Carolyn, Author at Fennell Seeds

Easy Trick to Keep Car Loving Boys Happy at Restaurants

I wanted to share a fun easy trick to keep car loving boys happy at restaurants. My husband came up the this little activity when our boys were little. My boys were obsessed with cars. I always kept a zip top baggie of cars in my purse or diaper bag so I had them at all times. Whenever we were at a restaurant my husband would turn over the kids menu and use the crayons to draw a little town for them. They would get out their cars and zoom them all over the paper.

Handicapped parking was always so interesting to them. If we were in a parking lot they would always yell if they saw a handicapped parking space and want to stand on the handicap stick figure painted on the spot. So we made sure to always draw in a handicapped parking spot on the paper. It’s the little things that make 2 and 3 year old boys excited. 🙂

This would also work for kids that are into trains. You could draw a railroad track and water station and passenger depot. We also would take all the sheets of paper and have the roads line up so it could be a larger town. They would spend a lot of the time waiting for their meal just scooting their cars all around their paper towns.

Can you tell which picture I drew and which one my husband drew? 🙂 I definitely did not get any artistic genes.

1 Week Clutter Free Room Challenge – Results

by Carolyn 2 Comments

I must say that I am so happy that I did this. My 1 Week Clutter Free Room Challenge. I thought it would be almost impossible to keep this room looking great all week. I always blame our crazy life and our 3 kids for the constant mess. Well, this just proves that if I just took a couple minutes to pick up each night then things would look pretty amazing around here.

Let’s start from the beginning.

I cleaned up and reorganized our family room to handle our Christmas mess. See my Before and After Post here.
I decided to pick up every little thing in my family room every night for 1 week.
Even when it got pretty messy during the day it motivated me to constantly remind the kids to put away their stuff because I knew if I didn’t it would be a bigger mess for me later that evening.

Found out it only took 2 minutes sometimes to put away the small things left out and that small step gave us huge returns!

Here is one day when it became messy during the day.

Now previously I would pick up most of it but inevitably there would be a toy or something that I didn’t really know what to do with it or it belonged in a place I just didn’t “feel” like walking to right then and over a week those little things would build up. Next thing I knew my family room looked a mess.

This evening I can truly say that my family rooms looks exactly like it did 1 week ago. I am pretty impressed with myself right now, its the little things right? 😉

What I can take away from this challenge:

Just take 2 minutes every night to put EVERYTHING away. This has the effect of motivating me to to pick up often during the day so that my nightly job isn’t too big a job.
I want to do this in more areas of my home.

I’ll post a new challenge for myself soon.

This post will be shared at my favorite linky parties.

The Most Important Thing I did for Myself when I became a Mom

by Carolyn 3 Comments

I would call myself a social introvert. I love small group social outings, hate big cocktail parties. I really need a lot of social interaction but in small close groups. When I became a stay at home mom, I needed to make sure I saw other adults and have conversations during the day. Plus my husband would like to not be the main person I tell about how exciting the latest sale was at Gymboree. Ha! Enter, the most important thing I did for myself when I became a mom.

The Moms Club. It is the perfect thing for new moms. You can find one in your specific area so you never have to drive far. The group meets during the weekday and have both large group gatherings and also small playgroups that meet weekly. The playgroups are split up by age groups. 0 – 12 months, 12 months – 24 months, usually up to 4 yrs old. So it is always a small group.

These small playgroups are where I have met some of my closest friends. You can’t help but become super close. Everyone has a huge thing in common, your kids. 🙂 If you become a regular attendee of playgroups usually you all start to meet up other places. For example someone will say, my Thursdays are boring anyone want to do library story time with us? And next thing you know everyone is getting together another day too.

Kids are welcome to everything and even siblings to any of the other playgroups if you have multiple children. So no worries if you have more than one child.

One of the benefits that comes later is that everyone is in your area so as your kids get older and they enter school they will already know several kids.

Part of the by-laws of the small groups being a part of the parent Moms Club organization states that most events need to be free so no worries that this would be expensive. There is a yearly $25 fee to join and that is it. Most playgroups are held in homes or if you don’t want to host in your home you can pick to meet at a library or park instead when it is your turn to host.

I can’t stress how important these women became in my life and how much it made me enjoy being a mom. Any question I had would be talked about as a group. If my child was going through a weird stage I would get tips from the other moms on how to navigate through it.

