Because I’m all about Amazon Prime… I order most of my kitchen gadgets online…
I just got an email from Amazon yesterday because this onion chopper I ordered has been recalled.
If you have the M-700 model, you’ll want to get a replacement so you don’t risk being added to the list of those injured.
www.muellerdirect.com is their website. It was down yesterday… Probably from the high traffic of other kitchen gadget enthusiasts… But I was able to open the site today and it says to email recall@muellerdirect.com if you want to apply for a replacement.
So I got a sweet Garmin Vivoactive 3 delivered yesterday from my company… Because… Well… They are awesome and they actually show us they appreciate the hard work that we are doing my rewarding us with gifts to help us on our health and happiness journey. ❤️
I was so excited when I saw all the watch faces I could choose from in the Garmin Connect IQ app 😍, so I downloaded 6 of them. Then I went to apply them and 5 of the 6 had an error 🤦🏽♀️.
So obviously I scoured the internet to figure out why the faces wouldn’t work. I found a long thread about things that worked, then didn’t, like rebooting, but I tried that… 3 times already and still couldn’t see the faces🤷🏽♀️.
Then I found the solution of all solutions… Garmin Express! You download the application to your desktop then hook your Vivoactive 3 up with the power cord to your USB slot and it will sync and make updates to your smart watch that didn’t happen from within the watch menus (I had checked for updates within the watch menu and it had said it was up to date 🤔).
After the updates were complete… I had all my watch face options available! 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
So I slept with my new Vivoactive 3 on 1 wrist and my old Fitbit Blaze on the other to see how they compare. I’ll be wearing both the whole day today too to continue my research 😂.
I’m a database analyst, so you probably won’t be surprised that I chose a face with all the DATA (Data Lover 🤣).
I think my favorite thing about my Garmin is that I can wear it while swimming, giving the kids a bath, washing dishes… You know all the things I can’t do while wearing my Fitbit Blaze. But I’m still a Fitbit fan because that’s where all my friends are that I do fitness challenges with.
Are you into fitness? How’s your health? You can’t outlift or outrun an unhealthy gut. 😝 But I’ve got something that might help. ❤️
Since I’m trying to figure this out again… I think I do this every year (that we send Christmas cards), I’m going to just write it out for myself, and for anyone else that it may help. (Update: I never actually published this last year when I wrote it, and I had to figure it out again this year when I came to search my blog and couldn’t find my post… so I’m finishing it in 2019 so I’ll have it for our 2020 cards)
We have our Address List Master in Google Drive so that we always have it with us wherever we go, and we can update it as we need to.
First, I made all my updates, highlighting records for people I knew had moved, so we could follow up with them, removing people who had passed away in the last year, or people whose cards were returned to us with no forwarding address, and adding any new friends we had made throughout the year. After I got my Google Drive list updated, I copied it into a new Excel document and saved it with this year’s name.
Here is where I always run into trouble… I got into Word and cannot figure out how to update my data source. I love data, and I love databases, and it seems like this should be something simple, but I cannot figure it out… maybe… if I used the same file name, then I could just go into the same Word document and just refresh the data… but I am going the wizard route… yet again. If I get it figured out before next year, I’ll update this. But… Christmas is only 4 days away and we need to get these cards out.
Sorry if you get one from us and it’s late… we tried.
Open Word
Go to Mailing
Go to Start Mail Merge – then select Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard
You’ll see options open on the right side of the page, click the Labels option button then click on Next: Starting Document
Click on Label Options
A window will pop open and you’ll choose your Label vendor and Product number (we use Avery #18660) then click OK then click Next: Select recipients
Click on Browse, then
Double click on your Excel list that you just created/updated then click OK, it should show you a preview of your address list, follow the wizard to confirm.
Click Next: Arrange your labels, click on Address block, then click on Match Fields, you’ll want to make any updates here to make sure your sample looks ok. In my list I have first and last name in one column, so I make sure the First Name references my Name field and the Last Name doesn’t reference my data at all or it prints the entire name twice. Once your updates are made, Click OK. Then click the Update all labels button before clicking on Next: Preview your labels, then click on Next: Complete the merge
Select Next: Preview your labels, and then Next: Complete the merge.
