Relax In Paradise

As a mother of five, I seldom find time to rest, let alone all out relax! My father has a hot tub and once in awhile I will manage to find the time to escape to sit in the warmth and steam, outside under the stars with the smell of the pine trees wafting over me. Well, I decided that it is hard enough to get out there, it's time to get one of my own! I talked to the hubby and it was a done deal. Our credit union was having a spa sale so we got a great deal and now we are in the process of building the gazebo around it and deciding on hot tub accessories (like a good looking cabana boy!). I found a great website for hot tub covers, they had great prices and some amazing designs! I had no idea you could do that with a hot tub cover! Wow! So hopefully next thing I know, I will be relaxing in my own hot tub paradise! Check out the one I chose!

Isn't it amazing? Really, I will be relaxing in my own private paradise. I have even bought ferns to accent around the deck! Anyone want to join me?

I do have to point out just one thing, just so you all don't think that I am all about the aesthetics, after all, my husband does, this particular cover is made with heavy duty re-enforced outdoor vinyl and the most durable and proven ink sets available. It is tested and proven to be waterproof, resistant of the chemicals used in most spa's, they won't tear, mildew or shrink.

And as for the wood on the gazebo, I might have fought against that horrible looking, green, treated wood with the little holes all over in it, but I agreed to redwood and yes, resealing it every year. And I did give in on the plastic vs. real wood flooring. But in my defense, what good is a spa if it is not relaxing? And just how relaxing can it be without being aesthetically appealing??? So, my paradise is now in the works, complete with a beautiful spa cover to give the look of a plush forest, redwood gazebo and plastic floor (awww, we all take a little, give a little). Now, if I could just find that cabana boy!

Dinosaurumpus

Dinosaurumpus! Is one of my very favorite children's books and one that the kids and I have read so many times that the cover is falling off and torn and the pages are curling. This is a darling book that introduces children to the different types of dinosaurs with a cute little rhyme and happy, colorful pictures that help to bring your children's imaginations to life.

Tony Mitton has a wonderful way with words and a very creative imagination that grows throughout his writing which flows off the pages and into your child's head in a colorful imaginative story full of excitement and fun.

Guy Parker-Rees illustration's are so colorful and vibrant that they just jump off the pages and into your child's imagination to complete the total, amazing experience.

This is a book not to miss. Take the time to find it and read it to your children. I was able to get my copy through the Scholastic book orders my children brought home and I am sure that your local library would have a copy to check out. But however you get your hands on it, just do it, read it and I hope you can enjoy it as much as my children and I have.

Keeping Kids Bedrooms Tidy

I have struggled, trying many different ideas to get my children to get their rooms cleaned and keep them that way. I finally found something that has worked! We made a bedroom cleaning chart that has worked so well. We had to tweak it a little the first time we went through it to accommodate everything in their individual rooms and their individual personalities as well as to not make any one step over whelming but the finished product has worked like a charm.

They start with their 30 minutes of cleaning every day and get as far through the list as they can. Then the next day they start at the top again so as not to get behind again and work as far as they can until eventually they finished the last thing on the list and the next day they started at the top and got through the whole list in a matter of minutes and were able to get on to other chores in the house.

Now their rooms have this quick checklist that they go through everyday to keep their rooms clean and they are much happier and so am I. Below are the two lists that I created. Feel free to use them and adapt them to your children's individual needs.

Boy’s Bedroom Cleaning
 Make Your Bed
 Pick Up All Blankets, Pillows & Stuffed Toys
 Pick Up All Dirty Clothes
 Take All Dirty Clothes To The Laundry Room
 Pick Up All Clean Clothes & Put Away
 Put All Shoes In The Closet
 Pick Up & Throw Away All Trash
 Pick Up Lego’s
 Pick Up All Other Toys And Put Them Away
 Put Away All Things That Belong Somewhere Else

Girl’s Bedroom Cleaning
 Make Your Bed
 Pick Up All Blankets, Pillows & Stuffed Toys
 Pick Up All Dirty Clothes
 Take All Dirty Clothes To The Laundry Room
 Pick Up All Clean Clothes & Put Away
 Put All Shoes In The Closet
 Pick Up & Throw Away All Trash
 Pick Up All Dolls And Put Them Away
 Pick Up All Other Toys And Put Them Away
 Put Away All Things That Belong Somewhere Else
I hope you can find this as helpful as it has been to me.

