Honey Bunches of Oats giveaway!

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

*ENTRIES ARE NOW CLOSED*



I'm so excited about this giveaway! As a Purex Insider, I received a free box of Honey Bunches of Oats in the mail and FIVE FREE PRODUCT COUPONS to give away! I'm definitely not as good as reviewing cereals as Michael is, but we do like Honey Bunches of Oats in this house. We received the new Honey Roasted flavor, which I had not tried before. We like the variety of the granola bunches and the flakes, and the new Honey Bunches of Oats has even more granola bunches than ever. It also has fewer grams of sugar than Honey Nut Cheerios and has 10 grams of whole grain in each serving.


Here's the scoop:

Five readers will each win one FREE product coupon for any one box of Honey Bunches of Oats. You may win more than one coupon as each reader can have up to two entries. The winners will be selected using Random.org. I'll contact the winners by email, Facebook, or phone (however I can reach you) after the giveaway is closed, and you'll have 48 hours to respond or I'll choose a new winner. The giveaway will close Friday, May 18, 2012 at 6pm EST.


How to enter: (up to 2 entries per person)

1. Leave a comment telling me your favorite variety of Honey Bunches of Oats. You can find the varieties on their Facebook Page here.

2. Leave a separate comment with one of your favorite inexpensive recipes. Anything will do. You won't be judged on your recipe; all entries are of equal value :)


Don't forget that we'll be having another Purex giveaway in the near future too!



*I am a Purex Insider. Post provided a free sample of their Honey Bunches of Oats - Honey Roasted, but no other compensation was received & my opinions are my own.


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Lately

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

My two handsome guys:

My hero hubby put Mac to sleep twice that day.  Love him and am grateful that I get to have him around so much!  We also have a new, never before seen arrangement of our living room now.  David is so creative that way - I'm always amazed at the arrangements he comes up with and how well they work.  I might look at the furniture and the shape of the room and come up with maybe 2 possibilities to arrange it but I think this is the third this year and I really like it.


Mac is so grown these days.  He plays with his feet now and has started on rice cereal once a day, which helps him sleep longer in the mornings.

Out to dinner on Mother's Day
These past five months of being a mommy have been so much fun.  We just enjoy Mac so much, even when he's ornery and doesn't want to take naps :)

On Mother's Day we also really appreciated Pastor Dan's sensitive and appropriate sermon on Hagar and Abraham - the God who sees and foresees.  Loved hearing about some of the nuances in the Hebrew words that we didn't know before and really showed God's special thought and care for Hagar.  I love the story of Hagar so much and wrote a paper on it in college... didn't get 100 and I'm still not sure why ;)

I put a lot more pictures on Facebook, including the lemon that Mac wanted to chew on... sooo funny.


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Let's Be Honest

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

Purex is launching a new campaign called Let's Be Honest.  The campaign features funny videos showing real life moments that will be posted through July at Purex.com.  And as part of this campaign, they will be sending me more free product coupons to give away on this blog!   So check out the videos, stay tuned and keep an eye out for the giveaway, coming soon.


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my manipulative sweetie

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

These days, Mac LOVES it when I play ride a little pony with him on my leg.

The problem is, when I start, I'm not allowed to stop! As soon as my poor leg wants a break, his little poochy lip comes out and his eyes fill with real crocodile tears. This isn't his whiny/fussy attitude, this is his heart-is-breaking sobbing.

And as soon as I start again, he smiles through his little red puffy eyes. It's terribly cute. But I can only physically fall for it so many times. :)

Sometimes, he doesn't get what he wants by crying. Sometimes, he gets it by being all smiley and chatty when it's time for me to put him down and do chores - I can't resist him then!

Just a little story from today:
I was awakened at 5:30 to the sound of him filling his diaper over the monitor. When he was done, he just lay in bed and chatted to himself in the dark. I woke myself up to go change him. I was just so glad that I heard it so all I had to change was his diaper. In another hour, I would have been changing his clothes, crib, giving him a bath, etc. Well then I didn't want to take him with me because it was too early for him to be up but he was wide awake. I just put him back in the crib with his water sounds and he stayed happily awake in his crib listening to the water and cooing while I went back to bed for another half hour or so. What a good boy!