If everything looks good, you can choose to Print, but I choose the Edit individual labels option because we almost always have a few more records we are waiting to get addresses back on, but we don’t want to wait to print the rest. We click Merge, then All and it writes every address to the Word document so you can make any updates before you print. I save my document to my desktop then when I am ready I load my labels into my printer and print them. (Make sure you are loading your paper the right way, mine has to be print side down in the tray).
I hope this helps you! And I am sure it will help me next year when I’m trying to figure this out again!
Because I failed miserably the first time I went live on Instagram, and had to search the internet, just to find out that there was no way to recover my Instagram Live if I didn’t click on the Save button before posting it… But I did find that I could do a screen record, as long as it was still in the 24 hours that my Live stayed… well… live. So… I made a video to share with others who may run into the same issue that I did.
Hopefully this will help you before you do your first Instagram Live…. or in case you made the same mistake I made, hopefully it’ll help you learn how you can still save a copy with a workaround. Below is my second live on Instagram, I did click the Save button before I posted it, and it did save to my phone, so I was able to upload it to YouTube. 🙂
And I use this video editor to crop out anything outside of the screen that I’m trying to capture.
And if you didn’t know…. IGTV is pretty awesome. It allows you to upload videos between 1 and 10 minutes… you know how you can only load 1 minute clips to your posts on Instagram or in your Stories??? Well… with IGTV you can post a longer video, then you can share a clip of your video as a post on your feed, and you can also share the clip to your story so that people can click on it and it will take them to your longer video. I thought it was pretty fabulous when I learned I could take longer videos and not have to crop out only my favorite minute.
We woke at 4:00 am to get dressed, and get the last things packed up. I sent my hubby outside as soon as he woke to see if the fridge was cold, and it was! All the praise hands 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼!!! I had planned to leave at 5:00 am, which really meant I wanted to leave by 6:00 am… I gave us an hour buffer… we didn’t end up leaving until 6:30 am and then we had to make a stop (at a Flying J) shortly after we left (probably within 30 minutes) because I was already getting nauseous. I would later discover how cool the RV spot we pulled into was because you could get up, get water, and dump all at the same spot!
I’ve been in planning mode for the last couple months. And we leave in around 57 hours and I am still trying to book the last couple nights of our trip. Now, it is a 3 week trip, so I still have some time, but I hoped to get everything booked before we left so we’d have a plan. Not that that means anything, since this is our first RV trip, we may find that we can’t do everything as fast as we had anticipated, so… we plan, but know that things may actually change, and we’ll roll with it.
A big bummer was when I was looking into where we could park/drive at Monument Valley and I found out that we can’t actually drive the RV through Monument Valley… To get there and back to the Grand Canyon from Scottsdale, AZ adds about 6 hours to the trip. So rather than drive all the way there to see what we can see before we can go no further, we are going to skip Monument Valley this trip and spend extra time at the Grand Canyon. We had originally planned to stop in Chicago for a night, but the Memorial Day murder rate helped me decide we could skip it this trip, and plan for that when the kids are older. We also planned for a stop in St Louis to see the Arch, but the 2 RV parking areas around there sounded like they weren’t in the best neighborhood, then there was the whole flooding, so… we’ll just pass by the Arch on the freeway… I think… (I haven’t actually solidified the exact routes yet, but we do have apps for that) and keep moving on to our next stop, and plan the actual visit to the Arch for when the kids are older as well. Part of the hesitation for just getting an RV site and Ubering is that we have 3 kids in car seats still, so if we were to Uber, we’d have 3 car seats to contend with wherever we are Ubering to. Thankfully, my parents are renting a minivan for while we are in Michigan for the wedding so that we can get around and leave the seats in the car while we go to the wedding and reception.
Since we will now have over 24 hours at the Grand Canyon, I found out we can take a train ride (https://www.thetrain.com/) to the Grand Canyon, so that saves me from trying to figure out where we should stay and how best to get to and park at the Grand Canyon with an RV, plus it means we can stay put for 2 nights. And, the train actually has an RV parking area so we can pull in for the night, wake up early, head to the train, spend a few hours at the Grand Canyon, then ride the train back to the RV, and wake up early on the 31st for our long drive home. They actually give a AAA discount too, so that’s a perk. However… you do get charged $35 for entry into the Grand Canyon unless you have and NPS Annual Pass.
