Star Light, Star Bright

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Our Christmas tree isn't "ours" any more. The Christmas trees my husband and I used to have we very simple, elegant, Martha-Stewart-approved affairs, with all white lights and gold and silver ornaments and only things found in nature: pine cones, acorns, snowflakes, apples. Those trees were beautiful, worthy of being feature in a decorating magazine.

Now our tree features a purple hippopotamus and a Perry the Platypus ornament. Our kid is responsible for that. I'll be honest, but don't tell anybody -- we like her tree better.

We're still creating our family decorating traditions, and we're adding new stuff to our tree every year. When I was a kid, our family tree reflected all the stuff that was important to us: Phillies ornaments, Star Trek ships, handmade craft projects, hand-me-downs. We're trying to incorporate that into our tree as well.

Our daughter is kind of the star of our lives, and so there are a lot of stars on our tree. Shae loves them, and so do we. One of her favorites is one that was made especially for this year's Heart of Haiti campaign. I love that she loves it because it basically features all the things I love in an ornament that will featured on our tree for many years: it's artisan-crafted, it's made of recycled and sustainable materials, and it's going to directly help someone provide a better life for their family.

Mostly I love this ornament, though, because it represents everything that we wanted our tree to say this year: "HOPE." And I hope that she will always love this ornament as much as we do.

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I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective, and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own. #CleverHaiti

Lilac With Heart-Shaped Leaves

This Mother's Day, I'm working with Clever Girls in support of Macy's Heart of Haiti to shine a light on the "trade, not aid" program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

What is Macy’s Heart of Haiti? Heart of Haiti is a “Trade, Not Aid” initiative launched by artist and social entrepreneur, Willa Shalit, The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and Macy’s. Already, Heart of Haiti has led to employment of 750 artists in Haiti, providing financial benefits for an estimated 8,500 people in the country.


Each item is a one-of-a-kind design and handmade by a Haitian master artisan from raw materials such as recycled oil drums, wrought iron, papier-mâché and stone. The collection features more than 40 home decor items including quilts, metalwork, ceramics, jewelry and paintings and is made almost entirely from recycled and sustainable items such as old cement bags, cardboard, oil drums and local gommier wood.


Heart of Haiti products are available online at Macy’s.com.

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Like the story of Creation, it all begins in the garden.

We didn’t have pets when I was a kid. What we had were gardens – flower beds and rose bushes and hydrangeas and vegetables. I learned how to take care of small defenseless things and feel unconditional love by helping my mother tend to the gardens.

Clematises and strawberries are a lot like kittens, if you think about it in a certain way. In the beginning, they need the right kind of food and water and bedding or they aren’t going to make it. They need sun and rain and fresh air to grow up tall and strong. They need the right kind of nutrients and an endless stream of careful, loving attention or they aren’t going to behave the way they’re supposed to. They need to be protected from creatures that would devour them while they’re young and sweet and tender. They need to be trained, so they don’t get all leggy, their runners headed off in a hundred directions, leaves everywhere, but never flowering, never bearing fruit.

Same with kids, really. They need to be trained.

My mother trained us in her garden. Everything I know about how to be a good wife and how to be a good mother and how to be a good person – how to BE – I learned from my mother, in her garden.

All those garden-related adages you might have heard? They’re not just true about gardens; they’re true about everything, metaphorically speaking, if you think about it in a certain way. You have to know how long to keep your precious little sprouts safe and sheltered before they can be transplanted. Sometimes you have to keep their petals covered to protect them from the big cold world. If they don’t grow in one spot, maybe they need to be moved. Give them time to put down roots. A skinny little stick with just a couple of buds can grow into something huge and beautiful, if you give it space to spread and thrive. Love it, enjoy it, not for what it is now, but for the gorgeous thing it will become, when the time is right.

And remember: one man’s weed is another man’s wildflower. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

My mother is like an accidental Zen master who’s been showing me the path to true enlightenment for the last 38 years. I just needed to practice my active meditation, to pour forth all the necessary blood and sweat and tears, to dig deep enough into the soil to find the truth that my Mom’s been teaching me all this time. And now the student has become the master, for I am sharing the wisdom with my daughter that I learned from my mother, and that she learned from her mother, and so on.

She probably doesn’t know it, but when I am working in my own yard, digging in my own dirt, I take some words I’ve heard before, and I change them up a little bit, and just like a seed becomes a sunflower through light and love and magic, so too does this poem become a mantra, a prayer:

“The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

I am closer to Mom in the garden

Than anywhere else on earth.”

It all comes back to the garden.

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Thank you to Macy's Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart" promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Yogurt. Yum. (Yes, Really.)

I wrote this post while participating in a blog tour conducted by Clever Girls on behalf of Dannon. I have been compensated for my time commitment to the program but my opinions are my own.

For more information and recipe ideas, visit www.oikosyogurt.com or www.Facebook.com/oikos. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

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We eat a lot of yogurt in our house. Ever since we discovered the insane awesomeness that is Greek yogurt last year, we have been eating a really lot of yogurt. When we were making our post-earthquake-hurricane-preparedness arrangements last week, one of our biggest worries was what we would do if lost our electricity for an extended period of time, because we have a whole drawer full of yogurts in the fridge, and every one of them are our Preciouses, and would we be able to eat them all before they went yucky, and would we have to fight over who got which flavors? Because let me tell you something right now: I will THROW DOWN for the black cherry yogurts. I don't care if I have to cut my husband off at the knees -- DO NOT come between me and my yogurt.