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a good night's sleep

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

Mac has been sleeping so well lately! I feed him and put him down around 9:30(ish) and he wakes up at 6:30 in the morning like clockwork. Mom & Dad are tickled pink and very proud of him. Most days when he wakes up and I go get him, he isn't even fussing, just hanging out in his crib waiting for me. We have tried to be pretty strict about once we put him down, we don't pick him back up. We might try to comfort him and give him his paci or things like that, but I think he's gotten used to the fact that he isn't going to get picked up once Mom & Dad put him down for the night. It's also helped to make sure he's pretty full when I put him down. A lady at church helped me to become more aware of that - since he's so thin, he doesn't have as much reserve as chunkier babies and it helps to keep him full.

When we were in Chicago, I put him down for a nap and he was crying and carrying on. When I went to check on him, this is what I found:

He had kicked his way out of his jammies!

Naptime has taken a little longer to establish but he's even started napping great lately too, taking a couple multi-hour naps every day and becoming more predictable in his napping. It's nice to know that I can expect to have a chunk of time every day to get my chores done. Still, I'm always happy when he wakes up and I get to spend time playing with him. :)
Sometimes he wakes up so happy and just wants to coo and chat with me. He loves to tell me all about what's on his mind and how it makes him feel. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what he's saying.


Lastly, Charlotte lent Mac her Bumbo chair and he seems to be getting more used to it. Now he can even watch Mom cook since he can sit on his own.


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Travelling

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

This month held a lot of unexpected events for us. We unexpectedly found ourselves unemployed; it was a shock to me at first but David keeps reassuring me that everything will be ok. We're sure that God has a plan for our family and has a place that he wants us to serve. Right now we're still looking for that place.

We took the opportunity of having no immediate obligations to take an impromptu road trip to visit family and take Mac to meet everyone. We hadn't been to Chicago for 14 months and I hadn't seen some of my siblings and my grandma in that long, so I'm so thankful that we had the chance to go.

First we headed to WV to visit David's family. Mac has been smiling and chatting lately a lot, and I don't think he disappointed his grandparents :)

Mac saying goodbye to his granddad

We stayed in WV for the weekend and then headed up to Chicago, which is usually 10-11 hours further but took longer with Mac. He traveled like a champ, sleeping most of the way. I rode in the backseat when he was awake to keep him company and he cheerfully talked to me. We surprised my grandma and aunt, but my mom and sisters knew we were coming. It was the first time we had visited that it wasn't a holiday and we had no agenda or schedule except to visit with family and a few friends. We didn't do a whole lot but had a good week and got to spend time with everyone that we wanted to. Now we just need to quit going to Chicago in the winter - there's so much more to do in the summer!

When we left, my youngest sister came back with us and has been with us for two weeks. I'll miss her company and having girl time when she leaves tomorrow. We came back through WV on the way home and stayed over a day with David's parents again and were able to see other family and friends that day. Two days later we drove down to NC to visit my cousins while my sister was with us and David and I also popped over to see some of our best friends in the same town. We don't get to see them very often and I love to watch my friends' kids grow up and stay connected with them.

The weather has been like spring and we even made it to the beach this week for Mac's first time. It was windy though, so he stayed in his stroller out of the wind for the most part. He also celebrated his first St. Patrick's day this weekend.

He was a little tired when we took this picture. I made corned beef, cabbage & mashed potatoes and my sister helped with the Irish soda bread. I also made a pistachio brownie trifle with oreos. I've decided to make a trifle for each holiday for a whole year. Trifles are perfect since they mix cake AND pudding or cream. What's not to love?
Mac is not a snuggle bug. He likes to be played with, hold his head up and look around at what's going on, and he's been that way since he was born. I'm so impressed with the way that he traveled, although it didn't do much for helping us to establish a routine, and we added changing time zones and Daylight Savings Time into the mix. He's such a rewarding child since he gives the best smiles that light up his whole face when he's happy. I'm so thankful that all of our families except my one brother and his kids were able to meet him!


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Diapers

Posted by: WoodElves / Category:

First, some cuteness. He always looks so alert and calm when we snap him in his car seat:

Second, a picture of me and hubs with his birthday cake. I only get to make one cake a year (now two, yay!) so I usually take the time to make something fun. This year it was a Beatles cake, just regular Betty Crocker cookbook carrot cake.

