Fennell Seeds

Bow Bootcamp – How I Got My Little Girl to Wear Bows

Let’s just say I was sort of tomboy growing up, well…maybe I was a major tomboy. 🙂 I hated dresses, bows or anything girly. But in a fit of hypocrisy, I wanted my little girl to wear bows and not pull them out as soon as I put them in her hair.

I had 2 sisters and no brothers so my parents were just fine with me being into sports, jeans and tennis shoes. Then I had 2 boys and it made me long for girly things. Bows, pink, dresses and dolls where do I sign up?!?! Four years later, I was blessed with a little girl and I got to play and dress her in anything I wanted, until the toddler years.

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Toy Review – Gifts my 7 year old boys actually played with

by Carolyn 4 Comments

Do you love to see what other Mom’s purchase for their kids? I do. It is how I get my best ideas and I thought it would be helpful to hear what my kids have received and what actually was a hit or a flop. I love hearing reviews from other Moms what they think are hits and misses versus just looking through a catalog or watching commercials.

I even ask my neighbors and Moms of my boys good friends what they are purchasing to get ideas. I definitely spend way too much time researching. Maybe I just need to relax since they never look at me and say, “Wow, you must have spent so much time deciding that this would be the perfect gift for me. Thank you!”. It is more like, rip and tear through the packaging as fast as possible and 5 minute later they ask…”Is that it?” and their Dad and I freak out that they aren’t appreciative.

Let’s get back to the dream…the perfect holiday gifts.

Here is the list of what my 7 year old boys actually played with in 2015. This is what they received last year and my take if it was a hit or a miss. If you click on the name of the item it will send you to my affiliate link.

Connect Four – This game has actually seen the light of day many times versus being in our game closet collecting dust. It is one of my favorite games too so that may be why it comes out a lot since I will actually play it with them. HIT

2. No Stress Chess – never used. I think we got this out to look at it and it has lots of instructions and we never actually played with it. Big Fail

3. Chopsticks – My boys actually like sushi and were struggling with regular chopsticks so I found these in a magazine and purchased them. These are fun stocking stuffers. The boys love them and use them whenever we have sushi. HIT

4. Spirograph – Used once. This is way more difficult than I remember but maybe I was older when I used it? I love the idea but my boys didn’t seem that into it. I will definitely keep it for my daughter as she like to draw more than the boys. MISS

5. Guess Who – another game that I loved as a kid. This one was played with a bunch the first couple months of the year but hasn’t been out of the game closet in a while. Maybe I need to break this out. I like it so would give it a thumbs up. HIT

6. Illustory Comic – This is such a great idea but actually starting the book seems scary because you want to make it perfect. It is a fail for us but maybe if I wasn’t such a perfectionist and just let my boys draw and write anything on it it would work for us….deep thinking now…maybe I just let go and let them just do it and maybe it will actually get done. MISS

7. Art Set – for one of my boys this is a big hit. He loves it and gets it out on his own to do some projects. My other boy has never used his once. This was such a steal of a deal for such a nice set that I have no regrets since my daughter will probably love it. HIT

I will definitely keep track each year of what I purchase and which gifts are hits. If you haven’t seen it already check out these posts:

Favorite Advent Toys that Kids Love

Toy Review – Gifts my 3-year-old received last year and what she actually played with

Fennell Family Life plus Weekly Goals

by Carolyn 2 Comments

This weekend was so great for my boys. We took a day trip to go visit our yellow lab, Dixie, who is at hunting school. She has been there almost 6 weeks now and we were really missing her and wanted to make sure she knew that we are still her family. While my husband doesn’t hunt very much, my father does and wanted to her to become trained to go with him when bird hunting. I was all for it so that she would become a well trained dog. I think she has a few more weeks before she will come home and rejoin our family. We are all missing her terribly, I think my husband wanted to dog-nap her to bring her home with us.

It was a beautiful area where the training school is located. We played with Dixie at the kennel and then took her on a long walk through the fields and the horses would all come up to the fences to have us pet them. It was so fun. But we were surprised at how emotional our boys were when it was time to leave. They both were very upset which was good to see because my boys are not the most emotional kids. I like when they open their hearts.

This week will be full of prep for the Thanksgiving Holiday. We go visit my parents at their beach house for the week. I can’t wait to see lots of aunts and cousins.

This weeks goals:

Family

Go eat lunch with my boys at school
Set up a date night. We haven’t been out just the two of us in a couple months and we need it.

