The cutest personalized Easter gifts you ever did see + giveaway
The following is a sponsored conversation with Put Me in the Story. All opinions, dated couches and ill-lit iPhone photos are my own.
One of the awesome things about having little kids (mine are three and five and LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT HOW SOON THEY’LL BE FOUR AND SIX, k thanks) is that they get so excited over little things.
Like eating off certain plates. Or getting straws in their chocolate milk. Or the mail carrier! Hoo boy, they love seeing Trudy walk up our steps!
I’ve written before about our love for Put Me In The Story’s personalized books (lots of times) because they’re a win-win-win in our house: the kids LOVE them, I LOVE how cute they are, and the stories are actually well-written and fun to read — which, as a writer, is very important to me.
Unlike the (really hilariously terrible) type-written personalized book I had as a kid in the late ’80s, Put Me In The Story books allow you to customize a lot more than just your child’s name. You upload photos of them for different sections of the book and also customize your dedication — which sometimes appears on the cover, too.
This is important if your three-year-old has suddenly decided she does NOT like the name you gave her at birth and creates a new name.
Like our darling daughter: Hello Kitty Lottie Skye a.k.a. Dino a.k.a. Aurora
Everybody wins!
These are the two books we chose for the kids for Easter: Don’t Push The Button for D, and I Love you Honey Bunny for C. They’re adorable, of course, because these books can’t be anything BUT adorable. And colourful. And OH-SO-PERSONALIZED!
The stories are both so sweet, but I must say that Don’t Push The Button might just be the best one we’ve gotten yet — right up there with My Name is Not Charlotte Rose, which practically makes me cry it’s so freaking cute. (I have recommend it to many, many friends and readers and they all love it, too.)
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| Look at the last page! Look at it! *sob* |
Don’t Push The Button is a quick read (which is a bonus for Darling Husband who gravitates towards the fastest, shortest stories on the shelf) but it’s really clever.
I love the little monster (Larry) and the fact that he says “We can’t! We mustn’t!” More kids books need to be that cool.
Ready to order one of these over-the-top adorable books for your child’s Easter basket? How about getting it for free? …
Enter Put Me In The Story’s giveaway for a chance to win a personalized Easter Book Bundle!
Giveaway ends 3/10/2016 at 11:59pm CST
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Twelve minutes
The following is a sponsored conversation with Pearl & Daisy Natural Soap Company. All opinions, messy topknots and ill-lit iPhone photos are my own.
I slid the cakes in the oven, set the timer, and drove myself to the emergency room a couple of Fridays ago.
Nothing super-serious, but let’s just say that having a totally unplanned hysterectomy at 31 isn’t exactly awesome for your physical health (uh, or your mental health).
I worked the whole time I was there (#freelancelife) and one of the nurses commented that she’d seen a lot of people doing strange things while waiting around in a gown by she’d never seen someone actually working.
I was back home by lunchtime. Darling Husband had taken the cakes out for me and they were cool, so I moved straight into making the buttercream frosting and the chocolate drizzle for the top. The cake was for my mother-in-law’s birthday party that evening, so there was no time to waste.
I didn’t feel great for the rest of the day, and when the time came to leave for the city, I decided to stay home and take it easy. I even had an idea of what I’d do …
The sweet folks over at Pearl & Daisy Natural Soap Company — a rad business right here in Truro! — had asked me to take part in their #Take12 campaign and I’d been meaning to do it for weeks. How hard was it to schedule a 12-minute bath? Pretty hard, apparently.
Twelve minutes without my phone.
Twelve minutes without reading a book.
I thought about my morning ER visit. My frantic need to make the cake. The fact that it had taken me weeks to set aside these 12 minutes.
I jumped a little when the timer rang, signalling the 12 minutes were up. I dried off one hand, turned off the timer, and stayed a few minutes longer just enjoying the water.
