Felt food is freakin fun!

 I love felt. I have an obsession with play food too. So I decided to make some. YUM

                           Smiley face breakfast.

                                             How bout a veggie burger on a whole wheat bun with veggie chips:)

                              And uh um a healthy smore?

                                                                   Peanut butter and jelly.

                           Oh how do I stop!

What do I really need for my new baby.

There are a few things I could have done without that would have freed up some space for more important things on my baby registry.  This was something I wish I would have known to ask for. A crib with wheels. I wheeled that baby around the whole house effortlessly. It made my life so much easier after I bought it. It is an Eddie bauer side sleeper or bassinet if you will. It was so much better than leaning down into the port a crib and then if I needed it in another room I would have to break the whole thing down, to much ado. So this is my number one baby must have(other than the little essentials of course).

I did need that port a crib to travel though. If you are big on traveling and sleepovers at grandmas this is a must have too. I was lucky and found this at my local grocery store for 20 dollars.











Then I found out my baby was colicky. BOM BOM BOM! It happens; it isn't as bad with this little miracle right here. The vibrating bouncy chair. Turn that sucker on and zzzzzzzz.

Turned out the kitten loved it too. Maybe a kitten should be on the list too.

Next is a high chair from IKEA. There were no nooks and crannies for food to get into. No unnecessary padding to get slimmed. The easiest chair to clean. Super easy and fast, I likey.



And the bath must haves are an infant bath lounge and chair. I went to my local kid to kid (up cycled kids items) and found both for 5 dollars each. Happy mommy.

The boppy pillow came in handy alot. And I mean alot. With nursing, lounging, and tummy time.

It helped sister hold her correctly too. OHHHHHHH

And a funny hat, but mostly a car seat. I loved my car seat that locked into my stroller. I forgot how nice it is to have that huge undercarriage that you can shove everything in while your out and about.

The Bumbo was cute for a few picture opportunities. But really it was just for giggles. Than today I found out 4 million Bumbo's were recalled for safety issues. So maybe pass on this one. It is better for there tummy muscles to work on there own I would imagine.

And above all peace of mind. You will be running to the store 10 times as much now anyway so you will have plenty of opportunities to grab what you need anyway.

Disneyland DIY mouse ears

These were the easiest hair clippies I have ever made. I made little red bows and then glued the felt circles on to the clips, Yea. Disneyland here we come!

Blow up bubble fort.

I had three days straight of this in my house. They loved it. Did not want to take it down. It was by far the best imagination key we have had in a long time. It turned into so many things like a reading fort. The funniest was they pretended they were shrunk down inside a whale and were traveling around trying to find a germ to destroy. We put balloons with helium and they swirled and swirled around. Every stuffed animal ended up in the "cave" as well.

                                                       A duvet cover and a fan, who knew?

Everything you need to know about nutrition if your just starting out.

       Everything I knew about nutrition was wrong. Well actually I knew nothing of nutrition. My mother was raised on Irish American diet. It was heavy in starches and carbs. And the sugar, so much desert.
       She loved to cook until she became seriously obese after she had me in 1981, the year they found the Glycemic Index. If you don't know how the GI works definitely look at the info. I wont go into all of it but the basic knowledge of it is the GI measures how a carbohydrate containing food raises blood glucose. If that food raises your glucose levels to fast and to often you gain visceral fat. VERY BAD. Visceral fat acts like an organ and releases toxins making you T.I.R.E.D. among many other horrible things to your body.
        I started feeling different after my first child. I was still eating everything my mother taught me to eat, tons of starchy potato dishes, tons of pasta, and tons of cheese and sugar. I was starting to get headaches all the time. Depression was starting to be a problem. Also my arms started to look like mens arms. None of this connected for me because I didnt have someone to tell me I was eating wrong. This is what was available and what I loved to eat!
       Now I slowly am finding out that if I want to feel good some big changes need to happen and it was daunting at first because I was doing everything wrong. I couldnt do what I liked to do anymore like biking and playing with my children beacause I had no energy. If I only knew what all those cupcakes and pasta dishes were doing to my brain and organs I could have made some changes sooner.
       What I now know took a long time to find out. It would have been alot easier if I would have learned it from childhood but I am glad I took the time to find out what to do. So I now know that I have to eat well to feel well.

