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my favorite place

I’ve mentioned it before. My favorite place.  The cabin on the lake where we spent our childhood summers.

It was and is an amazing place.

It’s in the middle of NO WHERE (which I say with all affection, no where is a PERFECT place for the cabin to be).

Addie & Hay visited with me last May, but this was the first time to take all 3 kids and to be there together with the other kids we grew up with…

ashley ann...a wonderful new favorite!

I’ve said it before, that I love using Google Reader as it pulls the RSS Feeds from all my favorite blogs to one nice neat place.  This made is easy for me to read in the middle of the night from bed while I was giving Piper her bottle, and now read when I wake up and can’t for some unknown horrid reason, go back to sleep.  But when I look down the list of feeds that have been pulled for each blog, I’m always a little overwhelmed by

a little serenity

There is so much to a day that can be daunting and mundane….laundry, dishes, errands, work, diapers, cleaning…..blah.  That’s it’s nice to give yourself a little boost here and there, even if that just means looking across the room at something pretty.  I

like to plant things in our garden that I can cut for inside the house too.  We have Hydrangeas, Roses, Sunflowers and Rosemary that can all make me smile.  But my current happy friends are the Chicks & Hens and Nasturtiums.

design love! darling beach house

My decorating infatuations are ALL OVER THE BOARD.

There was a time in my life when I told my mom that when I grew up I wanted to have a house “with like FIFTY rooms in it“. Not because I wanted a big fancy house, but because I wanted to be able to decorate each room entirely differently than the next.  I think my Home Collection days at Ralph Lauren have forever changed how I see things.  Now all I see is The Safari Room,…

a helpful reminder

Having little helpful reminders are good.  Goodness knows with each pregnancy I clearly lost more brain cells than I ever started with, so now I pretty much know nothing, and remember nothing.

Case in point, packing for my trip with the girls I made a quick dash out to the car to get something. My running shoes were also outside by the stroller.  I put them on the front doormat so that I wouldn’t forget to bring them inside to pack.  When I got back to the house from the…

steam? convection? in your own kitchen?

So this week I’m back in Scottsdale.  Remember the Bosch Vision Washer & Dryer?  Yep, I’m back in that training facility…and I promise, if those machines weren’t installed, I’d be trying to squeeze them in my tote bag!  As it is, I’m thinking I may need to dash next door to their laundry room and use the Vision Dryer steam function for a 16 minute freshen and de-wrinkle!

But back to the point.  For this trip, I’m here at the training…

how does your garden grow ~ part 2

OK, I NEVER would have guessed this is where our garden would be at this point!

I posted 2 weeks ago about the vegetable garden we had planted around Mothers Day.  Thought I would give you a garden update.

This is where it was the day we planted.

This is where it was a month later.

This is where it is 2 weeks after my last post.


HELLO!?!?!?

Needless to say, when…

fungus pharm

Fungus Pharm Certified Organic Soybean Oil

Ok with a title like that, you were afraid to open this post, weren’t you???  I would have been!

From time to time, I’m going to start highlighting some of the items in the Favorites Gallery. I figure you all don’t have time to go through it all the time, so this is a quick and easy way to tell you about some of the things I really love and use a lot. I originally wrote this last year when the blog first launched, so as an…

tab it baby ~ part 2

A few months ago, I wrote about my new favorite organization tool
that let me make up a project binder just the way I wanted it

I use this binder every hour of every day!

But what makes this binder work is the awesome removable tabs.

I am WAY BEYOND IN LOVE with these tabs…

My newest way to use them is in my Flat Belly Diet Family Cookbook.

Because I’m…

organizing tips

This tip has to do with helping to get yourself organized.  It comes from BabyCenter and although a REALLY, REALLY long list…there is LOTS of great info and very helpful tips.

Their first 5 are some of my favorites:

  1. Commit to change
  2. Take it slow
  3. Keep it simple
  4. Sort & purge
  5. Store things sensibly

Some others from the list that I really like and our family does as well:

Find a key spot for your keys.
We have a bowl in the kitchen for ALL keys (and sunglasses),…

how does your garden grow?