Thanks, Pearl & Daisy, for convincing me to slow down a little!
xo
Work-at-home life: Five things you NEED to know about yourself
1. Know your internal clock:
I know I’m at my best in the morning (that’s why I get up so early to work on my novel), so I try to schedule as much writing before lunch as possible.
I know I always, always, always feel sleepy and distracted in the afternoon, so that’s a better time for me to do my phone interviews. I can’t procrastinate them or drag them out — they’re real people! — and it doesn’t matter if I’m alert or sleep, my typing is just as quick.
I also know that I’m TERRIBLE at working after the kids are in bed, although I have to do it sometimes. It takes me much longer so it doesn’t make financial sense to do this unless absolutely necessary. My friend K who works at home, though? She excels at night. We’re all different.
2. Know your exit cues:
Since a freelancer’s work is never done, it sometimes feels like there’s not a “clean break” to step out of your work mode. There’s no 5 p.m. closing time or crowd of colleagues all walking out together to make you feel like you’ve done a good day’s work and now it’s over — it’s just you, feeling like you haven’t done enough and maybe you should work tonight after the kids are in bed? Probably?
For me, I hate, hate HATE leaving a story when it’s 90 per cent done. It kills me when I absolutely have to walk away at that point because of a bus pick-up or an appointment, because it’s ALMOST DONE. But if I can finish and file a story, it feels like a natural quitting point for the “work session” (since it may or may not be an actual full work-day).
I also won’t feel “done” working unless my inbox is under control. I use Inbox Zero so everything needs to be pinned for later or snoozed until another point in the future. Ideally, I finish work with the happy spinning sun that means I have ZERO emails in my inbox (hence the name), but that doesn’t always happen.
3. Know your quick fixes:
If I’m feeling like a zombie, there are a couple of things I can try to snap myself out of it so I can get back to focusing:
- Chug half a bottle of water (I’m probably thirsty)
- Pop a Lifesaver Wint-o-Green mint thingy in my mouth (they give me a boost)
- Go make a snack
- Fold a load of laundry, clean up the kitchen quickly, etc. for a mental break
- Spend a few minutes cleaning up my office/craft room (which is always messy)
- Literally RUN up and down the stairs a couple of times or run on the spot (I do this in front of a mirror and face a different direction every 60 seconds to mix things up, ha.)
4. Know your triggers:
5. Know your quirks:
I gave my five-year-old an iPhone … but let me explain
When I upgraded to my iPhone 6 earlier this year, I gave my five-year-old my old iPhone 4S … and I’ve been feeling judged about it ever since.
Every time my son announces his new toy in public, I feel like interjecting with “Um, hi, I am NOT that parent! Can I explain?”
I was NOT going to be the parent that would let my child have a freaking iPhone in elementary school. I’m still not, I swear. Kind of.
Yes, he has my old iPhone, but there’s a list of rules longer than the terms and conditions of iOS 9. For example, no, we don’t pay for a cellular plan. That means he can’t make any phone calls — except 9-1-1, because I think that works on all phones even if they don’t have service.
We also don’t pay for data, of course, so his “phone” can only access the internet here at home on the WiFi. (If it’s not usable as a phone, can you really call it an iPhone? It’s really a glorified iPod.)
I have parental controls activated so he can’t download anything — not even free or educational apps — without me approving the transaction. He also can’t access any websites except PBS and other extremely G-rated content.
So what does he use it for?
Mainly “texting” us and his grandparents (well, iMessaging to other Apple devices) which is helping him work on his spelling. He’s addicted to FaceTime (video chat).
Sometimes he’ll plug in headphones and listen to music while he’s building LEGO creations, and occasionally he’ll get permission to watch Netflix on his phone. The camera roll is filled with pictures of toys, and he’s getting better about keeping his hand steady so some of them are pretty good.
