Easy recipes for how to make your own natural homemade lip gloss and lip balm for you or your Valentines. Valentine’s Day is exactly one week from today. I have nothing. Frantically searching my brain for some Valentine’s Day subject to write about I toyed with a cute boy-meets-girl and bat eyelashes at one another, the excitement of receiving a handwritten card or a flower from a boy (or girl) and slowly peeling open the note as you glance up ever so slightly from the corners of your... more

This month in the Eat Well, Spend Less series we are focusing on getting back to the basics of feeding your family. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. Dinnertime is ever evolving in our house. This year we embarked on the path of swim club family, dragging the eldest to and from the pool a mere five nights a week for two-hour-long swim sessions. Combined with basketball, swim lessons for the younger crowd, catechism, homework for four, and time to wind down and... more

How to make homemade shaving cream with coconut oil and shea butter that smells of a delicious rosemary-mint pairing. Great for personalized Christmas gifts or just to pamper yourself. Around the same time that I started washing my face daily with the Ginger Coconut Oil Body Scrub I had concocted in the kitchen, I also had the revelation that post body scrubbing, you could shave your legs without using shaving cream. Shaving cream and I are lifelong enemies. I have to buy some pretty expensive... more

A look at how we use a string trellis system in our garden to guide indeterminate tomato plants upward. Plus, what is the difference between determinate and indeterminate tomatoes, why it matters, and companion planting. This week is planting week. The last frost date happened this week. The rain has stopped. I can see the sun. The stars are aligning, and it’s time to get these seedlings in the ground. The first to hit the dirt were lettuce seeds, which went directly in the dirt, but after... more

‘Tis the season for pears, and Jessica from GoodCheapEats and Life as MOM is here to give you a few great ideas of what to make with them. I’m taking some time this week to get caught up on work, get my manuscript off to my editor and whatnot. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that Kjell was referred to Mayo Clinic, and we’ll be headed there next month. Thanks so much for all your kind thoughts and prayers. Jessica graciously offered to step in while I get caught up,... more

It’s the last week in the Eat Well, Spend Less series, and I can’t believe how fast it flew by. This week is all about the shopping experience and how and where we shop to keep the grocery budget under control. Living in the Midwest poses a few challenges as you start thinking about grocery shopping. The first and probably most prominent challenge is that of local food availability during the winter months. These definite seasonal shifts also lead to seasonal shopping differences... more

When I considered what I would plant in my garden in the spring after Ole had finished placing each and every rock around the bed, I really just picked things that I liked. I didn’t do much planning or thoughtful introspection. I knew I wanted a kitchen garden, a potager, and already had my herbs in pots. I went to the farmer’s market, looked around, found a few things I knew I wanted like everbearing strawberries and tomatoes, picked out a few more items and then I just went for it.... more