What to Do with the Piles of Kid’s Artwork
When you live with a budding artist, you live with piles and piles of artwork. And ALL of it is special. And NONE of it can be thrown away. At least, that’s what my 5 year old tells me constantly. And as gung-ho as she is about recycling, I still can’t manage to convince her that we can recycle some of her artwork, too. So, instead of living with the masses of piles everywhere, I started looking for ideas of what to do with it all to help contain it and keep it from taking over my entire house. I came across several great suggestions like these: Continue reading this entry »
Great Household Tips
Here’s some great tips I just got from Tiffany. Be sure to read the last tip about cleaning the lint filter on your clothes dryer! Enjoy!!
- Reheat Pizza - Heat up leftover pizza in a non stick skillet on top of the stove, set heat to med-low and heat till warm. This keeps the crust crispy.
No soggy micro pizza. Saw this on the cooking channel and it really works. - Easy Deviled Eggs - Put cooked egg yolks in a ziploc bag. Seal ziploc, then mash till they are all broken up. Add remainder of ingredients, reseal, keep mashing it up mixing thoroughly. Cut the tip of the baggy, squeeze mixture into egg whites. Just throw the bag away when you’re done for easy clean up.
- Expanding Frosting - When you buy a container of cake frosting from the store, whip it with your mixer for a few minutes. This will double it in
size/amount. You get to frost more cake/cupcakes with the same amount. You also
eat less sugar and calories per serving. - Reheating Refrigerated Bread - To warm biscuits, pancakes, or muffins that were refrigerated, place a cup of water in the microwave with them. The
increased moisture will keep the food moist and help it reheat faster. - Newspaper Weeds Away - Start putting wet newspaper in your plants, work the nutrients in your soil. Put layers around the plants, overlapping as you go. Cover with mulch and forget about weeds. Weeds will get through some gardening plastic, but they will not get through wet newspapers.
- Broken Glass - Use a wet cotton ball or Q-tip to pick up the small shards of glass you can’t see easily.
- No More Mosquitoes - Place a dryer sheet in your pocket. It will keep the mosquitoes away.
- Squirrel Away! - To keep squirrels from eating your plants sprinkle your plants with cayenne pepper. The cayenne pepper doesn’t hurt the plant and
the squirrels won’t come near it. - Flexible Vacuum - To get something out of a heat register or under the fridge, add an empty paper towel roll or empty gift wrap roll to the end of your vacuum hose. It can be bent or flattened to get in narrow openings.
- Reducing Static Cling - Pin a small safety pin to the seam of your slip and you will not have a clingy skirt or dress. Same thing works with slacks
that cling when wearing panty hose. Place pin in seam of slacks and — ta da! — static is gone. - Measuring Cups - Before you pour sticky substances into a measuring cup, fill with hot water. Dump out the hot water, but don’t dry cup. Next,
add your ingredient, such as peanut butter, and watch how easily it comes right out. - Foggy Windshield? - Hate foggy windshields? Buy a chalkboard eraser and keep it in the glove box of your car. When the windows fog, rub with the eraser! Works better than a cloth!
- Reopening Sealed Envelope - If you seal an envelope and then realize you forgot to include something inside, just place your sealed envelope in the
freezer for an hour or two. Viola! It unseals easily. - Conditioner - Use your hair conditioner to shave your legs. It’s a lot cheaper than shaving cream and leaves your legs really smooth. It’s also a
great way to use up the conditioner you bought but didn’t like when you tried it in your hair… - Goodbye Fruit Flies - To get rid of pesky fruit flies, take a small glass fill it 1/2″ with Apple Cider Vinegar and 2 drops of dish washing liquid, mix well. You will find those flies drawn to the cup and gone forever!
- Get Rid of Ants - Put small piles of cornmeal where you see ants. They eat it, take it “home”, can’t digest it, so it kills them. It may take a week or
so, especially if it rains, but it works and you don’t have the worry about pets or small children being harmed! - Clothes Dryers - When the heating unit in our dryer went out, the gentleman that fixes things around our house told us that he wanted to show us the lint filter in our dryer. It was clean. But, when he took the filter over to the sink and ran hot water over the mesh material, the hot water just sat on top of the mesh! It didn’t go through it at all! He told us that dryer sheets cause a film to build up on the filter and that’s what burns out the heating unit. You can’t SEE the film , but it’s there. It comes from the dryer sheets that make your clothes soft and static free. You know how dryer sheets can feel waxy when you take them out of the box? Well, that’s the stuff that builds up on your clothes and on your lint screen. This is also what causes dryer units to catch fire and potentially burn your house down with it!He said the best way to keep your dryer working for a very long time (and to keep your electric bill lower) is to take that filter out and wash it with hot soapy water and an old toothbrush at least every six months. He said that makes the life of the dryer at least twice as long!
Note: I went to MY dryer and tested my lint filter by running water over it. The
water ran through only slightly and mostly collected in the mesh screen. I washed it with warm soapy water and my dish scrubbing brush and was done in 30 seconds. Then when I rinsed it, the water ran straight through the filter. No puddling at all! Apparently, that repairman knew what he was talking about!
Per-Diaper Pricing
My sis sent me this link from BabyCheapskate.com on how to know if you’re paying a good price per diaper. Love this lady! 
Mundane topic alert! I’ll bet some of you have an image of me sitting around obsessively crunching diaper prices. I swear it’s (mostly) not true! But a reader asked me how much she should be paying per diaper for size 4 premiums. I figured I’d go ahead and create this list for everyone. Make a note of this, it will help you evaluate the deals you find.