Drink water, slowly throughout the day. If you down it all at once it will go straight through you.

Go all natural! The more you find out what you should eat and recipies that you hav'nt grown up with the better you will start to feel.(Pinterest has amazing clean food)

Search engine key words to find healthy recipes cant be found by just typing in "healthy recipes" alot of websites use that as a key word to just get you to there website.  Find body building and excercise websites and blogs and they usually have actual healthy recipes. Some good key words are clean food, paleo food, GI recipes,


Now MOVE! Find a new interest because if you have a passion that you master it will give you lifelong happiness.

This was about a year ago. I would eat so much sugar. Not the good fructose kind the bad sucrose kind. I found a good alternative. It is agave nectar.  So many ways to use it to sweeten things instead of buying food with the bad sugar already in it. Like unsweetened Greek yogurt with it drizzled on top than fruit and granola. Perfect breakfast. Or pancakes made with almond flour and use the agave as syrup. The agave is better for your body because it doesn't rush into your blood stream.

I am doing a bit better in this pic you can't tell but I am 10 lbs lighter. I have recently lost another ten on BodyRock.com  and I am running up to 5 miles now. It seems that when I eat clean I can just keep on running. I used to get cramps or start to have muscle pain. Not now, I can not wait to post my after photos. Not quite there yet though.

Are chickens a good family pet?

 We have officially named our chickens. Great. If I had a sarcastic font that "great" would have been in bold Sarcastica.  We first decided to get chickens because we had heard they were nice and low maintenance animals. So we went to our local farm store and purchased three cute fluff balls.

Cute, kinda. Well we kept them under a heat lamp all day and night. My two year old was caught giving them kisses. GREAT. The cats LOVED to watch them and a few overturned chickies later they were ready for outside. My daughter and her friends thought that they were little babies to take care of and they would sit on my daughters shoulders and lay in there laps when they would swing on the swingset.

 We had made a cute coop for them stapled down the chicken wire. Added all the stuff they need like roosting boxes and bare ground to scratch at. Next night. BAMN. Three chicken exploded. Thats what I told my eight year old. I did'nt want to tell her that a racoon had tore apart the chicken wire. TORE Apart! Vicious. So back to the farm store.

                                        More cute chickens later. Ok they are kinda cute.

         And here is my master chicken catcher. All in all they have been fun for my girls. She named one Punk rock (Who we found out one week ago is a Cockadoodlin Rooster) The other one that follows that one around is Rhodie. Then there are two others that I can't remember, anyway they keep all the bugs away. That is a good point I suppose. Can not wait for the eggs, any day now!

Lego Building contest

     My daughter won a best of show Lego building contest at the Salt Lake Library. Does she look as excited as I was, NOPE. I was so happy she won. She worked all week on that zoo. Every little animal had there own habitat. There were spectators in the stands including Harry Potter and that big hairy guy too. It had detail in every little Lego. What a great ribbon to add to her collection.
     Lego's are a solid investment. And those new nano mini blocks you can build even better detailed things with those. Love to Lego!

Best slip and slide EVER

We had the most fun on this gigantic water slide. My daughter said it was the best slide EVER. I even had to go down. I'm not gonna post that though. It ended in my face sliding across the grass because I went farther down this 200 foot water slide than the kids did even with there blow up snow sled. What I did was buy a huge painters tarp and I used the pegs from the old slip and slide to hold it down. I would recommend the white tarp not the clear or black one, I could imagine it burning the lawn. The white worked perfect no lawn burning even though we had it on there from 10 am to 9 pm. The kids ended up using the floaters and tube sleds and foam sliders on the tarp. WE had the most fun I have had on the back yard slip and slide EVER.

