Author: natosha
Are you flossing all wrong?
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
Are you flossing wrong?
Have you ever done something your entire life only to find out it was a waste of time because you were doing it all wrong? This is Nathan’s story about how his first cavity was caused by his faithful flossing fiasco. I’m giving you the whole story so hopefully you can save yourself some cavities and wasted time from improper flossing.
He’s a straight-up guy, my husband. He does what he’s supposed to. Skip brushing your teeth because you’re tired? Um, no? Eat a cupcake because you’re mad? Why? Turn off the air conditioner before turning off your car? Most definitely. This guy does almost his entire life by. the. book. And I love him for it. Usually.
And so he flosses his teeth. I’ll be honest. I’m not a very good flosser. I know it’s really good, but it really hurts because the floss always gets stuck and then goes full force into my gums. My mouth is really small. Just literally, though.
So he flosses. I don’t (usually) floss. But, at least I know how to floss properly. I always assumed he did, too. Since he’s such a flossing pro, afterall.
Turns out his entire flossing life has been a lie. He officially has 3 cavities! Gasp with me now! gasp! Mr. Flosser has 3 cavities. Where you ask? Right where it would count if he was an actual flosser.
Did you know you’re supposed to floss around your tooth? If your gums were a mountain that comes to a peak between your teeth, the floss should slide all the way down the mountain on both sides. To almost the center of the bottom of your tooth. On every tooth.
The dentist lies to me and says it doesn’t take very long, but just getting that floss wrapped around my fingers without it unwinding or turning them blue takes me a little while. So, when I do floss, I use the pick kinds. It really helps with my crazy close together teeth. And it makes it go faster. But that’s a lot of teeth and a lot of…floss-es.
You probably shouldn’t listen to me, though. Because, even though I’m married to Mr. Flosser, I’m not a Mrs. Flosser. And apparently, he isn’t, either.
But that is) the proper way to floss, in case your entire flossing life has been a lie like Mr. Flosser’s.
Find stylish toddler bedding
If you’ve searched for the perfect toddler bedding and come up short, this post is for you today!
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
You’ve seen the gorgeous kid bedrooms on Pinterest or your favorite home furnishing website. They’re furnished with handsome functional furniture, adorned with the cutest toys you’ve ever seen, and sprinkled with the perfect style elements to make any grownup or kid excited to go to sleep. Okay, well. Maybe not that last part but, it’s exactly what you have in mind your own toddler bedroom.
And then you go to the store. It’s Paw Patrol or Disney Princess. Or, if you’re lucky, teddy bears. The best blankets that are toddler sized are actually crib quilts and they look like it, too. What’s a stylish mama to do with a toddler in their own bed? Especially a stylish mama on a budget too small to walk in the door at Restoration Hardware?!
You could scour Etsy for a baby blanket or crib quilt that looks more grown-up than the typical teddy bears. But, it won’t take long before you realize that you could easily be dropping over $50 for a blanket your toddler might (or might not) use for a season or two.
Don’t get discouraged yet! I have figured out the perfect solution for attractive toddler bedding options on a budget! Like a $20 budget. Here’s the secret: Throws.
Yep. That opens a world of gorgeous, grown-up possibilities for your toddler’s bed! You want a modern toddler bed? No problem. Thinking a fluffy cloud blanket is the perfect choice? You got it. Or are you really aiming for the skies with a farmhouse toddler bed? Me too. I found the perfect woven throw at TJ Maxx for only $19.99 made by Max Studio (similar woven throw).
Want to hear the best part? If you design your toddler’s bedroom to fit in with the rest of the decor in your home (or at least in the same color family), you can use your new versatile toddler bedding in other parts of your home when your toddler grows out of his or her toddler bed.
I know, right? Genius. This is one of my most favorite discoveries yet to keep our home looking stylish, even in my son’s toddler bedroom.
Quick Ceiling Fan Upgrade for $5
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
You can update your ceiling fan from completely disgusting to brand new with just $5 and an hour or two with something you probably already have at home!
You know when something is so gross, you don’t even want to look at it? As if not looking somehow makes you safe from the dirt and grime? This is how we cleaned the grossest ceiling fan I’ve ever seen.
My son’s ceiling fan was like that when we moved into our house. After I noticed how gross and dirty it was, I turned it off even in the heat of the summer. And I prayed the dirt wouldn’t fall off. Haha.
His fan was especially disgusting because the guy who lived here before us was a smoker. Tar covered our walls and ceilings, and this fan showed it. There was gross brown tar all over this, and that oily tar from the smoke catches all the fuzz bunnies and makes monster greasy fuzz bunnies. Gross.
