Austin Weekend Event: Nurture My Child Summer Camp Fair 2018

Check it out this weekend! Nurture My Child Summer Camp Fair 2018

When: Sunday, February 25th, 2018, 1-4pm

Details: The Nurture My Child Camp Fair is a friendly, community focused camp fair to help parents select the right summer camp for their child. Free admission and free parking. Fun, free, hands-on activities. Learn about spring break, summer, and overnight camps for ages 4-18. There will be over $10,000 worth of free camps and giveaways to win at the fair.

Where: Norris Conference Center (2525 W Anderson Lane), Austin, TX

Five Days and Five Time- and Sanity-Saving Ideas: Day 5, Scheduling Care Appointments

Day 5: Always Schedule the Next Dentist, Haircut, Doctor, Fill-in-the-Blank Appointment While you are There

Today's post is about scheduling your family's regular care appointments for the year. This seems comically straightforward, but how many of us take our kids to the dentist and forget or put off scheduling their next appointment? No more. Make it a priority to always schedule your next appointment for any service or medical visit while you are in the office. This will save time in the long run and ensure that you and your family are up-to-date on wellness and self-care appointments....

Five Days and Five Time- and Sanity-Saving Ideas: Day 4, Control Paperwork Clutter

Day 4: Create an In/Out Paperwork System

Paperwork clutter getting you down? We are all inundated on a daily basis with mail, bills, important documents, and kids' school forms, assignments, and completed work. I have a simple, inexpensive suggestion to control this paperwork clutter...

Five Days and Five Time- and Sanity-Saving Ideas: Day 2

Day 2: Scheduled weekly grocery shopping and a little help from some friends...?

Today's post focuses on scheduled weekly grocery shopping. This and regular meal planning have made such a difference in our family life. This is a very simple, practical idea, but it took our family some time to fully commit to it. The key is to choose a day to make your grocery store list weekly (based on your weekly meal planning) and to grocery shop for the week and stick to it consistently.

I also highly recommend considering the use of an online grocery shopping service like Instacart. This changed our lives and that is only slight hyperbole (no ads or sponsorships here; I just genuinely love this service). Imagine, no more spending 1-2 hours on the weekend driving to different stores and grocery shopping with kids in tow, or running to the grocery store last minute to buy "something" to make for dinner that night when you and the kids are already tired and hungry. This is a recipe for disaster and a whole lot of impulse buying. You know what I'm talking about...

Five Days and Five Time- and Sanity-Saving Ideas, Day 1

It’s the New Year. Many of us are thinking about, or are already making progress on, better organizing our lives. And some of us have already given up (been there). In an effort to keep us motivated (myself included), I am going to post one practical, time-saving idea a day over the next five days. These five ideas may save you time, and, in some cases, money, as well as sanity. You will have to put in some time at the outset, but these suggestions will likely leave you less frazzled in the long run. Many are tried- and-true approaches that have made a big difference in the life of my family (others I am still working on).

Some of the ideas may not work for you and your family or may not be a priority; that’s fine. Pick the one idea (two if you are feeling particularly ambitious) that you think would make the biggest difference in your and your family's life and adapt it as needed. Then, once you have incorporated it smoothly into your weekly routine, you can try out some of the other ideas.

Day 1: Meal Planning...

Free Online Resource: Resilient Child Summit, January 22-26, 2018

I want to share a free resource that may be helpful to your family, a friend's family, or families you work with – the Resilient Child Summit presented by GoZen! will occur online next week, January 22-26, 2018. By registering for this free online summit, each day you will receive access to 3-4 expert interviews (from 20 of the world's top resilience experts) packed with practical tools to help kids cultivate resilience and manage stress better.

Favorite Podcasts for Kids (aka Road Trip Survival Tools)

Our family recently took a road trip from Austin to Marfa, TX. Having two daughters so close in age (8 and 6 years old) is wonderful in so many ways, but there are also times that the girls get on each others' (and our) last nerves, especially in the car. There’s just something about the close proximity of being in a car, not to mention the loss of autonomy that comes from literally being strapped in, that can lead to not-the-best behavior from the kids, and us adults.

Enter my abiding love for podcasts. I use them in the car all. the. time. The girls love them and I love their rapt silence as they listen to their favorites. On a long road trip, podcasts are our family's sanity-saving survival tools. As we have tried out quite a few podcasts for kids, I thought I would share our favorites.

Non-Traditional Christmas Eve/Christmas Menu

As I mentioned in a previous post, we are all about Thanksgiving in my house. Hands-down, it is my favorite holiday. We cook for a week in anticipation of that meal. In the past, we did a repeat variation of Thanksgiving for Christmas Dinner, but years ago, roughly coinciding with having a toddler and a young baby underfoot, we threw that idea out and decided to go for something far simpler and non-traditional that would stop stealing Thanksgiving's thunder and create its own. These days, we take an Italian-inspired approach. Christmas Eve is focused on pasta and seafood + artichokes, my favorite. The recipes we will be having this year are...

Our (mostly) Vegetarian Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. I love the idea of coming together with family and friends to share a meal and focus on our many reasons to be grateful. While I am a vegetarian, my husband and children are not. Without the centerpiece of turkey on my plate (I substitute with "nurkey") my focus has always been on the side dishes. While the decadence of the carb-bomb of Thanksgivings past is certainly something I have enjoyed, these days I try to make a more healthy-ish meal. Without completely tossing the carbs, my compromise is to up the vegetable quotient of the dishes I serve.

Below is the tried-and-true menu of recipes compiled over the years that we will be having at our house...

Cooking, Family, Recipes, Menus, Holiday TraditionsEsha ClearfieldNovember 20, 2017Thanksgiving recipes, Thanksgiving

Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead

On November 1st, the girls and I created our annual Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead altar.

Día de los Muertos is typically celebrated between Halloween and November 2nd in Mexico (where the holiday originated) and in many other Latin American countries, as well as among Latino communities in the United States. There are many similar traditions in other cultures as well. The general idea is that the separation between the living and the dead is lifted on All Hallows Eve (Halloween), All Saints Day, and All Souls Day (November 1st and 2nd) and the spirits of the dead return to visit the living.

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