We Had A Clothes Swap with Woolite and Crowdtap. Woot!

So, I received a pretty awesome opportunity to join forces with the fine folks over at Crowdtap.com and Woolite, to share the love for Woolite, which keeps clothes feeling newer for longer, recently. This was the first time I had ever been picked for a Sample and Share through Crowdtap, and to say I was excited was an understatement! I decided right off the bat, that I wanted to have a clothes swap, invite some friends over for snacks, shopping, girl time, and of course, some FREE Samples from Woolite, along with a $1 off coupon!

I got on Facebook and created an invite, spread the word amongst the friends I see most often, got a handful of RSVPs, and I was getting pumped up! THEN, one day, in the mail, arrived a box from Woolite! Sophi was so excited she could barely contain herself.

"Yook, Mommy! Yook! Yook!"


Yesterday, I ran out and got the things that I would need to make some goodies, drinks and whatnots. Then today came. We cleaned the house near spotless {you know, the way you I only clean when I'm expecting company}, cooked up some damn delicious serrano pepper, cream cheese, and bacon puff thingies, laid out all of the clothes {mine and things that had been dropped off or brought by my one girlfriend}, and then we waited. And waited. And watched {and got kind of sad} as people kept not showing up.

After I allowed myself to feel sorry for me for a bit, I jumped up and said "We are STILL DOING THIS!" So, myself, the Sophster, and my girlfriend, Kim, all got fancied up and started pouring through clothes and yummies. Mitch was here too, but he mostly just ate food. You know how much dudes love shopping.


Kim and I had a great time trying on shoes, blazers, and dresses. Sophi also had a great time! She kept saying, "I want to play dress up with Mommy and Granny {Kim}".

"Hmm, which one first?"


Anyway, here are more pics of our adventure...


After we were done playing, we obviously still had a hefty handful of Woolite samples, so we decided to hit the streets! Being a Sunday afternoon, a lot of neighbors were out working in their yards. So, we grabbed the rest of the samples and started stopping in every yard, telling people about how Woolite is for every day use and how it can keep your clothes fresh and new, like no other laundry detergent! I don't have pics of this part, but believe me, we had fun!

Oh and by the way, Woolite is only the beginning of my Crowdtapping adventures! I have barely been a member for a month and I was just picked for an upcoming in store Hosted Party at Old Navy! I'll get to pick three of my girlfriends to come and party it up with me for the day. We will each get to pick a bathing suit, flip flops, a beach towel, AND a beach bag, FOR FREE!! Seriously people, what are you waiting for?! Go sign up. Have I mentioned that it is completely FREE and the "work" is really a lot of fun! Anyway, you can find my sign up link here. If you have anymore questions about Crowdtap, please just ask. I'm happy to answer any question that I can.

Mommy Fail: How Often I Under-Estimate My Child {Big Girl Bed Transition}

I've noticed lately, that, without realizing it, I under-estimate Sophi, a lot. This really makes me feel pretty crappy. I mean, it makes me happy and so so proud when she exceeds my expectations of her, but for a second, I feel like a pretty bad mom for not giving her the benefit of a doubt. Let me just give the two most recent examples.

Bears.


I was doing an early morning search on Amazon one morning, trying to look for a specific Melissa & Doug alphabet puzzle, when I found the M&D Wooden Bear Family Dress Up Puzzle. At first, I wasn't going to get it. I just knew that Sophi wouldn't be into it right now. She hardly pays attention to puzzles and I thought that this would just be too involved, that she would dump the pieces all over the floor, play with them for 5 minutes and then move on. So, I just added it to her Amazon wish list and added the alphabet and the number puzzles, into my cart, because those were the ones I knew she would love.

I try really hard not to be a compulsive shopper, so I sat with those items in my cart for a couple of days before deciding to go ahead and give the bears a shot. It was only $12 and she would eventually like it, right??

The day that the puzzles came, the UPS man rang the doorbell during nap time {like always...grrrr} and I rushed to open the box of goodies. I like to have new stuff opened and displayed on the coffee table when she wakes up from her nap. I do this even when we are just doing a tot school activity. I love to let her come out and discover whatever is out for her to play with. That time of day is always best, also, because she is fresh from her nap and there's not much of a chance of the crank-a-pottomus showing it's ugly head. Anyway, so she wakes up and she immediately goes to the number puzzle. We went over a few numbers and she was over it. Then, she spotted the bears! She RAN over to the other side of the table and then, like magic, she was glued to those bears! She played with them for THREE hours, when I had to pull her away for dinner, and then she was right back on them again after dinner. The child is obsessed with the puzzle. I love that she can create stories with the different outfits and facial expressions of the Mama, Papa, and Baby bear. She is also learning to recognize the different expressions and their meanings. If you have a toddler at home, I cannot recommend this puzzle enough. By the way, she has hardly touched the two puzzles that I was so sure she would love. Oh well!