Please take a look and see if there is one in your town. Click here for the main page. I get nothing for recommending them, I just can’t imagine what being a stay at home mom would have been like without this group. They made it fun and not lonely. I love my Moms Club peeps. 🙂

This post will be shared at my favorite linky parties.

How I Treated Myself – New Pajamas

by Carolyn 1 Comment

This post may contain affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

Sometimes you just have to treat yourself, right? I try to get pedicures occasionally and they feel like I am splurging on myself, a little indulgent. Well, here is how I treated myself again.

My latest feel good purchase is new pajamas. I purchased one pair of these pajamas 2 years ago from Target and love them. I wore them all the time and hated when they were in the wash. I would then wear one of my husbands old t-shirts to bed.

The fabric is the perfect weight. A very light flannel. This makes them super soft but not too hot. I like to sleep under lots of covers so I don’t want pajamas that are too heavy. The pants were a little bit long but I fixed that by washing them and putting them in the dryer on hot. I didn’t do that with the top, I hung that to dry because I like the size of the top. Now they are both the perfect fit. I like them baggy.

When I went to buy another pair I couldn’t find them in Target. Just last year I figured out that they only come out once a year, right before Christmas. I could never find another pair that felt the same. So I had to wait until close to Christmas. I ended up buying a set for myself and 2 more as Christmas gifts.

My little girl wanted in the picture.

These are now such a steal at under $25.

Click here to go to Target to order.

I promise you will want to order more. It feels so indulgent to wear my new pajamas. I am especially happy to have a new pair for my girls trip coming up. My poor friends have seen my one good pair of pajamas 4 years in a row. Now I can act like I am just so fashionable in my evening wear. Ha!

A Grocery List that Finally Works for Us

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

I feel like I need to share this awesome app for keeping up with a grocery list for the family.

In our family we have had several grocery list systems over the years. A long time ago, when it was just me going to the store and I would just make my list on a piece of paper on my counter. I would keep the paper out during the week and just add what we needed to my list. This worked for a while but sometimes I would be out running errands and would decide I wanted to go to the store and didn’t have my list or would lose it. Also, it was just another piece of clutter laying on the counter at all times.

When we had a couple of kids my husband started going to the store more often for me but he would just grab the things I just asked him for and wouldn’t get the items I needed on my list because he didn’t have it. We even tried to keep a list on a white board on our refrigerator.

Now we have finally hit our stride. We use the app Cozi to keep up with our grocery list.

It is easy to click on the app on my phone and add something to the list any time I think of it.

The big bonus is that my husband and I share the same account so it doesn’t matter who is at the store. Both of us have the same app and see the same list. So if I added paper plates 2 days ago, when he goes to the store on his own to get more BBQ sauce he can see that we need paper plates without even asking me.

He can check off that he bought it and then it is no longer on the list. I love it! This is a good example of how technology can be amazing and save so much time and energy.

Have you converted from paper lists to using an app? Which one do you like?

1 Week Clutter Free Room Challenge

by Carolyn 2 Comments

My family room felt so good and relaxing to be in yesterday. Did you see the before and after photo? My husband and I were both saying how good it felt that all the clutter was gone. I decided I would try and keep the room clutter free for 1 week. This will be a good challenge for me. I’ll call it the 1 Week Clutter Free Room Challenge. I need to have a reason to make sure I pick up every last thing that is out of place every evening. Anyone want to pick a spot in their home to try to keep perfectly picked up for one week with me?

My hope is that this will become a habit. We are the type of people to let things slowly go over a couple weeks and then have a big clean up. By the end of the couple weeks that we let things get so cluttered that it would be embarrassing if someone stopped in without notice. Plus, it is a big job to clean up the room after 2 weeks. It would be so much easier if I picked up every single thing every night.

Here are two pictures of the room today that will be my goal pictures.

I am good at always putting the pillows and blankets back on the couch every evening. It is the little toys that sneak up on me. Especially when I know my daughter will just pull it all out again the very next morning.

I will post how it goes in the upcoming days. Let’s see if I can keep these toys picked up.

After Christmas Clean up – Before and After

by Carolyn 9 Comments

Today was a school day for all 3 of my kids so I jumped to reorganize some toys while they were all out of the house. The kids had a great Christmas evidenced by so many toys that we don’t even have room for them all. I had to clear out a bunch in order to fit the new stuff. This had to happen when the kids were not around.

