Lost the back of your earring?

When you 2 year takes the back of your earing and buries he’s secret “treasure” try taking off the top of an erase of a #2 pencil.  It will hold your earing in place until you have enough time to run by the mall and pick up another one for free (and they should give you another one for free).

The Twinkie is Back

If you miss your elementary school days when you reached into your Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox to pull out the Golden deliciouse cremed filled delight, it’s time to bring back the memories…without the guilt.  Weight Watchers has released the

Work out Mommy does a review of the delacacy:

The good news? Only 100 calories per snack cake. (If you are following the Weight Watchers program, they are only 1 POINT® per cake.)

The bad news? They are TINY! Be prepared to practice portion control here as I easily could have eaten the whole box. They also contain some of the bad stuff we know we shouldn’t be eating, but if you need something to satisfy that sweet craving, these hit the spot with relatively little impact.

Workoutmommy.com

The New Mom at School

Teri Cettina with Parenting.com takes a good look at issues an outsider faces when taking her kid to a new school.  Answering questions about all the other mom’s knowing each other to being intimidated by the new teacher, Teri does a great job of walking through this process.  Check out her q&a here… 

How to clean plastic food containers

When you can no longer take the spegetti sauces stains on the bottom of your tubberware it’s time to turn to Mary from 1001cleaningtips.com. She has a 3 step process:

Cleaning Tip #1: Use Baking Soda to Remove Stains
Baking soda is one of the most amazing products ever invented. It has so many different uses and applications around the house. Among it’s many uses, baking soda is a powerful tool for fighting stains on plastic food storage containers. If you have a stained container, try sprinkling baking soda in the container and scrubbing it with a damp cloth or sponge. All but the toughest stains will disappear before your eyes.

Cleaning Tip #2: Clean Containers With White Vinegar
Like baking soda, white vinegar can be used for many different purposes around a home. Vinegar has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the toughest available solutions to household cleaning problems. To use vinegar to remove tough stains from your plastic food storage containers, simply create a 50/50 mixture of vinegar and water in the container. Allow the vinegar and water mixture to sit in the container for thirty minutes, and then rinse with cold water. Most stains will disappear following this procedure, which can also eliminate odors.

Cleaning Tip #3: Combined Cleaning Power
If either of the above tips alone don’t solve your problem, you may want to try a combination of the two methods. Scrub your containers down with baking soda and rinse clean. Follow up by adding a mixture of vinegar and water, and leave it in the container overnight. Pour out the water, rinse, and then wash as you normally do.

If your plastic food storage containers are still stained after trying all three of these cleaning tips, it’s likely that it’s time for you to purchase new containers to hold your leftovers and other food items.

1001CleaningTips.com

How to tell the difference between a good and bad contractor

When the honey do list gets so big that you have to bring in a 3rd party most moms are stepping into a sea of ignorance with a “please don’t take advantage of me” feeling.  Do it your self give a checklist of what to look for and what not to look for when finding a contractor.  First, what not to look for:

Don’t usually like to write things down or work with contracts. Often say things like,  “we don’t need a contract, we understand each other”.

Try to convince you to use non-standard materials or not build to industry standards including statements like “ we don’t need permits they’re just a money grab by the city, county etc”

Need to be constantly supervised to ensure they are working and using the materials called for in the job specifications, then threaten to walk off the job when you supervise them ‘too’ closely.

Often look for payment upfront or at last a majority of the funds soon after starting the job. Or they claim to have made a mistake in the estimate and ask for more money to complete the job.

Make infrequent appearances at the job site and don’t supervise or coordinate the work of subcontractors or their own workers.

Frequently want to move onto another aspect of the job before they have properly finished the first part.

Check out their page for the list of what to look for.

