This post is sponsored by Voya but the content and opinions expressed here are my own.
Everyone has that one gift they always remember. The bike or the coveted boots or new cell phone. My memorable gift was the year my grandfather gave all 10 of us grandchildren stock. I was young enough to not have a clue what stock was and had never heard of the stock market. He sat us down and explained it to us and I am forever grateful for this investment.
This year, instead of giving the kids in your life a bunch of new toys hat they really don’t need, consider investing in their future. Voya Financial helps Americans plan and invest their money into safe accounts and mutual funds to help protect heir future. After reading a little about them, I found that they are even offering every baby born on October 19th of this year a complimentary $500 mutual fund. Do you know anyone with children born on that day? Let them know about it!
Voya Saving Tips:
-Budget
-Set up an IRA
-Purchase Life Insurance
-Contribute a small amount of your paycheck to an investment fund.
In a Google Consumer Survey, nearly one-third of parents said they would rather family and friends gift a financial contribution to their child’s future during the holidays. To be completely honest, I fall in that 1/3. I would so much rather receive financial support for my kids future than another toy. What about you?
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I just wanted to pause for a minute and tell you how much I appreciate you reading my little space on the internet. It never ceases to amaze me how many of you read, comment on and share my posts. This year, I am especially thankful for all of my readers and everyone I have worked with over the last 12 months. I was looking back at spreadsheets during our move and couldn’t get over the fact that in 8 short months, this hobby of mine turned into a business and I don’t know what we would do without the supplement income from it. It has also been such a healthy outlet for me and has been very positive in my life. This blog has been such a blessing this year and I can’t wait to see the leaps and bounds it takes in the next 12 months.
I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving, eat lots of turkey and kick up your feet. Laugh with family and hug them real tight. There is nothing in the world like family. I love you all!
This post is sponsored by Mezzetta but the content and opinions expressed here are my own.
Every holiday season I begin putting together new recipes for different things. Thanksgiving, Christmas parties, Family Christmas dinner, etc. There is always a list of events that I need to cook for. I was at the grocery store the other day and saw Mezzetta olives! I made a delicious Holiday Pasta Salad recipe last year and I thought the olives would be a great addition to a Holiday skewer I was planning for this week!
Ingredients:
-1 red pepper chopped into one inch squares
-Basil leaves
–Mezzetta Green Olives (cut out the pits)
-Feta Cheese cut into one inch squares
Directions:
After cutting the pepper and cheese, place the ingredients on a skewer. Drizzle with olive oil and season with ground black pepper.
These are so easy and the perfect color for a holiday appetizer. Mezzetta is hosing a Holiday Sweepstakes where you can win an Olive Lover’s Gift Basket with a ton of goodies. Be sure to enter the sweeps here!
Thank you to NBC for sponsoring today’s post and inspiring me to try NBC TVEverywhere!
Today is officially our last moving day! We are moving the last bit of our furniture and belongings over to my parent’s house. This move has been so bittersweet. The process itself has not been fun. We have been packing and moving boxes every spare moment for the last week now and we were out of town for 9 days before that. We were bummed because we missed out on all of our favorite T.V. shows. Lucky for us, we discovered a new way to watch T.V. without the T.V. On our desktop! We were literally able to catch up on our favorite NBC show, The Voice, while we were packing – which was awesome. We even created a fun and romantic date night out of it.
Saturday we went to a wedding and my in-laws kept our kids for us overnight so that we could get some packing done. We got so much done and thought we deserved a break, so we cuddled on the couch under blankets and caught up on The Voice. See? Packing can be fun! 😉
It not only made packing a little more fun, but we also got to catch up on the show we had missed -even though we had already moved our television. I absolutely hate to miss out on The Voice and watching Blake and Adam go back and forth. They crack me up. This season has been really fun because there is a contestant on the show who has made it pretty far who is from Alabama. We love to root for our hometown girls in this state!
We had an emotional few days packing up all of our belongings from our first 4 years of marriage and knowing we are leaving our first home – the house we came home to after our honeymoon and brought our babies home to for the first time. We are so excited to begin our next adventure and find the perfect next home for us. I’m excited that even through the chaos we can still catch up on our favorite NBC shows, like The Voice, on my laptop. This show gave us the perfect musical distraction we needed through our move and I love that we were able to watch T.V. without the T.V.
