I’m hoping to take the pressure off of Valentine’s Day with this adorable free printable classroom valentine—no craftiness required! Your kids (and their friends!) will love them. Score one for mom.

Somewhere along the line, mothers of school-aged kids decided that cheapie paper valentines from the drugstore are not good enough for their babies. I’m not sure why or how, but it sort of ruined things for the rest of us.

Now I feel like I have to come up with something inventive and homemade or I’m a failure of a mother. Plus, I’ll have to listen to things like “Look what Emma’s mom made.” Can you hear the disappointment at my failures dripping from her little voice already?

So I took the bull by its stupid horns and came up with an idea of my own—and I turned it into something super easy for other moms to run with. All you need is a printer and maybe (maybe) some sort of bear-shaped treat. Take that, Emma’s mom.

I can feel my husband’s anxiety rise as the seashells clink into the bucket from their little sandy fingers. The girls’ faces are full of the bright-eyed joy that goes hand-in-hand with discovering treasures. My husband’s face is tight and thin lipped and definitely wondering where the hell are all of these seashells going to end up and how long do I have to wait to throw them out?!

Me? I fall somewhere in between. I’m one part embrace the magic and one part at what point will we tip the scales and become eligible for Hoarders?

My girls like collecting things. Gemstones. Birthday cards. Sticky candy wrappers that are still holding on to the scent of their favorite treat. While I totally understand the desire to hold on to things that make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, I also understand not wanting to live in a house that looks like the local dump.

The attempt at balancing both sides had me scrambling for a way to deal with our current seashell collection ituation. Our house was littered with partially-filled Ziploc bags of seashells waiting to find a home. We could have thrown them all out, but I liked the idea of doing something special with them, in hopes of bringing back a little of that bright-eyed joy whenever my girls see them.

I recently perfected the recipe for the best DIY body butter ever—the mother of all DIY body butters, if you will. Get your pinning finger ready, because you are definitely going to want to save this one for later!

I originally posted a recipe for a creamy, luxurious DIY body butter just in time for Mother’s Day back in 2013. It was pretty awesome, but it had one drawback: you had to refrigerate it in the warmer months to keep it from melting because it was coconut-oil based. Now, I love me some coconut oil so I was not about to eliminate it from the recipe. But I did find a way to make it hold on to its creaminess.

Today, I’m completely updating that post to give you an even better recipe that doesn’t require refrigeration and that makes the perfect budget-friendly gift for any lady in your life (yourself included) who might need a little pampering.

My daughters, who are experts in the art of papering, are obsessed with this stuff and have been slathering it all over themselves ever since I made it. Note to self: double the recipe next time and stash some where they can’t find it! 😉

I’ve gotten really into green cleaning products recently. With all of the attention we pay to the chemicals we ingest, we sometimes forget about the stuff we clean with. I collected some of my favorite DIY green cleaning recipes to share with you. If you’re looking to cut down on using chemicals that are harmful to the environment and to our bodies, this post is for you.

Whenever I tell people I make my own cleaning products, the first thing I get is the Huuuuh? face. As in, why on earth would you do that when you could run to the store and pick one up that’s already made for you?

Let me start by telling you right off the bat that if it wasn’t easy, I wouldn’t do it. I’ve got way too much going on to be bothered with complicated green cleaning recipes. The recipes I use are incredibly simple and nontoxic—in my book, this is key when you have a toddler who not only puts just about anything in her mouth but scales furniture when I turn my back.

The next thought that flickers across a person’s face is usually, How do you know it actually works? Most people don’t ask that out loud but you can totally see that they’re thinking it (my sister, however, absolutely asks it out loud). Once I explain the ingredients I use and their magical powers (which I’ll get to in a bit) the face is usually all Tell me your secrets!

Since I can never remember these magical recipes off the top of my head (I keep them on a card in my recipe box), I thought I’d lay them all out for you right here…

For me, tea and crafting go together like movies and popcorn. It’s a pair that you just don’t mess with.

There’s something so freaking zen about sitting down and making something with my own two hands while I sip a cup of tea. It puts me in my happy zone. Another thing that puts me into that zone is laughing my butt off with my closest friends. A few weeks ago I had a (brilliant) idea: why not combine these forces of goodness into one big, fat, happy party?

So I did.