Menu Plan & Parenting Tips!

Monday! Hope you all had a fantastic weekend!

Monday: Stuffed Burgers and Garden Salad

Tuesday: Bean Burritos served with Chips & Salsa

Wednesday: BBQ Chicken served Button Mushrooms and Spinach Salad

Thursday: Grilled Skirt Steak over Rice with asparagus and Garden Salad

Friday: Picnic Dinner and a Movie in the Park

Saturday: Birthday Pizza Party

Sunday: Grilled Brats served with Grilled Veggies and Garden Salad

Get creative with your fruit and watch it fly off the table! We took a picnic to the Zoo and when I was grabbing some extra napkins from their snack counter, I saw some coffee stirrers. I grabbed them and skewered our fruit! These were gone in the blink of an eye!

Use empty spice containers as vials for a nature sample!

Masking Tape and a new car make the cutest most inexpensive gift for boys! Add larger car sets for even more fun. They use the tape to make roads. I usually start the first strip of tape with a plastic bread tab that they can re-use to find the end over and over again and I also add black dashes to the center of the tape on the first section so that they can see how easy it is to visualize tape as road!

Use a gumball machine capsule to house dice and keep them from flying across the room

Our 2013 Bucket List is seeing a lot of action and we have been striking things from the list almost daily! go to the original LINK and link up any posts about Summer or your very own bucket lists!

Enjoy every minute my friends, for as you wake up each morning, you realize how another day has come and gone so quickly...

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Simple Sofa Shelf

Midweek and I feel like this one is really dragging. I have a horrible cough that just seems to take the wind out of me with every single breath I take and I just want to stay in bed. Instead we are working on small projects around the house and trying to just keep the rest of the family healthy.

Our latest change is taking place in the living room. Our walls are taking a beating from the couch. With 3 kids and 2 adults in this room the most, it seems obvious that it would happen. We play games here, watch movies and have our evening reading/discussion time here. It was time to make a quick and inexpensive solution. We purchased a piece of wood from HOME DEPOT and 3 brackets from Ikea. 2 coats of black paint allowed to dry overnight + 15 minutes of installation and we were all set!

I'm still working on styling the shelf but for now I am THRILLED! It keeps the couch away from the wall and gives us a little more display space. This entire wall is my next project. 

Here it is as of this morning. I have changed this out often. I plan on picking up some sort of butterfly stems and low flowers for the glass jars. The box on the left holds all of our remotes. The easels hold artwork done by my children and on the far right are some photos from  my trip to Europe.

This is another wall in the living room that needs more work and a lot of help. I am looking to add Words, Letters and more photos.

Happy Wednesday my Friends!

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Did You Know?

We wash a lot of dishes over here...A LOT! I am a huge fan of the touchless systems that are still pretty new. I worried about my kids running them dry playing with them in the bathroom and then I worried about how much it would cost me to keep replacing them in the kitchen too, with all that we wash. Each replacement is just a little over 4.00 and with these pumps in 3 rooms of the house, that can add up.

Did you know that with a simple butter knife, you can pry off the top of these containers, refill them and then it snaps right back on??! I have successfully refilled one 3 times so far! Even if the lid cracks the next time, I just saved myself 12.00, color me HAPPY!

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How to Throw away 150.00

So we went to Disney World last year and had a blast! We went the original intention of purchasing these really neat strollers we had seen the previous year. They were umbrella strollers that reclined! We had yet to see something that lightweight with the recline feature. PERFECT, we figured for evenings at the parks! We only ended up using them a couple of times since the kids wanted to actually walk! On our next trip to Mexico, we only brought one for our 9 month old. As he was sitting in it being pushed down the sidewalk (not curb, not potholed street, not speed bumps) the seat suddenly became loose and our son was hanging out the side as though it were a HAMMOCK! My husband was able to put his hands on the underside while I got the baby out, but the stroller was DONE! Look at just how the bar just broke?! The hardware popped out, nowhere to be seen! Not only were we on vacation, we were on our FIRST day of vacation! So on that trip we had to buy another stroller. Oh well these things happen, and we had the other one still at home. Husband figured he would save this one and see if it was fixable. (not at all now that he tried! haa)

We are strolling the mall now several months later with our now 1 yr old, he's in the non-broken stroller and suddenly he is hammocked AGAIN!?!? I mean it happened in the EXACT SAME SPOT! look at the strollers side by side! This cheap piece of junk broke in the exact same spot on 2 different strollers! They claim it holds 35lbs and my son now at 1yr old is not even close to 30lbs, at 9 months old he was even smaller. So what is the problem with these? I have sent notices to Disney World in hopes that they will check into these strollers a bit more and my next letter is to Kolcraft directly. What a poorly designed stroller that started out with a great concept. Stay away from the kolcraft brand if you actually want your child safe in a stroller!
Now if you want to move on and talk about a FABULOUS stroller, we replaced CHEAP with functional, Chic and AWESOME all for a decent price! We fell in love with the sleek look of the Mia Moda Cielo stroller, I will be posting the photos of our son in this stroller soon, but let me tell you it's a HUGE difference. Retails for just under 180.00 and it's AWESOME! The look has people turning their heads and the ease of use ixs amazing! It just glides! The storage? OMG! It's TINY when folded! it's the size of a large beach bag! In fact, I bet it would fit in one! I will have to try it out! I will share photos in my next post!