The cute stripes…

And the polka dots…

Not only are these great for kids, but what a great idea for adults, as well.  Housewarming, grandparent gift, party favors, themed plates for your lake house, ranch house, out house!   The possibilities are endless.  What about Bridesmaid’s gifts, birth plates, patio plates.  I am getting really excited here.  The owner is a mother (of two boys, no less…There’s no wonder I like her product!) who is also an artist.  She merged her art with melamine and Voila!  These great personalizable plates were created. When you look at her website, be aware that each design comes in multiple color choices…just click the plate to see more choices of color, font, and personalization.

They are just fabulous.  Check her out.

Today, I have what I thought would be something very simple to find…but it wasn’t.  If you are a mom of a child with ear tubes, swim ear, any ear issue, lend me your ear.  After 2 1/2 years of having tubes in my son’s ears I have become well-aquainted with ear plugs.  I know every doctor has different rules, but our ENT told us that we needed ear plugs post ear tube surgery only for the lake and the ocean.  He only wanted protection from all that dirty water.  Last summer, I spent a fortune at our local drug and grocery stores trying to find the perfect ear plugs that stayed in my son’s ears and didn’t fall out.  By the end of the summer, I still did not have success.  Nothing worked!  

This summer, I found Putty Buddies!  These handy little plugs are made of silicone and mold perfectly to your child’s ear and they aren’t coming out.  Two plugs come in each container, but I even tear each plug in half to get four re-usable plugs out of each container.  Yes, they are re-usable.  The only reason we had multiple plugs used over the past week is due to color preference.  If you gotta wear ear plugs, it is 100% necessary to have a choice in color, don’t you think? 

My 4 year-old son loved these plugs.  I rolled them in a ball and gently pushed them in his ear until they easily molded to his sweet little ear.  They stayed in, he picked his color each time and we were all happy.  Take it from me.  I have been thru almost all choices in children’s ear plugs and these…these are the best!

The cute “Chubby Tubby”…

Darling buckets…

Pitchers and Vases…

Fabulous bins…

Totes and Caddies…

Creative solutions…

Check out all the fun patterns here.  Also, if you request to receive a catalog, once you confirm you are a real person via email, you will receive $25 off an order of $100 or more.  So, get busy and check out all the great ideas for organizing your things.  Hup to it!

I am coming out of hibernation for an even more worthy cause….a mom named Jana. I have written about Paperdoll Designsbefore, and I still love Karen and all the creative things she makes. Last week, she created some very cute cards in honor of her friend, Jana, who was diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer. She is a mom to two young girls and is fighting the fight of her life with her chin up and with complete faith in God’s healing power. I don’t know Jana myself, but I have had my own battles with health and know many young women who have as well. It is so hard to be sick and be a mom… After all, you are “Mom!” I would love nothing more than to help Jana in her time of need if not by helping sell these cute cards, but just being a small piece of encouragement in her daily fight. Please read PaperDoll’s post here and order some of these cute cards available in red/brown and green/brown.

Karen at PaperDoll Designs is donating $3 of every set of “Jana” note cards, plates, platters, trays and bag tags sold to help Jana’s family out.  What a worthy cause.  Who doesn’t need a cute set of cards for yourself or a friend?  Check out her other cute items and order them in the “Jana” style, too!  Keep PaperDoll designs close as school gets closer.  So many cute things for the kiddos! 

Our hearts and prayers go out to you, Jana!

White chocolate is my favorite and I added peanut butter chips and some Crispy Rice for a little crunch.  Oh Man!  It arrived in a cute plastic container with a cute little CHOCbite already taken out of the top of the bar.  This was divine.  When my mailman delivered it to my door, he knew it was chocolate from the return address and instructed me to, “Enjoy that bar, Penelope!”  Did I ever. 

Who wouldn’t love to receive a piece of chocolate in the mail?  This is such a great idea for a gift for any chocolate-lover in your life.  The packaging makes it even cuter.  If you aren’t sure exactly what masterpiece you would create, there is also a section of their favorite bars ready to order to make it simple.  Check out CHOCbite.  It’s a great new concept for the perfect make-your-own chocolate bar.  Delish!

Clean Eating is the gist of The Gracious Pantry.  It is created under the same principles as the Candida Diet:  Eat simple foods that are easy to digest.  By doing this, the energy previously used on digesting refined sugars and high-fat foods is free to move to places in your body that need healing (allergies/sinuses, painful joints, stomach issues).  The numbers of people I know with any of those problems is growing every day.   Stating the obvious, you would certainly lose weight by limiting or eliminating sugars and high fats.

After reading The Gracious Pantry, I am highly motivated to hop back on the wagon.  Tiffany has created a website that is a fabulous resource not only for great  “Clean” recipes, but also for how to get started from Step One.  She offers a list of items to have in order to stock your pantry with clean foods and she also clarifies exactly what needs to be eliminated and how to substitute for those ingredients in your recipes.  (What an amazing help!)  The list of recipes is long and are great to get you started.  She also blogs on favorite brands, which I have found to be extremely helpful when at the grocery store.  Knowing “legal” brands sure makes the grocery trip shorter rather than having to read every package you purchase.  On top of the great recipes she posts, she also has a store that points you in the right direction for tools and recipe books she uses in her kitchen.

