Category: Clever Girls Collective

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that I’m all about tasty but simple meals.  I want things to taste like I’ve slaved all day in the kitchen, but i don’t want to be all day in the kitchen.  So I often use some packaged products along with some fresh products to accomplish that.  Kraft Recipe Makers are exactly the kind of “help” I’m looking for to take dinner to the next level and using them cuts dinner prep to an amount of time I’m comfortable with.

Thank you to Ubisoft for sponsoring this post. Please click here to learn more about Ubisoft. I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective. #UbiChamps

My 16 year old daughter Amber, is the one who reviewed ‘Rayman Origins’ a game from Ubisoft for the 3DS.  Amber is enthralled with video games, so much so that she is planning to go to college to become a video game designer.

Part way during our daughter’s sixth grade year she made a statement one evening that shocked us, “Can I be homeschooled?” It was something that we thought long and hard and over, over about for months after that, and by the time the school year was out, we agreed that we would try it for a year and see how it went. Since we just started our fifth year of homeschooling, I guess you could say it worked out, but we weren’t always sure it would.

I’ll be honest, I had never heard of the term “do-over” before moving to the United States.  I remember the first time I heard it I had a long list of moments scrolling through my mind that I would have liked a do-over for.  Most of them have to do with parenting…

One in particular comes to mind when our daughter was just a couple of months old.  She’s 16 now, but it’s something we still talk about.  Actually I can laugh about it now, back then – I was simply horrified and thought for sure I was in the running for worst mother of the year.

When we moved to SD 11 years ago we were suddenly faced with the task of coming up with family traditions of our own. No longer could we depend upon the extended family traditions that we did at holidays, it was just the three of us now, and we had to compensate!
Over the years we’ve kept some of the old traditions, made up some new tradtions, and have melded the two together creating ‘updated tradtions’ for our family.
So what exactly are ‘updated traditions’ you ask? Well things like:

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If someone would have asked me what my ultimate family vacation would be last year, I would have replied a Mediterranean Cruise.  But I was able to fulfill that dream with my family this past April, not just a Mediterranean Cruise but a Transatlantic Cruise, and all that with that famous Mickey Mouse on the Disney Magic!