Eye Glasses

Wow, I am really behind on the news! I guess that there was a news story about an online company called Zenni on Fox News I guess they offer prescription eye glasses for as low as $8! Of course I hear this after I have my whole family's eyes checked and get glasses for the ones that need them. Big C, of course had to have the Converse brand frames, which were $125.00! That's before the lenses, protective coating, shatter proofing and scratch resistance! We are totally not talking cheap here! $8 would have been a bargain! So I decided to check them out.



I went to ZenniOptical.com to see what they had. I am sure they are going to have basic, run of the mill, glasses. Nothing fancy, nothing special. Boy was I wrong! They had a better selection than Sears and all of them, I mean every single child's frame was totally reasonably priced! They didn't have any designer brands for kids, that I could find, but what they did have were stylish and trendy and not a single pair was more than $29.95! Every single pair was under $30! That just can't be beat!

So now I am left thinking that I definitely paid too much for Big C's glasses. However, I know he will lose them, break them or just plain grow out of them like he does everything else at the moment. So a little vindication comes from knowing that I know am armed with the information I need to make the right decision next time!

Opening The Door To Prayer

I love this quote by Elder Henry B. Eyring from his Ensign, November 2000 talk, Write upon My Heart. It reminds us, as a mother, what a powerful and important role we play in the day to day lives as well as the eternal progression of our children and families. We are their foundation, it is our job to make sure they know that they are loved by us as well as their Heavenly Father and their Savior Jesus Christ. It is our job to open the door, to give them the foundation of prayer.

"When we teach those we love that we are spirit children temporarily away from a loving Heavenly Father, we open the door of prayer to them.

"We lived in His presence before we came here to be tested. We knew His face, and He knew ours. Just as my earthly father watched me go away from him, our Father in Heaven watched us go into mortality."

Silly Sally

If you have the opportunity to read Silly Sally by Audrey Wood, I guarantee you will love it. It is one of my all time favorite children's books. The story reads like a poem with laughable illustrations and a hilarious and very creative story line. The pages are filled with brightly colored illustrations that will keep a child attention and imagination going for a long time. It is a repetition book which is great for smaller children but it is fun enough that even my 12 year old loves it.

It begins... Silly Sally went to town walking backwards, upside down.
Along the way she met a pig, a silly pig. They danced a jig.
Silly Sally went to town dancing backwards upside down....

Along her journey to town she meets up with a pig, a dog, a loon and a sheep before meeting Neddy Buttercup who has a silly way of getting them all to town.

I just can't say enough about how much fun this book is for young children as well as older ones, myself included.

Save BIG $$$ on Groceries + a Killer Deal on Newspapers

I am in love! I was introduced to a new website (completely free!!!) by a wonderful lady. She was giving a class on saving money on your groceries. I have seen this concept before but she had some great new ideas and wonderfully easy organizing tricks that even I can do. So here's the concept:
You combine the store's sale ads with coupons to get products at amazing prices, sometimes even free!

All you need to do is visit Grocery Smarts, use password g84ctw, and they make it all so easy. They list all the stores ads, combine them with the coupons from this week and previous weeks newspapers and tell you which ones will give you the best deals.

Some of the great deals from this week were Herbal Essences Shampoo and Conditioner $0.50 each bottle, plus a free Mani or Pedicure! Power Aid Sports Drink; Free. Oral B Tooth Brush; Free. Juicy Juice, 8 pack Juice Boxes; $1.00. Duncan Hines Brownie Mix; $0.50 each. Stouffer's Family Size Dinners; 2/$5.00. These are some MAJOR savings! My receipts show well over 50% savings at all stores.

Now, I have just started so I don't have the coupon power that I will shortly. However, here is what is suggested. You should get one Sunday Paper for every member of your family, babies included. This allows you to get one product per person using the store ad and your coupons. So in my case, I would buy 7 news papers, one for each of us and I would have had 7 coupons for Power Aid. I would have been able to get 7 bottles of Power Aid for FREE! Oral B Toothbrushes, I could have gotten all of us toothbrushes for FREE! You get the picture, right?!?

Salt Lake Trib and Deseret News:

1 Sunday Paper each week $39/6 months

2 Sunday Papers each week $78/6 month + $8 Grocery Gift Card

3 Sunday Papers each week $117/6 months + $16 Grocery Gift Card

4 Sunday Papers each week $156/6 months + $32 Grocery Gift Card

Standard Examiner

1 Daily Paper and 5 Sunday Papers each week $17.50 per month for 6 months

(I know this sounds like a HUGE waste of paper, it does to me too. But just remember, all those papers you get can be taken to most elementary schools and they recycle them for money!)

