together with a big family of spiders and their webs in early summer for $10 and yes, it took a while to tend to it. But finally, here is the result:

Would you have recognized it as the same trunk? Here is how it all went down: At first I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the thing and where to put it. When I saw it at the yard sale I instantly knew that it would be very practical. I just wasn’t quite sure where in my house I needed this extra storage the most. First it was gonna go at the end of our bed. But then the massive amounts of toys in our living room started to really get to me and so the trunk found its temporary destination. It is still a little bigger than what we would like in the living room, but right now it is perfect to hold cars, cars, cars, and balls. And I kept the style pretty neutral so that it can move around in our house as needed. Here is how it looks in our living room:

And here is how much storage space it offers:

But let’s rewind. At first I was considering painting it since I already had all supplies on hand and the makeover would have had a cost of zero bucks. So I removed all the extra trim and put my birthday present (a sander) to work to remove some very old lacquer. But then I realized that the wood was pretty dinged and dented and would need to be sanded down to almost nothing if I wanted it to look smooth. An even coat of paint would have highlighted all the dents even more. On top of that the living room is a pretty heavily used place for rough playing and we don’t want our son to hit his precious head harder or more often than he already does. Here is how the trunk looked without trim. Later in the game it also lost its flimsy legs.

That’s how I ended up going down the upholstering road. And that’s when I understood why ottomans are so freaking expensive. It’s because foam is freaking expensive! Just the piece on top would have been $30 if I hadn’t had a 50% off coupon. Luckily Joann is pretty generous with their coupons and the thicker home decor fabric that is usually pricey as well was marked down to $6 a yard. So all in all I spent $10 on the trunk and $40 on foam and fabric and just managed to stay within my self opposed limit of $50 for a storage ottoman. Look at this pretty corduroyish rough but soft fabric:

I had the top piece of foam (2 inches) cut to size at Joanns and the thinner side side pieces (half inch) were easily cut with a sharp steak knife. Then I glued the foam to the wooden trunk with caulk and got so excited that I forgot to take a picture of this stage.

Next step was to cut the fabric to size and sew some simple seams as described here for my other ottoman makeover. Pulling it over the ottoman and stapling took about two hours because this guy needed a lot of staples. A lot!! See here how I tucked in the rough edges, got the corners done, and tried to make it all even. As for the hinges, I just took them off before and then screwed them back into the same places on top of the fabric. Works just fine.

To finish it off completely I am hoping to add some dark tapered square bun legs underneath at some point in the future. Those legs are $8 a piece at the hardware store, so it will have to get done on another month’s budget.

In the meantime Milo is happy that he can reach into the thing perfectly to pick up some cars and let them roll down the lid back into the trunk.

And mama is happy that at the end of the day she can just make the mess disappear and enjoy a clean living room. Life is good.

Winter Wreath Tutorial:

1. Buy any wreath base (straw or foam) at a craft store with a 50% off coupon.
2. Use an old knit sweater or scarf or buy one at a thrift store for less than $5.
3. Buy a cheesy piece of Christmas decoration at the Dollar Store.
4. Cut the sleeves off the sweater and cut them open on one side so that you have flat pieces of knit fabric. If you need more, cut up the body as well.
5. Wrap the fabric around the wreath and hot glue it to the back.
6. Cut up some smaller bands and glue them around the seams and some other random spots.
7. Hot glue the decorative trees or whatever else you found at the dollar store on the bottom of the wreath.
8. Use a burlap ribbon to hang it on the door.

While the dining room was happily being made over a few weeks ago, I couldn’t but notice how my desk nook on the opposite side felt a little left out. When we moved in I found that this unusable corner would make a perfect area for working at home, getting paperwork done and bills paid. The small desk that I once bought at a yard sale for $10, sanded down, re-stained, sealed, and re-hardwared (of course completely undocumented at that time) fit in nicely and that was it.

The drawers started to overflow, bags and power cords tended to accumulate next to it and it just didn’t feel cozy enough to really get some hard work done. Something had to change. So here is a tiny little mini-makeover for ya:

The desk top is being protected by a dining room matching pillow case.

The mini lamp is borrowed from the guest bedroom for as long as we don’t have any guests.

The two white frames were side-products of the spray painted chandelier and one of them is now serving as a not-so-white white board. Just put some nice paper behind the glass and use dry-erase marker on it. Much prettier than plain white.

In reality this desk is more a disguised storage unit than a desk. In case you were wondering what I am hiding in there:

What is still missing is a small storage ottoman to house some overflow that doesn’t fit into the desk anymore. They have basic ones at Walmart on sale for $11 that could easily be upholstered with a different fabric. Stuff like paint chips, Ikea catalog, and screw drivers (there is just no point carrying them back down to the tool bench all the time with the rate of projects going on here these days) need a new home urgently. And yes, those oaky handrails and the shelf in the wall cut-out will be the victim of my white trim paint at some point. Sooner or later I’ll get you all, you rustic oak .. har, har!

