Mom Talk

Tea Time Means Me Time

April 5, 2013 by Sandra 5 Comments

Nighttime at my house is not uneventful.

It involves diapers, baths, snacks, making sure children have brushed their teeth, reading, bedtime prayers, talking, saying goodnight, and making sure kids stay in their beds. Our regular routine takes about one hour to go through from start to finish, and it can be mentally exhausting some nights.

When the dust has settled and my four-year-old stops getting out of his bed, I look forward to having a little me time. And for my longtime readers, who followed my partial juice fast in February (where I blogged about my daily meals and snacks), you know that my regular nighttime drink of choice was tea.

I’ve been a tea-lover forever. Well, not actually, but it seems that way. Tea and I just go together. It’s one way that I relax and unwind after a long and busy day of being a wife, mom, and work-at-home mama.

Bigelow Tea Time

One of my favorite brands of tea is Bigelow Tea. Right now, I’m enjoying their vanilla chai tea at night. I love it, because with a little rice milk, it’s the perfect drink to sip while I catch up on emails, read blogs, and decompress before I head into whatever nighttime projects I have scheduled.

Sometimes after I’ve had some me time and I don’t have to work on any projects at night, I get to sip my Bigelow tea while my husband and I catch up on the latest episode of Dateline. While this is a rare treat lately, it’s another way I love to enjoy my tea.

Thank you, Bigelow Tea, for making such a huge variety of teas to enjoy. Your tea is a much needed part of my nighttime ‘me time’ routine.

Do you drink tea? What’s your favorite way to get in a little me time?

Make Potty training less stressful with GoodNites Disposable Bed Mats

November 19, 2012 by Sandra 4 Comments

With five children, we are no strangers to potty training.

But one thing I’ve found to be true for our family, is that nighttime training has been more of a challenge for our boys than it ever was for our daughter. Our daughter was completely potty trained day and night at two years old. Our boys have taken a lot longer than this, and we still deal with bedwetting on a regular basis.

Basically, our washer and dryer get a workout.

But we’ve found a great potty training tool to make our lives just a little bit easier when it comes to nighttime training. It’s a tool that is helping us keep the bed sheets out of the dirty laundry basket on a regular basis, and instead, spending more time on a dry mattress.

Huggies Disposable GoodNite Bed Mats.

They’re making a big difference in our family.

We buy them easily online at Walmart.com. My husband goes to pick them up the next day, and the boys have fun helping me put them on their beds. And when I say they have fun, they really do. 🙂 They like helping to remove the sticky adhesive on the back of the bed mats and get them set up on their mattress.

Here’s what they look like on our toddler beds.

Both of our younger boys are still in toddler beds, although Isaac will be graduating to a twin-size bed in the near future. These bed mats would fit nicely on either size bed or mattress. As you can see, they cover most of the crib-size mattresses we use for our toddler beds, and they would have no problem fitting nicely on a twin mattress.

Our boys have been doing a good job of keeping these bed mats dry, but if they do have an accident, we simply remove the bed mat and replace it with a fresh bed mat. No more having to wash their sheets every single time they have an accident. Why? Because these mats keep their sheets dry. 🙂

I know we’ll be using these bed mats for a longtime to come. Our boys are using them now, and we have one more child after them to potty train, who is currently still in diapers — our sweet Elisabeth.

Let’s hope she follows in the footsteps of her older sister and is completely potty trained by two years old. I can hope, right?

Are you currently potty training your kids? If not, at what age where they completely potty trained where you no longer had to deal with bedwetting?

I am a member of the Collective Bias Social Fabric Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and Huggies. All opinions are my own. #HuggiesWalmart #CBias #SocialFabric

Mom Talk: where I share about my real life

August 15, 2012 by Sandra 7 Comments

I’ve been reading books and blog posts about writing.

The same two words keep coming up.

“Just write.”

That’s what I keep hearing, so today, I’m going to do just that. Write. Even though, at this moment, writing is sometimes difficult to do with an 8 month old nursing baby in my arms. (When I need to, I’ll take a break, but then I’ll get back to writing.)

I started this blog post by beginning a fresh new post and simply typed in the title, “Mom Talk.” I don’t know exactly where that came from, but it just came to mind, and I like it.

Then I quickly realized that I needed an image for my post, because although I’m trying to “just write,” I can’t create a blog post and not have a picture in it. That’s just not me. My ‘inner designer’ won’t allow me to do that. 🙂

So I quickly powered up Photoshop, went through some of my most recent uploads, settled on the above picture, cropped it, took a few minutes to add the pink background & the words, “Mom Talk” then saved it and uploaded it to WordPress. Whew. Done.

I’ll probably switch out the picture in my Mom Talk posts periodically, but for now, I like the picture of my girls. One 9 yrs. old, one 8 months old. Both in need of a mom who is present, not behind the computer too many hours a day, who listens to their stories and babbles, and who cares about the state of their hearts.

Anyway, today was an eventful day.

I had an appointment that ended up lasting almost twice as long as I thought it would, and by the end of my appointment…

The kids were starving.
My thong of my flip flop had broken. In public.
I didn’t have any extra shoes with me, so I had to drag my foot as I walked so that it wouldn’t be so ~~embarrassing~~ noticeable. I can’t help but laugh at this now, even though, it wasn’t very funny at the time. Just ask my husband. Poor guy.
Elisabeth was on her last diaper. And I mean the last diaper. I had Ruben go to the car this morning to get the very last diaper we owned from the diaper bag we keep in the car in case of emergency when we are out of the house. I had intended to stop at the store after my appointment to get more diapers, but who knew my flip flop would break? Instead (on the way home), we made a quick stop at Publix where Ruben went in and bought a bag of generic diapers. We’re not really picky about the brand of diapers we use.
My phone was about to die. I had been using it to read a new ebook I downloaded on writing. I just installed the Kindle App on my phone yesterday after reading Amy’s blog post on ebooks. Love the app!
I’d decided that we’d be getting fast food on the way home.

We were all glad to finally be home. After we ate and unwound a bit, we left again to make it to the library before it closed. I had a book on hold waiting for me, and Breanna and Nathan needed some new reading material.

On a side note, we’ve started a new system with our two oldest kids to get them to read more. It’s working wonders. Breanna didn’t really need any motivation, but Nathan, our 12 year old son, did. He really needed motivation to read books with a little more substance and pages for that matter. Basically, we pay them one penny per page that they read. The books that they read need to start with at least 100 pages. That is unless they ask to have a book approved that is less than 100 pages. If the book has substance, and it’s 60 pages, I usually say, “yes.”

This is working wonders. My 12 year old son is now a voracious reader. He’s saving his money to buy LEGO sets, of course. And he’s totally cleaning us out of pennies.

That’s the gist of our day.

End of Mom Talk.

What did you do today? Have you ever had a flip flop break on you in public? Lol! 🙂

Mom Talk

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