Big.Girl.BED!

This one makes me haz a sad. Ok, well, really it makes me very proud, but sad in that "Wahh! My baby is growing up!", kind of way. I have been asking Sophi for months if she is ready for her big girl bed {we bought the bedding like two months ago}, and her answer has always been a resounding "NO! I want CRIB!" This weekend, without Mitch on my side, I decided to take matters into my own hands. This girl has got to learn how to sleep in a bed that is not a crib. So, early Saturday morning, I disassembled her crib, took the front rail off, put her new bedding on and prepared myself for the hell that was going to come once she realized that she wasn't confined anymore!

I positioned myself in the corner of her room, called her in for the surprise, and this is what happened:



...not exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

She was terrified. Wouldn't even come into her room! I thought for a second about what I could do to get her comfortable enough to at least come sit and try it out. So, I hopped in the bed and slowly coaxed her into coming in with me. I showed her how excited her "babies" were to be in a big bed, I showed her how she could scoot to the edge and dangle her feet off, and best of all, how she could get in and out all by herself! After a few minutes, we couldn't get her out of that bed! We played in it most of the morning.



Then came the first true test. Nap time. We held our breath and crossed our fingers when we put her down. Not only did she go down without a single problem, she slept for TWO HOURS! We actually ended up going in a waking her up because it was 4:00 and we knew that if she slept longer, she wouldn't go to bed that night. You want to talk about one seriously proud mama?! Yeah, I'm that girl. All afternoon I just kept saying, "I can't believe Sophi slept in her big girl bed!".



That night, she begged to get into her "big bed" after story time. She ran over and jumped in without even the first request for a hug or a kiss goodnight! She slept straight through the night and woke up around 7:30 the next morning, and instead of immediately crying out for me, she just laid there in her bed and talked and sang songs and played with her babies until almost 8:00. WOW! I sold my kid short. We didn't think she was ready at all for this transition. I thought for sure that we would be putting the front rail back up on her crib before bed Saturday night. Boy were we WRONG. She's pretty cool. And she LOVES her big girl bed! I've also taken like, 100 pictures of her sleeping in her bed. Maybe I'm just a little proud of our girl!




Next stop, POTTY LEARNING!

Have you recently gone through any big transitions with your littles? Which ones? How did you/your little handle the transition?

Happy Earth Day!

So today is Earth Day, 2013. I was hoping to get Sophi out in the yard and do some digging and planting and playing with earthworms, but it's raining. That's ok though, because we couldn't wait for Earth Day this year to get into the yard and get dirty! We like to plant things for Earth Day, around here. I think it's so important to teach Sophi how to give and receive from our Earth. To show her how much pride comes from planting, harvesting, and eating her own food. Or just planting a tree or a flowering plant that will make oxygen for many years to come. I love that she loves getting her hands dirty and tending the garden with me. It's pretty much the coolest thing, ever.

What's funny is that, a few years ago, I was very unaware or Earth Day. I mean, I knew about recycling because we had used the blue recycle bins since I was a kid, but I never put myself into learning about ways to make our planet more sustainable for years to come. Until I got pregnant with Sophi. It's amazing how much more aware of things I became. I wanted to make my world better so that she could have a better world. I wanted to educate her to treat our planet with kindness and respect, so that her generation and generations to come could have a better world. So, that's what I'm doing. By no means am I perfect. I still use fabric softener and I stopped cloth diapering when she was 15 months old, I don't always buy organic, I drive an SUV and Mitch drives a {very non eco-friendly} truck, but we do try to make things right, when we can.

Our Earth Day projects this year, were to plant a blueberry bush and to turn the flower bed that Mitch built last year, into a small veggie garden.





Sophi was so excited to help plant our very own blueberries in their new pot. We both found it very curious that the plant would live in orchid bark, instead of soil, like all of the other things we have planted. She helped me pile the bark up around the root ball of the plant and then helped by dumping the remaining soil from the transplant pot, into the new pot. She also took great pleasure in plucking the few ripe berries off of the plant and popping them in her mouth. They are, after all, her favorite. :)


Clearly, we were excited about finishing our new project.


