Fall Polishes - My Favorite Brands

I will preface this with saying that I, personally, have never been one to do green or blue polish.  However, it is all the rage this fall and appears as part of the fall hues in all of my favorite brands.  I will likely stay with the rich browns, reds, and grays that I look forward to as part of my fall polish palette, but there is definitely something for everyone in these popular fall lines!

From OPI

Mom's Need to Brag a Little :)

So Ben's 5th birthday was August 1, and we had a birthday party for him with, oh, about 40 of his closest friends :)  We were all set on a Spiderman birthday theme.  However, one day, a few weeks before the party, I saw him and my husband whispering about something.  Ben proceeds to come up to me with his big eyes and devilish grin and say, "Mommy, can I have and Angry Birds birthday party."  Well, considering this is BOTH his and my husband's favorite iPhone game, I knew that Dad wanted and Angry Birds birthday just as much as Ben did.  I surely couldn't disappoint my two favorite men, so both my husband and I set out looking for ideas on how to make this Angry Birds theme work.  Being an avid cupcake maker, myself, here is what I came up with.  I have never seen 40 cupcakes go so quickly!  It was a ton of fun (and quite a bit of work), but it was all worth it.  I have to give credit to the blog http://thecraftingchicks.com/, which is where we found the idea!  Of course, my son pointed out to me that we were missing the black bomb birds, and the white egg birds, but I think he will let me get away with it just this time.

Mom's Need Resources: Love and Logic

I was talking with a girlfriend last night who has a 14 month old daughter, and their little angel is just starting to have a mind of her own.  As most toddlers, her favorite word is no, and as soon as you tell her to stop, she looks directly at you and goes ahead and does it anyways.  She wants to see if you really mean no, or if this is just some big person joke.  My friend commented on how well behaved and loving my children are (she did not see the nasty look Ben had given me 10 minutes prior when I said that in fact he couldn't have ice cream before dinner).  I told her how good that made me felt to hear her say that, but that I too had went through the exact same things with both of my children as she was experiencing now.  At that time in my parenting career another mommy friend of mine had suggested a book that truly helped me get through those toddler years, and then some.  I didn't want to be one of those mom's that were constantly yelling at their kids, or counting to 3 (or 5 or 10) to get their kids to behave.  Empty threats ("wait until your father gets home") are counterproductive, as your kids see your authority melt away with every threat for which you fail to follow through.  This book, called Love and Logic: Magic for Early Childhood helped me stop the yelling (except maybe when Hanna decided to paint lipstick on her baby brother with bright pink nail polish that she had found) and focus in on more constructive parenting.  No, these beautiful little creatures that we bring into this world don't come with owners manuals.  But if we employ the wisdom of other moms, and sometimes professional psychologists turn authors, we may be a little closer to handling those parenting challenges with grace and a little less gray hair :)

Moms Need to Hear Nice Things About Their Kids

Yes, moms need manicures. We need nice bags, and recipes that make them look like they are a stylish Martha Stewart. But all of that is just the icing. The "cake" is our families...the children that make us a mom. And compliments about those amazing little creatures that have caused bags under our eyes, spit up on expensive dresses, and embarrassed us by asking inappropriate questions extremely loudly at just the wrong time mean more to us than any praise over a lovely bag or a gourmet dessert.

Today, when I got home and began thumbing through the mail I came upon a handwritten envelope with a local address from a person whose name I didn't recognize. Being that this was much more interesting then the sales flyers or my husband's ESPN Magazine, I opened it first. I found a handwritten note from one of the administrators at Ben's preschool. Having only known her as Miss Mary over the past two years, I hadn't recognized the last name on the return address. Her words brought tears to my eyes both when I read it the first time, as well as when I re-read it to my husband on the phone a few minutes later. While I won't bore you with the whole note, I will share the two parts that choked me up the most:

"You have been one of my favorite hello's and now you are one of my hardest goodbyes."

