Veteran's Weekend Fun

This is Nolan at 13months old celebrating his second Veteran's Day with a parade. I love this picture and it's one of my favorite flag shots. I need to take a few with both boys now. We're really thankful to be surrounded by so many veterans in our family including hubby who served in the Air Force.  

As part of the celebration this year, Tim McGraw put on a concert on the Navy base in town. I was lucky enough to get to go thanks to a moms group friend! We went as a moms night out event and left the little ones home with the husbands. I have to say this is the first time I've done that since Carter was born! It was a blast. Tim played great and the venue was spectacular. Navy vessels were lit surrounding the stage. Here are a few iPhone shots I managed to snap.

NutriCrystal Wireless Smart Food Scale UPDATE!!

UPDATE!! NutriCrystal has provided me with a coupon code to offer you 10% off your purchase of a NutriCrystal Wireless Smart Food Scale. Just enter: K98Z2 in the coupon code portion during checkout and you'll receive the discount! you can visit their online store here.

If you know me at all, or heck, even if you've paid just a little attention to my blog posts, you know we have weight issues in our house. Not the normal I weigh too much problems but the opposite. Both of our children are on the tiny side. By tiny I mean if 100 kids the same age were in a room mine would be the tiniest.... under the 1st percentile. Even when we use a breastfed only growth chart that encompasses the world, mine are way under the 3rd percentile and sometimes they dip and drop even more.

Now we all know weight isn't everything but when your infant or toddler stops gaining weight doctors and mothers tend to freak out. Couple that with their giant appetite and you start to wonder if something is actually wrong. Along with the barrage of tests (and a few diagnoses we've been given) we see a nutritionist. For Nolan, I kept a detailed food journal of every single bite he ate for weeks on end. Fun times for sure! For Carter we've been trying to get an idea of exactly how many calories he's consuming on average in a day.

Up until now this meant notebooks, food journals, and lots of weighing and guesstimating what was being eaten. Then I got the NutriCrystal Wireless Food Scale. It's bluetooth capable and works with a few different free apps on the iTunes store. You can simply set you food on it and have it logged and recorded in an easy to use app. Basically I set my food down and pick up my phone. There I open the app and hit connect. Once I record the weight I can customize the entry with both a food category (drop down amazing list) and a food type. The app has all the info on how much protein, fat, etc. is in the food simply from you categorizing it. I spent hours on Calorie King.com when Nolan was having issues trying to look up the nutrient info for everything he was eating. This is so.much.easier!! I'm still working through the app and finding all of it's fun features. I haven't yet found a way to send my entire summary by email but hope that's there (if not I'll be requesting it on the app feedback). How perfect would that be to send straight to our doctors?!

Other fun facts.. the scale charges by USB. No bulky electrical cables. It's sleek and stylish so it fits in sitting out in our kitchen constantly.

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Halloween fun

Here is a quick peek into our Halloween fun. The following pictures were taken by my talented friend who owns Oh Happy Day Photography here in Jacksonville, FL.

 

...and now our trick-or-treating fun! (pics by me)

Surf Grip Fun!

I recently got the chance to try out a cool surfing related product. It's the Surf-Grip by Sick Performance Concepts, LLC. Now we are just a few short miles form the beach but with two kids in tow it can feel like a cross country trip. I try to limit the amount of "stuff" we drag to the beach because honestly it's a lot of work for me. This means I usually don't bring any sort of fun water toys for us, the big kids. I was pretty excited to try Surf-Grip out because it's tiny and can take the place of a boogie board or wakeboard. Here is what it is. A simple lightweight and buoyant cone with a handle inside. It increases the persons buoyancy while just body boarding in the waves. Check it out in action here.

Looks like fun right? It's completely simple for a novice or wannabe surfer or bodyboarder. I'm sure I look crazy playing with it but who cares, it's fun! This isn't the beach season for us right now but come spring it will be packed in our beach kit every time!

You probably noticed I have two in the picture. That's right I have one to give away. Just use the rafflecopter form at the end of this post for your very own chance to body surf at the beach! You can even personalize them using model airplane paint!! Please tell your friends to check out the giveaway too!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Win CollageIt Pro 3 for Mac this Halloween

Want to win your own copy of CollageIt Pro 3 for the Mac? Enter below!!

CollageIt 3 Pro Review

I recently received a copy of the program CollageIt 3 to review and check out. When Carter turned one, I gathered up all 13 of my monthly pictures I had painstakingly remembered to take each month on his birth day. Then I sat down to put them into a fun collage and realized I had no idea how everyone else had been compiling them. I went to Shutterfly and a few other online photo shops and played around there but unless I wanted to buy a print I couldn't get a nice high resolution digital copy. Next I hit Google looking for collage programs and there were plenty. I searched through a bunch, however, I wasn't able to find one that easily let me tell it how many pictures I had and just simply add them. They were easily set up for certain stock collage types but not one that fit my custom 13 pictures. In the end I settled for opening a powerpoint slide and adding 6 pictures at a time. I had two collages not one and they were hard to see. It wasn't ideal but at least I had something to show off our fun monthly sticker onesies. Here is my first final product... as you can see I even cut his head off in one picture (oops missed that until now)!!

As soon as my CollageIt 3 copy was downloaded I knew the first thing I wanted to do was to finally make that collage of Carter's first year. As most people do I decided to just play with it and avoid reading any instructions. After all, who wants to read a book just to play with their pictures?? It turns out the program is very self explanatory and easy to work with. I quickly picked the template I liked and added all 13 pictures. A few short minutes later and I had this!!

All 13 pictures of my handsome little guy in one image. I was able to easily round the edges, rotate and crop pictures, change the size of each image box, and more. I didn't feel like I had to be a computer programmer to work the program which is good since I leave that to hubby!I'd easily recommend this program to anyone wanting to create quick customizable collages from their pictures. If you're interested in trying it out you can get it FREE for 3 days ( from Oct. 29 at 0:00 CST to Oct. 31 at 24:00 CST) from the iTunes store here. If you download I'd love to hear what you think of it too!!

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.

Busy Moms and Tots of Jacksonville

Are you looking for a fun playgroup where your children can socialize and you can make new friends? If so, check out Busy Moms and Tots of Jacksonville. This is the playgroup I help organize and as long time members we can't say enough good things about our group. Nolan has grown up with such a great group of kids and now Carter is doing the same. Besides the normal playdates, we do fun things like holiday parties, craft swaps, and preschool learning events.

My latest adventure was coordinating a felt storyboard swap. I created pieces for Bernard Most's book Whatever Happened to the Dinosaurs?. Nolan loves this story and always makes up his own theories for where the dinosaurs have gone. Here is how the set turned out.

Nine of us participated and each person made nine copies of their project to then swap. I now have nine different unique sets that all go to various great books!!  We've done this for quiet book pages, bows, and even sensory bin contents.

If you're in the Jacksonvill/St. Augustine area and are looking for a playgroup check us out. If not, check meetup.com in your area for something similar. I'd also love to help anyone who has questions on playdate ideas or group logistics. You can see some of my playdate idea pins on Pinterest.