Got Milk? Breakfast Blitz #Giveaway

Have you heard of the Breakfast Blitz campaign from the National Dairy Council? It’s a free, easy way for you to earn prizes and also potentially help out your local schools. A win/win, right?

All you need to do is head to the Breakfast Blitz home page by clicking HERE. Then simply enter the UPC code from your milk container and you’re on your way to potentially being a winner! I don’t know about you but we go through about 5 gallons of milk a week here so I’m heading back to the site daily to enter! The more UPC codes you enter, the better your chances of winning are. Prizes include a Breakfast Blitz Fuel Pack, Free Milk for a Year (I’ve got my fingers crossed for this one!), $200 towards NFL merchandise, NFL tickets, and tickets to the 2013 Super Bowl (my husband will be hoping for this one!). 

Also, each of your entries will earn one vote for the hometown school that you’ve selected. I personally selected the elementary school that Isabelle will start Kindergarten in the fall (where did my baby go?!). The top 250 schools that receive the highest votes will receive a $1,000 Fuel Up to Play 60 Grant to use towards school breakfast programs. The campaign ends on February 17, 2013 though so head over there now to enter!

In addition to having a chance to win through the campaign, one lucky Dollops reader will have a chance to win a “Tackle Your Day” breakfast basket from Milk Mustache.

The “Tackle Your Day” breakfast basket will include:

• Spilt milk bowl
• Spoon straw
• Tackle Your Day Challenge Chart
• Milk Mustache Magnet
• Cow slippers
• Mustache glasses
• Breakfast Project Recipe Cards

Please use the Rafflecopter form to enter!

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Good luck and don’t forget to go visit the Milk Mustache Facebook page to stay up to date on everything Milk!

*There’s no purchase necessary. See rules for official details, enter here: http://milk.am/mbbfastblitz. This post is part of a compensated campaign on behalf of The Motherhood and Got Milk? As always, all opinions are my own.*

Please Don’t Buy Me Flowers

In preparation of Valentine’s Day, I’m just going to say it: I hate flowers. Okay, okay that’s a bit harsh. I guess I just don’t understand flowers.

While most people would be excited to have their (fill in the blank) buy them flowers, it’s really the last thing that I want. Yes, they are pretty and look nice but what am I supposed to do with them? We live in a small house that’s overrun daily with little tornadoes. Our coffee table is covered with Barbie, Spiderman, and farm animals – not roses.  All of us can barely fit at our kitchen table to eat never mind look at a beautiful, flower centerpiece. Our kitchen counters are used to cut crusts off sandwiches and a safe haven for endless art projects to dry. So if I do get flowers I constantly have to move the vase from one spot to another while we try to live our lives around the flowers.

Speaking of vases, what do you do with them when the flowers are dead? We have a collection of empty glass vases collecting dust in the basement. I suppose I could do something crafty and pretty with them. Maybe fill them with glass beads and put them on display? But again WHERE?

Oh, and speaking of dead – the little petals and leaves that start falling off? As if I need one more thing to have to sweep up.

And let’s not forget the main reason that flowers drive me nutty – they are so damn expensive! I just can’t get my head around spending $50+ on something that is constantly in my way and is already on its way to death’s door. Instead, I’d prefer $50 worth of Reese’s Peanut Butter Hearts or $50 worth of Diet Pepsi. Actually, better yet, I’d prefer 50 minutes of alone time at Target. 

So I respectfully repeat, please don’t buy me flowers.

Snowy, Swing Set Fun!

I was lucky enough not to have to shovel our driveway after the blizzard (my awesome husband did it). However, in a moment of weakness I agreed to shovel a path to the swing set for the kids. Although a path doesn't seem like much, when I was half way through the yard and waist deep in snow I was beginning to realize just how crazy I was. I had two followers "helping" behind me though on our quest to the North Pole (aka our swing set) so how could I stop? We eventually made it and the kids had so much fun that it was worth it.

Henry debating if he wanted to slide down (while Isabelle throws snow on him!)

Isabelle ventured down, snow and all!

Jumping off the top level in to the snow (no bones were broken!)

Blizzard of 2013

So we got a bit of snow over the last couple of days...

The kids were SO excited. Me? Not so much. My husband who had to shovel the driveway? Even less thrilled.

But how can the pure excitement of the children not make you smile?

 

We were VERY excited (and surprised) that we did not lose power since we have lost power for multiple days in previous storms. So all in all we have absolutely nothing to complain about this storm. My friend who is a nurse worked yesterday and then slept at the hospital last night. On her way home this morning her car got stuck three times. The last time she was unable to get it out and had to walk a quarter of a mile in the snow to get home to her husband and two girls. We are really blessed to have selfless people like her that go out in these storms to take care of others. A big thanks to all the essential personnel who make our world a better place!

I Hope She Shares Her Cake With Me

Although it feels like I’ve known Annie of Stowed Stuff forever, we’ve actually only been friends for a year. We set off on a tiny jet plane as virtual strangers last February to the blogging conference Blissdom. The trip really could have gone either way but luckily we instantly connected (the wine may have helped). I’m now happy to say that Annie is one of my closest friends and I’m so grateful to have her in my life.