"This graduation is going to be a tough one for me. Ben has made a permanent impression in
my heart. To steal Dorothy's final words to the Scarecrow...I think I am going to miss
him most of all."

Even typing it brings tears to my eyes. I have seen Miss Mary in the afternoons when I pick Ben up, chatted with her when I have had reason to stop by the office, and shared laughs at the children's many performances over the last two years. She has always made a fuss over Ben, but she is amazingly kind and loving with every child I have seen her interact with. I never really considered Ben as having stood apart to her, yet always appreciated how genuinely kind she was to him and the rest of our family. Her note touched me so greatly, not only because she went through the amazing effort to send the personal note to our home instead of leaving it in his mailbox at school, but also because I had raised this little person that had made an impression with an adult at his preschool in this way. I felt this to be a huge compliment to him and his character, and, I can only hope, to his dad and I for how we are raising him.

I'll take a compliment of one of my kids any day over all the designer purses or manicures in the world :)

My June Challenge

I had planned to wait until July to come up with my first challenge...planning ahead is the key to success, after all.  However, I'm going to jump in this month, albeit a few days into June, and I'll explain why.  So my 4-year-old, Ben, came down with a sore throat and fever yesterday morning, which kept up anchored to the house on one of the first truly beautiful Sundays that we have had this year.  Typically, we would frantically be running errands, coming home, packing up the picnic basket, then head to the pool.   There, we would monitor the kids playing with their friends, while we caught up with fellow parents that we had lost touch with over the cold winter months, when we were only able to waive to one another from snow covered car windows at school drop off or pick up.  The kids would play until exhausted, we would pack up the car, and usher them home to showers and bedtime.  In exchange for a relaxing night, we would run around doing laundry and packing lunches for this last week of school, only to collapse on the couch only long enough to go over the week's schedule and then go to bed.  This is a normal Sunday in our house, just as in so many other houses across the country.  Yesterday, however, being grounded by Ben's fever and sore throat, we actually stayed home.  Ben napped on and off on the couch, my husband monitored him from the other couch, while keeping one eye on a baseball game, and eventually napped himself.  I cleaned out the refrigerator and then joined Hanna in the backyard, where we both sat in the sun and read and chatted on and off about what was in our respective books.  After a very casual dinner we all sat on the couch and watched a little TV.  We tucked the kids into bed, and Ben came down several times to report that he wasn't tired, having slept all day.  At his request I went and laid in his room with him for a little while until he was ready to fall asleep.  When he finally seemed to be out for the count, I went back downstairs to re-read my last post about the monthly challenges.  Looking back at my day, I decided I didn't want to wait until July for my first challenge.  So here it is:

Each day this month I am going to spend at least 10 minutes with each of my children alone just talking about their day or something that is on their mind.  


We are so busy with keeping up our busy lifestyle that sometimes the simple things are what we end up missing. Yesterday when Hanna and I were sitting outside, and then when I was sitting in in bed with Ben when he couldn't sleep, I was able to have really nice talks with both of them.  Some serious, some funny (things from the view of a 4-year-old boy tend to be fairly entertaining), but all of them important.  Being a working mom I tend to get caught up in the tasks and I don't really spend the kind of time I would like to just being with my kids.  Furthermore, when I am with them I am trying to maximize my time, so unless I am doing homework with Hanna I rarely spend much one-on-one time with either of them.  This month that will change.  I am going to make time every day to spend at least 10 minutes alone with each of them just talking...no homework, or TV....just talking.  Without a doubt, as happened with Ben last night, some of the things will be funny and worth sharing, so I added a tab onto my blog titled "Quotes From My Kids" which will also serve as my own kind of diary for myself of my personal challenge this month.  Kind of an online record of all of those things our kids say to us that we as moms tell our other mom friends, or our parents, or husbands...Those endearing moments of motherhood we wish we could capture and freeze in time.  As is the goal of the monthly challenge, I am hoping that doing this for the rest of the month of June will create a new dimension to my landscape...a tradition with my kids that helps me relate to them in a different way and makes them feel special, and creates some memories for us to have in the future.