This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #BeHealthyForEveryPartofLife #CollectiveBias
These days with young kids, my husband and I have very little time for date nights. While we have family around, they are really busy working and keeping other’s children and we feel bad asking most of the time. Sitters are few and far between and so we have to get creative when it comes to dating and keeping the flame alive.
Our marriage and relationship is very important to us and we make a point to keep it a priority. Dating your spouse is so healthy and so we try to do it as often as we can. We try to get the kids in bed around 7:30 every night and that is normally the time we get to have our uninterrupted date at home! Usually we choose to eat our dinner after we put the kids to bed and we watch a movie and cuddle on the couch. Here is how we make sure to have few interruptions:
– Make sure the kids are good and settled in their beds before we start our movie.
– We mix Emergen-C in our drinks every so often to ensure we have healthy days and nights. With over 20 varieties of vitamin supplement drink mixes, the possibilities are endless.
– We keep our Advil tablet vial on hand at all times so keep those annoying headaches away. Who wants to deal with aches and pains on a date? Not me!Nothing’s stronger, longer lasting or better on your tough aches and pains than Advil, and nothing works on more pains than Advil (among OTC pain relievers).
– I always have one (or five) ChapSticks on hand to keep my lips moist. Especially during the cooler months to prevent them from getting dry or chapped. My latest obsession is the ChapStick Total Hydration! The advanced nourishing formula is 100% natural, age defying and clinically proven to give you healthier looking lips.
– We turn our phones off or put them on silent so others don’t interrupt our limited quality time.
Usually when we take these steps, we end up having a great date night at home with few interruptions!
This post is part of a social shopper marketing insight campaign withPollinate Media Group® and Dove Hair, but all my opinions are my own. #pmedia #LoveYourCurls #pmgdove http://my-disclosur.es/OBsstV For years I was always that girl with the curly/frizzy hair. I didn’t really know what to do with it. This was back before straighteners. It was just a pile of mess for most of my childhood. Because of this, my hair was in a ponytail 90% of the time. I was embarrassed by it and it was just easier to throw it back and not have to deal with it. Straight hair just seemed to be the only way to go. I mean, look at the emoji keyboard! Only straight hair there.
Fast forward to high school and I fell in love with straighteners. I thought they were awesome -that is, until an amazing thing happened. More and more girls in my class began to “scrunch” their hair. Do you remember this? Even the girls who didn’t really have any curl or body to their hair began to curl or scrunch their hair because they wanted that body. Around this time and during my early years of college, I began to change my attitude about my curls. I began embracing them instead of straightening them. I found out very quickly that my hair enjoyed being itself a lot more than when I was burning it every day.
My hair began to grow faster, thicker and healthier (until I had kids, but that’s a whole other story). Now that I am a mother, I am so thankful that I have curly hair because I can jump out of the shower, run a brush through it, put a little product in it and go. No more shame. In fact, it is extremely convenient and a big time-saver. I don’t have to spend an hour on it unless I just want to and it still looks good!
Dove Hair is celebrating curls by creating the Dove #LoveYourCurls Emoji keyboard! I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and I love it! I can finally express my curly-headed self with curly headed emojis! They are so much fun and my friends who have curly hair have also gotten on board and are enjoying them as well. They are so much fun!
Be sure to Download the Dove Love Your Curls Emojis in the App Store and Google Play Store to show you #LoveYourCurls! Dove Hair is partnering with Twitter so each time women or girls share a tweet using the hashtag #LoveYourCurls, a Dove curly emoji will appear in the tweet!
Don’t forget to share a photo using the hashtag so I can check out all of your great curls as well! Have you downloaded the Dove Love Your Curls Emoji Keyboard?
Happy Friday! I can’t believe we are less than a week away from Thanksgiving and exactly one week away from Black Friday! You know what that means? It’s time to start making those Christmas lists! If you missed it, I shared my Holiday Gift Guide for the girls on Monday and now I am sharing some of my favorite inexpensive stocking stuffer ideas!
I’m including a few more of my favorites in the widget below. What are some of your favorite stocking stuffers? Do you have any other ideas I didn’t include?
So far, this week has been crazy. Total chaos. Between just getting home from a super long trip, having construction workers in our house, packing and organizing everything, Ryan being out of town, scheduling Christmas pictures over the weekend (and the list goes on and on) I feel like my head just might pop off of my body. On top of all the craziness, SR is sick and has been miserable all week. It is breaking my heart.
