featured – Pollywog's Place Blog

Shared Bedroom Makeovers… Two become three

Published on January 25, 2024February 22, 2024 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog9 Comments

As many of you already know, we bought this house and it has already been well-loved. It was definitely in need of some TLC… a bit more than we had realized at the time but we’ve been making improvements as time and budget have allowed.

We had a lot of hopes and dreams for this house when we first moved in but there were so many issues that happened and had to be dealt with that we just had to focus on those. Plus the pandemic had just started, we were dealing with an unexpected high-risk pregnancy and then a stressful premature birth with a NICU stay and other complications, and then when we thought things were getting better we were sidelined by an unexpected leukemia diagnosis.

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Amish Friendship Bread – A gift that keeps on giving!

Published on December 12, 2023December 12, 2023 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog2 Comments

Are you still trying to come up with a gift idea for someone? This is a great gift to give… either finish the starter out to bake the bread or gift some starter and a copy of the directions to your friends so they can bake their own bread.

I was recently gifted several starters so I had to dig through my old binders to find my old recipes for this gift. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve made any of these recipes. I ended up making 2 loaves of the Basic Recipe, 2 loaves of Banana Bread, 2 loaves of Chocolate Bread, and a double-batch of pancakes, and I still have 2 cups of starter left over to start another batch.

I have included the basic bread instructions in this post and I will also try to include a pretty printable for gifting. This would be so cute to give a small loaf of bread with a small jar of starter and the instructions.

There are many other variations available and you can easily search for more flavor variations online. I will try to update the blog with some of the other recipe variations that I have in my binder.

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She’s Here!

Published on July 13, 2020July 13, 2020 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog7 Comments

Hey y’all! I’m so so sorry that I kinda just dropped off the social media for a bit. The past few months have been very hard as this pregnancy took so much out of me but we are so happy to announce that the wait is over!

Just before midnight on July 8th Ms. Shyanne came screaming into this world via c-section. Although we were as ready as we thought we could be we weren’t quite expecting her to be here right then.

She weighed in at 8lbs and 1 oz and she was 19 1/2 inches long. They also determined that she was around 36 weeks when she delivered.

She is in the NICU due to some of her prenatal diagnosis. She has already breezed through one surgery and is making daily progress towards coming home although we know there will be more surgeries to come.

While the pregnancy seemed so chaotic from the beginning with all the negativity because of my age and then diagnosis after diagnosis for our little girl, (Just this last month we learned of her duodenal atresia which resulted in severe polyhydramnios and then we were ultimately admitted for preeclampsia/HELLP syndrome.), we feel so blessed to have this precious addition to our family.

I will try to finish up some of the posts related to her prenatal issues as well as a more detailed post about her birth and NICU stays but for now I’m just going to try to focus on life at home and recovering so that I can be ready to take care of our little one when she comes home.

We have been posting updates and tons of pictures on our personal FB pages if you’d like to follow us. I’ll also try to start posting on Instagram more regularly as well.

Thank you all for your kind thoughts and most of all for your prayers and please keep us in your prayers as we know the next few months will be quite crazy around here.

Making Memories: A Christmas To Remember!

Published on December 25, 2019October 5, 2025 by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog2 Comments

So we did get to celebrate Christmas in our new house even though we can’t officially move in yet and we had no power… or heat! We set the tree up and decorated it on Saturday and everyone had a lot of fun helping.

After the decorating was done it was time to kick the kids out of the house until Christmas as I needed a gift wrapping station. We had all helped to bring in a lot of the boxes I had in the shed… there may still be a gift or two hidden in there somewhere!

That was a lot of work to get all of those gifts wrapped and taken care of as I hadn’t wrapped the first gift, other than a couple that we took to a party, and there were a lot of boxes!