Essential Oils for the Family

I so every excited, we just got back from a little weekend road trip and I found my family physician kit waiting for me on the front step. I had taken a wellness course a few weeks ago and the coach was the health director for a nearby holistic retreat/spa center. In our class we learned all about holistic living for ourselves & our families. We also had a chef instruct us on raw food preparations and I got a great overview of natural medicines and "clean living" One of the major insights for me was just how many uses for there are for essential oils. I've always used essential oils in my home diffuser to purify the air, but I just wasn't clued in on the fact that you can apply organic, therapeutic pure essential oils to food, water or even directly into your mouth to get the concentrated benefits. wow. I ordered up this super amazing kit for my family from this company that bundles essential oils for usage, for example they have a Family Physician Kit which is what I got or you can get kits based on weight management, daily living, clean living... Looking forward to making, posting and sharing my explorations into how to use the oils and finding fun ways to make my family healthier. They have a buying club you can join to get started plus receive member discounts of 25% off retail. www.mydoterra.com/doterrastyle

Fairy Garden

We finally got around to setting up our fairy garden. Back in August we bought Tess a fairy cottage. She loves fairies and she has her very own fairy living in our front tree who leaves all kinds of tokens of affections for her. Sometimes she leaves seashells, sometimes the tree hole she resides in is covered in glitter and sometimes she even leaves magical animal totems. We love our fairy, even though make-believe is a bit taboo at her montessori school, magical is just the way things are around our house. We worked this weekend on getting a mini lawn and and the landscaping basics down it. It was a great start to building our fairy house. For anyone looking to build your own fairy garden, Hobby Lobby has a great selection of inexpensive mini garden elements. We purchased the cottage from Amazon, and had the fairies figurines left over from the fairy cake/party we had for Tess when she turned 5. The pea rock, soil, and edging all came from Lowes. We are looking forward to planting some scale greenery when the weather gets a bit more predictable. Check back to see the progress on our little magical world. 

Bird Mobile

Tess has this great idea of making a mobile using her Usborne Animal stencil birds. I was so impressed because she conceived this craft and designed the mobile and orchestrated the color schemes all by herself. Somedays the kids just make things easy for Mom...and well somedays they don't. I love the Usborne stencils, they are super sturdy and thick compared to other stencils we have purchased. The kids spend hours with these and they are always great for packing in a bag and pulling out when you need quick calm down activities. Usborne has a whole range of them.http://w3503.myubam.com/search?q=stencils  We used the same technique of sandwiching the drawings between contact paper to make holiday ornaments with their Christmas stencils and had a whole tree of hand drawn sweetness. 

Staycation

Everyone needs a little break from routine. Since the start of school this year it seems that every moment has been scheduled and accounted for. We all get a little burned out following the calendar and tracking our every class and playdate, no matter how fun they might be. Just so happens that this weekend was another of those over scheduled weeks where just getting to all the activities seems exhausting. We had several things on the calendar for downtown so I thought it might be interesting to stay downtown and walk to our venues and play tourist in our own hometown. Oh yes we were busy, two shows in the Theatre District, brunch with friends and a costume event at the zoo. We stayed at the Hotel Icon and amazingly avoided traffic and arrived on time for EVERYTHING. kinda rare around here. This is definitely something we would do again. It was pretty great not nagging the kids to hurry up, letting them get a sense of their own downtown and having someone else do all the cooking and cleaning up. 

Lost Weekend

It has been so long since a post, I go back in forth with to post or not to post. Part of me thinks I should be better preserving these snapshots of our precious fleeting time and part of me thinks my time would be better spent making more memories. I'm torn but today I'm thinking just start again, make it quick so that maybe just maybe I can accomplish both goals. I have a lot a catching up to do so I'll start with posting a few images of our get away weekend in Bastrop Texas. The kids love when we have a "country" get away. They go gaga over the animals, the big sky and running & playing weekend cowboys & cowgirls. This was the first year that Theo jumped at the opportunity to ride the longhorns, he even hammed up the experience by posing with his drawn on mustache. It was probably the last weekend for lazy river rides and all day lounging in the pool. The weather has just started to hint of fall and temperatures in the day were around 73 and then dropped to 51 in the evenings. Just perfect for our sweet family escape. 

Usborne Books

I had to post about the most amazing new book find. We ordered a bunch of books from Usborne Books and everyone in the family is in love. We first came across Usborne Books when T was a baby and they quickly became her favorite books. When T2 came along he was just as enamored with them. He really loved all touchy feely books and the early words books and mom loved that they were not filled with licensed characters and inappropriate content. But since then I just haven't seen a lot of Usborne titles around. Come to find out Usborne is an international publisher and that's why I just didn't seem to come across them in our local bookstore. Anyway long story short once we found a source we ordered an entire library of these books. I will be posting on my favorites as we discover them. A real stand out are the Lift & Discover series. We have the Question and Answers book. The illustrations are just so precious and the quality is amazing, the best part is how much my kiddos love this book. You can order them from www.usbornekid.com

Advent Calendar

This year I wanted to do an Advent calendar to bring daily awareness to this special time of the year and talk about the meaning of Christmas with the kids. I wanted something that would fit into our existing holiday decor and be easy & inexpensive to make. I decided on using my favorite old standby the rubber stamp. All the stamps we used to make the calendar had previously been purchased for other projects and the brown bags we had in the pantry so...the price on this holiday project was almost nil. The entire project only took about 30 minutes from start to completion. I filled the bags with a mix of holiday projects, small sweet treats, stickers and words of giving. One of the bags had a gingerbread cookie cutter with a note that said, Lets make holiday cookies today. Another bag had a bag of decal gems and a styrofoam ball with a message that said, "Design an Ornament". The calendar has been such a hit, every morning the kids come down and can't wait to see whats in the baggies and count down the days until the 25th. This is most definitely a tradition we will keep up with. So far I have been able to recycle and save the bags so next year we are good to go and can use them again.