All I keep doing is pausing to pray. I mean, what else can you do when you are overwhelmed and can’t afford to take a break? I am counting down the days until Thanksgiving because even though we will be going from house to house, it will be the closest thing to a break I will have had in a while.
Since we are packing up, cleaning and moving all week, my go-to outfit has been leggings and an oversized shirt pretty much every day. I ran a few errands Monday and figured I should put forth a little more effort, so I wore my new Rocksbox jewelry and I am kind of obsessed with it! I love the ring, but it is a little too big. Apparently my fingers have lost weight. haha I can’t quite decide if I want to keep any of it yet or not because I just bought a couple of pieces from Altar’d State in Jacksonville last weekend. By the way, that is basically my new favorite store! It reminds me of a less expensive Anthropologie and I love it because proceeds from every sale go to charity.
Well, I am going to get back to packing now, but what do you think? Should I keep any of the jewelry from this month’s Rocksbox?
This post is sponsored by Hallmark but the content and opinions expressed here are my own.
A couple of weeks ago, I announced that we had been hit with a couple of big surprises that week. One of them was that my cousin and best friend is pregnant…with TWINS! We are so over the moon for her! It’s kind of crazy because twins do not run in our family and her doctor said this happening was a 1 in 10,000 chance. It is truly a miracle. The other huge news that hit us was that our house sold!! Finally! After 20 months on the market, we are finally moving! The catch? We are moving next week. Yep, right during Thanksgiving. In order to try and enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday and be able to spend time with family, we have decided to move on Wednesday.
So why is this Christmas going to be so different? Well, we have decided to move into my parents house until we find a house in order to save money. They have plenty of room now that the three of us kids are grown and out on our own, but it will be a huge change during a very busy time of year. It will definitely not be without challenges, but we are so grateful to them to allow us to stay there because we will be able to save a ton of money for a down payment on our next home. We are hoping to be there for only a month or two, but one thing I’ve learned is that you just never know what God has in store for you.
We just got back into town Sunday night from Jacksonville and had been gone for 9 days. I came home to a mess and tons of laundry and I am now in the process of packing up our entire house with only a week left to do it. To say I’m stressed would be an understatement.
While we are going to be going through a big move and hopefully another one soon, I am determined to make Christmas just as special. Change is very hard on young kids. This is probably going to be tough on H especially, so I want to keep things as normal and fun as possible. That means sticking to traditions.
My mom has a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree that she let me borrow to mess with Ryan and the kids. I came home yesterday with it and told them this was going to be about as good as it gets this year. Of course, I was playing with them and Ryan got a kick out of it. I also stopped by Hallmark and bought these adorable Charlie Brown Itty Bittys as well as this adorable little Peanuts Christmas Light Show! I bet you can’t guess which one was H’s favorite! He loves anything that plays music. He just giggled and danced and played it over and over. It made my day that he was so happy over this tiny gift.
While I was at Hallmark, I also picked up wrapping paper, ribbon and tags to start wrapping all the presents I bought in Florida. I was a little bit too obsessed with the plaid reindeer paper. It is adorable and I have big plans to sit in the floor in the middle of all of our boxes and start wrapping a few gifts while watching Hallmark Christmas movies! They are my favorite.
Have you ever had a crazy holiday due to a big life change? What do you enjoy buying at Hallmark?
I seriously can’t believe we are already talking about Christmas and Gift Guides. Is it that time of year already? I was thinking at first that it was too early to start talking about Christmas presents, but then it hit me that Black Friday is next week. Jaw drop. Because we spent 7 hours in the car on the way home from Florida yesterday, I had a little bit of time to start on my lists of ideas for my family and friends. I figured the best one to start us off would be the gift guide for all the ladies in your life!
I actually own a few of these and love them all! I added a few other items that I don’t have that are on my wish list this year including Hunter boots and L.L. Bean Duck Boots. I also just bought my first bath bomb by Lush while I was in Florida and I am officially a fan. I also bought their sea salt spray for my hair and I am obsessed! I love hair products and trying new things! I also own this coffee tumbler and it is a favorite of mine.
What is on your wish list? Have you started your Christmas shopping?