Next, we sowed seed into our little garden bed. As you can see, from the pic above, we chose basil, beets, carrots, bell pepper, and spinach. I already had a sage and a rosemary plant that survived from last year. The bell pepper is kind of an experiment for me. We love them, but I have heard that they are not the easiest to grow, and I'm always up for a good challenge. The other stuff we just use a lot of. I love juicing beets, carrots, and spinach and I use the crap out of basil over the summer months. I'm especially excited to have basil again this summer to go with my tomatoes that I started from seed late last summer! Anyway, here's the bed right after we sowed the new seeds...



And I snuck out today, when we got a break in the rain, to snap a picture of what it looks like now. We planted two weeks ago, today.




Are you doing anything special for Earth Day, this year? I would love to hear about any projects or activities that you have come up with!

Guilty Pleasure: PB, Nutella, Banana, Marshmallow Sandwich

I've been working slowly on catching up on my DVR recordings lately. I've finally got the DVR down to about 50% full and I'm only 3-4 weeks behind on most of my shows. I'll catch up one of these days, right?? Anyway, I was watching the GLEE episode from like, 4 weeks ago, about guilty pleasures. Of course, there was plenty of gleeking out and singing and dancing and all that. Glee is definitely one of my guilty pleasures, but that is not the guilty pleasure that this post is about.

THIS IS:



That is a Peanut Butter, Nutella, Banana, and Marshmallow Sandwich {aka my guilty hide-in-the-closet-and-eat-it PLEASURE}!! So, I saw this thing on Pinterest where you can spread some Nutella on some bread with some bananas and marshmallows and I thought, "Wow! That looks pretty much amazing", and then I thought "I can totally take this to the next level.", and I did. This is the yummiest most sinfully delicious thing pretty much ever. I'll put out a warning though, this sandwich is not for the faint of heart. Especially not for those who have a constant watch on calories. This is a cheat meal. My FAVORITE cheat meal. This bad boy is going to cost you about 700 calories, but every calorie is so very worth it. I promise.

Here's what you'll need:



Your Favorite Bread
Peanut Butter
Nutella
Banana
Marshmallows {I used three jumbos and the 4th one pictured went straight to my mouth...NOM NOM}

It's pretty self explanatory, next. I like to spread PB on one side of the bread, Nutella on the other and then stack the marshies and banana up in between. Since I have the big marshmallows, I just pulled them apart a bit with my fingers to get them to lay flat on top of the banana.



Now, you can slap this puppy together and it will be completely delicious just like this. OOOOOR you can take it to the next level and slap it onto your steaming hot panini press! Then just wait and watch as the chocolate and the peanut butter and the marshmallows melt all together into ooey gooey goodness!




It's READY!



Ok, grab a spatula, get it off of the grill, and let it cool for just a couple of minutes. It will be VERY HOT. After your two-ish minutes have past, slice it, pour yourself a glass of milk and TAKE A BITE! You're welcome. :)



What are some of your guilty pleasures?

My iPhone is Fancy, Y'all!

This post will be short and sweet but I'm just too excited about this to not share {yes, I am very easily amused}! I found a tutorial to pretty up the icons on my iPhone a long time ago but that junk was just way too complicated to wrap my mind around, and I forgot about doing it. UNTIL I found a NEW tutorial on Pinterest a couple of days ago. This one is super easy to follow {lots of preeeeeetty pictures!} and the blog writer even makes it a fun read. Anyway, it takes some time because you have to download one at a time, but it's sooooo worth it. Check it out!


Pretty, right??

The tutorials can be found here for the downloadable app icons, and here for the icons that originally come with your iPhone. Not to mention, the name of the blog is The Super Messy Supermommy! A woman after my own little messy heart. Go check her out and have some fun customizing your iPhone!

Becoming my Nana

When I was younger, I remember always picking at my Nana about her kitchen drawer full of used plastic bags, aluminum foil, twisty ties, and rubber bands. I thought she was so silly for washing and reusing these small items. She would always defend her reason by saying that she lived through the Great Depression and back then, "you didn't just throw things away". I would just roll my eyes (in my rebellious teenager way), or give a laugh and move on. I thought I would never do something so silly.

Fast forward to now. If you walked into my kitchen, you would see plastic bags hanging to dry in the window sill and also folded up in the drawer. I save rubber bands from produce and twisty ties from bags of bread. I save these things because I realize that it's an easy thing to do, to wash and reuse, and it not only saves our family money in the long run, it is taking that small step towards saving our Earth.