(Skip over this picture if you aren’t into seeing gross stuff. Yuck.)
I’m going to tell you how we fixed that puppy up since it isn’t in our budget to get a new one at the moment. It’s pretty easy (even for a beginner DIY’er) and super cheap. Just how I like things!!
You’ll need:
- A screwdriver
- Cleaning gloves if you’re squamish like me
- Degreaser or all-purpose cleaner
- Paper towels
- A ladder (or a bed under the fan you can stand on!)
- Spray paint
- About an hour (mostly to let the paint dry)
Optional:
- Cleaning gloves
- Spray primer
- A drop cloth to catch the overspray
Now let’s get down to business!
- Gloves on!
- First, you’ll want to unscrew the fan blades from the fan.
- Then, get your cleaner and paper towels to give the fan a good wipe down. If the lights have been on and are hot, be sure to spray cleaner on your towel, not the fan.
- Clean the blades real good.
- Lay out all your fan blades on your tarp and spray them in nice even strokes. If you have smoke tar on your blades, this is when you want to use your primer to make sure the paint will stick to any oil you didn’t get off thoroughly.
- Let it dry. And follow the instructions on the back of the spray paint can to know when you can apply your paint layer.
- Let it dry.
- Screw the fan blades back onto the fan.
- Stand back and hear the angels singing.
See? You, yep, even your busy doing-it-all mama self can have a brand new looking ceiling fan in no time!
Home Tour on Main Street
What a year we had in this house
This historic house gave us a run for our money. It’s our greatest mistake. It’s also one of our greatest accomplishments. It’s that wound that you subconsciously favor.
We bought this old house and expected to spend 3-4 days deep cleaning and scrubbing it clean before moving our things out of the storage unit and into the house. Well. That lasted about 2 days. We cleaned and cleaned and the dirt still streaked. We had a 2 year old at the time, and I could just see him licking the kitchen floor in typical 2 year old boy fashion. That wasn’t going to happen if I could help it.
Tiny House: Moving In
The good news was it was a tiny house, so the crazy idea to rip out the kitchen didn’t sound too crazy at the time. Fast forward 6 months. The kitchen was ripped out (and completely validated my wants to tear out that disgusting kitchen. There’s no way we could have cleaned all the nasty places.) and replaced with something highly functional and gorgeous. We fixed plumbing, installed $2000 worth of Ikea closets, worked our butts off in the crawlspace to control humidity, entertained countless contractors and consultants to help us find the problems, and organized until we could function in the tiny house. And finally, the farmhouse sink was installed & the gorgeous historic windows were framed with dramatic white curtains, and it was a cottage perfect for a sweet little family of three.
But that summer had been a hot and humid one. We thought it was because of the lack of central A/C (a definite necessity in Georgia summers!), but it continued to be a situation.
But, we finally had a kitchen sink and curtains for privacy, so we bit the bullet and moved in with a little sawdust still on the floor. Nathan’s parents had been helping us throughout the summer and they were slated to come and help us the first weekend we were moved in.
My son woke up with a fever that morning and our lives would forever be changed.
Moving Out
To make a really long story not so long, we all got sick for a few months, thinking we were passing a bug back and forth. But, we finally gave up the fight at that house and moved out. Turns out it was mold making us sick.
While we were living there, we realized that it was just too far of a commute for Nathan, and the house was always intended to be a temporary living situation while we figured out what direction to take with our life. Well, in that year, we grew a lot and learned a ton and knew exactly what we wanted: a house to take care of us so we could make real traction towards our big goals.
Sold!
So, we sold it above market value for full list price with multiple offers on the table. By the time everything was said and done, that house was adorable and absolutely a stunner. (If you need help staging your own house, you might want to start with this post about how we sold this house for full price in a day.)
It’s the worst year of our life where everything we had was on the line, but we still remember it so fondly. It is that boyfriend that treated us badly that we still loved for some reason. It’s the furniture you hated but didn’t want to get rid of. It’s the worst kid in the class that the teacher can’t help but love.
She’s a beauty and will always have a special place in our hearts. We hope you enjoy having a look around our Main Street memory.
Welcome!
Foyer
Master Bedroom
Bathroom
Dining Room
Second Bedroom
Tiny Kitchen
Living Room
Outside Front
Back Porch
Places to Find Crazy Fabric Bargains
Sometimes a girl just needs some fabric. You can use fabric for so much stuff, even if you don’t sew. Chair covers, tablecloths, throws, blankets, ottomans, pillowcases, table runners, dog crate covers. You name it, fabric can cover it. And it can totally change the look of something. It’s like paint for your furniture, except a lot less messy.