Do you remember the first time you got sick after moving out from home? How much it sucked not to have mama around anymore who could bring you tea to the bed, rub your back, cook some soup? Just when you don’t feel like doing anything at all, you have to lift your own butt out of bed and take care of your miserable sick self. Now this kind of misery gets taken to a whole other level when you add a young toddler to the equation. When not only you have to take care of yourself, but also make sure that kid’s diapers still get changed, he is fed, and somewhat entertained.

After a minor scare when Milo couldn’t breathe well through his swollen throat last Friday, had his highest fever so far, and had to be taken to the urgent care clinic at night (diagnosed with strep throat and croup and a cold), he recovered really quickly and left it to his parents to fight the virus for the rest of the week. Pretty much as soon as his temperature went down to normal two days later, the kid was up and about and happily chatting with his hoarse voice. Believe me, it was a big relief to see him happy and getting better again. But then my throat started to feel like sandpaper, my sinuses were swollen shut, and that overall body ache made me feel like more like crap than a functional human being.

At first I was still trying to go to work and at least make money with half of the brain function that I had left, but after two days I had to give up that idea as well. And I also had to give up the idea of being a fully functional mom for a few days. Usually I like to read books to my son, take him for walks, explain the world, sing songs, come up with games played with household items just to make sure that he learns as much as he possibly can. Only when my voice almost completely left me, I finally gave up that ideal for a day. Milo watched as much TV in a day as he could stand. He had to come up with games himself, find things to play with, while I was just passively watching him. He ate the same chicken noodle soup for lunch and dinner two days in a row. And guess what, he was fine with it.

One thing we are all looking forward to is getting out of the house again. I never knew how isolating it is to have a sick child / friends with children who you don’t want to get sick as well. We miss our friends, play dates, and the fresh air outside. Thanks to everyone who sent us well wishes.

Oh, and since Milo’s nose-blowing-rate went down to once per hour and mine down to every 30 minutes, I think that we can declare this virus to be defeated now! Weekend, here we come!

Who knew that parenthood could be so much fun? Just when you thought that your baby smiling, laughing, crawling, babbling is sooo awesome, it gets even better. It’s just so much fun seeing this little guy growing up that I still can’t get over it and catch myself frequently staring at him in awe or laughing out loud over one of the funny things that he does.

As we all know, Milo is not so much of a sit-n-looker, but a hyperactive doer. He still barely ever sits still. Now that he is walking probably less than ever. He just started walking at 11 months and now he is already running and chasing us through the house. He climbs up and down the couch, dances, jumps without lifting the feet, and would walk/fall down the stairs forward if we let him.

If I had to take a wild guess at what Milo could do as a job later, I would probably say something handy. His fine motor skills are super precise. The morning cereal gets scooped up with the spoon and into the mouth almost without spills. The screws in the play work bench get unscrewed with the play screw driver like no big deal. And have I mentioned before that my 14 month old boy knows how to use the iPhone to a point where it gets dangerously close to sending emails to work contacts?

And he learns processes so quickly. These days you can’t do anything without fearing that Milo will copy it immediately. Yes, fearing. Like don’t let him see how to turn on the gas stove. Or how to push buttons on the dishwasher. But yes, let him see how we swipe the floor and how to wipe the table with a rag. The broom is his best friend right now. The other day we went to the animal farm where I put a quarter in the food machine, got some grains out on the bottom, and held them up in my hand for the sheep to eat. After watching this whole process just once, guess what Milo was doing for the next half hour: Feeding imaginary food to the sheep.

With all this alertness going on I shouldn’t be surprised that Milo is already using a bunch of “words” consistently and understands a lot of what we say. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Considering that he has to process 3 languages on a daily basis. My brain has a 2 language maximum at any given time.

Milo understands the words for daily activities like eat, brush teeth, change diaper, put on shoes, turn off light, etc. in both english and german. And sometimes he will even follow those requests. The language coming out of his mouth is still mostly gibberish except for a few words that he uses consistently in the correct context in one or the other language. His first word was “Hi!” and he still uses it very frequently. Another favorite is “Ja” – German for yes. He will answer it to almost any question you ask him that he is okay with. If he doesn’t want he will not give any answer. If he doesn’t want something at all, he will say “no, no, no”! He also says “maaa” which means more/mehr and works in both languages. His latest word is short, but very useful for Mister Engineer: “A!” – short for “an” (means on) which he uses whenever he wants something that makes sounds, lights, etc. turned on.

See for yourself: