Tag Archives: lifestyle blog

Turn It Up Tuesday – #81

Posted on April 6 by Jillian416 • 4 Comments

We hope you all had a Happy Easter…and enjoyed it with friends and family!

We’re excited to have you with us, week over week. We continue to grow and feature more blogs, which is so exciting!! Who doesn’t love having their name / blog in the spotlight every once in awhile. 🙂 Please join us and link-up your best posts!! Just remember, you have the possibility to be featured in each week’s post!!

Welcome to the 81st week of Turn It Up Tuesday! Last week, we had an awesome time on Turn It Up Tuesday with 431 links – another amazing week! We’d like to thank each and every one of you for making every week so amazing! Keep sharing your amazing posts with us here on Turn It Up Tuesday!

Filed Under: All About Me, Link-Ups

Flint Lockwood and a Meal Plan

Posted on November 2 by Jillian416 • 1 Comment

Making our meal plan was pretty easy this week, but before I get to that, I want to share Emmett’s costume – he was Flint Lockwood from the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movies.

A few weeks ago, Seamus was at Kohl’s shopping and came across a t-shirt that had the tuxedo print on it. He obviously bought it, because what’s cuter than a 2 year old wearing a tuxedo shirt. HEHE At this point we still were unsure what Emmett would be for Halloween, he had mentioned being Daniel Tiger from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, but it has a head piece and Emmett isn’t fond of putting things on his head. So, we kept thinking…

One Saturday morning when Emmett decided to sleep in, Seamus and I were just laying in bed brainstorming ideas and he had the brilliant idea for Emmett to be Flint Lockwood. With his tuxedo shirt, and a pair of jeans, all we would need is a lab coat! Did you know you can get them in child-size lab coat and at an affordable cost?? This is the lab coat (affiliate link) we purchased for Emmett and it fit him perfectly.

This worked out perfectly, because to Emmett it felt as though he was just wearing regular clothes not a costume so there was no fighting to get dressed. Plus, he loved that his labcoat had pockets and he could hide his many necessities (ie: his hot wheels, binkie, Percy from Thomas and Friends). It was really the cutest thing!!

We made it about 6 houses down the street before we decided to call it a night. I wasn’t expecting to get far, it was chilly and drizzling, but I thought we’d at least make it down the street, oh well. At the first house, while we were waiting for Emmett to grab his candy, the family dog ran out to sniff Emmett. Very sweet dog, Emmett was not in danger, but because Emmett doesn’t have a lot of experiences with dogs, he was freaked out. So, every house going forward we had to coax him to come up, that they didn’t have a dog, that it would be okay – it got to the point where he was just crying. Poor guy! I kept asking if he wanted to go home and he’d tell me no, I asked again and he said yes. So home we went. I’m glad we got out and got to experience everything – next year will be even MORE fun. 🙂

Now our Meal Plan

Breakfast: 2 Scrambled Eggs & bacon

Lunch: Salad with ham and chicken, blue cheese crumbles, sunflower seeds and honey mustard dressing

Sunday: Pot Roast

Monday: Breakfast for Dinner

Tuesday: Tacos and Guacamole

Wednesday: Homemade Steak Subs

Thursday: Scrounge day

Friday: Rotisserie Chicken & Baked Potatoes

Saturday: Balsamic Pork & Asparagus (Seamus found this recipe, I need to get it from him so I can share it)

It’s a pretty easy week, but one that will be super yummy!! Have you seen my post with tips to make your meal planning easier? You should check it out, these are my TRIED and true tips – they really work.

Join me and link-up with Laura from Mommy, run fast! and Jill from jillconyers.com.

Your turn!

What were you or your children for Halloween? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Looking for a quick, easy and FREE way to get your news? Check-out theSkimm and sign-up for your daily email box delivery of the world’s news, plus if you share your birthday, you get it listed at the bottom of the newsletter on your day. It’s like celebrating with thousands of people!!!!

