Spring Flower Soaps

Spring Flower Soaps for sale!!

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My girls have made several batches of Spring flower soaps

with different scents and a set of hearts, too.

With a little help from me, they chose the colors, mixed them, added in the essential oils for scents, then I poured into silicone molds. After they cooled, the girls popped them out.

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We made quite a bit of soaps and there are too many for us to use so we are offering them up for sale to you!

They make cheery additions to your sink and smell wonderful on your hands after washing. They also make lovely little gifts and I have given these as party favors, too. There's a bonus here-- your kids might find washing their hands more fun with Flower soaps!

You have a choice of whatever colors you want and they are being sold as sets of 3, additional soaps at extra cost.

Made of moisturizing, clear glycerin; tinted with food-safe, made for soap, coloring; then scented with natural essential oils.

The scents are:

Pink Hearts- cinnamon

Yellow Flowers- Pearberry

Dark Purple Flowers- Lavender

Blue Flowers- Fresh Rain

Orange Flowers- Citrus

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Now the business part:

Set of 3 soaps are $7 per set

each additional soap is $1.50 extra

Shipping will be exact to your address, which means you'll need to send me your address so I can figure the shipping costs then add that to your total.

Once I have the total, I can send you a Paypal invoice. After I receive payment, your Spring Flower soaps will be sent the very next day.

Leave a comment on this post with your email address and I will contact you shortly.

I have a limited number of soaps, but I am willing to make more if there are plenty of orders.

Thanks!

Spring Preview

SPRING is in the air around here! The temperature outside is in the 50s and I can see little buds forming on the trees and bright green shoots coming up from the ground! The kids played outside this morning, the windows are open and my girls have been working on something special for Spring! Stay tuned...

Tell Me The Truth, Doc, Am I Gonna Die?

I make a lot of our foods from scratch-- partly to save money and partly because it tastes better. We have long since stopped buying meal "kits" like those so-called quickie side dishes or frozen heat-and-eat meals. There are a few exceptions, like fish sticks or just-got-home-don't-feel-like-cooking-let's-throw-a-pizza-in-the-oven.

That said, we had my Mom, Aunt and Uncle here last week. We had some paperwork to go over for the insurance people related to my Mom's house fire, and they stayed for dinner and an extra day. My Aunt brought a store-bought frozen lasagna for us to eat for dinner, so all I had to do was add a salad and rolls. It tasted alright-- doesn't compare to home made lasagna. The next day, since they stayed an extra day and I didn't plan on feeding 3 extra adults, I ran to the store and picked up hotdogs, buns, and chips for lunch. I bought a brand I don't usually buy (it was on sale) but I had it before (at least 10 years ago) and it's a good brand of hot dogs.

I'm paying the price. I believe I have food poisoning. Started out with severe stomach pains on Saturday morning and I was not hungry for anything. I declared it to be movie day and the girls and I watched a lot of movies while I huddled under a blanket in between my runs to the bathroom. Hmmm, "runs" might have been a bad choice. A few days later, I am still not 100 percent, but not as bad as I felt on Saturday.

Without health insurance, I cannot make an appointment to get a check-up and a diagnosis for what is causing my stomach pains. Everyone else seems to be fine and we all ate the same thing, although Hubby says the hot dogs gave him some severe gas. I have to rely on past experience with past illnesses and compare symptoms with those listed in our medical books and on the internet.

I'm slightly hypochrondiac, which means if I don't keep it in check, I can take a little stomachache and make it out to be a tumor growing and envision my belly stretching beyond normal limits and doctors operating and then removing a cancerous, hairy, 40-pound cyst from my body. I imagine a little blurb in the tummy to be something more than gas and think it must be my appendix getting ready to burst! It doesn't help that when I described my symptoms to my husband, that he started to imagine the worse, too, and later on, comes to me with tears in his eyes and tells me not to leave him!

When I think back to when the pain started and my reactions-- stomachache, runs, nausea-- it boils down to what I ate that I don't normally eat: the lasagna, the hotdogs, the chips. If, by the end of the week, I still don't feel better, after trying some natural remedies to help soothe the stomachaches, I may make a trip to the doctor's office. If anything, it will ease my hypochrondial mind and keep me from planning my funeral. In the meantime, I'll try and not be a monster to the rest of the family and drink lots of water and ginger ale.

Speaking of monsters.. I finished this little guy for my handmade toy swap and sent it off to my swap partner last week. He was fun to make and I definetly see more monsters in my future. He was my 7th monster and they get better and better each time.

Now, excuse me while I go and snuggle under the blanket in front of the TV.

Getting There...

**THANK YOU** for all the great tips and ideas you have given us about training Maisie! It really helped us to read about your own dog-training stories and knowing that training a dog doesn't take overnight and I admit, I was feeling a bit like a failure thinking we have had her nearly 3 months now and she still isn't potty trained yet.

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Maisie's indoor accidents are becoming less frequent and I am pleased to say that I only cleaned up 2 accidents yesterday! We try to keep a little area for her to do her business in when we go outside and it works-- as soon as I lead her in that spot, she promptly pees.

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We are also keeping her on a long leash when we take her outside now. We had an incident when she knew we would chase her off when she found some cat poop, so she ran off towards the front yard. As I chased her, she ran into the road and I feared for her, praying that no car would come flying down the road and hit her. She looked anxious and tucked her tail under and ran back to the yard when a SUV slowly drove by and I swear the driver of the car gave me a dirty look. I managed to grab Maisie and told her that was the end of her "leash-free" days.

