Tips

Easter bags!

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How cute are these???

When my in-laws came to town from Joshua Tree last month for Victoria’s birthday, they were clearly thinking ahead and brought Easter🐰 gifts for the kids.

I, on the other hand… Ordered things from Zulily… Forgetting that they sometimes take forever to arrive…🤦‍♀️ But they arrived yesterday evening… Just in the knick of time ⌚.

I just saw the bags from the grandparents this morning when my hubby brought the bag down. 😍

Such a creative idea, lunch bags, and what appears to be stick on dividers, except they are super cute, and some rope and staples and you’ve got a cute little Easter bag. Then add your own creative style to decorate. I’m guessing this was Nana Edie’s artwork since she is super creative and these are just adorable! ❤️ Maybe Grandad Rob helped too 🤷‍♀️.

I’ll have to remember this when I want to make some cute bags with handles! ❤️

Cold Urticaria… Yes, you can be allergic to the cold!

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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.

Protein Bites

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Here’s how we made our super easy Protein Bites…

3/4 Cup of Creamy Peanut Butter

1 Cup of Dry Oatmeal

1/2 Cup of Chocolate Chips

1/4 Cup of Local Honey

1 Serving of our favorite Protein Powder (we use 2 scoops of Lean)

Mix it together (I recently started warming the peanut butter and honey for 30 seconds so it is easier to mix before adding the rest of the ingredients), scoop out (if you don’t have scoops, they are amazing, I never had them before until my mother-in-love passed away and we kept lots of her baking items since she was an awesome baker, they come in so handy) and form into bite size servings, then chill for a bit so they aren’t so sticky for little hands.

Saving a video from Facebook

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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.

Amazon Returns

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If you are doing an Amazon return and printing the label at home… I have a tip for you! The first page is always the instructions, and I’m pretty sure you know what to do anyway.

When you click Print Label & Instructions and select your printer, the preview will show up and the instructions will be on the first page, and your actual label and the paper you need to put inside your package with your return on the inside of the package will be on the second page.

In the printer dialogue box select the second radio button down to the right of Pages and type in 2. Also change the color to Black and White (you’ll save your color ink for important thing where you need color, and the color cartridges cost more money anyway).

Then print! Voila! You just saved paper and colored ink! ❤️

Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Bread

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I found this recipe on Pinterest…

Pumpkin baked oatmeal with chocolate chips

And went with the honey option instead of the maple syrup, and added in a little bit of Almond Extract. Any time a recipe calls for Vanilla extract, I used the Vanilla, and add in the Almond Extract as well. I love the taste, and it makes everything a little more delicious!

So… I pulled it out and let it cool 10 minutes before I cut it and seems like it could have baked a little bit longer. I’m going to let it cool all the way, then refrigerate it and see if it stays together better tomorrow.

The kids loved it (I did too), and I love that they have another option for breakfast now.

As an update, I pulled it out of the fridge for an after dinner snack and it totally stays together now! 🙌

Egg & Cheese Croissants

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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.

Let me know what you think!

Turning a Powerpoint into a video

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After we got the Powerpoint complete for my uncle’s mom’s funeral service, we needed to figure out how they were going to play it. Since it had both music and videos, we figured converting it to a video file would be best so they could just pop in the DVD and play it through a projector.

I’ve done this before, but for the life of me, I could not remember, so… what do I do best? Ask Google!

This was an easy one! I kept trying to save it, but I couldn’t find the save as video option so that it would put it into one nice little package for me with everything I needed. But, Google told me I need to Export it… Duh! That totally makes sense now, right?

Always, always, always… click save every few minutes while you are working on a project. The last thing you want to do is work for hours then make a mistake that causes you to lose your entire project. After your Powerpoint looks like you want it to look… Save it! Then.. Export as Video, you can change your requirements, I didn’t want it to go to a CD since I know know if their DVD player will be able to read it from a CD, so I just exported it as a video. Then, I uploaded it to YouTube so they can review it before I burn it to a DVD for them.

I hope this helps you! I’ll definitely refer back to this myself the next time I work on a Powerpoint… I use it so much less now that I’m out of school. I’m sure I’ll have to help my kids with some as they get older. But, I will tell you that I was super shocked to see my 5 year old using a computer with a keyboard and mouse in her Kindergarten class when they were in the library. Kids are so smart and they are definitely way more tech savvy than we were a their ages.

Mosquito Bites

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Mosquitoes used to eat me alive. And I was allergic to them so they would swell huge, get a fever, and hurt for days. If a mosquito bit my forehead my eye would swell shut. And… I love tropical vacations. The only bad thing is that there are tons of mosquitoes.

We left from our wedding, straight to the airport, and overnighted to Tahiti. When we landed in Tahiti, we thought we were going to jump on a flight over to Moorea, only to discover they had updated our itinerary… and our flight wouldn’t leave for 8 hours. We were exhausted, and I still had tons of hairspray in my hair, and tons of makeup… so we decided to take a bus to the boat shuttle,

then another bus shuttle to get to our hotel earlier. When we got to the hotel, our room wasn’t ready….