Filed Under: Family, Food & Recipes

Crock-Pot Chicken Noodle Soup

Posted on October 29 by Jillian416 • 10 Comments

Heart-warming Chicken Noodle Soup

It happens every year, the cooler weather hits and I want soup. There is just something so very very comforting about sitting on the couch (because soup just shouldn’t be eaten anywhere but on the couch – haha), curled up in your softest sweatpants and socks, and your warmest sweatshirt, sipping that delicious steaming bowl of soup. Seriously, is there anything better!?

It’s no secret that Fall is my favorite time of year. Just something about it makes me come alive! I recently decided to try my hand at chicken noodle soup, but wanted to make it in the crock-pot because I’m not one for standing over the stove for hours on end. I like to cook, and then let the food do its thing.

I have to admit, this adventure was a success. The soup turned out delicious, and I cannot wait to make it again! It’s filling, hearty and warms you through and through. I highly recommend you run out and get the ingredients today, and make it for lunch all week. It would absolutely make a perfect dinner, too – I just prefer having soup for lunch.

[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:3]

Your turn!

Do you love Chicken Noodle Soup? What’s your favorite recipe? Share in the comments below!

If Chicken Noodle Soup isn’t your favorite, what kind is?

Looking for a quick, easy and FREE way to get your news? Check-out theSkimm and sign-up for your daily email box delivery of the world’s news, plus if you share your birthday, you get it listed at the bottom of the newsletter on your day. It’s like celebrating with thousands of people!!!!

I’m linking up with Peas and Crayons, join me by clicking here.

Filed Under: Food & Fitness

Cleaning After Finding Bed Bugs

Posted on October 24 by Jillian416 • 2 Comments

Finding bed bugs in your home can be a nightmare situation, I’m sharing my tips on how we got the majority of them out of the house before we had pest control come in.

If you haven’t read my post about identifying bed bugs, I recommend you click and read it. You’ll understand more of how we found them, it will give you the full picture.

Finding bed bugs in your home can be a nightmare situation, especially if you are not armed with the appropriate means to handle the situation. While, I truly hope you never have to deal with them, I’m going to be sharing our exact process for how we cleaned up, immediately after finding them.

The first thing we did was collect all of the bedding that had been infested. We wanted to remove the bedding without having the bed bugs fall out and land elsewhere in the house. Since we did not have everything we needed from the very beginning, we did the best we could. I grabbed all of our white 13 gallon trash bags and brought them to the entrance of Emmett’s room. Then I slowly started peeling away his sheet and mattress pad, I curled them inside of themselves and immediately placed it into a white garbage bag, tied it tightly closed and took it to the basement.

When washing items that may have bed bugs or their eggs on it, you want to ensure that you are washing your clothes in hot HOT water and then drying (for at least 30 minutes) in the highest temperature your dryer can go to. This will kill off any of the living bugs and their eggs. I also recommend, that even if you don’t see any bugs on an item, you wash &/or dry it anyway, there could be eggs that you’re not seeing and you don’t want to mess around. We took all of the stuffed animals, blankets, everything on Emmett’s bed and our own, down and washed them.

Once I had the first load of wash running, I went back upstairs to see how Emmett was doing. I recommend having a full queue of TV shows/books/new toys for your little one to play with, or better yet, if you can send them to a friend or family member’s house, do that. We didn’t have that luxury, so Emmett got to watch an extreme amount of TV that day.

Back in Emmett’s room, we took the entire crib apart because we wanted to ensure that there were not any bed bugs hiding inside of the brackets of the crib. While Seamus was doing that, I went through his dresser, ensuring that there were not any bugs hanging out inside or underneath any of the drawers (there weren’t, thank goodness). We also took the time to check the drawers of his nightstand and changing table, and the only place we found them (in his room) was on his bed skirt and around the baseboards near his bed.

Anything that was left in his room was placed inside of a white plastic garbage bag and immediately taken into the basement. We wanted to avoid any risk of the bed bugs spreading elsewhere in our apartment.

In my next post, I will be sharing how we managed to keep the clean laundry from getting re-infested and how we started the pest control process on our own.

If you want to read more about how we identified the bed bugs in our home, feel free to click on through.

Your turn!

