Tutu Pretty

It's Brenna's birthday weekend - let the festivities begin!
(I had this tutu made by Tiara's Tutus. It's handmade and incredible quality.
I'd strongly recommend her!)

Free Roastburger!

A while back, Brittany posted a coupon for a free roastburger. That coupon is back! Find it here!

Where do you keep...?

I have been trying to organize our house little by little lately. So far I've organized two cabinets - and they've stayed organized! This project is really bringing to light all the little areas in our house that holds our homeless stuff ; all the little things you need but don't really have a home for. I'm convinced that SOMEONE out there has found a great place for these items. So I'm going to find out and pass the knowledge on to you!

My first topic is: bread.

Currently our bread is tossed into the top part of our pantry on top of our canned goods. (Small pause while you marvel at my food storing abilities...). During the winter this isn't really a problem. I normally keep it over to the side on top of the soup cans since I don't use them often. During the summer the bread seems to breed like rabbits - hot dog buns, hamburger buns, english muffins, bagels, white bread, wheat bread - and I end up with 40 packages of bread on top of everything - getting smooshed and eventually molding before I pull it out again. There has to be a better way!

I went straight to the experts at Bread.com. According to the Federation of Bakers, wrapped bread (our standard, grocery store shelf variety) should always be kept in it's wrapper and tightly closed. When stored this way, it should stay fresh for several days. If it will take longer than a few days to finish your loaf you should NEVER put the loaf in the fridge! The average temperature in a refridgerator is approximatly 41 degrees - the perfect temp to make your bread stale! Place your bread in the freezer where it can live amongst the frozen veggies for up to 3 months. To thaw, just toast for about ten seconds.

You can now sleep better at night knowing how to properly store your bread. How do you store your bread??

Everyone Needs a Little Smile Sometimes

This video cracks me up. Very popular at our house.

Getting It Done

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but it's only July 5th and I've nearly finished my to-do list! I had given myself a month to finish this list and it's only taken about a week. With some focused effort I could have had all of the items crossed off (except the books - peace and quiet comes in such small increments at my house! I'm sure many of you fellow momma's can relate! I hope I don't offend any Jane Austen fans, but I cannot finish Sense and Sensibility. It's painful for me to read. Just so boring.) Anyway, the things that are left seem to be multiple step things - I need to do something else before I can finish them, so they are taking a bit more time.

Putting my to-do list down somewhere instead of keeping it all in my head was the simplest thing, but I accomplished so much just by taking that step. In the book, "Getting Things Done", David Allen suggests making lists of all of your 'to-do's' - daily, weekly, monthly, even those things you'd like to do at some point in time but have no concrete plans of doing it right now. His reasoning is that when you have all of these things floating around in your mind, you can't really get anything done because you're constantly bogged down. Your mind will only remind you that you need to do these things when you can't really do anything about it. His great example was to think of if you have any flashlights in your home that need batteries. Now think of when you are most likely to remember that you need batteries....right! When you go to use the flashlight!

So my goal is to make this a weekly habit. Every Sunday, writing my to-do list for that week. I even made a cute little button for it - so feel free to steal the button and join in! What's your to do list for this week? Here's mine:

1. Get tire fixed on car.
2. Backup pictures on discs.
3. Clean house for Brenna's Party
4. Shop for Brenna and her birthday party!
   
5. Gather financial paperwork for records.
   
6. Birthday present for my good friend.
   

This One is for You Mom

Good Morning Rock Star

Brenna woke up this morning with some serious bed head.
Must have been a sweet party in her crib last night!

(yawning - being a rock diva is exhausting work!)