These are the per-diaper prices to beat for Cruisers (or Swaddlers) & Huggies Supreme. In other words, this is the most I ever want you to pay per diaper. I arrived at these figures by assuming a $7.99 per jumbo sale and a $1.50 coupon:
How One Stay-at-Home Mom Schedules Her Week
This post is from my sister – the proud mommy of a 9-month old baby boy! (Who’s one of the cutest boys around, by the way!
A little background on me: I am a new stay-at-home mom to my awesome baby boy, Andrew. I am also a bit of an organizational freak (it runs in the family) . I am one of those people that needs lists and structure and order to my world in order for anything to actually get accomplished. As I know a lot of new moms do, I have really struggled to not only care for my baby (and my husband) but to also actually get something else done with my life. I had dreams of all the projects I would do around the house once I stopped working and stayed at home with my new baby. And dreams they have remained…. 
About 4 or 5 months ago I decided I needed some sort of weekly schedule set up as well as a running list of “to do’s” Continue reading this entry »
Easy-to-Follow, Picture-Instruction Recipes
I’m not really a great cook. In fact, when Shawn and I got married a dozen years ago, one of our agreements was that he didn’t mind cooking if I didn’t mind cleaning it all up. Of course, over the years, that’s changed. Since he’s still working a full-time job AND running a business “on the side”, and I’m just a stay-at-home mom, I’ve wound up taking over most of the cooking in the house.
The good news is that I’m enjoying it more. But, I still wouldn’t say that I’m great at it or anything. And I’m definitely NOT any kind of gourmet chef.
So, when my sister sent me a link to this website with cool, easy recipes, I had to give it a gander. I was VERY pleasantly surprised to see that not only were the recipes pretty straight-forward and easy to fix, but there are step-by-step directions with pictures for each step. So, even the harder recipes feel easy and attainable. Oh, and the author has a GREAT sense of humor, too!!!
Check out The Pioneer Woman Cooks and see what you think. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be trying out her recipes tonight for dinner!!
Milk Bands
Just saw this ad (on my own site, no less) and decided to check it out. They’re called Milk Bands and they are a bracelet that helps a nursing mom keep track of which side she last nursed on, how long the nursing was, and what time it was.
What an awesome invention for all the sleep-deprived moms out there who can never remember from one feeding to the next which breast to start with, or even when the baby last ate! I’m getting one for my pregnant friend and maybe even one for myself! Check it out…
Product Review: Joovy’s Caboose Stand-On Tandem Stroller
Pros:
- Smaller and less bulky than traditional double strollers.
- No need to carry double AND single stroller. Since my 4-year-old, Kaylee, goes to school on Tues/Thurs I was carrying around a lightweight single stroller AND the double stroller, OR having to switch them out depending on where we were going. This one is small enough to be a single stroller if needed. I took my 19-month-old, Brayden, to the mall the other day in it, and it didn’t look awkward not having a child in the back like it would have with the double stroller.
Morning Sickness… bleh.
First of all, whoever decided to name this phenomenon “morning sickness” should be shot. It sets moms up for a rude awakening when the sickness that started in the morning continues into the afternoon, evening, and night time. I mean, if it’s called “morning sickness”, shouldn’t I be feeling better by lunch time? Not necessarily. 
After having three children with pretty bad morning sickness in all three of those pregnancies, I’ve tried just about every remedy out there. The bad news? There’s not a cure-all. The good news? There’s lots of different things to try. Sometimes one thing will work and then the next time something else works better. So, just because you’ve tried one remedy and it didn’t work, don’t necessarily rule it out completely. There were a few things that worked more successfully than others for me, so I thought I’d at least add a blog about it to hopefully help someone else out there suffering from this nasty cocktail of hormones.
Continue reading this entry »
Swimming Lesson Advice from a Pro
I have a good friend who used to teach swimming lessons every summer in her back yard pool. She has taught most of the kids I know and has also trained lifeguards for years. Wouldn’t you know that the year that I’m ready to put Kate in swimming lessons, my friend is out of the business. So, the next best thing is what I’m listing here: her advice to me about how to scope out a person or place that offers swimming lessons. Hope this helps you the way that it helped me!
- Try to get in a class that has 6 or less kids.
- Make sure the class meets at least 4 days in a row. Normally they meet 4 days in a row for 2 weeks.
- Try to meet the teacher ahead of time, since it is all about relationships and how the teacher will do with your particular kid’s personality.
- Find out how the teacher will deal with getting face wet and how they will handle kids that don’t want to do what they are asked. My opinion is that you want them to lovingly lead your kid rather than force them.
- Above all, if the class has more than 2 students per teacher you will need to stay
where you can watch your kids because a teacher almost always turns her back to at least one student and that is when that student chooses to do something brave!!
Save Those Boxes!
A few weeks ago, My sister-in-law and I were talking about how to store baby gear between babies and she mentioned a great idea that she had read somewhere. We both thought it was great advice and that I should most definitely share it here…
Save your boxes.
You know – all those huge boxes that the car seat, the stroller, the high chair, and the swing came in. Put them in your attic while the items are in use. Then when baby #1 is done with them, put them back in their original boxes in the attic. It will keep them protected, clean, and easy to store until you’re ready to pull them back down for baby #2.
Of course, you could always just do like I did and have babies 1, 2, and 3 so close together that you never actually put all the baby gear completely away. I’m not necessarily recommending this method for you, I just know that it’s the way it happened for me.
Thanks for the great idea, Tiffany!