Standby...check out my "Quotes From My Kids", and I would love to hear some of those funny things your kids say as well :)

Moms Need New Adventures

I was reading a recent post on my favorite blog by Kelle Hampton, Enjoying the Small Things at www.kellihampton.com, and she was discussing how every month she was going to challenge herself to do something new...something she always wanted to do but had always found an excuse not to. She challenged herself to run everyday. Even if it was just a few blocks, she was committing to put her running shoes on every day for a month. This stayed with me even after to folding closed the cover of my lovely new iPad (my husband thinks it's his iPad, but just because he got it for his birthday :). So I continued thinking about this and how important it is to continually add to our own personal dynamic...kind of a landscape of who we are as a person. Choosing to give ourselves a new challenge on a monthly basis changes the landscape, and adds new dimensions to who we are as a person.

I feel like this idea is central to the whole reason I started this blog...to remind mom's just like me that they are important people independent of their lovely children, that they deserve nice things that make them feel pretty, that they need to pamper themselves, and to have an identity as a person, as well as a mom. How better to find definition in yourself then posing new challenges, finding new things you love, and accomplishing things that had always been on your "someday I'm going to ____" list.

In challenging yourself every month to try something new for those 30 days maybe you'll find things you hate and never want to do again, but at least you tried. For example, I really don't think I like fish. I've tried it a few times...don't like it. My husband doesn't like it, so there's never any pressure for me to make it or motivation for me to try it. So, in thinking about these monthly challenges I decided maybe one month I should commit to making at least 5 different kinds of fish for dinner that month. Maybe I will find one or two recipes that we like and can throw into our dinner rotation. On the other hand, maybe I slave over 5 dinners and each time we are disappointed or end up bagging it and ordering takeout. Either way I can come out at the end with a broader landscape of who I am. I can either add "fish connoisseur" to my definition of myself, or permanently remove "try salmon" from my list of "someday I'm going to _____".

So this month I'm going to come up with my challenge for myself for July :) When I do I'm going to make myself accountable to any of you who may be reading this, hoping you might be out there listening. Maybe you"ll take the challenge on too. Maybe you'll share your personal challenge here and we can do it together.

A few things I have been thinking of for my first challenge in July:

• Take at least one picture of my kids every day and add them to my blog 

• Try to make a different kind of fish for dinner once a week for the month

• Finally start Ben's baby scrapbook even though he is almost 5, and complete at least 10 pages before the month is up.(Hanna's book is a beautiful testimony to her first year of life and of my creative energies...as a second child Ben is lacking any concrete representation of the first year of his life.)

What would you do? I'd love to hear your ideas!!

For The Kind Of Bags That We DON"T Want

This post is at the request of my beautiful friend, mother of two, and style star (you know who you are ;) So we all love bags...you know the ones that you carry around as fashion statements as well as your home away from home. Its those pesky ones that we get under our eyes that we don't like! You know...those ones that scream to the world that your preschooler kept you up all night with an ear infection, you were up late finishing your daughters science project because she didn't tell you it was due until 7pm the night before, or that your husband came home and told you that he needed 100 cupcakes for the firm's bake sale tomorrow. Here are a few suggestions I've found to help minimize those bags and help you look like you spent the night at a spa...not in the kitchen!!

• Make sure that your skin is well moisturized. Well moisturized skin retains elasticity better than dry skin. This allows your skin to maintain its shape under the eyes, instead of sagging, creating that baggy appearance.
• Apply tea bags soaked in cold milk - milk has healing qualities that helps stimulate the skin around eyes and therefore decrease the swelling. The cold causes vasoconstriction, thereby decreasing the swelling as well (this is the nurse in me talking :)
• Use vitamin E or caster oil under your eyes before bed. Vitamin E is a wonderful moisturizer (see above). Caster oil helps improve circulation and reduces congestion. Increased circulation moves excess fluid away from the under eye area, therefore reducing the bags. Reducing congestion that has settled in the area also helps reduce the appearance of bags under the eyes.
• Make sure that you completely remove your makeup at night before you go to bed.
• Use egg whites beaten with a drop or two of witch hazel. This makes the skin look tighter and less puffy.
• Decrease salt intake. Just like fingers or feet swell when you retain water from a diet high in salt, so do your under eyes.
• Sleep on your back with your head elevated so that fluid does not settle under your eyes.

