Tips and tricks I wanted to share

Hi everyone. This is going to be an educational and hopefully usefull blog. First off, let me introduce you moms out there who don't already know about Momfaves, to, well, Momfaves. It is an awesome website where moms can post recipes, quotes from their kids, fave restaurants and shops and websites, pretty much anything. So, go sign up, www.momfaves.com. It is also run by a friends of ours, Josh and Rebekah Unfried.

Ok, so in the spirit of sharing secrets and tips I will share some of my own. It occurred to me to write this today because I have been sitting on my couch staring at a HUGE chocolate milk stain left by, well, he shall remain nameless, but I think you can all imagine. So, not only is it chocolate, it is milk, stinky milk, and pretty much an entire glass. My first attempt didn't work, which was store bought foam cleanser. I was getting ready to lug out our carpet extractor, but thought I would check online first to see if anyone, anyone at all, had another solution. Turns out, they did. Some mentioned other store bought cleaners, but then I ran across one that seemed different enough to work. Rubbing alcohol. The great thing here is, it doesn't soak in because it just evaporates. But is also really gets the stain out, without discoloring or anythng. So, I poured about 1/3 of the bottle on the stain, then soaked it up with a towel, it really worked! I did another 1/3 and even more came up. I am going to wait until it is completely dry to do another round, but it has gotten about 90% of the stain out. I figure the last little bit will have to get the extractor, but that is ok with me. The majority of the stain is gone.

Another little trick I learned from a friend is to mix your dish soap with water in a squirt bottle. The squirting action kind of foams up the soap for you and it actually saves you so much on soap. I do almost 50/50 water to soap and a regular size bottle of soap lasts about 4 times longer!

Another good trick for making yummy smoothies is to slice up your bananas (very important that you slice them first) and then freeze the slices. This acts as the ice part of your smoothie and makes it nice and thick without watering it down.

One more for now, kool aide water colors. Lightly mix your chosen flavors with enough water to make it usable ( you can always add more, but you want it to be colorful). Then ask your kids to paint a picture of whatever the "paint" smells like. It is scratch and sniff art !!! They will love it and if they eat some, so what!!! You can also draw a picture for them, of fruit, and then let them paint it with the appropriate color/flavor. So much fun!

Hope these help or inspire you.