Mommin' It Up!

June 6, 2012June 2, 2012

Pin for the Wednesday: Summer Beach Cupcakes

Happy Wednesday! Since I’m out at Hermosa Beach in sunny California today for the Toyota Women’s Influencer Network event, I thought I’d highlight a beachy pin today! It is a great winning pin to kick off your summer with. On Sophie’s last day of preschool right before Memorial Day, I told her we’d make cupcakes to celebrate. So I got on Pinterest to find a summer cupcake idea. Here’s my original pin:

These looked super-easy to me, and I already had cupcake mix and frosting and Goldfish crackers so I ran to Kroger while Sophie was at school and bought some Teddy Grahams and some gummy Lifesavers. I also used some generic laffy-taffy like candy I had at home.

Here’s how our beach cupcakes turned out! I was right, they were indeed super-easy! The kids and I had a lot of fun decorating them and there was nothing to it. I cut the taffy with a knife to make a beach towel and surfboards, and crushed some poor Teddy Grahams to make sand.

I let Joshua and Sophie do their own. They weren’t quite as interested in making them “cute” as I was!

beachpicframe — Sophie's on the left, Joshua's on the right. Surfboards!

This was a fun & tasty winning pin for us! The kids loved decorating them and eating them of course. It was a fun way to kick off our summer.

What have you been pinning and winning with? I’m dying to see! Link up below. There are just a couple of rules:
1) In your post, please link to your original source – the pin you got the idea from.

2) Make sure and link back to our original Pin For the Wednesdays Post here at Mommin’ It Up! (please!)

3) In the Mr. Linky below, leave a direct link to your Pin FTWednesdays post, not to your main website.

4) Totally optional – grab our cute #PinFTW button! The code box is over there in our sidebar.

Don’t have a blog? Just leave your winning pin in the comments!

Show us what you got!

June 5, 2012

Cool off with Tide Coldwater

Y’all know how Jenny and I feel about Tide. If ~~this is your first visit to this Mommin’ It Up~~ you don’t, you can read about it here, here, and here. Oh, and here, here, here, here, here, or here. Ok, I will stop now.

Needless to say, Tide is one of our favorite companies to work with because ~~their PR people are fab~~ we believe in the product and we use the product ourselves. (And also their PR people are lovely.) Ever since we first started learning more about the science behind Tide way back at BlogHer ’09 (the conference when I got stuck in an elevator), we’ve been totally brand loyal.

In particular, we love Tide Coldwater. I know that since learning about how much energy can be saved by washing in cold water (and finding out how well Tide Coldwater actually works), our family hasn’t used anything else. It’s such an easy, simple thing to do – but it can have such an impact on the world.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Take a look at this.

Isn’t that amazing?

The first two lines of that image have some pretty incredible stats, but read it again from the third line on. We may not be able to get every household in Dayton (or anywhere else) to wash with cold water, but we can definitely make sure our household does – and what an impact that has.

And seriously, it works just as well as regular Tide. Which works much better than anything else. It’s a win-win.

This summer we’re going to keep encouraging you to Cool Off with Tide Coldwater. Jump on in!

June 4, 2012June 3, 2012

Jenny Rapson and the super-bummer summer

Well, Joshua’s not even technically out of school yet (his last day is tomorrow) and I already can’t wait for it to start again. The big kids are at a point where the dynamic betwixt them is very difficult to bear. Joshua delights in letting Sophie know how stupid she is and in getting on her nerves, and Sophie delights in screaming like a banshee and grossly overreacting to everything that he does. OH, and Joshua also delights in tattling on Sophie who delights in doing whatever-the-hell-she-wants-no-matter-what-her-mom-told-her. As you can imagine the tattling also sends Sophie into hysterics.

And all these hysterics from them send me into hysterics of my own.

I’ve made very few plans, besides buying a pool pass to the local pool, which I hate, to survive this summer. I really do not like being on the go that much and three days a week at the pool is about all I can stand. I have no money for kids camp or a nanny. I also apparently, have no mothering skills for navigating this time in our lives.

When I was a kid, my mom had a job and my dad was a teacher so he was home with us in the summer, but he was constantly building something so you know, if we got on his nerves he could just hammer something. And anyway, we were free to run around our very safe neighborhood and come home when we were hungry for a JELL-O Puddin’ Pop and then leave again for hours on end, so I think it was just an easier time to be a parent. This is not the world I live in. Partly because of choices we’ve made that are for our family and partly because the world is just not as nice and safe and easy now as it was thirty years ago.

So, what will we do this summer to pass the time? I think I’m about to go sign my kids up for every possible daytime VBS in our area. Well, every daytime VBS run by good Christians that is. I’d like the kids to stick with Jesus and all. I LOVED VBS as a kid and Joshua and Sophie loved it last summer. They can have fun, be apart from each other, and learn about Jesus. And Jonah and I can have some alone time. Win-Win-Win-Win. Yep, VBS and the pool. Children’s museum once or twice…I don’t know what else. I still have toddler nap times to work around!

I’m sure you all judge and/or hold me in contempt, but I am not looking forward to this summer at all. But hey, I’m going to be in LA for the first three official days of break! Which means my official summer with the kids will start with jet lag, but I think it’ll be worth it. And I’m setting my expectations for the summr low, so they’re sure to be exceeded, right!? RIGHT!!????

How are you keeping your kids busy this summer?