The Benefits of Reading to your Children My aunt works with teenagers and helps prepare them for the ACT. She also works at an elementary school. She has seen many children progress through school and she told me that she made a realization. She discovered that the number one predictor of students who will excel in school and in the ACT, are those children who have learned to love books. So how do you teach your children to love books? The very best way to do so is by reading to them and reading to them often. As I was scrolling on social media (as I do far too often), I found a post from a local facebook group a couple...
Budgeting and Meal Prep Recently my husband switched jobs and we now make $40,000 less a year. Though this switch was definitely the right decision for our family, it does mean that we have been trying to budget more and eat out less. I recently saw the below post on the Kids Eat in Color Instagram page and it got me thinking that though with these crazy grocery prices it may seem cheaper to eat out, it truly is cheaper and healthier to make food at home and to use clever ways to save the excess. Cooking at home does take time and planning, but with the right tools, it can go by quickly and if everyone pitches in, cleanup...
Our First Priority At Christmas my mom plans nice meals for every night; she makes the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; she cleans up everything after dinner; she prepared everything for a Bob Ross paint night; she spent months planning and executing a Harry Potter escape room; she buys all of our presents; she wakes up super early to get her work done so that she can take my sister's dog out for her, then she comes back in and changes my daughter Nellie's diaper and helps me get breakfast for her; and this year she did all of this year all while exhausted because a week prior to Christmas, she was in Utah with me and Nellie and we stayed...
A Fun Holiday Tradition We moved to our house in October of 2020, so we didn't quite start with holiday traditions right away. But for two years now, we have been invited to a cookie exchange with some of the women of our church! It has been such a fun tradition and with the help of some of my trusty GKW products, making these delicious brown butter chocolate chip cookies from Ambitious Kitchen, it was easy and fast! The trick to making the baking of brown butter cookies fun is setting up a show on your laptop for the whisking of the butter. It takes quite a bit of time because you have to whisk the butter continually until you...
An Alternative Gingerbread House I don't think of myself as a crazy health nut, but if my toddler is going to be happy if I give her fruit while I eat ice cream, then I might as well do it right? So Nellie has never had candy and in my mind, I'm going to keep this up as long as I can! So when my neighbor asked me to decorate gingerbread houses with her, and then asked what we could use for decorations that would be healthy, I took that idea and ran with it! I wanted to make sure it was still colorful and fun so I started out by quickly slicing strawberries with the Tari Slicer. These strawberry...