If you’ve had bed bugs, or other pests in your home – what were your first steps in fighting them, before you could get the professionals in? Comment below!

Looking for a quick, easy and FREE way to get your news? Check-out theSkimm and sign-up for your daily email box delivery of the world’s news, plus if you share your birthday, you get it listed at the bottom of the newsletter on your day. It’s like celebrating with thousands of people!!!!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

The Long Lost Meal Plan

Posted on October 20 by Jillian416 • 1 Comment

Though, I’ve been absent, making our meal plan is STILL just as important!

So, even though I haven’t been around all that much the last few weeks, Seamus and I have continued to meal plan. For us, it is a necessity. When we don’t, chaos ensues, which leads to us eating out WAY too much – which is never good for the wallet or the waistline.

Meal planning has never been one of our favorite activities, because we will tend to go back and forth on what to eat. I’ll suggest something, then Seamus will and the other one won’t want that meal. We would go back and forth and tend to just get overwhelmed with the process. We’d dread Saturday nights!

After WAY too many annoyances when making our meal plan, we decided to change some things up.

We started making the list earlier on Saturday, instead of after Emmett was in bed. This allowed us to avoid the times when we both like to do our own personal work. This is probably the #1 reason why meal planning isn’t such a chore any longer.
We both want “our” meals to be the ones made. However, that sometimes just isn’t feasible – now, instead of pushing for our meal to be the one chosen, we both take it in stride if it isn’t, and we decide to make it the next go round. Because of this we now have more meals in our “master list” and it makes next week’s planning easier because we already have one meal queued up.
We focus our attention on making the list. Previously, we would sit at our desk with our computers open and would BOTH be distracted. It would take ages to the get the meal plan done and we’d just get annoyed. Now, we do it either at the table or on the couch, while Emmett is watching some of his TV. Don’t get me wrong, we do occasionally still have our computers or phones around to look for recipes, but we aren’t doing other things during this time.
We aim to have an arsenal of different recipes or food ideas ready, before sitting down to make our list. It doesn’t always work, and can backfire, if all of the meals you have in mind are turned down by the other person, but this has helped at times.
Institute one scrounge day a week! This is so important, in my opinion, it is one less meal you need to plan for. It leads to savings at the grocery store and savings of your sanity. 😉
And finally, easing up and not taking the whole experience so seriously. There are people who LOVE to meal plan and I am sure that is because they view it as a very relaxing activity. So far, with this new method, things are going A LOT better, and while I cannot say I enjoy making a shopping list, it isn’t quite so unbearable.

Now, on to this week’s meal plan

Sunday: Rotisserie Chicken & Asparagus

Monday: Pork Tacos

Tuesday: Cornell Chicken (Seamus has shared this recipe with me in the past and it is OUT OF THIS WORLD!)

Wednesday: This is our 3 year wedding anniversary, so we’ll be going out for a family meal, since it is a work night. Not sure where we’re going yet

Thursday: Homemade Pizza

Friday: Scrounge Day

Saturday: Fetticini Alfredo Spaghetti Squash (recipe to come)

Breakfast: 2 scrambled eggs & 2 slices bacon

Lunch for me: Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup (recipe to come)

If you’re looking for more meal plan tips & tricks you can check-out My Recipes, Week Night Dinner Arsenal or Cooking Light’s Meal Planner (this one is awesome, you drag and drop your meal choices).

I’m linking up with Laura from Mommy, run fast! and Jill from jillconyers.com – you should join us, there are even MORE meal ideas over there!

Your turn!

Do you enjoy meal planning? What are your tips, if you do? Share in the comments below!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Reemergence – Where Have I Been?

Posted on October 14 by Jillian416 • 2 Comments

Hey there, friends!

I haven’t been posting much, actually outside of the link-ups I participate in, I haven’t posted at all. I’m not going to apologize because I just don’t feel guilty. Life got busy and I let the one thing slide, that I could. While I’ve missed writing and sharing my daily ins and outs, I had no option but to put something on hold, so that I could actually manage things in my life.

