Needles and a Pen » Knitting, Sewing, and Nursing School

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  • Welcome to my blog!

    Hi! I'm Traci. I'm a Registered Nurse who loves quilting, knitting, cross stitch, and the great outdoors. In my pre-scrubs life, I owned Real Photography, and you can still see my old wedding and portrait photography site here .

    I've created a map that shows links to our camping/hiking/general family fun review posts that you can find here. It's pretty much the coolest thing on this site. Thanks, Google!

    I great big puffy heart *love* comments, so please let me know you visited! I try to always reply!

cooking in my kitchen

The kitchen floors were replaced today.  Or I should say over-placed, since the original linoleum is now just underneath the new stuff.  I celebrated by making dinner from scratch (clam chowder) and chocolate cakes with Will.  Later this week we will also say goodbye to the royal blue counters!

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I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing–starting to feel at home, starting to feel like I didn’t need to wipe down every surface every 5 seconds with chlorox wipes, starting to feel like maybe I could let Will eat a cookie without panicking that the crumbs would bring on the mouse invasion when I saw a gray blur out of the corner of my eye scurry under the oven.  Of course, it was very fast and it was out of the corner of my eye, so I can’t be SURE that it really was a mouse (or even a gray blur).  After all, we haven’t caught a mouse in almost a week.  And there hasn’t been a dropping to be found.  So maybe it was a mouse, and maybe it was a figment of my imagination.  Either way, I finally carved out a little time for a Halloween themed project!

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(ETA: the cake was an uber simple boxed chocolate cake with powdered sugar added to the top using these stencils from Macys.  The witch one is the cutest but it was bigger than the house one and didn’t quite turn out right for us.)  😀

Rachel - That cake totally rocks (recipe pretty please?). Super mama!

And get rat-tack. It’s heavy duty stuff that you have to sign for at the hardware store, and you would have to put it places where Will couldn’t get at it. But with the number of mice you have (by the sounds of things!) it may be the only thing that works.

Can’t wait to see the kitchen with it’s new floor and counters 🙂

mom - Love it! Adore the pictures of Will the photographer! And the cakes look fabulous!!