House/Home

Order Britton’s Birthday Cake
Order Christmas Cards

Blog

Link up with 6 Blog Hops. I would like to get some readers, it will be more fun to write if I know that someone is reading. Hi there, if anyone is reading this. 🙂
Write a Thanksgiving post that links to my 5 favorite posts to have up during the week of Thanksgiving. I will take the week of Thanksgiving off.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Friday Favorites – Water Bottles

by Carolyn 2 Comments

When you are a Mom to kids who are getting into sports you realize your water bottle needs change quickly.

First – they all go missing….ALL THE TIME!

Second – you stop worrying so much about quality

Third – you find a kind you can live with the quality/cost and stock up on a bunch of them.

I used to buy the Thermos brand. I liked that they didn’t sweat and they were well made and great for not getting things wet in their lunch boxes. My daughter has one and they work great for when I am still in control of their backpacks and getting them to and from their activities and school so I can make sure we don’t leave without it.

Here is my daughters…

Then your kids grow a little and their sports practices become so often that the parents finally say to each other “This is crazy for us to all be driving here every day…Let’s Carpool!” This is awesome in so many ways except the one negative. The kids become responsible for their own sports gear and getting it off the field and into the car of their ride home. I don’t know about your kids but my kids have no sense of responsibility. We start missing random things like a shin guard or ball or the most often is water bottles.

We have been through a bunch of water bottles and this one is my new favorite.

Here are my reasons why I love it the best (as of this week).

simple, only 2 pieces
large enough for all the water they need
doesn’t have a lid that could potentially not be closed properly and leak
cheap enough that I can buy a bunch to keep on hand and not be completely annoyed when they lose one.

Moving on to these type of water bottles makes me feel like my boys have grown up….no more characters. 🙁

If you want to purchase these you can use my affiliate links.

What type of water bottles do you use?

Bonus Cleaning – Daughter’s Clothes

by Carolyn 2 Comments

This is an embarrassing mess to show. My excuse is that it is the end of summer clothes season (yes it has still been shorts weather where we live) so this has been used all summer and now it time for the clean out and change over to fall clothes.

I keep most of my daughters clothes in our Master Bedroom. One day I’ll switch them into her room but this is where she mainly gets dressed so it is so much easier to have them in here.

Before:

The biggest mess is the bottom shelf

Let’s get to work. First I am going to remove all the clothes and make a bigger mess and put them into piles. Isn’t that how all projects go? First make a bigger mess, promise your husband it is going to be better in an hour I swear and then it all comes together at the end.

I made piles of outgrown clothes and shoes for my sister who has a 1 year old little girl. Then a pile of summer clothes that may still fit next year to put away in Britton’s closet upstairs.

Then I vacuumed and dusted the bottom shelf and went through her pajama basket on the middle shelf on the left and got rid of a lot of outgrown pajamas. Cleaned up the clothes that were just laying on the top shelf and Voila!

Much better! Now I need to shop for a few fall items. She needs leggings and casual clothes. All her dresses are hanging up. My daughter will only wear leggings so in the winter I mainly have her wear a dress with leggings underneath. I am now feeling much better about her clothing situation and our mornings will go much smoother.

Fennell Family Fun – School Pictures

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

I feel like we are in picture overload here in our house. We had professional portraits taken a week ago that turned out so great, I can’t wait to upload some pictures here. Then the very next day my boys had their school pictures so I decided not to order them since I was going to have the family ones. My boys are well known for not smiling at all so I thought they would be terrible. Well, they sent home the proofs to give us a final chance to order them and they are fantastic.

Here are pictures of the pictures so poor quality.

So now I have spent the money on the professional pictures and now an extra amount on the school pictures. Britton had hers this week as well but I haven’t seen the results of those so that could cost me a pretty penny as well.

Why do they charge so much for school pictures now? Well, of course, they want to make money, but with having 3 kids it is just crazy when the smallest package starts at $35. We went from not having any professional pictures for at least a year, to having a boatload of pictures all at once. I guess I won’t be to sad one day to have lots of pictures of the kids but I will be sad to look at our bank account at the end of the month. Ha!

My Packing List

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

Our family does a lot of weekend trips. Before kids it was easy to just throw my stuff in a bag and go but now it is a lot more stressful. The worst is getting somewhere and realizing you forgot something important like the camera part of the monitor! I have done that before. My husband is super organized but I missed that gene, one time I was packing and frantically wondering what else I needed to pack for the kids, he said he couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a packing list. I had no clue what he was talking about and once he explained it made perfect sense. Keep a list on either paper or your phone of what you packed and then the next time you can reference your list and you will be much faster and know that your aren’t forgetting anything!

Now I will share my embarrassingly messy list….ready….here is my packing list.

Ok now please erase that one from your mind and think of one with swirly fonts and pretty pink and green lines. Ha! This is actually a list I made (and used over and over again) a couple years ago since there are diapers and sippy cups listed on there…now I don’t have to worry about those items so have a little bit less to pack. Yea!