Ok, now on to the point of this post :D We have gradually been starting cloth diapering with Mac. We knew before he was born that we were going to want to cloth diaper to save money and since I stay home with him, I can cloth diaper without too much hassle. Also cloth diapers are a lot more advanced than they used to be, so they aren't as much work as they were in the old days. We also knew that we weren't going to start out cloth diapering to give us time to adjust to being parents and research out the cloth diaper system that would be the right fit for us. We like the idea of being able to buy diapers now and use them with all of our children - way more economical and less wasteful than using exclusively disposables.

Now I'm really spoiled because the online cloth diaper retailer Diaper Junction has their only store location here in Virginia Beach so I was able to go to the store and see and touch the different diapers in making my decisions. Also, I don't have to pay for shipping. The other nice thing is that right now, Swagbucks offers Diaper Junction $5 gift cards for only 299 Swagbucks. I'm able to get those and save $5 on each of my orders.

This is the bucket that I got to put the soiled diapers in until washday. It's just a Safety 1st Easy Saver diaper pail and I got it because several people wrote on the reviews that they use it for cloth diapers. I got a Planet Wise wet bag to put in it to hold the diapers. On washday, I throw the wet bag and all the diapers straight into the wash together. I got the diaper pail from Babies R Us using a 20% off coupon and a gift card. It usually retails for $20 which isn't bad at all compared to other diaper pails. The wet bag was $16.50 from Diaper Junction and I used one of my gift cards for that too.


Like I said, we've been starting out slow with cloth diapering. Right now I just have one Flip diaper cover and this Best Bottom diaper cover. The Flip was on Mac when I took this picture. I have enough diapers here to last more than one day so if I'm doing much cloth diapering, I'll have to wash them every day but I wanted to do some test runs before I bought too many more. I used my friend Hope's excellent diaper review post here which helped a lot with making some of my diaper buying decisions. I've been stuffing the Flip with these generic tri-fold diapers from Babies R Us and I got three size small inserts for the Best Bottom to use for my trials.

I like that you can use any inserts with the Flip and you don't have to buy their specific inserts or multiple sizes. You could stuff these with kitchen towels in an emergency - it doesn't really matter. The problem with this for me is that it's a little too much like old school cloth diapering and not quite as convenient since you have to fold and stuff. Also, Mac had a blow out in the Flip today and it seemed like it didn't do too much to protect him but I'm not going to pass judgment until I'm sure that it wasn't because I didn't have it snapped tight enough or that his legs are still too thin for the leg openings.

Here is the Best Bottom with one of the inserts snapped in. I really like that these snap in and don't involve any folding so that makes them more convenient to use. I will have to buy different sizes of inserts as Mac grows, but again, since I'm investing in all of our children here, that doesn't bother me too much. Depending on the inserts you get, they're about $4 each. The different size inserts also keeps it from being so bulky on the little guy. When I change him, I'll just pull the insert off, wipe out the cover, and following Hope's advice, let the cover air dry and I'll put the Flip on him for the next go round. That way I rotate the covers and let them air out between uses.

There are lots of other kinds of cloth diapers and it's pretty overwhelming to wade through them all and decide what's right for you. I decided that I wanted to go with these All-in-Twos so that I could wash the inserts and reuse the covers; and I wanted these brands that use the same cover as the baby grows and I don't have to buy several sizes of covers.

Right now I'm really liking the Best Bottom and foresee myself buying more of those and making them my primary diaper. We're still getting the hang of it and we use disposables at night still, because I haven't invested in any overnight inserts (which are thicker) and because David primarily changes him at night. Sometimes.

Lastly, for disposable diapering, I highly recommend this little diaper caddy:
When I went to set up the baby registry, my friend Rachel recommended I register for one and I'm so glad I did. Until I started cloth diapering, we pretty much never changed Mac at his changing table - we just carried this caddy around the house, plopped it down wherever we were, and changed Mac right there. We still have it in our room at night for night changes. It's so convenient to have everything so handy.

So far, cloth diapering has been quite manageable as we ease into it. As I learn more and get more diapers, I'll be sharing more about what I learn.


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