Winter Pictures

Sorry that it has been awhile since my last post and of pictures of the boys! I know many of you are interested in current pictures so I put a few up. The beginning ones are of us trying to get a decent one for a Christmas card. As you can probably tell, that is much easier said then done with a 3 year old and 16 month old! Here are a few of the blooper shots.

This one is actually pretty nice of Benjamin. He loves the camera:)








Andrew loves to hug his brother...
He also loves to help me in the kitchen. Our apple pie was yummy!




we made Thanksgiving cards for their grandparents.relaxin'


Benjamin being silly!



all they need is their morning coffee and newspaper and they could be middle aged men. lol




We had a lot of fun at my business customer appreciation open house last weekend. Here is the Shaklee table that I set up. I am already planning for next year.
after the open house, our friends The Roth's stayed for dinner. We exchanged presents and everyone had a lot of fun.

"let me out!"


Benjamin and I enjoy the parent/toddler classes. Here are a few pictures that his teacher took.



Go Pack!
The boys love to "help decorate" and redecorate our little tree. I think next year we may get a real one, but this year this one was perfect. :)
Andrew doesn't always like to take his naps. The other day, he finally passed out half way up his bed! I guess he was so exhausted that he didn't have the energy to get all the way back up. We put pillows and blankets on the floor so when he finally woke up, he didn't fall and get hurt. It was so cute!
Thanks again for reading and keeping up with my blog. Remember my Organize Now party starting in January. I hope you'll join me in getting organized. I am so excited about it!

Wishing you and your family a wonderful Holiday season and New Year too!!!

Rebecca

Organize Now!

I am super excited about this - I am going to start an Organization Party on my blog!!! This is something I have been thinking about doing for awhile now. I got the idea from another blog I saw doing something similar last year.

I mentioned in a previous post about organizing my spice rack that I am very organizationally challenged. :)

Every year, I set a new year's resolution to get myself more organized but never get it accomplished. Life happens and I get busy and overwhelmed and my organizational goals get pushed further down my "to do" list. Does this happen to you too??

So I thought I would make myself accountable by blogging about it here! To be honest, I am pretty nervous about it. By putting it out there, I KNOW I will follow through. So I need your help in doing that by doing it with me. We can share our successes and set backs together.

I am going to use this awesome book through Amazon called Organize Now by Jennifer Ford Berry. Every week she give you easy steps and goals to work on how to organize one area of your life or home. The goal is to simplify.

I am going to start blogging at the first week of January, so you have some time to get the book and get a head start if you'd like. If you order through the Amazon link above, Waterways will get a small referral credit back which I would really appreciate. I thought with holiday shopping you may already be ordering from Amazon so it's a nice addition to your shopping and if you buy $25 from them, you will get free shipping.

I would love for you to join me and get yourself organized too!

No matter where you are on the organization spectrum, I think that you will benefit by linking up to my party and sharing your stories too. It will be fun and also motivating!

So here's some pictures from the book.

All the weeks are laid out in nice attainable goals. She provides some great tips each week and ways to reduce clutter too. Something I am always striving to do in my house! :)

I love how she starts with organizing your own mind and life vision. So important for the rest of the organization process.


And the quotes throughout the book are great and inspiring.

Here's a little info about Jennifer. She really did a great job with this book.



I plan to blog every Thursday and share what I did (or didn't do - but hopefully more did then didn't:)


I can't wait to finally get myself more organized! My husband is more excited about it then I am I think. lol. And I plan to involve my kids too. :)

Thanks for reading and hopefully joining in. It's going to be a great year!

What are your new year's resolutions going to be?

Click Here to order your copy of Organize Now today!

Rebecca

Small Business Saturday special offer - Nov. 26th

I was so excited to learn about Small Business Saturday, which is this Saturday, November 26, 2011! I thought that this is a great way to support small businesses. I plan to make some purchases that day, will you?

I wanted to do a special promotion and here it is:

Take 25% off of the retail price of all Shaklee product orders made through Waterways on Saturday, November 26th!!

To get your discount, please email your order on Saturday, Nov. 26th to:

waterwaysmusic@yahoo.com

I will place your order for you and have it shipped to your home.

It's a great opportunity to stock up on green cleaners, vitamin supplements, vitamin skin care products and Cinch inch loss products (in anticipation of losing those extra holiday pounds:). Shaklee also makes great gifts for those on your list who may be hard to buy for.

You can check out Shaklee's products on my website: www.waterways.myshaklee.com but remember to place your order by email: waterwaysmusic@yahoo.com on Saturday. You can also order by calling me direct at: 765/532.8394

This offer cannot be combined with other Waterways specials and discounts

Thanks for reading and have a healthy and wonderful week and Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Rebecca

organizing the spice rack

If you know me, you know that I am a big procrastinator. I always like to do things well and if I feel I can't, then I put it off until I can. (which sometimes means a very long time!) So that makes for a lot of projects hanging in the wings that start to bog me down. Well, I decided to start doing something about it again. (once in awhile I get on these kicks:) I decided to start getting myself on an organizing schedule, something I have always struggled with. I thought that I might as well get ahead of my new year's resolutions this year. :)

I started reading Jennifer Berry's Organize Now book as part of my New Year's resolution last year but never got too far because I got so overwhelmed! lol. (I really needed help!) It is a great book though for all of you that are in my boat and need some help with the organization in your life. I did get the book out again recently and was inspired to do a little organizing...

