TODAY is our 17th wedding anniversary! Hooray! Seventeen amazing years. Jayson and I have experienced many wonderful things together. During our time together we have lived in TWELVE different homes, in FOUR different states. We have loved SIX sweet dogs and ONE beautiful son! Through thick and thin, our marriage has strengthened and our friendship grown. I feel very lucky to be married to my best friend. Jayson makes me laugh every SINGLE day and always makes me feel special, beautiful, and loved. It’s pretty wonderful to get to spend your time with someone you enjoy so much. Happy seventeen years Mr. Lyon – I love you!
Now that Eben is getting older, he isn’t into Mr. Sweet Greens reading aloud to us (heck, we can barely bet him to hang out with us at all!) Ha!
Unless it is during the month of October. That is when our family enjoys our fun tradition, Mr. Sweet Greens reads us spooky tales by candlelight. It really is a treat!
We close the curtains, kill the lights, light our eco-friendly candles and put our reusable tea lights in all of our indoor Halloween decorations. It really gets us in the Halloween spirit and it is neat to see Eben get really excited for it. We usually have a yummy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies or another pumpkin treat along with homemade apple cider or cocoa.
I am looking for a spooky book to read together this month – any recommendations? Does your family have spooky October traditions? Please share them in the comments section!
NOTE FROM SWEET GREENS: Thank you supporting the companies that keep Sweet Greens in business.
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The holidays are right around the corner! I have already been teasing Mr. Sweet Greens that I am ready to get out the Halloween decorations. He just rolls his eyes at me. Ha! I can’t help it, as soon as September hits all I can think about is Halloween and pumpkin spiced everything! I can’t wait to get out those giant reusable bins full of decorations. And don’t even get me started on Christmas and Hanukkah. Bring it on!
We have quite a few Halloween decorations for all areas of our home, but one of my favorite spaces to decorate is our dining room. We have a large dining table, chandelier and windows that I always deck out! For Halloween, the chandelier it is covered in cobwebs, Spanish moss, a black crow or two and a bunch of little spiders. For the winter holidays, I hang large round ornaments and candy canes from ribbon in the windows. Am, I putting you in the holiday mood? Here are some of my favorite ways to decorate my dining room table, chandelier, and windows for the holidays.
The Dining Table During the “regular” months of the year, our dining table centerpiece consists of a large silver bowl that is overflowing with card games. It makes it really easy to start up an impromptu game of Old Maid or UNO right after dinner. And any extra time that I can sneak with Eben is okay with me! During Halloween that bowl gets filled up with our small Halloween themed games (one of my favorites is Spot It Halloween) and books. It’s a fun reminder to take some time after school to heat up a mug of spiced apple cider to play a game or read together. When Eben was younger, Mr. Sweet Greens would read us spooky stories in the dark. Now, we read our own spooky books together by candlelight. So fun!
During the winter holiday months, I fill the bowl up with Christmas and Hanukkah themed books and our huge collection of dreidels. In case you didn’t know, Dreidel is a favorite for anyone who celebrates Hanuakkah. It’s basically a game of chance played by spinning a top. It is a wonderful game night activity for the entire family and one that you should definitely add to your activity calendar for December.
The Chandelier Decorating our chandelier is one of my favorite things to do during the holidays. By decorating it, you can completely change the feel of the room itself, which is a plus for holidays!
For Halloween, you can decorate it with cobwebs, paper bats, hanging ghosts, or any other combinations of fun pieces to spookify your dining room!
For the winter holidays, by hanging some pine branches and cones off it, your guests will instantly feel the room is Christmassy and you get that amazing pine scent too.
You really can’t go wrong decorating your chandelier for the holidays, it is fun for everyone! And it looks really amazing when you invite friends and family over for Hanukkah dinner or Christmas brunch!
The Windows
Decorating the windows in our living is one of my favorite traditions. It is something that my family can enjoy from inside our home and it’s a fun treat for our neighbors outside too! I try to mix it up every year so that we have something fun and new to enjoy. It’s fun to get creative and try a lot of different ideas.
For Halloween, I have decorated with everything from homemade spooky silhouettes to pumpkin, bat and ghost cut-outs. When Eben was younger this was a particularly fun activity to do with him. Most younger kids love to draw and cut out pictures – having them hung on the dining room windows is just the icing on the cake.
For the winter holidays, I love to hang small wreaths tied with ribbon from the middle of each curtain rod. Other options that are super fun are large ornaments, pine cones or even stars or snowflakes. Anything that can be strung with ribbon is perfect for this project!
You can decorate your dining room table, chandelier, and windows for any holiday and it can be a tremendous amount of fun to plan with the kids. Just gather up some supplies, and spend a fantastic afternoon crafting decorations together. Seriously, Eben and I decorate ours together for every holiday, it’s a super fun tradition!
The bottom line is, when it comes to decorating for the holidays, you don’t have to spend any money, just gather up a few supplies that you already have on hand and just have a good time! Because, after all, that is the whole point! Have fun!
Now that it is back to school time we have very little time to hang out as a family. Even on nights when we’re all at home, there’s always something to contend with; be it extracurricular activities, social lives, homework, or my own business being, well, busy! To combat this and get some quality family time in each week, we spend Wednesday nights having a family board game night.
While the classics are always good, (we have a big bowl on our dining room table full of small games!) there is such a variety of fun and interesting new games available these days! Today I’d like to tell you about the four games that we have been playing quite regularly, recently. All of them are produced by Blue Orange Games, a fantastic board game company with a focus on being environmentally friendly and sustainable.