I’m going to start with the obvious option: thrift stores. Sewing people have a tendency to take on too many projects, and their fabric selection can tend to get out of hand. Or stores might donate the leftovers to the thrift store. Or, my favorite, someone had a huge project and bought too much fabric. Then you can get a huge chunk for practically nothing. I have a nice grey piece 5 yards long yearning to be something really cool. I found it at Goodwill for about $5. A steal, I know. It’s even a nice thick denim-ish piece, too. You just never know what you find at these places. You can even look at the sheets or bedding department for cool fabrics. That’s always the first place I look for project inspiration.
The second, less-obvious option is Harbor Freight. They have amazing deals on drop cloths, if you don’t mind it smelling like China for a few days. If you sign up for their emails and newsletters (or are just really nice to the person ringing you up), you can get 40% something almost all the time. Their drop cloths are huge and come in at a cool $12 for 3 yards. And, they’re a great neutral creamy color to boot. I love this stuff. I’ve used it to cover a huge dog crate, an ottoman, and a few other small projects around the house…all on $12.
And my favorite option of all is the Ikea As-Is bin. I always go straight to the as-is bin when I get there. I go the wrong way through the registers and see what Ikea wants to give me that day. And I always take my time to look through the fabric bin. It’s strangely an exhausting arm workout, but it’s oh-so-worth-it. They practically give away odd-shaped couch covers in luxurious upholstery fabric and hand out huge, continuous pieces of fabric in the form of duvet covers for super cheap. Sometimes, you just don’t want a seam running down the middle or sides, you know? My favorite score was a white 100% (timeless) linen duvet cover and shams, two tan linen pillowcases with two matching curtain panels. I paid a little more for the duvet cover (I think $25) that I would normally have, but come on, it’s linen. It’s the timeless fabric that has outlived generations. It gets softer with time and is oh-so-luxurious. But the pillowcases (still covering my couch pillows today) were a cool $3 each. So, if I didn’t want a tan linen pillowcase for $3, I could have totally given it a snip here and a snip there and turned it into something else totally cool like a set of linen napkins. And do you know how much that would cost you at a place like Pier1? Or even Etsy? I know.
So, there you have it. My fabric hunting on-the-cheap secrets. I hope I don’t see you there (or if I do, that you’re looking for something totally different). 😉
How to get your toddler to sleep quickly
There’s a secret to get your baby and toddler to sleep that has been passed down in my family for generations.
My mom told me about it when my son was born. She said that my grandmother told my mom about it. And, I’m sure she probably learned it from her mom.
It’s so easy you won’t believe you wasted so much time on other ways to get your toddler to sleep.
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
I am going to start by saying that we have mainly been a co-sleeping family. We weren’t always, but life has a way of changing your plans, so here we are today.
I didn’t usually use this method with my son as a baby because, well, milk did all the heavy lifting in the sleep department for us. Hopefully, we can change that next time around, but that’s how it went for us for the first year.
But, after the bottle was gone and my son began to grow up some, I needed some new tricks to get my toddler to sleep. And this fun trick to get my toddler to sleep just won’t work every night.
Plus, it’s also an amazing way to calm down a toddler that’s just too excited to go to sleep. I know sometimes even I can’t go to sleep after getting excited about something.
And, there are always those times that kids just need extra help getting to sleep because of environmental situations. Traveling and sleeping in a strange location always made my son take forever to go to sleep. And noisy situations are always tricky, too.
But, the great news is that this trick works and even helped my son go to sleep on the night before our surprise beach vacation. Yes! It’s that awesome of a trick.
Here’s what you do to get your toddler to sleep quickly.
You hold your toddler and pretend to be asleep.
Yep. That’s it. No, not like hold your toddler down and fall asleep. Haha. That’s weird. There are a few extra steps, but that’s basically the gist of it.
Here are the steps to get your toddler to go to sleep. For real.
- Hold your toddler close (or snuggle up close).
- Close your eyes and pretend to start getting sleepy even if he/she is still chatting it up.
- Start breathing softly but deeply.
- Relax your grip or hold on your toddler so they can feel you relax.
- Continue for 5-10 minutes, if it even takes that long for your toddler to fall asleep.
For real. I know. It sounds too good to be true.
There is some science behind this age-old sleep remedy, but since I’m not a doctor, I’ll let you do your own research.
This trick has helped me get my toddler to go to sleep so many times I really couldn’t even guess, and the best news is that it hasn’t failed me yet! If I am willing to give him about 5 minutes, he will fall to sleep without shedding a single tear.
Want to help a mama out? Share or pin this post so your mama friends can learn this time-proven way to get her toddler to sleep in no time at all. 🙂
And, if you’re cosleeping and trying to get your toddler in his own bed, you will love this trick method I used to get my toddler to sleep on his own in one day.