Hanna's Manicure

Daughters need manicures too! Hanna's pretty pink manicure...she loves getting her nails painted :)

Shellac Removal

So my beautiful Shellac Manicure was two weeks old yesterday. It actually still looked great, but my nails had grown quite a bit over the last two weeks and I am more comfortable with them fairly short and neat because of my job. So, last night it was time to remove the Shellac. You can go to the salon to have them removed, and some specialty beauty supply places carry these little covers that you slip over each finger that then dissolve the polish. I had time for neither of these last night. So, after reading a few sites that discussed removal, I gathered tin foil, acetone based nail polish and cotton balls. I dipped each cotton ball in the remover, placed one on each finger, and then wrapped each finger individually in the foil. I let them sit for ten minutes. When I removed the foil and cotton balls the polish had lifted around the edges and kind of shriveled up. I used and orange stick and just pushed the residue off each nail. After washing my hands I inspected my nails. They were perfectly smooth and seem to have been strengthened by being protected by the Shellac for two weeks. It was so different than when I had gels in the past. Since the nails are not buffed down before the Shellac is applied there are no rough patches or weak tips. It was great. I filed my nails down to where I like them and put some pretty bright pink polish on to celebrate the nice weather (Exotic Liras by Essie). Shellac manicure and removal a huge success :)

Moms Need Accessories

So we are in Chicago this weekend (American Girl trip for my oldest, and visiting our best friends). Fabulous trip. In my efforts to pack appropriately I surveyed everything I had initially laid out to see what should be packed and what could be left. I having the genetic material that causes me to pack half a wardrobe for a three day trip, I find it most effective to lay things out first to try and visualize the outfits, fill in gaps and weed out extraneous pieces. As I reviewed my choices, I realized that accessories were just as important, if not more important, than the actual clothes themselves. A plain black shirt dress is just a dress, but add a striped scarf and bright pair of ballet flats and you have a modern mom's weekend on the go outfit. This is perfectly appropriate for grocery shopping, running errands, lunch with friends and even a casual dinner with your lovely family. Pair it with a few long necklaces, heels, or peep toe patent leather embellished wedges and it's perfect for a night on the town. Same thing with jeans. The right shoes and jewelry can help you go from looking like a mom, to a stylish woman with kids. Slight linguistic distinction, huge practical difference. Throwing on a scarf and a cute pair of flats does the same thing for me that my manicures do. It makes me feel put together and like I still have a sense of myself, while being a mom at the same time. I feel better, I look better, and I carry myself with more confidence. I'm not saying to wear three inch heels while grocery shopping. I'm just saying that taking five extra minutes to add a little splash of style to an otherwise basic outfit can make a world of difference in how you look and feel!

Mother's Day

Ok, to all you mom's out there....I know you have been looking online here and there or admiring some bag or piece of jewelry when you are running around buying for everyone else. So here's your chance to chime in, mom to mom. What would you LOVE for Mother's Day this year???