What’s an NPS Annual Pass??? It’s a pass you can get for $80 that will allow you into all the parks on the list for an entire year. And you can buy it online… however… you can’t print your pass, they have to mail it to you, and since I am just looking into this 2 days before our trip… I don’t think that’s enough time to order our pass and have it arrive. You can pick up a pass from any of the parks though, so I am going to have Ryan try to run out to Lake Kaweah tomorrow to grab a pass, then hope that we can enter our pass online to save the $35 on the train tickets. If you are planning a trip to several parks this year, look into getting the America The Beautiful annual pass to save you some money https://www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/passes.htm#CP_JUMP_5088574
Here’s the locations you can visit with the pass: https://store.usgs.gov/s3fs-public/PassIssuanceList.pdf
I’m sure I’ll learn more as we go, but for now I need to figure out how we can do a tour of Hoover Dam since… that is actually our first stop on day 1… so I better get to figuring that one out sooner, rather than later. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/service/DamTour.html Looks like we won’t be taking the tour since you can’t go on the tour if you are under 8, and our kids are only 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5. Guess that will have to wait for another trip as well!
And what time are we actually leaving on Thursday morning? I don’t know yet… depends how late we are up on Wednesday night loading up the RV. I do have boxes all over the house right now with things I have already packed. And I’m praying that the kids aren’t taking things out and leaving them where I can’t see them because I am mentally checking them off the list as I put them into the boxes… Worst case… we can buy what we need on the road, thought I’d rather not spend money on something we already have… but the most important things for me to remember are… my grandma’s China that I am taking across the country for my sister, and our wedding attire… since we kinda need that for the wedding. Everything else… can be replaced… but I’m going to try to remember much as I possibly can so we can limit the amount of stops we have to make to buy what we forgot.
The Superhero family is getting ready for an adventure…
We’ve done road trips in California and once to Las Vegas to visit family, but it’s always been in our old Kia Sorento, or our Superheromobile, Toyota Sienna.
Trips with kids take SO MUCH LONGER than they did before we had kids.
All three of our kids have vomited on the road. So between vomit cleanups, stopping to nurse, stopping for bathroom breaks, stopping to change diapers, and stopping for food, our trips just take a lot longer now.
We’ve done some flights with kids too. Victoria’s first flight was to Maui when we went for our 2nd and my parent’s 30th wedding anniversary. They watched Victoria while we went snorkeling at Molokini. Bobby was technically there too… because I was about 5 weeks pregnant at the time. We took our baby announcement pictures there too!
Our second flight was to Cabo San Lucas, my mom and sister came to help this time because we had both Victoria and Bobby and had a wedding to attend where children weren’t allowed. It would have been easier to leave the kids at home with grandma, but I was still nursing Bobby, because he was only 6 months old at the time.
Alexandria has not been on a flight yet… and when we found out my sister was getting married in Michigan, I wasn’t too excited at the thought of taking 3 kids on flights to Michigan and back, especially since all 5 of us are in the wedding. So, I thought… maybe we can finally do our road trip…
We’ve been wanting to do a cross country RV trip for a while, but we just haven’t made it happen.
So, when this opportunity came up, we were super excited about the idea of making it happen. Our trip is scheduled to start 7/11/2019, and we’re scheduled to return back home on 7/31/2019. I’ve never done an RV trip (that I can remember, but I have seen a picture of me in an RV when I was a teenager, so… maybe I did, but if so my mom and dad did all the work, so I don’t remember it at all) so this is all new to me, and I’ll absolutely be using Google and YouTube, as well as all of my friends on Facebook to gather as much information as possible before we leave on our adventure.
I’m super excited to have a bathroom on board since that should allow us to eliminate some of our stops, we’ll have food and drink on board, so that’ll allow us to eliminate more stops, hopefully the kids are over their vomiting stage, they haven’t actually thrown up since we moved to Visalia in February 2018 (Alexandria was the last to vomit, and she did it twice in the last 30 minutes on our move here), and I’m really excited to get to explore our country, and see some pretty amazing landmarks, and get to do this with our kids.