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The leash also keeps her away from the areas where the cats poop and we hope to nip that yucky habit in the bud. She already learned not to snack from the litter box in the house so it's just a matter of helping her learn not to snack on poop outside.

photo taken by Oldest

Here's Maisie all wrapped up. She is a real sweetheart and the girls love her. Though we have our rough moments, I am glad we got her. Just have to remember that not only do we have to train her, we have to train ourselves to adjust to her needs, too. Again, thanks for all the advice, I couldn't have asked for better help and I am so glad that I have you all as friends! :o)

Poop!

I now understand why 637 people told me, "Glad it's you and not me" when I said we got a puppy and need to potty train her. Had I known it was going to be this hard to housebreak a puppy, I seriously would have thought twice about getting a dog.

I have asked long-time dog owners and the vet; searched the internet for advice and tips; looked up dog books for information and we are -this- close to throwing in the towel.

We take Maisie outside and use the same word every time we take her out. We give her positive praise when she pees or poops outside. We have her outside for 15 to 20 minutes, freezing our tushies off, only to have her take a dump on the floor not 5 minutes after we come back in the house.

She has an irritating habit of searching for cat poop in the yard and eating it. Talk about butt breath!

She has definitely calmed down and is not so crazy-goofy anymore, but she still has her moments when the kids decide to run around the house and she joins in on the chase. We've had to remind the girls again and again that dogs chase and they catch what they chase which results in bites. Poor Middle has been the recipient of several bites and that alone makes me want to say good-bye to dog ownership. Her arms look terrible with all kinds of scratches and teeth marks and I pray they don't leave scars. Let me add that Middle has finally learned to stop flailing her arms while she runs and has not had any recent bites from Maisie.

I have days when I ask my husband to remind me again why we wanted a dog. Oh, right, to alert me when something or someone is around or to bark when phone rings or someone is at the door. Is that all?

Then the husband hears on the radio that lots of people are giving up their pets because of the economy and they can't afford the costs of pet ownership and that makes me feel bad, to contribute to the problem if we get rid of the dog. And what would that teach our kids, to get rid of something instead of trying to work things out?

So please, tell me, is there a foolproof way to potty train a dog? Like fast? And how do we get her to stop eating cat poop? Our outdoor cats are polite, they do their business in the woods, not in the yard where we play, so we've been keeping her on a leash now when we take her outside, but we really want her off the leash when we are at home.

I'd appreciate any advice or tried-and-true tips you can offer us. Thanks!

Independence!

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Is there anything more freeing

than a baby holding his own bottle?

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Chocolate-covered Heaven

Before I met my husband, I didn't really care for chocolate. I mean, if someone offered me a choice between a chocolate chip cookie or an oatmeal cookie, I would take the oatmeal. Every time. Choose between jelly beans or a chocolate bar? Jelly beans all the way. I was more of a fruit candy kind of girl-- gummies, jelly beans, butterscotch hard candies, hot tamales... you get the idea. Chocolate? Eh, take it or leave it. If I had to have chocolate, it had to be milk chocolate. Dark chocolate was just nasty, ugh! With the exception of chocolate covered cherries. I love anything with cherries, and those chocolate covered cherries don't last long around here!

My husband, on the other hand, L O V E S all things chocolate. He will eat nearly a whole bag of kisses in one sitting, or if he couldn't find any chocolate, he'll raid the pantry for chocolate chips-- the poor man's chocolate! Somehow, over the years, watching my husband enjoy eating his chocolate treats, licking his fingers and smacking his lips, I've become a chocolate lover. When I was pregnant with baby #4, my food craving was chocolate. I tell you, I never ate so much chocolate! That dark chocolate stuff? Growing on me!

I was disappointed when Brach's stopped making chocolate covered cherries and the stuff out there now doesn't compare-- the cherries are withered and tough. I always get a box for Christmas and the one I got this past season, I only ate a few before I gave the rest to my husband and the kids. So imagine my delight when I saw a recipe in the latest Taste of Home magazine (Feb/March issue 2009) for chocolate covered cherries (wonderful candies two ways)! I just had to try it.

I tweaked the recipe a little, because as always, I use what I have on hand and I don't like/buy some of the ingredients called for. They are fabulous! A little time-consuming to roll each cherry inside of the creme filling, and then individually dipping each in the chocolate (I used real melted chocolate instead of candy coating), but the result? Oh so worth it! They are the best I've tasted in a long time and the kids had fun rolling the cherries (of course I enlisted their help! It was like playdoh!).

Middle licking the spatula. Mmmmm!

What cherry? I didn't eat any chocolate covered cherry!

Yummy yummy yummy!

The candy was gone lightning quick after this photo was taken!

After we rolled all the cherries inside of the creme, I still had some creme left over. In the magazine, it listed 2 ways to make candies with the creme and the other way was to make cookies and creme bonbons. As I said, I don't like/buy some of the ingredients listed for that, so I improvised and added cream cheese and cocoa to the leftover creme then scooped out little balls with a small ice cream scoop, froze them, then dipped in chocolate and chilled until hard. I made my own version of chocolate truffles! So good!

I know this recipe will go into my little recipe book and will be made at least once a year. I am already adding this to the list of home made goodies for Christmas 2009.