The iPhone is always left in the kitchen to charge, he must ask to use it, and he can’t FaceTime anyone with checking with us first (uh, after that one time he tried to FaceTime his buddy Josiah at 7 a.m. and his mom answered — sorry, Jenn). The phone’s been taken away for a few days as a punishment, but he often goes a week at a time forgetting to even ask for it.
Our three-year-old daughter begged for her own phone so we eventually handed over a really old iPod touch. She can “text” emojis to us, make calls using FaceTime, listen to music and play a few preschool apps.
She thinks it’s hilarious to run to another level and start video-chatting with us like she’s away on vacation. She also takes a lot of selfies and sends them to our family members.
As much as I’d like my kids to have devices that allowed me to track them relentlessly with apps — I’m nosy, plus it would be fun — it’s not necessary at the ages of nearly-four and nearly-six. I know exactly where they are at all times, anyway, and usually I’m with them when they’re not in school.
Our son has only left the house with his phone once, when he and our daughter went down the street to play at a friend’s. I told him to “text me” when they arrived, even though I was watching from the window the entire time. Sure enough, he enlisted the household’s resident techie — the 10-year-old — and she signed him into the family’s WiFi so he could iMessage me.
When I got the message (“Hi mom”) I was so proud. He wrote me again, asking for me to please bring down their snowpants (I did) and I messaged him back an hour later requesting that he and his sister come home for dinner. Pizza emojis helped pass along the message, I think.
At first, it felt ridiculous to hand my old iPhone — a real, working phone that had served me well right up to the moment I upgraded — over to my five-year-old. It still does, in a way. But I’m sure my mom felt a little ridiculous giving me a (used) laptop when I was eight years old, and I became so comfortable on computers that I was coding as a tween.
It would be silly to pretend that our kids aren’t around screens every single day, or to act like an unserviced iPhone is all that different from the iPad they use to watch cartoons while they eat breakfast.
Technology isn’t going anywhere, and the fact that my kids are embracing it to connect with our family makes me proud.
Also, they’re learning to take non-blurry photos, and that’s a useful skill.
DIY “fake” nightstand: How to trick your eye with a faked matching set-up
Our bedroom furniture is by far the nicest, most high-quality furniture we own … so it’s kind of a shame that guests hardly ever get to see it.
The trouble was that because it’s so nice (read: expensive) the set only came with a single nightstand. Getting a second one would have meant spending hundreds of bucks and that didn’t feel feasible at the time, so we’ve always had an unbalanced boudoir.
Although my dear husband didn’t mind charging his iPhone on the floor, it bothered me that we didn’t have the pleasing symmetry of a nightstand — and lamps — on either side of our bed. Of course, my nightstand was so huge we couldn’t fit a matching one even if we decided to shell out the $300 or so.
When I came across a matching set of (ugly, patterned) lamps at a yard sale for $10 over the summer, I decided we had to figure something out. I was going to be a real grown-up with two real nightstands and matching lamps, one way or another.
I toyed with the idea of hanging a floating shelf at exactly the same height as my nightstand, but that would mean we’d be stuck with the existing room layout — not to mention it would be annoying when we moved someday. So finally I decided that it didn’t matter what a new nightstand looked like: it just had to be exactly the same height as the other one, and fit into the skinny space between the bed and the wall.
I sketched out the required height and width and told my handy husband to go crazy. As long as it was exactly that tall and wide, it was all good. So he built a simple nightstand out of 1x3s and a square of plywood, and I suggested adding a rectangle of MDF to the front to look like a drawer front.
I realized the MDF was a mistake (again) when I stained everything nice and dark (Minwax’s “Dark Walnut”) because MDF doesn’t play very nicely with stain. Oh well, the nightstand would hardly be visible, I reasoned. It was just there to be a vehicle for the lamp! (And to hold a charging iPhone.)
I applied three coats of polyurethane, sanding lightly between coats, and it was one of my nicest staining jobs to date (usually I get slack about the poly). Read More
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Heather's Handmade Life 