Dr. Eureka: This is definitely my new favorite game! A fast-paced game that makes you feel like a mad scientist, it can be a real brainteaser. The goal is to match the position of colored balls in a test tube, based on your “scientific formula” card. Up to 4 people can play at a time, and a typical game only takes about 15 minutes, so it leaves plenty of time for rematches or other activities. I really love Dr. Eureka, probably because I am the best at it in my family and I win every time! Ha!
Fast Flip: A really fun speed and matching game, this one features a veritable fruit salad of adorable, healthy foods. You have to match numbers and fruits together depending on what comes up with your cards and tokens, and is small and portable. It’s great for bringing along on family vacations, and is perfect if friends come over because it can be played by anywhere between 2 and 8 players.
Gigamons: No, this has nothing to do with the Pokemon Go craze! It’s a board game where the earth’s elements are represented by creatures with mythical powers. In this tile matching game, you earn powers from the various elemental creatures that help you with gameplay. A great memory booster, this game is also suitable for even younger players, so if you have a young child in the house, it would be a great choice.
Top That!: This fun little matching and stacking game is great for any kids who enjoy magic tricks. With problem solving elements, and a focus on being quick and perceptive, it is a fun, fast-paced game great for all ages. My family had a fun time playing it, and the little rabbit coming out of the top hats is so cute!
The games we’ve enjoyed playing at recent board game nights are all the better for being eco-friendly. The games themselves are quick to learn (great for parties!) and work on important skills like memory, coordination, critical thinking, and visual perception. The components are manufactured from nice, sturdy materials and obviously made to last (these will be passed down for generations to come). Best of all, Blue Orange Games is committed to planting two trees for each one used to create their wooden game pieces! They’ve won over 200 awards for game design, so you really can’t go wrong. I can whole-heartedly recommend checking out their catalog of games for yourself, and maybe starting a new weekly tradition with your family.
All opinions are my own – we are just huge fans of Blue Orange Games!
NOTE FROM SWEET GREENS: This article wasn’t written by me. Thank you for supporting the companies that keep Sweet Greens in business.
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With the kids heading back to school and the seasonal work picking up, preparing supper can suddenly become a great source of stress in some people’s lives. Depending on the number of people who need to be fed, your work schedule, taking care of the kids, and any other responsibilities, you may feel like cooking is a chore that is best left to a restaurant. That is, if you can afford one. Here are some tips to make mealtime at home a little less frantic and stressful.
Make a Weekly Menu Believe it or not, trying to figure out what you are going to cook on any given night can be quite time-consuming. If you are not really sure of what to whip up, you may be stressing yourself out thinking about all your options. Everything that is associated with food and eating should be enjoyable, so try planning out a menu to follow for the whole week and see if this cuts down on your stress. Don’t use do it for yourself, keep in mind the kids too. If you plan out school lunches in advance, you can save yourself precious minutes first thing in the morning.
Prep on Sundays Arrange your schedule so you can do all of your meal prep on Sundays. Or, if you happen to work on Sunday, put another day aside that you can devote entirely to meal prep. Don’t use that time to just prepare dinner for the week, prep breakfasts and lunches as well. If you send your kids off to school with their lunches, this kind of prep can be a life saver first thing in the morning. Just grab their lunch out of the fridge, toss it in their bags, and away they go! If you want a few days where you don’t have to cook, prepare double of what you normally do so there will periodically be leftovers to enjoy. Chop up any vegetables you need and, if necessary, separate them. Precooking and freezing meals, so you can just pop them into the oven when you are ready to eat, can be a huge time saver. Also, consider investing into a crockpot or slow cooker so, in the future, you only need to pull a prepped bag of food out of the freezer to toss into the crockpot to cook while you are at work.
Assign Roles Get your family to help out. The kids should be home from school by the time you start on supper, so their hands should be free! On days when you are making spaghetti, delegate boiling the pasta to someone else and have another person cook the meatballs and sauce. By getting your family involved and helping out more in the kitchen, mealtime can become easier, more enjoyable, and far more efficient.
Buy Easy to Cook Foods There is nothing wrong with enjoying making all of your meals from scratch. However, doing so does add more work to mealtime. Every now and then, go grocery shopping for easy to prepare foods. These are the kind of foods that you can simply pop into the microwave, or that you can eat straight out the package, like yogurt from Hampton Creek. Either way, easy to prepare foods or premade meals can be a lifesaver on those days where you are just too tired to put on your apron and cook.
Stay Positive Your mood can dramatically impact your attitude about cooking. There may be many reasons why you may not be in the mood to cook, or even reasons why you dislike cooking. The back to school season can be an exhausting time. However, you should not let those moods overpower your need to stay positive. Maintaining a positive mindset about things you don’t like to do can help to make them more bearable.
Look for ways to keep yourself positive. Listen to some music while you are in the kitchen cooking, or watch one of your favorite shows. Talk with one of your friends or family while you are cooking, as long as you remember to stay attentive to what you are doing! No matter what you decide to do, remember to stay safe and never leave cooking food unattended.
With the right changes to your routine, preplanning your meals, and a little help from your family, mealtime doesn’t have to be so overwhelming and stressful. It can be fun and engaging! Advanced meal prep can also help keep your grocery budget under control as you no longer making daily trips to the store. The best part about all of this is that you’ll feel better, be less stressed, and have more energy to spend with the people that you love!
