I live to plan things. I like to make lists and check things off…it gives me a little rush with every item that is completed. So it only makes sense that I get a little giddy when it comes time to make grocery lists. I usually plan meals either 2 or 4 weeks ahead of time- and shop for everything at once. It saves me a ton of time, and prevents us from having to go out eat because there is nothing in the fridge for dinner.

Now, I don’t say Monday the 15th we are having Lasagna, I just create a list of dinners and make sure that we have the ingredients to make them all and then I cook the meals as they suite me. So if I am feeling lazy, we can make a frozen pizza or whatever…

I recently took my planning one step further and converted all my recipes to Allrecipes.com. If you create a username and password, you can start saving recipes you like from the site into your personal recipe file. It also has an area to put in private recipes that you have from elsewhere. It was quite a project- I have about 100 that I use in rotation.

The cool part comes when you want to go shopping. You simply pick the dishes you want and it will automatically generate a grocery list for you based on the items needed for the recipes. You can even set up a “pantry staples” list so it will always add things like bread, cheese, milk, toilet paper etc to the list.

So you can have meals planned and a grocery list created within seconds, and the list is even divided up by section of the store.

Ok…lesson over…just thought I would share my latest find.

My mom keeps making fun of me about my hippy ways, so when I bragged to her last night about making my own beauty products she actually asked if I still shaved my legs. Oi!

It was super easy to make though, and now my bathroom smells heavenly. I chose an almond scent, but you can do it with any smell you like.

Sugar Scrub-

• 1 cup sugar
• 4 tbs olive oil
• 1 tsp essential oil or fragrance
• I also added some almond oil and aloe vera oil for extra goodness

Mix together and store in a plastic or glass container for skin smoothing yumminess!

The bath gel/hand soap was a bit more complicated. I bought the bath gel base at Hobby Lobby- it came in a big clear tub. I melted it down in the microwave and added fragrance oil, vitamen e, aloe vera oil and some shea butter. I also did a drop of coloring to make it the pink color you see in the picture. I am loving it in the kitchen.

Next up- air freshners and bar soap. Just gotta learn how…

My kids are like twins!

All of the sudden, my awkward little newborn turned into a full-fledged baby. I am not quite sure when it happened. Somewhere between the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas ham he started to change. His skinny little chicken legs seemed to develop rolls overnight. His eyes, suddently became bright and aware of the world around him. His shy little smiles turned into full on belly laughs and grins.