So the other day I was looking at our spice rack that we received as a wedding gift 7 years ago and realized that it is just taking up counter space. The spice containers were either empty or partially full of old spices that we never use anymore. I kept all of my regularly used spices on the counter top or on top of the stove - taking up a Ton of space and making things look cluttered. I finally got tired of it and did something about it.

First, I washed all of the containers in the dishwasher and let them air dry for a day or so (ok, for almost a week - but that is actually good for this procrastinator! lol)

My 3 year old was anxious to help so I gave him a few small tasks to help with and he was pretty excited about that. He mostly liked taking the empty bottles and pretend he was cooking with them. lol

I should have taken before pictures but I never thought to do it at the time. Here are some afters though to show you how I gained some well needed counter space back.

So here's the above mentioned spice rack. I still like it a lot and didn't want to just get rid of it. So I filled the pre-labeled containers with the spices that it indicated if I had them and actually used them regularly. Some of them were still empty here because I needed to buy some new ones.

For the ones that I didn't use, I simply took a sharpie and crossed it out and re-labeled it with something I actually had and used. I know, some of you perfectionists out there may gasp at how I did this. Why didn't she use a fancy label maker? Why write on it in marker?? Well, if I didn't do it this way, it would probably still be waiting for my procrastinator self to get on it. So I did what worked for me and what was easiest at the time. :)




This is a picture of all of the old empty spice bottles that we either emptied into the spice rack containers or into the garbage if they were old. My toddler enjoyed helping me fill this bag up and take it out to the recycle bin. I couldn't believe how many we had!!

This is all of the extra counter spaced I gained from where the many spices were previously. So nice!!


And I put the ones that I didn't put into the spice rack on top of the stove. It looks a ton better then it did before when I had the small ones stacked on top of each other for lack of a better place to put them. I love how organized it looks now.
I find that doing a little bit each week (or day if possible but that's usually not the case in my house!) is really helpful to my sanity. Do you feel better when you clean and organize? It's not my favorite activity to do at the time, but it sure does feel great when it's done. And this little project didn't take more then 30-40 minutes or so. And it was a great thing to do with my son.

How do you stay organized? Do you keep a schedule for cleaning and organizing? I would love your tips!

Thanks for reading and have a safe and healthy weekend. Maybe take a few minutes to organize a small section of your home.

Rebecca

PS - I am very excited to share the new Shaklee promotion that is good through December 31st. For all new members to Shaklee (membership is $19.95 with no annual fees and always gives you 15% off all products) you will get a FREE 30 day supply of Vivix , Shaklee's awesome anti-aging tonic, with a $100 order. It retails at $100 so it's a great deal. And Shaklee continues to run their free membership special with an order of Vitalizer supplements. All very good deals that I am excited to share with you. :)

family updates and Halloween pictures

Things have been very busy lately. When Benjamin got sick in September, it really made us re-evaluate priorities. Because of that, I haven't been blogging as much. I did try to get some pictures up last week but the computer wasn't cooperating so I decided to put it aside until now.

Benjamin had his follow up appointment with the neurologist from Riley recently. We were able to see her at her Carmel office, which was a little closer to home. And she gave him a good report! She was able to read the EEG that he had done in Lafayette the day before and said things looked good. We had this EEG done because we saw some possible seizure activity after he was done with the medication. But everything looks good now. The doctor thought it was just his body adjusting to being off of everything. We are really seeing our boy back to his usual self and we are so very thankful for that.

We also had a fun Halloween. We carved our pumpkins and Andrew and I even made some pies out of one. We also took the boys out trick or treating for about 30 minutes and then passed out candy after that. It was a lot of fun and wasn't too cold. They were so adorable in their costumes.


David enjoyed putting up his decorations. Some of them were so scary and motion activated.


One house in our neighborhood really went all out with their decorations. They even dressed their golden retriever up like an angel. Very cute!









Benjamin wasn't too sure what to think about this doggie on his head!







A couple days before Halloween...




Andrew and I enjoyed making pumpkin pies this year. They taste so much better then the ones we've had from a can pumpkin. Would highly recommend. And this group tasted better then our first attempt because we didn't forget any ingredients this time! lol


Yum! We still have some in the fridge and also in the freezer ready for Thanksgiving.

Our trees turn such beautiful colors this time of year. The red one is my favorite. We think it's an oak or ash tree. Does anyone know what they are?
Here are some more recent pictures of the boys...








David and Andrew baked ginger bread cookies recently. They were SO good!
The boys are so cute in their jammies


Andrew loves his doggie that great grandma sent from Texas almost 2 years ago now. He's part of the family:)
Thanks for reading! I hope you had a safe and good Halloween. I can't believe it's November already and Thanksgiving is right around the corner. We have so much to be thankful for.