So, you might be asking yourself, what exactly HAS been going on? (Am I right?) We’re all a little nosy, nothing to be ashamed of! 🙂

Emmett has been sick on and off the past couple of weeks. Not life-threateningly sick, but fever, sniffles, other such toddler things. And when he’s sick, he wants his momma, I am 100% okay with this. We spent a lot of time cuddling and watching TV.
Seamus totaled his car. He’s totally fine, no injury to him or the other driver (thank goodness), but still it required us (mainly him and his dad) to figure things out. It was an extremely stressful situation, that seems to be over with. Seamus will be a proud new owner of a Buick Lucerne. Seamus is tall and we eventually want to have more kids so this will suit him perfectly.
Work has been extremely stressful. Since my amazing boss left at the end of September, I’ve been assigned a few of her responsibilities and then I’ve also been training some new staff. So, I’ve pretty much been doing the work of 2.5 people. Yah. Stressed!
(This is the worst.) We found bed bugs in Emmett’s bed. Uggggh! Let me start out by saying that I debated coming onto my blog and essentially telling the whole world (if they were to read it) that we had bed bugs. For whatever reason, having them and dealing with them, just feels so dirty and shameful TO ME (I stress the TO ME part). I then decided, that since this is the place where I like to share the good, bad and ugly – this would be the perfect place to tell our story, and I will. I plan on writing a couple posts surrounding the topic. My hope, like most things I write, is that it will help someone else down the road. Plus, I was inspired by Katy of Chaos and Kiddos’ brutal honesty in a recent post of her’s Surviving Infidelity.

There you have it. To an outsider, it might seem like not a whole lot and I get it, but to me, I struggled with this really hard, especially with the bed bugs. Doing 40 loads of laundry over the span of 4 days and then having to put it all away, is pretty time consuming.

With all that going on, I just didn’t have the energy to also spend a lot of time writing, though I’ve missed it terribly!!!

You might be asking whether the bed bugs are gone? Well, we hope so. We had pest control come to our home on Friday morning to treat, the guy that came in stated that it could take anywhere from 1 to 3 (or even 4) treatments to get rid of them all. However, he DID say that our situation wasn’t that bad compared to others he had seen and dealt with. We check Emmett’s bed on a daily basis, his stuffed animals, the things he brings home from day care – all of it gets checked. I’ve kind of become obsessed with it, but after going through last week, I want to be as diligent as humanly possible. Like I said, more to come in the coming days.

If you’re still here, thank you!! I appreciate you all having faith in me and sticking around. I promise some really good content is to come. I just need to slowly get back on the horse!!

Your turn!

Have you ever went MIA on something that you loved dearly, but just couldn’t handle at that moment?

Filed Under: All About Me, Family

Social Media Mixer – #18

Posted on September 27 by Jillian416 • 3 Comments

Welcome to the 18th week of the Social Media Mixer!

Thank you to everyone who joined us for Week 17 – we had 126 blogs and numerous social media link-ups!

The Social Media Mixer is all about networking and making connections. Also, you can gain exposure and increase your social media following! Link up your blog posts and social media accounts and mix it up with some of the other linkers. Each week, the Weekday Mixer will start on Saturday nights at 8:00pm and go on until Wednesday nights at 11:59pm. A blog post will be chosen each week by each of the hosts and guest hosts and featured in the following week’s link-up! If chosen, a brief summary about yourself and your blog/website and all of your social media accounts will be featured. It’s a great way to stand out among the crowd! One blogger will be chosen for 2 weeks of free ad space on Epic Mommy Adventures!

Welcome your hosts!

And welcome your guest hosts for September!

And here are the Featured bloggers from last week’s Social Media Mixer…

Holly chose…

Slow Cooker Beef Chile Verde Nachos from Lou Lou Girls

My cute hubby called me from work and told me that he had just signed up to bring a main dish for the company pot luck dinner. Main dishes can be so hard because you have to get the dish to the party without falling apart and then finding something that will feed so many people! I love challenges! We decided on these incredible nachos. They were a big hit at the party! Mike told me that everyone was trying to get the last piece of meat out of the slow cooker because the meat was so tender. The great thing about nachos are that everyone can make their own the way they like.

