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Happy Mothers Day to all my fellow mommies out there – may your day be filled with snuggles, pampering, relaxation and laughter. And if some really funny baby faces make it into your day – major bonus!

Hope you are all having a very Hoppy Easter!

So Hershey’s is donating $10 per blog to the Children’s Miracle Network for every blog that participates in the Better Basket Blog Hop. Nancy @ Life With My Boys was awesome enough to pass a virtual basket my way and now I’m going to do the same!

You know Easter Baskets come in all shapes and sizes – some people get really into it with intricately decorated homemade Easter Eggs – some go the big old Egg fulla candy route. Since my kids are still young, I am avoiding candy-filled eggs and instead this year bought some Annie’s Bunny Grahams to fill a handful of plastic eggs for MM. When he is a bit older I’ll probably try decorating eggs with him, but right now I think I’d just be asking for a headache and broken eggs.

But since you bloggy buddies are a bit older – you know I’m not gonna skimp on the candy or the pretty! Here’s what my baskets would include if I could send you a real one:

• First off, the basket would be one of those beautiful wicker baskets that you could re-purpose for some terribly clever use in your home – lined with a nice fabric and just the right size for your needs of course.
• No Easter Basket in my life is complete without Reeses Chocolate Eggs so you will definitely get a handful of those, along with some Jelly Belly jelly beans (nothing but the best for my bloggy buddies).
• A fantastic book to curl up with, because there’s never a bad occasion for a new book.
• A gift card to the coffee shop of your choice so you can go read your book in the comfort of a plush chair while sipping some coffee and having a little treat from the bakery of course.
• If it were my kids, I’d give them a cute stuffed animal, because well that’s what you give kids, right? But for something a bit more age appropriate and socially aware, I’d adopt an animal in your name (like this adorable arctic hare) and include a picture and all the details of the cuddly friend you and I have taken into our hearts.
• And since no Easter Basket is complete with out an egg or two, I’d also include something like this (I do have an unlimited budget, right?).

So to the following friends – I wish I really could send you this basket – cause now I kinda want one, too!

• Jen @ Stuff Jen Says
• Andrea @ Red Knows How
• Jean @ Working Momma 247
• Susan @ Hello, My Name Is Susan
• Jen @ Our Daily Big Top

Hershey’s Better Basket Blog Hop Rules

• Copy and paste these rules to your blog post.
• Create a blog post giving a virtual Easter Basket to another blogger – you can give as many Virtual Baskets as you want.
• Link back to person who gave you an Easter Basket.
• Let each person you are giving a Virtual Easter Basket know you have given them a Basket.
• Leave your link at BetterBasket.info/BlogHop comment section. You can also find the official rules of this #betterbasket blog hop, and more information about Better Basket with Hershey’s there.
• Hershey’s is donating $10 per each blog participating to the Better Basket Blog Hop to Children’s Miracle Network (up to total of $5,000 by blog posts written by April 4th, 2010).
• Please note that only one blog post by each blog URL will count towards the donation.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

♥ Happy Valentines Day to all my lovely readers. I thought I’d share my favorite love poem with you all before going off into the day with my own valentine (and my mini-valentines, too). I hope your day is sweet as can be! ♥

2010 Glasses were the brain child of Make and Takes – but the cuteness is all ours!

Happy New Year!

2009 was pretty great…

2010? It’s gonna be out of this world!

Thanks to Karen for pointing this one out to me – Anti-Resolutions at Write Anything. I thought this looked fun – what things do you resolve NOT to do in 2010?

The rules are simple: List ten things you resolve not to do in the upcoming year and be as creative as possible.

My 2010 New Year’s Anti-Resolutions:

1. I resolve to not paint my skin purple and dress up like a dinosaur for my son’s 4th birthday party (seriously, don’t even try asking, Dan, I will not do it).
2. I will not go on an anti-book campaign and burn all of the books, magazines and anything else with words on it in our home- reading will always be a sacred past time in my home, no matter how annoyed I get when my son rips pages out of his books (I cringe just thinking about it). Promise.
3. I will not resort to crying, kicking and screaming to get my way, no matter how well it works for our five month old daughter.
4. I will not decorate my entire house from top to bottom in the pages from the December 2009 issue of O Magazine, no matter how many times Ellen asks me to.
5. I will not change my blog header more than once a day, unless I notice a typo or graphical problem that makes my eyes bleed just looking at it. (Hey, I want to keep these resolutions!)
6. I will not eat all of the delicious desserts in my apartment in one sitting. It will take me at least two.
7. I will not lock myself in my bathroom and read books all day, flushing the toilet every ten minutes or so to conceal my mischief. I don’t think anyone would believe I had to go that badly and such actions would probably lead my husband to call the doctor in a panic (or come in and hide with me).
8. I will not throw out all of my son’s toys when he refuses to pick them up, no matter how many times I threaten to. I will always back down, clean them myself eventually and forever be his personal doormat. We both know it’s true.
9. I will not become a dairy farmer and force my kids and husband to help me raise the animals and upkeep the land for the sake of having absolutely organic milk and cheese. This year.
10. I will not move 1,000 miles across the country to a state where we don’t know a soul while pregnant with our next child so that my husband can start a new career. Again.