This is our planned route… Stop #9 is the purpose of the trip, everything else is just an adventure! ❤️
So, now the real fun begins where we figure out how to use an RV, all the tips, and tricks, and where to stay. We plan to park on the street if possible when we stop to visit friends/family, but the big touristy sites, we’d like to find an RV park close to the tour site so we can get there easily since we aren’t towing a car.
I first learned about being allergic to the cold while I was watching the Bachelor. I thought the contestant was just saying she was allergic to get attention. I had no idea it was an actual thing.
Until… I started noticing my fingertips getting swollen and taking like 30 minutes to go back to normal. I forgot to say it in my video, but after my doctor did the ice pack test, and it just made my arm turn red, she sent me out to the waiting room to wait for the front desk girls to get my prescriptions for me. While I was waiting in the waiting room, I realized my red spot had turned into a huge red welt…
She diagnosed with me Cold Urticaria on the spot, and made a recommendation for me to see a rhuematologist. Seeing the rheumatologist is what got me started on my journey to learning about the importance of gut health. Not because he told me about it, but because he tried to prescribe me medication for a condition I did not have. I have learned that so many autoimmune issues are caused by an unhealthy gut, and I had no idea some of the issues I was having weren’t just my lot in life, but would get better as I got my gut healthier and healthier.
Watch the video to hear more.
Please message me if I can answer any questions for you.
Tonight I was helping my aunt and uncle work on a memorial video for my uncle’s mom’s funeral. They had sent me lots of pictures and videos, but there were some videos on Facebook messenger that I could not figure out how to save. Some videos did give me the download or save as option when I clicked on them or right clicked on them, but some didn’t give me either option.
So of course, if I can’t figure something out, I go to Google, and it usually has the answer for you summarized right below your question.
This is what worked for me… right click on the video to get the video URL, copy it. Open a new tab in your browser, paste the url, change the www. to mbasic. then click enter, you should see the video you want, click on the video so that it will open the video in a new page, click on play, then right click on the video and you’ll be able to “save video as” to your computer.
Hope this works for you! We were able to add a couple of really cool videos of his mom to be included in the slideshow.
I saw a YouTube video with this idea, and tried it from memory. I think it would probably have been easier with the larger sized croissants, but this is what I had.
I bought these to make pigs 🐽 in a blanket but the kids weren’t impressed. 🤷♀️
So this is my attempt to get them to eat them so we can finish what is left in the house.
While I usually tend stay away from things that are “enriched” because let’s be real, they aren’t enriched with anything good, as a matter of fact, the good that was in it, has probably been removed, I occasionally make eggceptions 😂. Check out this great article about Enriched food
Back to the point… so even though these croissant are made with enriched flour… it’s ok to have some crap food every once in a while. Just make sure you are having more healthy than unhealthy, and I don’t mean 51%/49% I mean more like 80%/20%.
So in order to know what is going in my family’s body, I like to make most of our food at home, because the pre-made, pre-packaged foods usually have things in them that are probably not so good for you. But, I am a busy mom, so sometimes we do have pre-packaged or fast food… But that isn’t what we have most of the time.
So…. if you must go to a fast food place and have an egg and cheese croissant, why not try making your own at home instead, you’ll save money, and you’ll know exactly what is in the food you are eating. You can easily heat them up and keep the crispy flaky layer by popping them into your Air Fryer (I LOVE my Air Fryer, I am actually selling my old toaster oven because it takes up more space and I love the simplicity of the Air Fryer!)
First, scramble your eggs and try to keep them flat as you cook them.
I used my Tupperware microwave egg cooker.
Pour the egg in, pop on the top, pop onto the microwave for 2.5 minutes and it’s ready to go!
Next… Open your croissant 🥐 package. These always freak me out because of the POP. But… I remember in the video he hit the container on his counter to open it. Genius! It pops it open as it hits the counter so it didn’t scare me. ❤️
I had my second batch of eggs cooking, but this is all you need to make your croissants! You could add bacon or sausage too if you like, but I tried just eggs and cheese this time.
Layer your egg then cheese then wrap it closed.
I followed the baking directions on the packaging.
So these are baked and ready to go, and I’ll be offering them up at breakfast time to get my kids to try something other than the usual, cereal, yogurt, or bar.
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