I had a major new blogger fail. I forgot to take pictures of the entire living room before I started. Dang it! There was an even bigger mess than this but maybe it is best if I don’t further embarrass myself by posting the entire mess. Here is the one picture I remembered to take. This is just the fireplace surround.

Yes, the entire front of all our shelves looked like this so I should be proud of all I accomplished. I was able to empty 2 baskets to make room for Britton’s new toys. One for her American Girl stuff and one for other new toys. Don’t tell my kids but I got rid of 8 puzzles, Mr Potato Head and a huge stack of books. We never read down here so I took the books I wanted to keep upstairs to her bookshelf. That made plenty of room for the new toys.

A lot of my boys new toys were taken up to their room or in our craft closet. That closet needs a major clean out as well because I can barely shut the door but we will see if I can get motivation to tackle that. If I do I will make sure to get before pictures.

Here is my after.

Doesn’t your room feel so empty and amazing after the Christmas decorations and tree are out. My kids were rolling all over the floor like we lived in a gigantic castle. Ha! They even felt the space and were so funny about it.

This post will be shared at my favorite linky parties.

My No-Fuss Calendar for 2016

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This post may contain affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

Having a new year means starting a new calendar. I love putting everything in a new calendar. It seems like I can be super organized and have a fresh start. I do not use a big planner, although they look so cool. I know that I end up only using the monthly calendar with one big page for the month. For some reason my brain works better looking at all 30 days at once.

Here is a picture of this years calendar. I hang it by 2 big magnetic clips on the side of my refrigerator.

I sometimes take a picture of it with my phone so I have it with me if I need to look at it to make a decision while I am away from the house. I bought it at Office Depot.

Maybe I like the monthly view because we take a lot of weekend trips so I can see when they are coming up and sort of prep our weekends around them. For example, I can know if we have a trip one weekend that I shouldn’t really over schedule the next few days afterwards but I feel if I just look at our life one week at a time it doesn’t let me plan out slow times after busy times to let my family recover.

I also need a large box to fit multiple things in one day. With 3 kids we usually have overlap in activities. This means my calendar is too large to carry in a purse. I do not have nice handwriting. Being left-handed is my excuse.

I have a dream of using a pretty planner like this
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or this Lily

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I even owned a Lilly Pulizer one last year but never even cracked it open. My husband and I do use an app for our grocery list so we are not completely anti-high tech. 😉 I’ll talk about that in a few days because it helps us so much.

This is what works for me right now. How do you schedule everything?

Happy New Years!

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

I hope everyone has a wonderful year. I know I am excited about the next year. This blog has been exciting for me. It is fun to write. Before I started I was worried about running out of ideas and instead my list of ideas has grown longer and longer. I think that is a good sign of things to come.

I wish everyone a healthy and prosperous new year!

How Losing Weight is like the Debt Snowball

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

This post may contain affiliate links. See my full disclosure here.

In my last post about How to get into the Weight Loss Zone I talked about how it is important to start at a time where you have 3 – 5 days in a row where you know you won’t have any major temptations such as a party, birthday or other social event where you will be tempted to get off track. I am going to talk today about how losing weight is like the debt snowball that Dave Ramsey talks about in his book the Total Money Makeover.

You want to have several days to let yourself get into a routine and not have to make decisions. Make a meal plan or eat similar things each day for at least 3 – 5 days so you automatically are having some small successes. I ate basically the same meals each day for almost a week to limit any decisions I would need to make. If I left myself open to making a decision I would possibly give myself a decision that was not healthy or conducive to getting me to my goal.

This is the same situation Dave Ramsey is trying to give people who are trying to get out of debt. He recommends that you start paying off your debts smallest to largest. This way you quickly feel some success with paying off small loans and then you are in the routine of feeling strong and successful in your mission. This will be the same with weight loss. Once you feel some small successes you can be stronger against temptations such as social events or being stressed and tired and can still acheive your goal.

Give yourself 3 – 5 days of your new way of eating so that you can feel good about yourself, strong and happy. This gives you the strength to get in the weight loss zone. Once you get in the zone you feel like nothing is more important than getting to your goal and you are strong against temptations. So set yourself up for success and get yourself into the zone!

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