What do you resolve not to do in 2010?

Stole this quite ruthlessly from Jen @ Stuff Jen Says:

1. Location: President Obama and his family celebrated Christmas in Hawaii this year. If you and your family could celebrate the holiday anyplace but where you currently live, where would you go?
   
   We’ve actually talked about this a couple of times recently. I like the idea of Christmas in Disney but the cost of travel, nevermind the cost of Disney would be pretty huge. So unless we come into a lot of money, this probably wouldn’t happen. However, we both like the idea of spending Christmas in NYC. We’d go for like a week, and try and convince our families to meet up with us. We’d rent a suite in a hotel so we’d have plenty of room and spend the season enjoying the sights and sounds of Times Square and Bryant Park – and be a little bit closer to our families for awhile.
2. Mood: What’s your mood this holiday season?
   
   I’d like to think I was pretty dang festive this year. I got into the Christmas Spirit about a week before Thankgsiving and that momentum continued all the way throughout Christmas day. It was a good year and although small since we didn’t spend any time visiting with family, I loved it. That said, the Christmas Spirit left me sometime that weekend and almost all of our decorations have already come down. Christmas food is still very much taking up space in the kitchen though.
3. Food: What are your favorite holidays foods?
   
   The desserts – we made sugar cookies and buckeyes for Santa and his weary little helpers – and made eggplant parmesan for Christmas dinner. I also enjoyed getting a Marzipan stollen at Trader Joes and enjoying the lemoncello torte birthday cake that Dan made for me (he actually made it twice as it didn’t quite pan out the first time).
4. Giving: Nearly 70 percent of Americans say they give to charities during the holiday season. Do you regularly donate money during the holidays, and if so, do you give to the same group(s) each year or do you change it up from year to year?
   
   We don’t regularly do anything but I do like to donate to a charity when I can. This year we stopped by one of the Giving Trees at our local mall and bought some presents for a child a little older than Miss BB. I liked the idea of picking out something nice for a less fortunate family and we’ll probably do something similar next year.
5. Traditions: Do you have any holiday traditions, like opening one gift on Christmas Eve, or prolonging the gift opening by having each person take a turn opening one gift at a time while everyone else watches?
   
   We like the one gift on Christmas Eve idea (pajamas of course) and of course Christmas Eve is my birthday so we make it a tradition to acknowledge that. We also put clementines in the stocking along with candy and small gifts – an idea I got from my grandmother who always did oranges in the stockings when I was growing up. We’ve been doing clementines because… I really like clementines.

Wanna play along? Leave me a comment if you fill this out in your own blog. Or you can comment with your own answers here if you are a poor blogless person.

You know that thrill of waking up on Christmas morning, to a pile of presents. You see the boxes and bags with your name on it and have that moment of anticipation, of “I wonder what’s inside?”

I didn’t get that this year. There were presents for my kids’ from family members that I didn’t know the contents of until opened; And my husband got a couple stocking stuffer-sized surprises (from me). But unless you count a few gift cards we received from family members and a very surprising Christmas bonus from Dan’s company, every present I opened… I wrapped. I bought. I picked out meticulously.

Dan and I have been in the habit of buying our Christmas presents for each other together. It’s always seemed easier. And until this year that hasn’t bothered me, because other people (namely our parents) were giving us presents, too. So I got to get “the present I wanted” and the “surprise presents” as well. It all made sense, until we moved. And neither of us thought much about it until the day after Christmas.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m disappointed that nobody sent me presents. We live 1,000 miles away and gift cards are more practical – and the kids are more important anyway. I put the gift cards we did get to good use – the kids got some adorable new outfits and I used a bit of our Christmas bonus to buy some of the books I’ve been coveting for awhile and Dan got a Mario game for the Wii and Wii Fit Plus was purchased for both of us. The rest of the bonus went towards our house savings fund, which will be the ultimate gift in a few years. “Santa” you could say, was good to us. But I missed that “surprising” feeling of “What will I get.”

All this means is that Dan and I decided to no longer aid each other in buying our Christmas presents. I want the surprise – so I’m going to let him surprise me. If there’s a present that I really want that doesn’t come Christmas morning, we can talk about it after the holiday and see what we want to do about it – maybe we’ll be blessed with more gift cards or another good bonus. And of course all of this seems to beg the question, “What is Christmas about? What is important and what isn’t?”

Is the stuff really this important? And for me the answer is no – but the surprises are. It’s not the item that matters, which is why picking it out myself doesn’t matter – to be honest, we maybe did this to avoid buying something the other wouldn’t really want. But… let’s have a little faith in each other and not worry about the material, but rather focus on the experience of opening a gift that the person we love picked out just for us. Celebrating the love that went into the buying of the gift – and not just the gift itself.

Does anyone else find themselves wrapping their own Christmas presents? Is the surprise important to you or would you rather just know you are getting what you want?

BOY STUFF

GIRL STUFF