Everyone has their own reason for wanting to start eating clean.  It could be like me…because I have to in order to keep my health, or for someone who wants to lose weight or just be take care of your body and be healthy.  I really like Tiffany’s advice in that you have to choose your own boundaries.  If you need a treat, will you allow yourself a treat once a week? once a month?  However often you choose, you need to set your own rules and stick to them.  This is not a diet, but a lifestyle change.  I can speak from experience that when you make up your mind to cut out processed foods and refined sugars, etc, your body will have never felt better.  Your energy will return, your body will heal and you will feel like a million bucks. 

Check out The Gracious Pantry and I would even encourage you to get her feed.  It will be great encouragement to receive good and healthy recipes to motivate you to eat clean and take care of your body!

Then, my mom introduced me to velvet hangers.  Where have these been all my life?  I was too proud to buy them when she told me about them.  Either that, or I barely heard what she said.  One day I was piddling thru a store sans kids when I ran across velvet hangers and recalled her telling me how great they were.  I fell in love instantly and bought a couple of sets.

I immediately went home and placed my more “delicate” things on my pretty new pink hangers (they come in all colors).  As I slowly replace the hangers in my closet, yet again, I was completely satisfied with the velvet hangers.  My things don’t slide off the end of the hanger…ever.  My clothes just seem to hang better on the velvet and pants don’t slip on the bottom.  They are fantastic.  If you need a little help in the hanger department, these are the best yet and easily affordable. Recycle those old wire hangers and start replacing with velvet.  Everybody’s doing it…

So…now it’s time to re-organize that closet.  Clean out, give-away, and re-hang all your fab clothes!

I bought this portable hook-on chair, not for my home, but for everywhere BUT home. I was disgusted on a regular basis at the high chairs I encountered at restaurants. I knew they weren’t cleaned between uses and I spent too much time wiping high chairs down in restaurants…they should have paid me for my cleaning prowess. Highchairs in restaurants have caked-on food, layers of dried slobber, and who-knows-what-else.  On top of cleanliness, I found that many industrial high chairs weren’t very safe for my babies.  They could slide out, slide through, or even climb out, as the seat belts never seemed to be functioning.  I couldn’t take it anymore! So, the Hippo Chair entered our family.

There are certainly pros and cons to this chair, but the pros outweigh the cons for our purposes. It does take extra hands to put the seat on the table….a set to hold baby and a set to attach the chair. We also don’t take the chair apart and return it to its bag. I just fold it up and throw it in the back of our car so we have it on the road at all times. We sometimes get weird looks as we carry in our own chair to the restaurant, but more often than not, our meals are kindly interrupted by admiring parents asking us where we got our cool chair.

I amcertain I have increased Chicco sales of the Hippo Chair single-handedly.  On top of that, I am no longer squeamish about putting my child in restaurant high chair.  It’s always clean, safe and fits my baby perfectly.  Amen! and Amen!

Today, my mom is contributing one of her favorite things…all things by Stephen Huneck.

We discovered the Stephen Huneck Gallery in Nantucket about fifteen years ago.  When I saw the colorful whimsical paintings of Labradors, I just had to have one.  His own black lab is named Sally and has created paintings, books, stationary, etc. in honor of his Sally.  We have the children’s picture books about Sally and her adventures among other things.   When our own beloved Sweetie went to the “Lab Chapel” in the sky (also a book) we named our next lab, Sally, of course.  If you love labs, you must check out Stephen Huneck’s web site.

We are a Lab family, so we love all things Lab.  You, too, will love his site and all of his work, as would anyone you know who is a Lab-lover, too!

Whether the market is crashing, the sky is falling or all the other “Doomsday” theories out there, I am TRYING to tighten up.  My husband would laugh or even scoff, but I am thrifty on several fronts.  I buy most of my clothes at Target, I play The Grocery Game and I do try to buy things on sale.  However, when it comes to house decor and my facial products and chemical peels, there’s just no way to cut corners.  We all have our vices, right?   

Being the on-line shopper that I am, I always look for free shipping…and it is usually SO easy to find.  My latest trick, however, saves even more than shipping!  Anytime I order on-line, when I get to the last page that asks for coupon codes, I minimize my page and Google the coupon codes for that company.  Once I find it, I cut and paste it to the code box and VOILA!  Money saved!  For instance, I bought a few swimming suits from Lands End a few weeks ago. (A cute giraffe top and ruched swim mini…I love it!)  I Googled, “Lands End Coupon Code” and I ended up receiving 40% off my bathing suits (seriously?) PLUS free shipping!  I saved $80 simply by taking two extra minutes to look for coupon codes.  Just now, I ordered a few cute things for the boys at Boden for our upcoming beach trip (Lord, please keep the oil away from western Florida!).  When I Googled “Boden Coupon Code” I came up with 15% off my order PLUS free shipping!  How can you lose on that?

I don’t have to drag my 3 toots to the store with me just to save on shipping. For me, it was WORTH the shipping to not have to do that!  These days, however, those Coupon Codes can add up really quickly and save you a lot of money…just for taking a moment to look for them.  The day I ordered those bathing suits from Lands End, I ordered from two other companies online.  In total, I saved $190 that I was “OK” with spending… 

There are many many coupon code sites, so I couldn’t begin to list my favorites.  Many sites rank the success of each code or publish when it was last used successfully.  I have yet to have a code not work for me by following the recommendations on the site.  Who couldn’t use an extra $200 in their pocket? 

For the record, I’ll keep that in cash, so “You-know-who” doesn’t know how much I saved.  Then, I can use it on the next “must have” for my house or new “age-defying” treatment for my face…Fantastico!