Embracing Life

The countdown to Hallowe'en begins! Please note this is not the actual number of days until Hallowe'en. The picture was taken two days ago. The house is totally decorated, although I still could use a few more things ;) One of the cool new decorations I bought this year are these Halloween Pumpkin Wall Decals from Kohls.  I love them!  My structured, OCD self feels the mantle is too cluttered, but the spooky side of me just doesn't care. ;) How do you decorate for Hallowe'en?

One of the things I enjoy about blogging is sharing my thoughts.  I know this page doesn't get a lot of traffic or comments, but I still enjoy doing giveaways for my faithful readers. Dial® soap has recently come out with a new soap, and I was lucky enough to receive two free bottles to try out at home.  I had my choice of two great scents, but went with the Coconut Lime Verbana, because that's always been a favorite of mine.  The NEW Dial® Deep Cleansing Hand Soap is the latest Dial® Brand hand soap bringing luxury to your hand washing experience.  This premium soap captures the fragrant essence of freshness, with an exhilarating blend of lime, coconut and verbena. With gentle micro scrubbers, it cleans and moisturizes deeply, for hands that feel sparkling clean. The kids were excited to try them... Keira loved that it felt like sand in her hand (the gentle micro-scrubbers!), and the boys liked that the soap was green. After drying their hands, ...

When Keith and I got married, we rented a house from my parents. It was where my grandma grew up and was about 100 years old.  We knew we'd be moving in a year or two, so we didn't buy any furniture, just borrowed from family or shopped some resale shops.  Our house was cute, eclectic and fun. When I was 5 months pregnant with Connor, we moved into the house where we now live. As a house-warming gift, we were given a brand new beautiful sectional for our family room, and took to furnishing that living space since that's where the tv was.  Over the years, we re-did the kitchen (cabinets, paint, etc), new living room furniture (to replace the sleeper sofa that didn't match anything), Keith added a second (full) bath off the family room (complete with a stone-tiled shower), and of course, furnished two nurseries, and then (sniff, sniff) big kid rooms....  Our bedroom, however, took a backseat. Two years ago, I had had enough of the mismatched dressers (one from Keith...

New furniture makes me happy!  When we got married, we rented our first house from my parents.  It was a tiny quaint bungalow.  We took the sleeper sofa that had been living in my parents' basement because we didn't want to buy new stuff when we would be moving in a year or two.  I bought a pretty couch cover and called it a day.  When we moved, the couch came with us.  Again, we discussed buying new furniture, but didn't quite know how long we'd be in the house.  So we bought another new pretty couch cover and went on with our lives.  (FYI, we did get a really nice sectional for our family room.)  Anyway, as the children got bigger, and more thrill-seeking agile, more of my living room furniture had to be removed.  I had a really pretty rocking chair, that I just knew was doomed to either break a kid (by them falling off) or be broken (by them rough-housing on it).  There was another chair that they insisted on climbing on, an...