Whether you put it on paper or on your phone it helps so much to make sure I have all our important items.

We could also talk about whether you like to pack a few days in advance or whether you wait until the night before like I do. I swear I do have a system! I like to have every piece of laundry done and put away and I work on that for the 2 days prior to the trip and then the evening before I am able to pack everything at once. That is the way it works for me. How do you like to pack? Would a packing list help?

8 Tips for Easier Christmas Prep – Finding Great Gifts

by Carolyn 2 Comments

A couple years ago Santa had been requested to only bring educational toys that had been well researched. Everything had a purpose and was going to be used for a long time. Christmas morning came and everything went well and we had a great morning until….we went to their cousins house. Santa had brought not only some educational toys but also tons of plastic junk from Walmart. I could see it from my boys eyes….the cousins house looked amazing compared to ours! I know we should only worry about what happens at our own house and not at others but having a direct comparison in two 5 year old boys eyes was not good. From then on Santa has done 90% well thought out educational toys and then added in a little pizzaz with plastic packaging and wild colors and “just because it looks cool” toys. I consider the toys that are in the wild plastic packaging the “decorating” of the event making it all look festive.

I enjoy researching and finding great gifts for my kids that they will actually use. The real reason is that I do not like to waste my money on items they will only use one time or are just pure junk. There are several websites that are great for finding gift ideas. Here are my top 5.

Cool Mom Picks – this website/blog has some great gift guides. I just typed in 8 year old boy into their search area and it pulled up a great list.
Modern Parents Messy Kids – another blog that has gift guides but I like how these gifts are broken down into categories like “best toys for getting out energy inside” and “best toys for construction/building”. I have especially been looking at the guide for toys for quiet time to help my 3 year old play independently.
Fat Brain Toys – this is a guide that usually has the latest toys and is divides by all sorts of ages and categories.
Pinterest – this is a no brainer but I have to mention it in my top 5. You can find just about any sort of list or category here. Everyone is so creative, I like gift guides done by men for men, it is very helpful to get a guys perspective sometimes.
Uncommon Goods – I like this site for gifts for the people who have everything. Great for a gift they have never seen before like animal footprint flip flops or stop motion animation kits.

My tip for ordering online. DO NOT WAIT UNTIL CYBER MONDAY!! I made a big mistake last year and made my list and sat and waited an extra 2 weeks to try and get the deals that it seemed everyone else had found in previous years. When I went to order that Monday quite a few of my “must-have” gifts were sold out. I almost had a stroke…here I had made my decisions and lists a few weeks prior and just sat and waited and now the items were gone! Plus my other items were not any lower in price. Never again.

Do you have any places I should look at to get ideas for gifts? I’d love to check them out.

Friday Favorite – Preschool Scissors

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

Is your preschooler still holding their scissors funny while cutting? My little girl was having the toughest time and the more I try to correct her grip the angrier she became and she wouldn’t want to cut anymore. Funny how that happens when working with 3 year olds. Ha! I found some preschool scissors that have really helped.

See that little yellow thing between the handles? They have a little spring mechanism that helps the scissors reopen after she cuts the paper. That was the toughest part for her and made her want to hold the scissors incorrectly. These scissors come in the craft box by Alex. Ready, Set, Cut. Here is the craft box I purchased.

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Now the scissors will only cut the thicker paper that comes in the box. I am sure once we are finished with the cute projects in the box I can find some thicker cardstock that she can continue to use these. She is finally starting to think that cutting is fun and learning the proper technique.

Bonus Cleaning – Kitchen Hutch

by Carolyn Leave a Comment

I can tell that a Bonus Cleaning post once a week is going to really help my house. Today’s project was something that is right in our face every day and now looks so good that it makes me want to keep everything around it looking nicer too. Funny how that works!

This hutch is right next to our kitchen table and has become a big dumping ground for craft items, markers, etc. Here is the ugly before picture.

Yes, it is just a wee bit out of control!

I decided to jump in with the items I immediately knew belonged somewhere else. The tissue box went back to the bathroom and the small buckets went to our craft closet (that needs its own post at a much later date).

Then I was looking at 4 pencil boxes. Do I really need 2 boxes full of crayons? No!

Lots of trash and construction paper was next on the list. Paper went to the craft closet and then notice the big Napa coffee table book. It was gifted to us several years ago. I thought we would love it because we are planning a trip to Napa hopefully next year but we haven’t really looked at it, so it is now in the donation pile I am planning to take to Goodwill.

Yuck, the aftermath is not pretty. I cleaned this off really good and…

The beautiful result! Ahh….makes my kitchen feel and look great! Why can’t I keep on top of these things? How do you keep up with your kids crafts?