But… they offered shower rooms in the lobby and said we could use those. So, we took our bags in, turned on the hot water, got undressed… and waited…. and waited… and waited. After 5 minutes of cold water, Ryan got dressed and went back out to the lobby to ask for help. One of the workers came in and felt the water and said it should have been hot by now. 🙁

So they had a wing of the hotel that was under construction, so they weren’t putting guests there, but one of the rooms was actually ready to go, so they said we could use the room until our Garden Bungalow was ready.

I’m sure you know what we did next… booked a massage for a couple hours later, took a shower, and took a nap.

After our massages we got to move into our Garden Bungalow and decided to take the hotel shuttle to a restaurant on the water for dinner. After we unpacked everything, we realized that the 2 containers of Off Spray I went out to buy on the morning of my wedding were nowhere to be found. But… we were just going out to dinner, so no big D.

Until they sat us at our table on the lagoon with long white tablecloths and gave us our menus and went to get us some glasses of water. I was trying to look at the menu when my legs started burning… and itching. I couldn’t figure out why. But… being close to the water, and wearing a dress, and having a long tablecloth meant that mosquitoes were able to get to my legs without me even realizing it. I got bit on both legs for a total of, I think it was… 18 bites. So, I said we needed to leave. The hotel shuttle had just left to go back, so we had to wait for him to return to pick us up and drop us off at the grocery store. Of course, everything was in French, so we ended up picking this up… it looked right. Then we walked back to the hotel. On our way back, we met a very sweet lady who said we could use lemon on the bites, and she showed us where her little Pearl Shack was that she owned, and said her son owned the ATV shop next store and he takes people on tours of the island.

So, back at our room, we ordered room service that came with… Lemon, and my hubby put lemon on my bites. It didn’t make the allergic reaction any less severe, I still had to spend the entire honeymoon with huge welts, with fever, and looking bruised and feeling super heavy.

That’s what I had to deal with… for years and years and years. I had no idea that my bodies reaction to bites could or would ever change… until I learned about gut health and started researching more natural options. Oh my goodness, you definitely need to learn about this stuff, it’s so crazy how so much of your health is tied to your gut! And I didn’t even learn about gut health until I was diagnosed with Cold urticaria, an allergy to the cold, yes, it’s a real thing. I thought it was something fake that the girl on The Bachelor made up to try to get more attention from the bachelor. But it was only a few months later that I learned it was real, and I had it, and they wanted to try to mask my symptoms by putting me on Lupus medication, even though I don’t have Lupus.

Anyway, that’s what got me started on this more natural path. My skin no longer has crazy reactions to the cold, my bites are much fewer (did you know the mosquitoes are actually attracted to the bacteria on your skin??? I thought it was my blood type, but when I would meet fellow mosquito attractive people they never shared my blood type), and when I do get bit, I say it looks like a normal person’s mosquito bite. In the last couple weeks I’ve been getting bitten again, and if you are like me, it drives me crazy when it’s time for bed and all I can think about is how itchy that bite is. This mama needs sleep, I work 30 hours a week from home as a data analyst and I also watch my almost 2 year old, and almost 4 year old, and have to pick up my almost 6 year old from the bus stop every day. I sleep like a log, now, and wake up super rested and ready to start my day, but… nobody likes to be woken up to itchy skin.

So… of course I went to google to find natural remedies for mosquito bites and one listed, that I know I have a bottle of was peppermint oil. I am not an oily mama, so I don’t know all the correct terms, but I put some oil straight onto the bite, rubbed it in and was good until morning!

So, if you have bites and have essential oils on hand, try it out. And if you don’t have peppermint alone, do what I do, and find one that has it as an ingredient. It can’t hurt to try it.

Also, if you plan to go to Tahiti, learn some of the language before you go, it’s so cool to see people light up when they know you can speak a little of their language.

https://www.tripsavvy.com/common-tahitian-words-and-phrases-1532902

 

Eureka!

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I forgot how much I loved this thing!

We definitely want a new vacuum for the house, and I found a list that shows the best vacuums for wooden floors, with Shark Navigator Lift-away Professional being listed as #1, and I actually found it on sale at Costco this week… But I didn’t buy it yet, because I hadn’t read reviews from real people. It’s $50 cheaper at Costco in Visalia, right now, than it is on Amazon if you are in the market for a new vacuum.

Actually… As I did more digging, I found out that even though it’s called the Professional… It’s a different model than the one sold at Costco. The one at Costco doesn’t have as many features, so it doesn’t cost as much. It’s probably still a really good vaccum, but we’ll likely stick to Amazon to order the right model based on the reviews for wooden floors usage.

But…. If you are just looking for a small vaccum, I’d say hands down, this Eureka Blaze is amazing for the price! I’ve been sweeping with my microfiber floor mop lately and this vacuum saved me so much time. We’ve had the vacuum attachment off for so long that I was thinking I had to use the mini attachment, which takes too long when cleaning up hundreds of kids crumbs, but with the rolling attachment it just took a few minutes.