Do Kids Need Computers?

These days there is so much wonderful information available on the Internet and so many wonderful activities to keep kids entertained through the heat of the day. But is it all really necessary? It is such a huge expense to buy them computers even with the great electronic deals you can find, you are still pushing hundreds of dollars. Does it really make sense?

Personally, I believe it does. The world is headed in a direction where computer are now the norm and will soon be a constant. Poverty nowadays comes with a cell phone and a computer. Households that do not have money for groceries have computers, Internet access and cell phone communication. It's a way of life that our children need to get used to.

Now with the gas prices the way they are and the economy in a recession, more and more employers are turning to telecommuting to save on the overhead of the business and to help their employees save on the price of gas. Working from home, even for part of the work week is becoming more and more prevalent. By the time our kids are grown, they are going to need to know the computer and Internet inside and out for their jobs, for the day to day lives. I don't know that they necessarily need their very own computer, but I do think they need one available to them, protected age appropriately and monitored closely, but they need to know how to network, how to surf the net, how to send and receive e-mail and how to type. It will affect them in the future.

Gotta Do Something Else

Big C gets the opportunity to visit his friend once a week. At our house, we do not have any gaming devices, the computer is for me and my job only and the televisions hardly ever come on. So he gets there and there is an X-Box, a playstation 3, a computer that they can play on, a PSP and then the television, if they ever get around to it. He spends the whole time playing. I think that his friend gets a bit tired of it, but then the next day they come here and play outside. So I guess it all works out. They get the game time and then the outside time. But, I really wish they could make more games that were as educational as they are fun. Why can't they make war games more historic, I guarantee that you would have a world full of kids that knew their history!

Video Games All Day

D's friend was here today and the boys basically sat ALL DAY on the XBox! Yes, I could have stopped it, D got tired of it but his friend can barely leave it long enough to eat or talk. I snatched them up and took them to the store to get a soda, then dropped them off about three minutes from the house to walk back - it was finally cool enough to be outside. D was ready to stay out for a bit but his friend couldn't wait to get back in and play. Time to clamp down on this!

It would have helped if D's bike was in riding condition, he needs a new inner tube I think. His brother managed to pop it and hasn't replaced it; instead he bought some kind of goo to fill it with. I'm not sure which way we're going on that... Anyway, D's friend said if D will fix his bike, maybe next time they're over here together, C (the friend) can bring his bike. That would be wonderful - his parents bring him in either a van or a truck so there's room. It's better when D goes to C's house, they have a trampoline, a large yard, lots of places to go in the neighborhood.

Because D never leaves the house normally, I had thought of a treadmill for exercise but exercise bikes might be better. I'd like either one and I know D (and C when he comes over) would be all into hooking them up to something. We could have a whole row of them! At least when they sit all day on games, they'd have to exercise to make them run. Some of these exercise bikes you can make payments on; when it's too hot to be outside, they and I could still be treating our bodies right!

Well I Tried!

I pulled out another box from storage to go through, I'm trying. Can I help it if so many things I don't need anymore will be perfect for my little grandbaby girl to play with? Or that some of these things have caused my oldest son to say, "I remember when we got that!" and then go on to happily talk about all the circumstances of a particular item and how much he enjoyed it?!

To me, this means it's not my fault if I don't get rid of all these things - I was GOING to. Really, I was. But I'm not selfish enough to follow through with it. See, it's not laziness this time, it's my noble character shining through!

Troubled Computer - Frantic Son

The computer is giving us a bit of a problem; we weren't sure if it was the computer itself or just the monitor. D brought the monitor from his room down to the main computer to try it and so far, it's working just fine. The monitor kept fading out and displaying horizontal white lines like a signal was being disrupted. D was frantic! He had borrowed big A's jump drive recently to get everything off of the computer in his room (the older computer that has no longer functional components and doesn't go online) to put it on the main computer. He's begging for more ram for the one in his room, I already had to do that for the one down here for my work - and then didn't really seem to need it! He was so relieved to find it's most likely the monitor that is causing the problem after he just copied all his files to this computer for safekeeping, all his music he's written on Cakewalk, and programs he's written.

Now he's trying to persuade me we need a flat monitor for both computers! I like the idea because then I can move this monitor up to the higher shelf and stand while i use the computer and down for him. He wants to sit while he uses the computer so we'd both be happy. Those thin monitors are easy and mobile, especially compared to lugging these huge unbalanced "old style" monitors. I already have been looking but he doesn't need to know that yet!