How to start a craft fair blog business network cheapest way possible

Whewww. There is so much information out there. I am trying to just filter out all the information I don't need. Simple is the way for me and I am writing my goals down.
                       Step 1- write goals down
GOAL ZERO- Get a website. Plenty of websites dedicated to that! I am going to use blogspot.com and pay for the .com name. $7.95 per month sounds pretty good.
Goal 1- Write down the inventory I will be taking with me to trade shows and craft fairs alike. I want to make things that are new and unique! Mockingjay's are going to be huge these next couple years.
Goal 2- Make patterns for all my projects I plan to make allot of. I make my own patterns out of freezer paper. They hold up well.
Goal 3- Gather tons of supplies for inventory needed from cheapest places possible. I love to go ksl.com (livin in Utah, woot-woot) and thrift stores. Junk has surely gone up in price because of the market though. That's ok it is Garage Sale season now!!!!
Goal 4- Make inventory. Make tons. As much as you can afford.
Goal 5- Sew sign with logo on it. I can't wait. I will make it like a banner quilt.                               (Maybe this will work)

Goal 6- Make business cards (with website name). Should make sure whatever your business name.com is not taken. I used godaddy.com. You don't have to buy it from them then another place again. Just once.
Goal 7- Put together display for craft fairs. This will be super fun. I found tons of cute pictures with search words like craft fair displays or boutique setups.
Goal 8- Take pictures of craft fair display for craft fair applications. They will want to see what you have to offer and for sure find out about juried and non-juried shows.
Goal 9- Apply to craft shows. Don't worry if you don't get in at first.
Goal 10- Get credit card square for phone. The payment is 2.75% per payment which is comparible to etsy/paypal fees.
Goal 11- Make price tags.

Now with my craft fair ready and in order I can spend some more time on my website. I started off with owning a domain name. I found the best name with a little research. http://www.marketsamurai.com/ helped me immensely.
Next; Content. Easy peasy.
Now the hard part. Networking all of my facebook and blogging and website stuff together. More on that next time

Bumper Jumper Inflatable customer review

 Dudley was fun for the first week. We loved seeing our daughter jump around the house with him. She would scootch around sayin yeehaw. CUTE. Then she bit his tail with teething excitement. No more Dudley. She couldn't resist chomping on that horse that oddly had the same texture as her teething ring. If the package would have come with a repair kit it probably wouldn't be able to be saved anyway. RIP Dudley. My take on this toy is A BIG PASS.

Sensory Table with colored rice

 The prep for colored rice is consuming but worth it in the long run. You can pack it away in an air tight container (we have those little moths that get into our rice) and play with it over and over again.    
    First I got three packs of each color of koolaid that I wanted. Although I could not find blue I had to just use food coloring.
    I dumped the three packets of one color in a heat safe measuring cup and put in just a tablespoon of super hot water into that and mixed it.
    Then I dumped the koolaid dye into 8 cups of rice and mixed it around. This is were the younger kids can help.
    When the rice is dyed evenly dump it out on a tray to let dry. I used wax paper underneath and let it dry a couple hours. The kids all around our neighborhood had fun playing dinosaur dig, garden, tea party,find the things in our sensory table, among a few. It really is a game for all ages.

Colored Shaving Cream

 This was so much fun we had to reheat the bath 4 times.  Really simple just get any tray that will hold shaving cream I used an old muffin tin. Fill the tins up with shaving cream and add a couple drops of food coloring. Fold in the color with a paintbrush. My tub tile is pink so It washed off with spraying water on it. White tile might take some bleach. Just wash it off right after they paint and you shouldn't have a problem with it staining. If your worried just have them paint on to the tub toys. My daughter thought it was hilarious when her rubber ducky had green poofey hair.

Disneland countdown advent calendar. And tips to save money at Disneyland.

We have been so excited about going to disneyland since we told the children on Christmas. (My mother in law decided to tell my daughter about it without me there on Christmas. I don't want to post anything about that do I!) I have been combing Pintrist and the internet for any ways to save money when we go so we could splurge on the Pirate adventure show. It is about 60 dollars each for dinner and the show but I went to the medieval time show when I was a kid and that was my best memories from Disneyland. Here are a few tips I have found.

TIPS TO SAVE MONEY AT DISNEYLAND
Keep snacks with you and water.(duh)
Pack lunches the food there is little spensy.
Instead of buying mass amounts of merchandise, get some disneyland trinkets from internet and around town before going( I have found disney stuff at WallyWorld and Target). When you go tell them that if they are good all day Micky or someone will leave a cool prize for them at the hotel at night. Perfect now a key chain for there backpack will cost five instead of twenty dollars. I also want to make some unique t-shirts to wear to. Better get sewing, yes!