Hi All!

I have been a very bad blogger lately..Kids back in school and sports and dance in full swing, we are busy busy bees!

I have been on a homemade kick. I’m thinking if I can make it for less and have fun while I’m doing it why not right??!!

Last week I made my first batch of laundry soap (smells wonderful) I already had the Borax so the total cost for all the other supplies was $5.35!! I’m keeping track of how many loads I’ll get out of this batch to figure out my total saving. 2  tablespoons per load but I add an extra if it’s an extra large load.

This week  I decided to tackle homemade yogurt. All the recipes I have found have said how easy it is and that once you make your own you will never buy store bought again..sounds awesome right…well I failed on my fits batch and threw out a gallon of organic milk :( Yesterday all the kids were at school so I thought I’d give it another try. This time I used a half gallon. I’m not going to lie, during the process I almost gave up and threw it all out again but now am I glad I didn’t!! First the milk go to hot but when I went to lookup what to do if if gets to high I found out that it’s supposed to get up to 200 degrees so then I felt a little bit better. It took about an hour to cool back down to 115. The next step was to add 2 tablespoons of store bought yogurt (for the active cultures) and keep it on warm for 2 hours…well that didn't go as planned. With my crockpot set on warm the temp was going up again. So I scrapped that idea, unplugged the crockpot and wrapped it up with 2 heavy beach towels to insulate it and I went to bed. I told myself that if I got up this morning and it didn’t turn out I was done with the homemade yogurt idea. I was like a giddy little girl when I unwrapped the crockpot and found perfect yogurt!! Homemade is a little runnier than store bought so I strained some in cheese cloth and…Oh my goodness, I’m in love!!

No Whey :)

 

If you are buying organic Greek yogurt and have a crockpot you have got to give this a try. No joke it’s

Da Bomb :)

Last Week of Summer Vacation..

We transformed our fish tank into “One Eye Willie” land!!

Last week we watched Goonies with the kids,  well now the girls are obsessed and they watch it everyday! Sofia walks around saying “that’s what I said, I’m setting booby traps” So Sunday while the girls where at Bella’s for the day Anthony, Kolby & I went to 3 different pet stores, came home and the boys revamped the tank.  Imagine the girls excitement when they came home and found this!!!

Lucia-“Mommy is that really one eye Willies ship?”!!

Monday the kids and I went to the movies to see Smurfs. I think I may have been a bit more excited about this movie since I grew up watching the Smurfs, but it turns out the kids loved it just as much as i did!

  

 

Yesterday we headed up to Ft. Myers and spent a few hours jumping around at Pump It Up!

Then found a BBQ place where kids eat free!!! Nice!!

On the list for the rest of the week~

*pizza & sunset picnic at the beach

*tiger show at the Zoo

*making S’mores on a stick and floating in the pool all day! (that’s the plan for today!!)

*trip to the spray pool

and any other awesomeness we can think of!!!!

Arthur Smarthur

Our First Organic CO-OP!

 

At the beginning of this week Anthony & I decided to join a local organic Co-op. The kids and I went on Thursday to pick up our first basket! I am so excited that we decided to do this. It about a 30% saving from buying organic at the grocery store, Plus it will force us to try different fruits & Vegetables that I may not buy on my own and when in season its all from local farms!

The bananas lasted about 2 days before the kids finished them off, cantaloupe was another favorite of the littles . We have 1 orange and one pluot left. We used the mushrooms over the weekend with pasta and I made a fresh beet and carrot salad tonight with dinner. Tomorrow the leeks will be a part of our menu!!

I would highly recommend looking into joining a co op in your area!

Rainy Day = Snuggly Day at Home

Every moment can be more wonderful than the moment before

Rather than wanting to hold to the past longer and slow things down and stop the aging process — just revel in the power of now! You can't stop time, and you won't stop the recycling process that is taking place upon this planet, nor would you want to — but you do not have to suffer the moving through time. Every moment can be more wonderful than the moment before.

--- Abraham

The most perfect thing I could have read today. This morning as I checked the calendar and realized that it was time to flip another page up it hit me that I didn’t want it to be August, August means back to school and my baby girl turning 4 years old… I was thinking “why do the days, weeks and years for that matter have to fly by so fast. I want a pause button and to freeze my littles just the way they are. Life is so fast and I feel like one day I’m going to wake up and the opportunities for a dance party in the middle of the kitchen and snuggling and cartoons and story time on my lap and chalk on the driveway will be gone and I’ll have missed to many chances to do all those things . So opening my email and reading this quote made me stop and change directions. So my little ladies and I shook it in the kitchen while “country girls shake it for me” played on the radio and now it’s time to hit Chuck E Cheese for some pizza and fun.

I know I’m going to miss this stage of my life but that doesn’t mean I won’t love what is coming next just as much!

To the Zoo with Nana & Papa

 

 

Yesterday we went to the Zoo With Nana & Papa. We got there at 11:30, just in time to make it to the Alligator feeding! Then we got to meet the Keeper at the Giraffe encloser. The Naples Zoo has recently gotten 7 young male giraffe’s. They are in a temporary home right now until the zoo can raise enough money to have their permanent home built for them. They are beautiful animals!!  The primates are all on individual Islands so you can take a boat ride around to see them all. There are Spider Monkeys, Lemurs, & Gibbons.

Our afternoons are so hot that most of the animals are trying to keep cool either in a cave or under something shady. As we were riding by the spider monkey island some of the trainers pulled up on their boat to do some work on the island and the monkeys thought it was feeding time..you should have seen how fast those monkey came flying out of their tunnel!!! It was a fun treat for the kids to see them running around after the trainers!!

Kolby wanted to see the snake show so Nana & Papa stayed with him while the girls and I snuck off the get our animal shaped bottles filled with fruit punch that we get every Zoo trip. So far we have a pink flamingo, a yellow lion, a black gorilla, and 2 blue dolphins!

I feel like we are running out of summer, but days like yesterday make me glad that we are enjoying every day of it!!!