Oikos® is not our usual brand of yogurt, but we got a chance to try it for this project. I compared nutrition information with our usual brand and saw all the stuff I was hoping to see: Dannon® Oikos® plain and fruit on the bottom contains 0% fat (the Dannon® Oikos® traditional blended varieties contains about 3% fat). Both are an excellent source of protein, twice that of most regular lowfat yogurts. I also saw that Dannon® Oikos® 0% fat berry flavors (blueberry and strawberry, my husband's favorites) beat our usual brand 2-1 in a taste test. INNNNNteresting. Kind of made this taste-test experiment a no-brainer.

And I am not going to lie to you: I have also been wanting to try Oikos® because I want to encourage any and all endeavors that put John Stamos on my television screen. (I can't help myself -- I remain a sucker for Blackie Parrish. Don't you judge me.) MOAR STAMOS PLZ KTHX!

Ahem. Anyway. I made one of my favorite breakfast treats, a fruit-and-granola yogurt parfait, with Oikos® yogurt this morning ...

... by mixing one package (5.3 oz.) of Oikos® 0% fat vanilla yogurt, ¼ cup of my favorite granola cereal, and ½ cup of frozen mixed berries. (You could of course use fresh fruit but I am trying to clean out the freezer before we go to the beach.) It was just as delicious as I had hoped -- maybe even more so than it usually is, because I think this vanilla yogurt was just a bit sweeter than our usual brand, and I was totally in the mood for a little extra sweetness this morning. My only complaint is that this particular package of yogurt was not at all as creamy as Greek yogurt usually is; in fact, my yogurt was totally runny. I think this was a one-off issue, though, and I'll be sampling it again to confirm. (My husband's blueberry yogurt was perfectly fine and tasty -- just my cup of vanilla had the problem.) In spite of the texture problem with this one serving, though, it was totally delicious, just the right amount of vanilla flavor and sweetness. I did end up getting quite a nice "chunky smoothie" out of it, oxymoronicishness of that phrase be darned.

So, in short: Dannon® Oikos®. Greek yogurt. Really tasty. (Even without a free poster of John Stamos with every purchase. Although even my cheapo-depot husband couldn't argue with the added value in THAT.)

Financial Alchemy

Ever wonder how I manage to keep myself out of debtors' prison? (Me too.) Click here to read more about how we manage our family finances.

Fun Fab Five

Curious about which bloggers made my Fun Fab Five? Click here to find out!

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas Card Time

I spend an awful lot of time thinking about Christmas cards -- way more time, really, than anyone ought to. Ask my husband; he'll tell you. Probably the one thing at Christmas time that I agonize over the most is my cards. (Okay, and maybe the tree. And coordinating my gift-wrap. But we'll save that for another day.) Let's not even get into the fact that I don't even technically send out "Christmas" cards, but holiday cards, which gets me into trouble with at least half a dozen relatives every year. (Yes, I am aware that I am a lunatic.)

If you've ever gotten a card from me, then you already know what kinds of cards I tend to favor: semi-generic winterish scenes, usually featuring some kind of nature (pine cones, snowflakes, vaguely Scandinavian wildlife), generally in pastel shades. Quiet and serene. Very Robert Frost-y, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"-y. I like faded blues and purples and silvers, and of course sparkles or glitter score double secret bonus points. It's almost impossible to find holiday cards that are blank, so I go with the least offensive sentiment inside (Season's Greetings, or Happy Holidays, or what have you).

But now I have a kid, and she has changed the holidays for me. For serious. Christmas is different once you have a little one (cliché, I know, but true). I still want to send out the least-specific cards I possibly can (because some people on my list celebrate other holidays besides Christmas, and I want to wish them well, too), but now I want the cards to be colorful and bright and cheerful, exciting rather than soothing, and I want them to have a picture of Shae on them because she's the most perfect and beautiful kid that I know. So I'm doing photo holiday cards again this year.

I've gotten cards from Shutterfly before, and even though they don't usually come with as much glitter as I tend to like, they're still really nice cards. I think the Valentine's cards that we sent out to our family back in February came out really great. But even those were pretty sedate. Lovely, but definitely quieter than my life normally is. So I made a deal with myself when I started thinking about this -- well, more like an ultimatum. Make the Christmas cards as much like my real life as possible. I deliberately picked out cards with more than two colors in them. Do you know how hard it is to change that particular habit? Boy, howdy. Especially because all of the selections are really nice. No, really. They are.

Here's the short version of the story: I narrowed it down to what I think are three really super choices. These, these, and these. I like all three because they have lots of color but are still simple and nonspecific (I believe that the Project Runway judges would call them "chic"), and just looking at them makes me really, really happy. Even with pictures of gorgeous supermodel children whom I don't even know. (Don't you want to know those people in the pictures? I do.) And I already know Shae, so I know her picture will look great on any of these cards.

But anyway, here I am, still spending time wondering what cards I'm going to end up sending. I haven't really quite committed to anything yet -- and maybe tomorrow I'll see something else that I like even better. I'll take suggestions, if you are partial to any design. You can see all of Shutterfly's holiday photo card options and let me know if there is something you like better. I might even listen, if your card suggestion comes with some kind of magic spell for getting Shae to actually sit still and look at the camera so I can take the stinking picture.

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Do you want 50 free holiday cards from Shutterfly? Click here to go to Shutterfly for information on how you can get 50 free cards this holiday season, and make sure to select Clever 1000 as the referral source.

This post is part of a series sponsored by Shutterfly. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.