My Nana passed away 5 years ago, this month. I miss her like crazy. I hope that she would be proud of the woman that I've turned out to be. A woman who recycles these little things, who grows food and cooks for her family, a woman who freezes veggie scraps and chicken carcasses to make stock for meals and composts to recycle back into our Earth.

Nana, if I could tell you one thing, it would be that, living through the Depression and finding means to keep even the smallest things didn't make you silly or ridiculous. It made you a world changer. My world. I hope one day, my grandchildren will think the same of me. I love you so much. XoXo

Just who are we weaning here??

I decided shortly after Sophi was born that I couldn't be the parent who let her child cry herself to sleep. I just didn't have it in me. So I nursed her to sleep until she was almost 18 months old, when she weaned, and then for a couple of months after that, I rocked her to sleep. This probably wasn't the smartest thing to do but hey, I stay at home with her and I have that time so why make her suffer and scream herself to sleep. We did try the CIO {Cry It Out} method for about 4 days{?} Know what happened? She screamed at the top of her lungs for over an hour each night. It never got better...and it never got easier for us. We have a seriously stubborn child. Don't know who she gets that from! Couldn't be either on of us....right. Anyway, after I stopped rocking her to sleep, I would put her in the crib and lay just outside of the crib, on her floor. This lasted for several months. Then, I decided to move outside of her door, thinking that if she didn't see me, she would realize that she doesn't need me right there for her to fall asleep. She's 26 months old now. We still lay outside her door every night for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour waiting for her to fall asleep so we can slip away and have some Mitch and Kammi time.

Last night, Mitch suggested that maybe we should try leaving her door open and walking away but staying close enough that if she calls, we could say "we're right here, honey!" and keep her from wigging out and scaling the crib. I agreed. So we put her to bed about 30 minutes ago and guess where I am? About 4 feet away from where I usually am. Waiting for her to fall asleep. And guess how many times she has called for me in the last 30 minutes? Twice. TWICE. In THIRTY minutes. Maybe she isn't the only one who needs weaning. It takes away a part of the "my baby needs me" fantasy and it freaks me out. I didn't realize this until about 8:00 tonight. This is something that I am going to have to work on, as much as she will. Goodnight, my sweet girl. Tomorrow you will be my baby again. Mommy and Daddy love you.

Am I the only one who has this issue? I'd love to hear stories of how you got your little ones {and yourself} adjusted to a healthy sleep pattern. Good night!

Easter

It's only a week past Easter so it's not too late to blog about it, right? Even though I had full intention on writing this a week ago. Oops! What can I say? The weather has been SO awesome lately that I just haven't felt like sitting at the computer. SO! We had a really fun Easter! Mitch and I were really excited because, even though this was actually the Sophster's third Easter, it was the first one where we have felt that she could get involved with the fun of the holiday...and we went all out! We did several tot school activities throughout the week and FOUR egg hunts! I'll show you the tot school activities that we did this week, first.

Easter School Activities

My iPhoto program kind of crapped out on me last weekend and I, sadly, lost a lot of pics. Mitch was able to get most of them back {that man is a God sent!}, but needless to say, I was an emotional wreck the night that it happened. I am still finding more and more that have been lost. I'm saying this here because, a lot of the missing pics are pics that I took of the Sophster with her school activities. {sad face}

This week was either a complete hit or a complete miss for Soph, and that's ok. We're both still trying to feel different things out. This is only the beginning. :)

The first thing I did was {get really super excited about my new laminator, and} printed out this egg themed, shape matching game. I found the idea on Pinterest but for the life of me, I can't find it now! Anyway, the big sheet has one big shape on each egg, and the individual eggs have multiple small shapes on them. Sophi figured this out pretty quickly. I kind of knew that she would BUT what I especially love about this activity is that it got her saying names of two shapes that she hadn't named before, rectangle and oval. Cool! Oh, I ended up gluing some of that no skid shelf liner to the backs of the eggs because they weren't staying in place well and she was getting frustrated. That worked out perfect. Fun for days!




Another thing that I did was just gave her two bowls, put several of her Easter eggs in one bowl, and gave her a spoon. Then, I encouraged her to scoop the eggs up onto the spoon and transfer them to the other bowl. Yeah...she couldn't have cared less about this. She wanted to break all of the eggs open and then put them in the other bowl. After a few minutes, though, she DID start scooping the egg halves and moving them from bowl to bowl. Success! Her interest was not held for long on this activity, though.