So a few weeks ago I posted this photo on Facebook and asked people to guess what we were building.  The responses were great…bunk beds? Chicken coop? A fort? A playhouse?

But what we (read = my fabulous husband) was actually building were vegetable beds. We decided that we just didn’t have ENOUGH stuff going on, that it might be fun to add ONE MORE THING to our lists.  I actually take full blame for this project as I thought it might be fun and…

back to basics ~ master closet

A few weeks ago I had one of those moments you see in cartoons where the character yells so loud and so long that the whole world around him FREEZES.

You know what I’m talking about.

When water shooting out of a fire hydrant freezes in mid shoot…

The person jumping is somehow suspended indefinitely in his jump….

The world just stops and stares at the source of the yell waiting for the OK to return to life.

Well that’s what

i've seen a vision...a bosch vision...and I want one!

How often do you read something like this, “I went to laundry training and I LOVED IT!”? I’m pretty sure you don’t read it all that often.

But truly, I did, love it that is!  I actually am totally and completely in love with the new Bosch Vision Washer & Dryer and have been racking my brain for creative ways to sell our current machines. (And they aren’t bad, they are front loaders and are only two years old….)…

More fun laundry tips...assuming laundry is fun

OK Seriously, this one I’m going to have to try!  Yesterday it was Chalk, and today I’ve got another wacky tip from my MOUNTAINS of Apartment Therapy catching up…

This was a comment shared by an Apartment Therapy reader, on their Spring Cleaning: Green Laundry Products post:

“I was a firm lover of (dryer sheets) until I found that I could take

wordless wednesday ~ chalk??

In the major overhaul over at our house, I’ve also been catching up on reading blogs that I love to follow, but have just gotten so behind!  One of the steps I took was to move most of them to an RSS subscription on my Google Reader and have been catching up on them when I give Piper her 4:00AM bottle.

Would you believe I had 231 posts from Apartment Therapy that I needed to catch up on!?!??!  And who knew, but May…

back to basics ~ the container store

Somehow I don’t think this is what The Container Store had in mind when they said we needed to hang our laundry….but hey, my ovens are next to the very small laundry room and it works!

In keeping with the theme Back to Basics, I’m going to focus on Laundry and Laundry Rooms this week.

I’m a huge fan of organization.  I love The Container Store.  Don’t believe me?  Read this and this.  Trust me…

quick gift idea

It was my dad’s birthday this past week and I wanted to make something with the Littles for his garden.  He and my mom have been working on an awesome vegetable garden that I will write more about later.  But since our Littles are a bit too little to do anything that requires too much skill, I went with painting rocks that Grandpa could add to his flower pots, as well as painting a little potted basil plant.

Super easy projects, and the

not just for laundry

Since we are on the topic of laundry, and since I still have about 8 loads to do myself, AND I seem to keep running out of time to write my recaps from laundry training.…I thought I would share a fun tip my Latte Fairy friend shared with me.

Wood Clothespins

They’re not just for laundry.

Truly, NUMEROUS uses.

But her favorite is to leave them in a jar in their family’s pantry.
Everyone knows how to use them, and then…

butterfly fly ~ stamping heaven!

If you know me, you know I’m not crafty.  Others in my family are, and are really good at it, but I’m not.

But I do like to do little things that make me feel like I’m a part of the handmade world, or that just make something feel special.

I’ve always been a sucker for stationary, gift tags, note cards, anything and everything paper related.  I love to write thank you notes, and wrap gifts.  But I don’t quite have the same kind of time to customize things like I used to.  But…

my favorite thursday!

Today is a little different than normal.  We may have a few extra friends stopping by to say “Hello” at My Favorite Everything because today is…My SITS Featured Blogger Day!

For those that have no idea what that means, SITS is a ridiculously, crazy supportive group that introduces you to other fabulously fun blogs, and today is the day for My Favorite Everything’s introduction!  Talk about a Favorite Day!  Thank you Heather & Tiffany!

I’m going to keep this short & simple I hope (if you know me,…