Rebecca

Children's health

As you probably can understand, children's health, particularly MY 14 month old's health has been on my mind a lot lately. He got pretty sick recently and you can read all about it if you click on "Benjamin" on the right side of my blog. I am thankful to say that he is doing better and took his last dose of meds tonight to counter the drug withdrawl he experienced in the hospital. He is getting stronger each day and we are very thankful.


So because this topic is on my mind, I thought I would get back into my regular blogging on health topics by sharing a few wonderful and natural products that I use with my own kids. As parents, we truly want the best for our kids. I never fully understood that until I actually became a mom 3 years ago. We are constantly worrying about our children's well being and health and doing our best to keep them well and healthy.


One thing that our pediatrician suggested when my boys were infants was to supplement their diet with a good vitamin formulated specifically for children. Something to "fill in the gaps" in their sometimes (or lately with my 3 year old, ALL the time picky eating habits:). Up until very recently, both of my boys have been very healthy. Even when Benjamin developed his sudden cough last month, the doctor thought that he aspirated something into his lung rather then it be the bad pneumonia that he had, because he didn't have any other symptoms. No fever, no runny nose, etc. His body was fighting it hard, which is why the doctors, including the specialists at Riley, didn't think pneumonia until they went in to find the aspirated object but instead found the mucus.

Hind sight is 20/20 as they say. Before last month, my 14 month old took a whole food natural powder vitamin Shakleebaby Multivitamin and Multimineral.

Both of my kids took this early on every day. It is easy to mix into their oatmeal or most liquids that they drink. I am sorry to say that last month I had forgotten to order it with my monthly Shaklee order and we ran out. I didn't think too much of it because we had another powder vitamin in the house called Citriboost. This is another great whole food multivitamin that Shaklee makes that is complete and safe for many people including adults and kids over the age of 1. My son was able to take half a scoop of this a day mixed into his oatmeal or drink. This is a great alternative for people who have a hard time swallowing vitamins and since my son was over a year old, I knew that he could have this so I didn't worry about ordering more of his children's vitamins right away. What I realized now however, is that the Citriboost was not as complete for his young needs as the Multivitamin and Multimineral powder is. Like I said, hindsight is definitely 20/20 and if I could do it over again....



Once my 3 year old was able to chew well, we switched him to Shaklee's Incredivites.

These are chewable and are an assortment of berry flavors that my son loves. Because he is under the age of 4, he only takes one a day which makes the bottle last for 4 months! This also has lactoferrin in it, which is the immune booster found in breast milk. My son still gets colds once in awhile, and a few more since starting preschool this year, but they usually come and go fairly quickly. And neither boy has ever had an ear infection!

When either of my boys are fighting something, we also give them chewable Vitamin C.


There is some research out there supporting vitamin C helping with immune function. One of Shaklee's chewable vitamin C is equivalent to eating 1.5 organic oranges. My older son can chew these and we crush them and put them into food or drink for my 14 month old. One of the doctors at Riley childrens hospital was talking to me about the research supporting vitamin C as an immune booster and infection fighter when Benjamin was there. They were supportive of us bringing our Shaklee supplements and protein powder in to give him in the hospital, which we were very thankful for.



One of my other favorite products that we use with our kids is Shakleebaby Gentle wash.
All of Shaklee's products are completely safe, natural and work really well. Shaklee uses pharmaceutical standards and third party testing on all of their products to make sure they are the highest quality and purest ingredients. So I never worry about the safety of products like the baby wash on my kids young skin. I was surprised to learn that the leading brand of baby wash (that we used to use!) actually has formaldehyde in it that is a bi-product of some of its ingredients. It is a small amount and not enough for them to legally have to put it on the label apparently, but Hel-LO-o! Do I really want my kids bathing in that chemical no matter how small of an amount?? Nope and I am thinking you may feel the same. One thing I love about Shaklee's wash is that it is so concentrated (like most of their products) so a little goes a long way. Very gentle, natural and safe. We really love it in my house.

One last thing I should mention is Laundry products. This is one area that it seems some parents overlook when thinking about their kids health, esp. young kids. Kids, especially babies, spend a lot of time sleeping.

They are breathing in anything coming off of the bedding and a lot of detergents with dyes and perfumes that make them smell nice, also leach chemicals. Not too good for young lungs and skin. I really love all of Shaklee's laundry products for my entire family, including sensitive-skin ME! lol


Shaklee's detergents are great for all skin types and they are very concentrated so a little goes a very long way. We switched to cloth diapers earlier this year (I wish I would have started with them with my oldest son - they are so great) I have heard so many conflicting reports on what detergent to use with cloth diapers. The only one that I have ever used is Shaklee (both liquid and powder) and both work great at cleaning my son's diapers. I will never use anything else.

As parents, we only want the best for our kids no matter how old they are. I truly feel that using the products I mentioned above are good choices for my kid's health.

Thank you again for reading. If you enjoy reading my blog, you can subscribe to it above so you will always know when I put a new post up. Have a great and healthy weekend! :)

Rebecca