My Favorite Manicure

Ok, so true to my blog title I feel I should comment on my inspiration....my manicures! Right now I am sporting the new Shellac Manicure, or 14 day manicure, as some salons are calling it. It looks like regular polish, isn't thick like gels, but it stays on for 14 DAYS!! This is the second one I have had, and I just love it. I have french now, and even though I keep my nails really short because of work and everything I do at home, it still looks great. I have to change my regular polish about twice a week because of chipping, so this saves me a lot of time (later blog will explain how a busy mom can find time to do a bi-weekly manicure and the products I use to make it flawless, quick, and durable). A few pointers for those who may try this fabulous manicure:

1. Call around. There seems to be a pretty wide variance in the price of these manicures from salon to salon. I got the manicure last Thursday at a fairly well known nail salon on the East side and paid $46. It would have been $40, but I paid an extra $6 for the french, which is fairly normal. My sister went to THE SAME nail salon on the West side the next day and paid only $25 for the very same manicure (minus the french, so with the french it would have been $31). The person who did her nails gave her the option of adding a hand massage and lotion application, or not. Since she said no, the charge was only $25. He explained to her that a lot of times the technicians don't explain this to their clients, but he does because he wants them to continue to come back by making it affordable. Bottom line, shop around and ask questions. For $25 this is a great treat a couple of times a month. They look great, and don't look fake at all!!

2. Maintenance. Being the manicure connoisseur that I am, I have done a little reading on this. Make sure you have a good moisturizer or cuticle oil to put on you fingers when you have this manicure done, as it can draw moisture out of your cuticles and make them dry. Otherwise they are totally maintenance free for at least 2 weeks.

3. OOPS. So yesterday I was reaching in our bathroom cabinet for something and knocked over, what else, but a bottle of nail polish. Of course it fell and shattered on the cabinet floor, leaving me to clean it up before it was tracked all over the house. Even though I was really careful, of course I still got some bright pink polish on my neatly manicured nails. Secret: only acetone based polish remover will take off the Shellac manicure, so all I had to do was take some non-aceteone polish remover and a Q-tip and touched up the areas that were stained with the pink polish. Good as new.

4. Color Selection. There are currently about 25 colors of this polish, including the french option. There are a wide variety, but if you are into bright blues, or grays (my favorite polish choice over the winter months) you are going to be out of luck here. Otherwise they have a nice selection of neutrals, pinks, reds, and dark burgundy.

So that was my first official post about my manicures. Again, it reminds me that I'm not just a mom, I'm still a person and I still have style. That makes me a better mom.

My Story

So about a year ago I took cupcakes into work, and one of my lovely co-workers, upon tasting my cupcakes, said, "Your hair is always perfect, your nails are always done, your kids are always neat, and these cupcakes!!!! Is there anything you aren't good at?" . Hmmmm.....let me think....YES!! I'm a mom, just like a million other moms out there who are struggling to get through every day in one piece! But her question made me think. Evidently, I must be doing ok. Even if I feel like I am coming apart at the seams after a long day at work and a sometimes longer evening with my lovely children I must come off to others like I have things under control. And isn't that really what we all want? We, as moms, all have a laundry list of things that we wish we could have done a little better, chores that are 3 days late getting done, birthday parties we should have started planning a month ago instead of a week ago, more patience we wish we would have had while helping our kids with homework, ect. Now, the majority of us are realistic enough to know that we are never going to be perfect (those of you who don't subscribe to this school of thought must have some fairy godmother that I have yet to be introduced to). But even in our own acceptance of our shortcomings, we still want everyone ELSE to thing that we have it all figured out! We want our friends, kids' teachers, mother-in-laws, and neighbors to think to themselves, "Wow, she has got it together, and she looks good doing it!". So here I am, giving you the tools I use, good and bad, that help me look like I've got it together (at least in the eyes of my cupcake-loving co-worker). Enjoy my stories, my favorite products, favorite websites, and recipes that make you look like you slaved in the kitchen all day even though you didn't. And, please, by all means, share the same things with me! We are all mom's striving to get through the day and look good doing it! Part of looking good is feeling good and finding that one thing that you can do for yourself that makes you feel like you are on top of things. For me, its manicures. Making sure my nails are done, whether I sit down with a bottle of polish or I splurge and treat myself to a professional manicure, I feel better and feel like I look more together when my manicure is nice and neat. Everyone should have that thing that does that for them. It will make you a better mom when you feel good about yourself. It took me a long time to figure that out, but I'm a better mom because of my manicures :)