January and February Fave Five

Here are my favorite 5 posts from the last two months.

I used to do this all the time (and by that I mean each month), but somehow fell out of the habit. So in light of this new-ish year, I'm bringing it back.

A new rainbow striped rug in my dining room.

How I save 10 hours a week with Amazon Prime.

SkinnyGirl Margarita Cake.

Superbowl Snack Stadium.

How to easily pack for a trip with kids.

Jessica

Chicken with Peaches

I'm all for an easy dinner, so here goes.

Put chicken pieces (breasts, thighs, whatever you like) in a casserole dish with a jar of peaches, soem dijon mustard, salt and a bit of soy sauce. Bake at 400 for 30-45 minutes and done.

Real life has been crazy around here (you know, the non-blog life), but I hope to get back to normal posting soon!

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

How to Save 10 Hours a Week

Here is my big secret for how to save yourself 10 hours each week.

We all know I love to save time. I double sheet the cribs to avoid changing sheets in the middle of the night, pre-make birthday gifts, and keep my kids in bed until it's time to wake up. Most of that is so that I can sleep, read trashy romance novels that I then stash on our mantle, and so I can spend time with my husband.

So here is how I can carve out a little "me" time to be a better parent as well.


Amazon Prime.

What? That's not what you thought it was? Well, let me assure you, that for me, I save not only 10 hours a week, but probably $200 as well.


Here is how my typical week plays out.

Sunday: Meal Plan. Receive giant package of toilet paper that I subscribe to on Amazon, it just shows up monthly, so I never run out. Brilliant! Save 1 hour of drive and shopping time.

Monday morning: Grocery Shop.

Monday afternoon: My 5 year old has outgrown her PE shoes, and needs new ones. For this week. Order a new pair of Sauconys in the next size up. They will be delivered Wednesday. Save 3 hours in driving time and shopping time at Nordstrom, my favorite shoe store, and $100 by not getting makeup for me.

Monday night: realize I forgot something (olive oil). Order from Amazon. Save 45 minutes trip to grocery store, plus $20 dollars and hundreds of calories by not buying chocolate covered raisins while there alone at night:)

Tuesday: Cook, mommy, drive kids to and from school.

Tuesday afternoon: My 5 year old needs 100 "somethings" by Friday for the 100th day of school. She wants paper clips but after looking all around discover we only have 48 in the house. Order from Amazon. Save 1 hour trip to Office Supply Store, plus $100 if I had sent my husband and he bought the latest gadget or gizmo while he was there.

Wednesday: gym, cook, mommy, drive...

Thursday: Wake up to discover we have half a pack of diapers left, not enough to get us through the weekend. Order from Amazon. Save 1-2 hour trip to Babies R Us, countless minutes of whining when my kids see toys they like, and $50 in un-bought toys.

While online remember birthday party on Sunday. Order a book and paints (see my favorite birthday gifts for kids here) from Amazon. Save 1.5 hour trip to Target and $100 I would have spent on other adorable things Target carries.

Friday: relax and enjoy the weekend! Save 3 hours and avoid random "errands" on Sunday that I know I can do with Amazon.


Total time saved: 11.25 hours

Total Dollars saved: $370


Amazon Prime, lets me order almost anything off their site, with free 2 day delivery. Returns are super easy if you make a mistake or something doesn't fit, they will even schedule a pickup form your house. Can you see my plan to never, ever leave the house? Of course the kids and school don't really play a part in this plan, but when I was nursing the baby for hour son end, I could still do all the shopping with Amazon, so smart.

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

This post contains affiliate links for products and services that I use and love!

My best Kitchen Organizing Tip

Today I'm sharing my best tip for keeping an organized kitchen over at Tiffany's place. 

Hint- I can't always keep my kitchen this neat!

Thanks!

Jessica

Snow Fun- Chilling Champagne in the Snow

Since it is President's Day, what should traditionally be the beginning of ski week, I wanted to belatedly share our ski and snow pics from the winter break.

Warning, lots of family pics coming!

But I did think up a brilliant idea for chilling champagne...

Use the snow.

And now the family slideshow begins...

Inside, building a fort...

Hubby and baby:)

Baby with Baba (grandpa).

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

The Truth about the New Baby Smell

Want the unvarnished truth?

That lovely "new baby" smell is really just a combination of the following:

• milk
• spoiled milk that seeped into the folds in a baby's neck and has yet to be cleaned out
• Poo
• Poo that has exploded out of the diaper and all the way up their backs into their hair
• Cradle cap ( or cradle cr@p as we call it)
• Spit Up
• Throw up (the difference being that throwing up involves projectile motion)
• Decaying umbilical cord

And yet, I still offer to go to someone's house who has just had a new baby, to hold it, and breathe in that new baby smell. Plus when they are really little, their poo smells like buttered popcorn, so you can just pretend it's something else:)

Check out how we welcomed our third baby into the family and "made" the older siblings love her, how we fit all three kids in car seats across in our car, and my tips for airplane travel with kids.

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

Valentine's Cookies and Getting a Toddler to "help" in the Kitchen

This is really less a post about how to make a sugar cookie, cut it our with a heart-shaped cookie cutter, and frost it, and more about how I get all my kids in on the kitchen action. I like to find age appropriate kitchen jobs for each kid.

