Homemade Christmas...mainly

Between building a house and building twins, we are trying to save as much money around here as we can these days. So with my slowed down schedule I have been busy chipping away at homemade gifts.
Canned goods are high on the list this year: homemade apple pie filling, organic jelly (made from the peels and core left over from the apple sauce- stuff you might otherwise throw away- here's the recipe I used), and sugar free apple sauce (which is so sweet and amazing- we let the apples cook down for forever in the crock pot; it tastes something like liquid fruit leather). A neighbor of my parents had three high producing apple trees with the fruit just rotting away on the ground, so we asked if we could pick up anything that fell. You might think that we just happened to luck out with all this free fruit, but you could probably find a similar source next year, if you live in fruit producing country, if you just look. That's the key part, looking! I drove past the same places for years before I realized that there was a grove of pecan trees...that were going completely to waste, or a pear tree that year after year no one seemed to care about at all. You just have to get up the guts to knock one someone's door and ask if you can use what is going to waste. You can also look for gleaning opportunities. One year my mom and I were able to glean, for free, at the end of the strawberry season, before they tilled in the fields and planted something else. The fruit was all either over ripe or under ripe, but we picked away, and I have to tell you it made some of the most amazing strawberry preserves I've ever tasted.Knitted objects are high on the list too. Shawls, fingerless gloves, baby sweaters...all sorts of projects have been flying off the needles these days.
Used books and new from amazon and a magazine subscription also made the list. One gift that particularly stumped me was for my mother...she's always a little tricky. But I heard her saying how much she could use a binder full of those clear pockets that will hold a standard size piece of paper, to hold all the recipes she clips and prints from different places. So while she was out of town I made this (I used family pics with us eating in the collage too...copies of course not the originals) and gathered up all the stay recipes I could find in the kitchen and popped them into her lovely new book. So this one is an early Christmas present, waiting for her when she gets home.

Need some ideas for gift giving in this budget crunched economy? Check out these links for some great ideas!
http://gnowfglins.com/2009/11/18/chai-tea-gift-mixes/

http://www.thenourishinggourmet.com/2009/11/handmade-gift-carnival.html#more-2402

There are a LOT of things in these links... I can get lost looking at all the good ideas in these links!
http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/?p=291

http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/?p=653
The list for this year is not complete yet, so more ideas will be posted in this link. http://sewmamasew.com/blog2/?cat=25

Blessings!c

Building update

I've been a little slow posting these pics. They are from last week. We had some family members who were able to come out and help for the day, which is such a blessing, since most days The Man is out there on his own.Thankfully God has provided almost two uninterrupted weeks home for The Man to work on the house (with decent enough weather to work in), and he has some help again today. He's hoping to finish laying block today. So the next big step is a foundation inspection...maybe sometime next week??? We'll see. And THEN framing! It's so exciting! I wish I could help with it more...but then The Man can't help me grow babies, so I guess it's fair :) c

Prego me

We had another check-up at the end of last week, and both babies are still girls (sorry mum-in-law, I know you were still holding out for a boy and girl). Praise God, things look WONDERFUL! I've already gained 30 pounds (which is how much you supposed to gain with one baby by the end of your pregnancy incase you didn't know). It's one of the best things I can do for the twins- to make sure that they go full term. It's hard and strange to see the numbers on the scale go so high, but I'm trying to swallow down those feelings and focus on making sure that I do everything I can to get these babies here healthy. I was reading the other day, from one of the MANY books in that stack, that the two most important things you can do when prego with twins is get rest and eat lots. I know it sounds silly, but to do those two things the way I really should, it takes purpose and focus. I realized in thinking about it that even though the path God has been taking us down seemed all wrong to me at the time (moving back in with my parents was never a part of my plan) God has been unfolding his perfect plan for our lives every day. He's has put me in the ideal situation to see that I can achieve these things. I am so grateful that though our life changes so fast that I can't make plans from one month to another, I can trust in a God who can make plans for me.
We had two other exciting pieces of news from the exams! The girls weigh more that average for 24 weeks, just a few ounces more, but for twins that's wonderful news. And for the really big news: both of the girls are now head down, or in medical speak: vertex, vertex. This means that they are in the ideal position for a natural birth, and hopefully they stay that way! God is great! Blessings!c
P.S. I have had an inspired, yet not so very original, idea recently. You can see all the information I have been reading and gleaning from different sources. I was struggling to figure out how I would remember some of the things I have found useful in all my research. I could see myself thinking, "Yes I remember reading some good advice for how to deal with this," as two babies scream at the top of their little lungs, "yes, seems like it was in a book." And all this knowledge I'm trying to gather up would be scattered to the four winds with every head splitting scream. So. I decided to make a "Baby Binder". I'm photo copying key things I want to remember books, and printing things from the web, three hold punching them, writing notes one them if I need to, and organizing them in the binder. My own personal emergency baby reference :)