The third thing I did was printed out a large b/w Easter egg, laminated it and let her color it with her dry-erase markers. She loved this! We are big fans of coloring around here! She also loved that mommy could just wash it off and she could start all over again. I presented this to her, along with the next thing, after her nap one day.


The other thing that got rolled out was a picture of the Easter Bunny that was printed 5 times, in progressive sizes. The goal here was to get her to sort them from largest - smallest or visa versa. She didn't get it at first. She was VERY excited when she saw it. She ran over and started pointing and yelling "Easter Bunny Easter Bunny Easter Bunny!!!", which eventually turned into, "One, two, three, four, five! Five Easter Bunnies, mommy!", which EVENTUALLY turned into her stacking them with largest bunny on the bottom up to the smallest bunny on top. So, even though it didn't work out as I had planned, she definitely got a few lessons from this and it wasn't an idea wasted. :)




The Fun Stuff!

As I mentioned before, this is the first year that we have involved Sophi in any kind of Easter egg hunt or Easter activities. The first thing we did was a glow in the dark egg hunt! I found the idea on Pinterest, originally posted by Play at Home Mom, and could not WAIT to do this!! So, I got on Amazon and ordered a bunch of these finger lights {wow, they're like $4 cheaper now!}, threw those babies in some eggs, waited for it to get semi-dark out so that the light wouldn't come in the blinds too bad, and hid them while Mitch distracted the nosy toddler with food. ;) I was nervous about how this would turn out, since she had never hunted eggs. As usual, I was nervous for no reason. Not only did she "get it", she LOVED IT! It was SUCH a huge hit! Then, the lights went to hang out with my little brother, who did a night time outside egg hunt for my nephew, who also begged to do it over and over again!




We colored eggs

Well, Sophi "painted" eggs. I got the cups all out and set up all nice and pretty, laid a towel down underneath, came prepared with dippers....c'mon lady, you're working with a two year old, here! LOL!! We showed her the "right way" and then she did it her way. She grabbed an egg, plopped it onto the towel in front of her, dunked her tiny little hands into the colored water, and painted those eggs! She was so proud of herself and asked to do it again for days after. We were pretty proud of her, too. :)



Yeah, we may have slammed one or two into the glasses and busted some shells. Oops!

Egg Hunt #2

Our first outdoor egg hunt was the Friday before Easter. There was an egg hunt over at Sophi's Oma's condo. So I got our little pretty all dolled up in one of her Easter dresses and we headed over. The weather could not have been more perfect. It was the first perfect day of the season, I think. Absolutely gorgeous! Sophi had a blast. She didn't get a whole lot of eggs because instead of grabbing the egg, throwing it in the basket, and moving on, she has to open every egg that she finds....right then. Oh well, she didn't care how many eggs she got so neither did we! Here are a few of my favorites from that day.



Easter Festival

Saturday, the day before Easter, my little brother and nephew drove out to join us for the Easter festival near our place. The kids had an egg hunt but it was kind of a joke. So many grown people were snatching up eggs and throwing them in their little's {3 and under} basket and Jaiden and Sophi only got a couple of eggs a piece. No biggie, though. Why? Because they had a train! And free popsicles! We stayed for a few hours and had a great time. Sophi is completely obsessed with her cousin. She is always wanting to hold his hand or hug and kiss him. She asks about him every day. I hope that when they grow up, that he will be like the protective big brother that she doesn't have. :)



Easter Morning :)

The Easter Bunny came Saturday night and left Sophi a trail of jelly beans leading from her room to her very first Easter basket on the coffee table! This was a HUGE hit! She woke up and we went in to get her, told her that the Easter bunny had come and had left some surprises for her. Once she woke up and got all of her snuggles out {oh how we love that part!}, she was off to explore! She stopped as soon as she saw the jelly beans and proclaimed "JELLY BEANS!!", then stooped down to eat one. We actually had to encourage her to follow the trail, and not sit and eat every one along the way. LOL! She had a blast going through her basket and discovering the goodies inside. After that excitement had calmed some, we gave her breakfast and I hid the eggs in our front yard while she ate. Then we headed out and let her hunt! She had a great time. We all did. It was an awesome Easter. She still asks to see the Easter Bunny {whom she refused to see while he was around} every night before bed. Silly girl, maybe you'll be ready for him next year. :)




Aaaand last but not least, our attempt at a family selfie on Easter morning. I looooove Sophi's bed head and how I look like I just rolled out of bed but I have that "I am one seriously proud mama!" look on my face. Because, well, I am.




How did you spend your Easter? Do anything special with the people you love? Whatever you did, I hope you all had a fantastic weekend!