So, the "big" ones (3 and 5) usually just sit on the counters. The baby, now 15 months old, is SO not to be trusted to stay on a counter without falling off, so she gets a special spot. A Learning Tower.

The Little Partners Learning Tower comes in a variety of colors now (mine is 4 years old and still going strong) so you can get it in red, or green, or something to match your kitchen. It's a total space-eating monster, and those little feet at the bottom that stick out to prevent it from tipping always catch my toes, but I could not do anything in the kitchen without it. All those rails on the sides keep toddlers inside, and bring them up to the right height for helping. Standing on a stool just doesn't cut it if you are under 3 in my experience.

Cookie "decorating" with messy sprinkles?  In a learning tower. 

(Oh, see how I contain most of the sprinkles here)

Making breakfast? Baby in the learning tower.

Need to empty the dishwasher without any "help"? Pop em in the tower.

Crying all day over spilled milk? Off with their heads. 

OK, not that, just got carried away with all the tower imagery. Maybe I should stop reading all those romance novels:)

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

This post contains affiliate links to products I own and love!

How to Pack for a Trip with Kids

This winter we are trying really, really hard to achieve my personal goals of 2013, which include 20 ski days for me (30 for my husband). I've got 12 down, so 8 more days to go and I've achieved it. Hurray! 

Of course, this is only possible if I can pack all 5 of us in an efficient way, and boy oh boy, are ski clothes (really all winter clothes) hard to pack.

Since I've written off air travel this year (although you can see my tips for plane travel with kids here), we are now down to car travel with kids.

These lovely "before" shots show just how unwieldy our previous method of stuff-it-all-into-a-suitcase-and-pray was.

Enter: Amazon (my favorite store of all time) and these awesome eBags Packing Cubes . One for each kid, 2 for each adult, and they make life a million bazillion times easier.

After each trip I just wash the ski clothes, then repack them into their given cubes. Tada! I'm all packed, right now, as we speak, blog, read  sit here for our next trip.

Any amazing other packing tips I should know about?

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

This post contains affiliate links to products I own and love!

2012 Year in Photo Collage

I spent January 1st this year creating our 2012 family photo collage.

I know, like with kids is always exciting, right? This year I did a few more pics of the grandparents, my mom and dad each with the baby, my grandma with my 5 year old...

Each year I try to just get a quick essence of what the year was. Was it like 2011 with a trip to Israel for my husband and I and Disneyland with the kids? Or 2010 when my sister got married so we have a ton of those pictures up. 

I find these are some of my favorite ways to remember each year. We hang them in our upstairs loft with our other yearly photo collages, but here is my 5 year old modeling this year's collage.

Then she wanted to make her own. So we took the Toilet Paper art canvas from her room, and I let her do whatever she wanted. I'm guessing she is in love with her baby sister since that's the focus of her collage. Plus I love the shot of the rainbow cake pops there from our 1 year old's rainbow birthday party.

How do you commemorate each year?

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

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I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

Taking Care of the Sick- Bringing Food to a Friend

Unfortunatly we have a friend with a 3 year old who is in the hospital for his second surgery this week. After the last surgery we brought over a little basket of cheer (and food) to make this awful process a tiny bit easier.

We involved out kids, since the idea of taking care of the sick is an incredibly important value for us. We let them each have a say in the food and gifts we brought, and my 5 year old even made a special box of "fun" for our friend to use in the hospital.

What to bring a sick kid in the hospital?

We wrapped a gift. It's a collection of craft projects that are really easy to do, hopefully form a hospital bed in the 7-10 day recovery. Similar to the Alex Toys My Giant Busy Box. Don't ask why I took a picture of my hand with a pop-up tape dispenser on it. Just imagine I was in the process of wrapping:)

Then we packed a cooler basket of food. What food do you bring to a sick friend? Yummy snacks, fruit, string cheese and applesauce, the basic kid foods that they might need. Plus we brought lunch over that day, kid-freindly and a slightly more grown up version as well.

All wrapped up and ready to go. The second present is for his sister, since you can't only pay attention to one sibling in the family, even if he is the one having surgery.

Just send a little extra web-love to our friends, and pray for a full and speedy recovery. Thank you.

Jessica

Thanks for stopping by! 

Please feel free to follow me with all those nifty buttons in the sidebar:)

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or RSS Feed

I link to these awesome parties:

Monday: DIY Showoff,  Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z  Tuesday: Nest for Less,  My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, Centsational Girl Wednesday: Savvy Southern Style Thursday: House of Hepworths, the 36th Avenue,  Crafty, Scrappy, Happy Friday:  Serenity Now, Tatertots and Jello

This post contains affiliate links to products I own and love!

The Homies are Up!

Just a quick plug to go check out Apartment Therapy all this week. They have started the process to award the Homies, which are awards for the best home and design blogs.

My blog is nominated, so I'm shamelessly asking for you to head over there, sign in (you can do it with facebook, super simple) and vote for me! Just scroll down until you find Stay at Home-ista and click vote.

Of course while you are there, browse around and check out all the other great blogs that are nominated this year.

Thanks!

Jessica