DoItYourself.com

Playing the Grocery Game: What Works and What Doesn’t

The Grocery Game is one of the most popular coupon clipping program out there.  For those of you who have never heard of the Grocery Game…

“The Grocery Gamewas first established by Teri Gault for members in Southern California. It has since expanded to stores in 48 states. It professes to help people save money on groceries (including food products, baby and pet products, paper products, drug store items, and other toiletries) by using a database to track product prices and coupons and by giving a weekly list of which sales at your local grocery or drug store are truly ‘rock bottom’ prices.” (Courtesy of a wonderful article found here.)

The women at mykindofmom.com signed themselves up in order to give an extensive review of the program thousands of moms have participated in.  See what they say…

Buying kid’s shoes every 2 weeks

Mom 2 Mom Tips shares here secret in purchasing back to school shoes.  The dilema of trying to find the half size shoe your really need or realizing that you kid grew 3 sizes over the summer and you’re plagued with guilt from not noticing the mangled toes of your daughter can be solved with a simple soulution.

Well, there is a much more flexible solution! Stuff the toes of the shoes with cotton balls. Plain old, ordinary cotton balls. Fit them into the toe along the shape of the shoe so they don’t feel “weird” when the child wears them. Add a few, try them on, add a few more until you’ve achieved the right fit. One advantage of cotton balls is that you can put different amounts into each shoe. As we all know, everyone has one foot that is larger than the other.

Here all about Mom 2 Mom’s shoe buying experience here…

21 Easy Hacks to Simplify Your Life

Zen Habits breaks it down to 21 Hacks to make your life a little easier.  From keeping e-mails to just 5 sentances to limiting your food intake to only 7 items a mom could adopt a few of these to make life just a little bit simpler.

I use these “hacks” myself (in this case, “hacks” refers to workarounds or tricks to reach your goal), and I’ve found them to be effective in many cases. Please note that you might have read some of these once or twice (or thrice) on this blog before, but I thought it would be a useful resource to gather them all into one post.

Also, don’t try to implement all of them — that would be far from simple. Not all of them will apply to your life anyway. Pick one or two and try them out.

Simple tricks to simplify your life:

1. Three-box decluttering. If you’re trying to declutter a room, drawer, shelf, desk … use three boxes to quickly sort everything. Just quickly go through each shelf or drawer or flat surface at once, putting things into three separate boxes: Trash, Donate, Maybe. The first two boxes are obvious … the Maybe box is for stuff you’re not too sure about — you can put this in storage for a few months and decide later. Put everything else — the stuff you love and use — back neatly.
2. Create a no-distractions zone. This is great for when you want to do some focused work — which is just about every day for most of us. Create a zone with no distractions — no phones, no email, no co-workers or kids or spouses, nothing on the walls, no IM or Twitter, no web surfing. Just the tools you need to do your work and nothing else. You could also create a time within your schedule for this distraction-free zone — say 8-10 a.m., for example. No distractions within that block of time. You can do email and phone calls before and after, but not during. I like this hack for when I need to do some writing but have a hard time concentrating.

Create a short-list.

More…

Snuggle time

Mommylounge spells out the recepi for a lazy Saturday morning with the kids.  If you have dreams of a pieceful time waking up slowly to the soft breathing of your children cuddling next to you, but most of the time you get, “I’m hungrey and want some cereal and the TV isn’t working!” then Mommylounge gives a few tips to help you out.

If you have kids it is often hard to find even 15 minutes to your self just to relax.  So instead of trying to get away from the kids, relax with them. All you need is a day without much to do and a bed.  Here’s what you do to create a snuggle bed of your own:

They have mathmatically made this into a simple 8 step process so click to more…

Things to do from $1 to $10 with the kids

MyKindOfMom.com list some free to cheap things to do with the kids this summer as the heat rises.  If you’ve turned the sprinkers on for the 4th time this week and you don’t feel like chatting with the neigbors at the neighboorhood pool check out these creative ideas here…

Emergency Car Kit for Kids

It’s not that complicated, but when you forget your diaper bag and there’s red Kool-aid on one shirt and poop in the pants of another you’ve got to make sure you’re covered.

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