In honor of her birthday tomorrow, I’m sharing my favorite pictures of us over the past year.  After you view the pics head on over to Stowed Stuff and wish her a happy (early) birthday!   

Making Strides Against Breast Cancer Walk (the only time we hung out together before heading off to Blissdom!)

Yup, we're wearing Lorax mustaches in a bathroom.

How cute are we?

Is it any wonder why we're friends?

There was wine involved....

We can't get enough goofy pics

Dollops and Annie: A match made in Heaven

Top 5 Reasons I Love Woven the App

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about Woven. For those who aren’t aware, Woven is a really cool, free photo viewing app for your phone or tablet. I feel like there are a million apps out there and I honestly wonder why I would even bother downloading them. Let me tell you though – I love the Woven app. As most of you know, I’m a picture nut. I love taking them and viewing them (over and over again!). So without further ado, here are the top reasons why I love Woven (and I bet you will, too!):

• Woven gathers all your online photos in one easy spot to view them.  Have an account with Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Shutterfly, Picasa, or Photobucket? Woven will gather them all for you plus photos you have stored on your phone/tablet. This leads me to…

• You never need to remember where you put the photo.  Days, weeks, or months later you don’t have to search a bunch of places to find the picture that you KNOW you posted to Facebook but you can’t find. FYI, it’s never where you think you posted it.

• Woven takes you on an instant walk down memory lane. Some of the first albums that Woven pulled for me were from vacations that my husband and I went on together before we were even married. We were young, kid free, and sipping cocktails. Ahh, living the life! I hadn’t seen them in years and honestly forgot the pictures even existed. I have no idea where the original copies of them are but it doesn’t matter because Woven found them again for me. I loved looking through them and I love that I can easily access them now whenever I want.

• When you find that gem of a photo that you forgot all about you can easily share it directly from Woven. Send it to Facebook, send a tweet, send a text, or share it as a link. Any way you want to share it,Woven’s got you covered!

• The final thing that I thought was pretty cool is that if you have a Samsung Smart TV or Blu-Ray player you can view the pictures directly on your TV. My kids (like me) love to look at pictures so I occasionally hook our laptop up to our television and run a slideshow of pictures.  Now I can do it more easily thanks to the Woven App.

For more information about Woven, be sure to check out their website, their Facebook page, or find them in the app store!

*I attended an event to learn about Woven. I did not receive payment for this post and all opinions are my own.

When Mr. Right is Not Right for You

When I was 20 years old, I got engaged to the boy I had been dating since I was a senior in high school. He was the first boy I ever dated. The first boy I ever kissed. He was four years older than me so as I was entering my freshman year of college he was completing his senior year of college. We dated faithfully all through my college years with visits every weekend and nightly phone calls. We were set to be married the October after I graduated college in 2001. I was beyond excited to plan the wedding and start the adventure that would be the rest of our lives.

I graduated in May and immediately started a full time job. This new job brought a whole new world with it. I worked in the city with a young crowd of people. We talked a lot. We went out a lot. We drank a lot. I was suddenly leaving a small(ish) town behind, taking the train to the city, and surrounded by people who were all different from me. It was exciting and eye opening. I started seeing a whole new world that stood in front of me. A world that I knew I would never fully explore if I got married in a couple of months. I pushed these hesitations and “cold feet” feelings off to the side and never told anyone from my “old” life about it. My new friends thought I was crazy for planning a wedding. I started to feel like I was living a double life.

October got closer and closer. In September my fiancé and I were planning on moving into a new apartment together. I started dragging my feet by saying that he could move in to the apartment and I would move in after the wedding. I sold it as it being a nice tradition of not living together before marriage but inside I was terrified of moving in with him. I knew deep down that it wasn’t what I wanted. The problem was that my fiancé was great. I could never say a bad word about him. He was Mr. Right. He didn’t do anything to make me change my feelings about the wedding. It was simply that I had graduated, grown up, and realized there was a whole world out there that I hadn’t explored yet.

I told myself that this was the life that I had chosen. How could I ever cancel the wedding? Getting engaged was a decision that I had made and I had to follow through on it. I couldn’t shake the feelings though. I can remember driving one day and thinking that if I had an accident and hit a tree that maybe we would need to post pone the wedding. I was NOT thinking of killing myself. After all, I had just discovered a new life that I wanted to live. But I was thinking that if I was injured (a broken leg, a minor hospital stay) that it would give me a reason to postpone – a reason that no one would question, a reason that wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

It was at that point that I knew that I had to come clean to my fiancé. It was by far one of the most difficult and emotional nights of my life. It was horrible but necessary. We ended up cancelling the wedding five weeks before the day we were set to be married. Invitations had been mailed the week before.  Keeping my feelings bottled up made my decision a complete shock to everyone.

I do wish that my change of heart and my path of discovery didn’t have to hurt people along the way. However, I know that my former “Mr. Right” would not have had the life that he deserved if he was married to someone who was not in it 100%. I look back on that decision and the months following as some of the most challenging of my life. I know now that it was a path that I had to go down to get me to where I am today. I have never doubted that I made the right decision and that I am living the life that I was destined to live. It turns out that sometimes Mr. Right is just not right for you.