reboot family dinner {+ a giveaway of two great books}

{Note: Congratulations to Emily and Jessica, the winners of the giveaway books. I hope you enjoy them, ladies!}

I enjoy our summer lazy routine where we let the girls watch more TV and eat more ice cream, but there's also a quiet bliss to our back-to-school fall routine. We begin spending more hours indoors, whether in school or in our living room, and our busier schedule makes those rarer family trips outdoors to pick apples or play t-ball all the sweeter.

With school fully ramped back up, I am getting back into the swing of family dinner. I admit to struggling a bit at times, continuing to serve the girls summer staples of deviled eggs or tuna salad before Nate and I have our own dinner hours later. And pretty please don't ask me whether they've been eating lots of snacks.

We've had our successes too. On Sunday, for example, we went out to pick apples and filled our bellies to the brim with fruit, so we weren't as interested in a full dinner that night. Instead, the girls played happily in the next room while we chopped and simmered apples close by in the kitchen. They loved to sample a bit of still-cooking, piping hot applesauce, and Daddy whipped them up a quick grilled cheese sandwich and mug of tomato soup while we were still mixing and canning apple creations.

Charlie's favorite part was the bluegrass band playing at the farmstand. Girl after her mama's heart.

We've all heard in recent months about the importance of sitting down to dinner as a family. Lately I've been pondering the definition of "family dinner" and wondering if there's more room to bend the rules a bit. I'm happy to be working with The Family Dinner Project (FDP) to experiment with my neighborhood pals and see if we can make family dinners better together. They have some fantastic ways to fit in food, fun, and conversation with your children into your day.

I'm betting you can guess Vivi's favorite part of the day...

On apple-picking day, we didn't all sit together at one time to share a big spread of food; however, we did connect as a family in picking and putting away a bounty of fall's delicious harvest together. Later on in the evening at bedtime, we played a game FDP calls Rose & Thorn, asking them what their favorite and least favorite parts of the day were and sharing our own.

If you are interested in making family dinner better in your household, I encourage you to check out the FDP website. They have so many wonderful (and free!) resources. I'm also happy to be offering a giveaway today of two books that have helped us keep the kids interested in trying and eating new and different foods, which is one of the important pieces in the family dinner puzzle. Thanks to their generous publishers for making it possible to share these books!

Here are the books you can sign up for a chance to get for free (sign-up is below, and it will be open until Sunday September 22nd, 11:59pm ET):

1. French Kids Eat Everything. I wrote about this book in April, and the post was syndicated on BlogHer. A publicity manager of the publisher, HarperCollins, found what I wrote and offered to share the book with two readers of this blog. I absolutely loved this book; it changed the way we eat dinner forever, and it has made the experience so much more pleasant. See more of what I wrote here.

2. End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad. Here's what I wrote about it in July. The publisher offered to give y'all one of these books as well, so sign up below if you're interested! My kids love this one and still to this day call it the pickle book because of the illustrated pickle who helps make the salad.

WIN THE BOOKS!

Use Rafflecopter below for your chance to win! It's that easy. Just submit a comment or drop me a line by email or Facebook if you're having trouble figuring it out. Good luck!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

conditioner: great for wavy toddler hair! {and a giveaway}

I was given some of Dove's new nourishing oil care conditioner to try. For those of you who have been following my hair saga, I'll start by saying it is ongoing. I continue to lose more hair than I think I should, then it grows back, and on and on. At some point I switched to using the "no poo" method of baking soda and vinegar, and I have never looked back. Vivi has similar hair to mine, so her hair needs almost no maintenance. Now that it is short, I don't even brush it any more. However, Charlotte still has the adorably wispy angel hair that needs a bit more maintenance.

homemade Mother's Day video & Animoto giveaway!

Happy May Day! I'm going to start off this month a bit differently on the blog and host my first giveaway. I'm not a giveaway girl usually. Maybe it's because I'm a book nerd, or because I'm frugal, but I don't often find myself getting excessively hyped up about any new product or electronic toy. I'm a simple chick. I have a dumb phone--you know, as opposed to a "smart" phone--and I prefer to scrub my floors on my hands and knees to the fancy steam mop that Nate bought and that, less than a year later, has just been donated to our church rummage sale.

Now that I'm past that little rant, I'll tell you about the electronic toy I love. When Clever Girls Collective offered me a chance to make videos from my pictures, I thought: how fun! It was perfect timing because I just scanned a bunch of pictures of my mom that my dad found and sent me. Since Mother's Day is coming, I decided to make a movie for mom of the pictures I scanned. Happy (early) Mother's Day Mom!



And guess what? I'm not the only one who gets a freebie. There's something in it for you too. Just go to Animoto and enter the code CleverFL to get a free video. AND one lucky reader will also get a free one-year subscription to Animoto Plus, which gives you unlimited full-length videos.

Here's how you can win the free year's subscription:

Leave a comment by midnight on Sunday, May 6th letting me know who you would make your free video for. Also sign into the Rafflecopter widget below and complete as many other entries as you'd like. The winner will be selected randomly by Rafflecopter and announced on Monday, May 7th. Good luck!

As they say on their website, making videos on Animoto is "shockingly easy." This is important because I have only a few minutes to spend on learning new things, due both to my post-baby brain power and hectic mommy schedule. But dudes, I'm serious when I say that if you already have the pictures and song, it will take you about five minutes to make your movie. So go for it!