An Easy Trick to Get Your Toddler to Sleep
Are you having a hard time getting your toddler to go to sleep? I have discovered a really fun trick to get my toddler to sleep.
I’m far from a perfect mom, but I do have my genius mommy moments. This one of my favorite strokes of mommy genius. Who doesn’t want (and let’s be honest, absolutely need) more sleep?
For real.
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
So, here’s a quick easy way to get your toddler to sleep.
One afternoon my toddler and I were laying down for a nap. We were co-sleeping at the time, and so I would usually help him go to sleep.
Shoutout to all the co-sleeping mamas out there. It’s hard work waiting on your child to be ready to go to sleep on their own. I know.
But this trick does work even if you aren’t co-sleeping with a toddler.
He was especially active and crazy this week. And, honestly, I dreaded nap time every afternoon. If you’re a mom, you know nap-time is the prize you get in the afternoon for enduring the morning. But to dread naptime. That’s a really really bad situation to be in.
Getting Toddlers to Sleep is a Game
All toddlers love playing games. I read something once that explained that toddlers are always the “losers.” They are smaller, shorter, slower, and less-coordinated than everyone else. They have to struggle more than others to accomplish even simple tasks. So, they always love a chance to actually win.
My little guy was no different. We played all kinds of “games.” Like playing the game to chase the germs out of his mouth with a toothbrush. Or the game to race mom to the potty. Or the game to see who could pick up the most toys the fastest.
Or, in this case, to see who could be the quietest.
Enter the Quiet Game
So, I came up with the idea to turn our naptime into a game.
I explained the rules of the quiet game. He was immediately intrigued. We had a round where I lost. It was all fun and giggles as I over-reacted to my loss. We had a round where he lost. And then, we played our last round of the quiet game.
You can tread carefully here. My toddler wasn’t afraid of being awake alone back then, but I know that now some mornings when I don’t respond immediately (or soon) he gets worried. So, proceed at your own discretion.
The last round of our game, the room filled with silence as we were competing to see who could be the quietest. And then, I started lightly snoring. I had “accidentally fallen asleep.” He tried to get me to wake up, but I just snored louder.
And eventually, he laid back down and talked to himself for a few minutes. It was the absolute most adorable conversation ever. It was excruciating trying not to laugh. I just wanted to hug him all over. “*sigh* Mom’s asleep. She fell asleep. We were playing a game. I wonder if she’ll ever wake up. *high pitched pretend voice* Oh no! Mom’s asleep! What are we going to do now?!”
And in just a few minutes, you’ll never believe it. The little pretend voice got quiet. And in a few more minutes, the wiggles stopped. And my boy was asleep. Without a fuss. And without a fight.
That is my genius mommy moment to get my toddler to sleep. If you’re having a hard time getting your toddler to go to sleep, give this tip a try. Even if it doesn’t work, you at least had fun trying! 😀
If you’re looking for a more long-term solution, you might want to read this post about how to get your toddler to sleep quickly every time.
Was this a helpful tip worth sharing? Help a mama out and share this to save her some sleep. 🙂
This post may contain affiliate links to stuff I love. It doesn't charge you any extra, but it will help support this blog and my family.
We moved into a really cool, very old home with beautiful light fixtures. I should say beautiful but disgustingly dirty light fixtures. The house had been a rental home until a smoker bought the place. Can you even?
Lord help me. I cleaned the you-know-what out of that house, repainted, replaced light switches, everything I could think of.
And when I was whooped from a day of painting on top of a ladder in a house that was 85* (and who knows how hot it was on the ceiling), I would crash into my chair and stare up at the ceiling.
Only to see the grossest, brownest, beautiful light fixture looking down at me. Begging me to clean it. And honestly, day after day I was just too sore or too tired to clean it. It glowed a weird creamy brown color. Really.
But one day my mom came for a visit. She helped me hang curtains in the whole house. And when I had hung curtains in 4 rooms, she volunteered to clean my light fixture for me. So it was her turn to climb the ladder.
Hooray! Mom to the rescue. She got some cleaner (we used Windex). I was surprised how easily it cut through the tar and grease from the cigarette smoke.
You’ll need a roll (yes, a roll!) of paper towels, especially if you have a chandelier with a lot of sparkly things. And you’ll need a trashbag.
You’ll also want a tarp to catch the yucky drips.
And if you’re a weenie like me, you’ll want cleaning gloves.
Here’s what you do.
It only took us 20 minutes tops, from the idea to having a white sparkly chandelier. And since we cleaned it, I can’t tell you how much more relaxing it is to crash in the chair after a long day of work.