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Google+

Cathy and Avie chose…

Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cinnamon-Brown Sugar Icing from Mayhem in the Kitchen!

Last year I bought the Costco pack of organic pumpkin puree, and based on how September has gone thus far, I’m going to need to stock up again this year. I know a lot of folks think this whole pumpkin spice thing is overrated, overdone, overblown, but I just can’t help myself. As soon as the air gets crisp and the leaves start to crunch, the pumpkin obsession stirs within me and there’s nothing I can do about it. …OK maybe it’s not quite that bad. But it’s close. I knew I was ready for fall when I went through and sniffed the entire autumn themed line of wax melt air fresheners at the hardware store. Twice. Three times on the Pumpkin Pie and Spiced Cider varieties. Lucky for me, one of my coworkers shares my pumpkin love, and requested a pumpkin spice treat for her birthday, so I didn’t even have to think of an excuse to make these.

Mila chose…

Therapeutic Blogging from The Realist Optimist

Our culture revolves around the idea of self-sufficiency and independence. We don’t want our survival to be dependent on anyone besides ourselves. But I’m pretty sure our culture has it wrong. Community is important. It always has ben and it always will be. We’re born into families, we play on teams, and we’re assigned to work in groups. We’re designed and engineered to function not in isolation, but in relationship with other humans. Even us introverts. After writing my most recent post on physical, emotional, and spiritual therapy, I realized that something was missing. I threw out a whole lot of information about the various forms of therapy and I neglected to talk about one of the best forms of therapy I have ever found: BLOGGING! I realize that some of you might not believe this fact, so I decided to make a list of the…5 Reasons Blogging Counts as Therapy

Cyndi chose…

Project: Pallet Shed- Finishing touches! from Scrapality

It’s been a long journey and a learning lesson from the first pallet to the last. My pallet shed is finally complete and I am very pleased how it turned out.

Ce Ce chose…

Crockpot Lasagna from 4 Sons ‘R’ Us

On top of it being an all-out yummy classic comfort food, lasagna is a busy mom’s secret dinner weapon. It’s such a great option, especially when we’re talking about a crockpot, not oven, version because it’s so easy to throw together and it’s really filling, so a little goes a long way. Plus, this recipe usually makes enough for leftovers, which is a bonus because lasagna is one of those foods that almost always tastes even better the next day.

Blog | Bloglovin | Facebook | Twitter

Natasha and Silvie chose…

10 Reasons Why I Am No Better Than My Kids. from Domain of the Mad Mommy

Am I supposed to hold myself to a higher standard? I mean, I am their mother after all. Yet, somehow, I am no better than my kids.

Lori chose…

The Latest in Cat Pumpkins and More from Oh My Heartsie Girl

Welcome To Weekend Fun Party Halloween Pumpkin Preview I could not wait to start sharing these cute creations I found while searching on All You and Good Housekeeping websites.

Jillian chose…

Fall Handbag Essentials with U by Kotex from Warrior Queen

It’s the first day of fall and California spent the morning pretending it was going to actually have cold weather for once. It’s quickly thrown a JK in our faces, but I took advantage and wore my favorite Sevenly sweatshirt as I dashed to Walmart to get the best deal ever…which totally inspired today’s post. It does help that my mom’s best friend gave me a Kate Spade handbag this past week…Paulina’s so proud of me!

Tiffany chose…

The Phone Call That Left Us Speechless from How Do the Jones Do It?

It was a school night and we were just getting ready to crawl in bed when the phone call came. ‘Jenny and her young daughter, Grace, don’t have a place to stay tonight. The hotel won’t take credit over the phone … can you go to the hotel in the next town over and pay for two nights?’

And the winner is…

Therapeutic Blogging from The Realist Optimist

Congratulations!! You have won 2 weeks of free ad space on Epic Mommy Adventures! Please e-mail Natasha at 1EpicMommy@gmail.com for more information on your free ad space.

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An InLinkz Link-up

Filed Under: All About Me, Link-Ups