Tyler, TX blogger - parenting, cooking, DIY-ing, crafting, sports, and life with three boys!
Scroll to the bottom to download and print your Father’s Day Dad and Grandpa Fact Sheets!
Father’s Day is coming up soon, and it’s time to think about fun, easy, low cost gifts to give Dad and Grandpa this year! I’m all about making memorable gifts that can be enjoyed and kept for years to come and these Father’s Day printables – All About My Dad and All About My Grandpa are perfect for Father’s Day!
Quick and easy, yet delicious meals are my favorites! I love when I can put together a meal in under a half of an hour, and this vegetarian burrito bowl is a go to quick meal that packs tons of delicious flavor!
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My backyard has always been a place to retreat to when life gets stressful. With so many uncertainties in our lives on any given day, it is good to have a place that we can sit back and just watch nature all around us. Since moving to Tyler last summer, I have been continually impressed and in awe of the nature in my own backyard!
This post has been brought to you by Bayer Crop Science. All opinions are mine.
We continue to try to make our backyard space a place that is inviting to bees and butterflies. It was somewhat handed to us because the previous owners took care to grow bee and butterfly friendly plants and kept up with their landscaping, but finding out how to maintain this level of nature love has been fun!
A few weeks ago, I decided to refinish the deck. It was in desperate need of a little sealant, and doing so really livened up the area. I also put some beautiful tropical flowers out on that space, and the butterflies and bees really seem to love my new flowers. I love to have my coffee out on the back porch, watching the butterflies and bees busily work.
Many obstacles are causing the monarch butterfly population to decline. The lack of available habitat is a big reason, as butterflies need a natural habitat to live, eat, and multiply. A decision will be made this year to add monarchs to the endangered species list, and it is our job to help them THRIVE! Finding a Monarch in nature is a special thing, so I am very interested in how to save them from becoming endangered!
One great idea for families to do together is to plant a pollinator friendly yard. I know that my three sons are always looking for things to do, and since we love being outdoors, a pollinator friendly yard and garden only makes sense! It is so much fun seeing butterflies and bees visit the yard and flowers that you planted! Milkweed and other nectar flowers are top priority for a pollinator yard.
What better way to bring education home than to talk about the life cycle of plants while creating a garden, and discuss the life cycle of a butterfly and a bee! My kids love getting in the garden with me. Yes, digging in the dirt is super fun for a little boy, but they also love digging a hole for the plants, dropping seeds or plants in the ground, watering them, and watching them grow all season long! And you cannot have a successful fruit and vegetable garden without pollinators!
The monarch populations will recover with a little help from us. More breeding habitats and food resources, including milkweed and nectar sources, across the migration route will help greatly.
HabiTally is an app that allows farmers, ranchers, landowners and everyday private citizens to enter data about their monarch habitat conservation efforts. HabiTally was developed as a collaboration between Bayer and The Climate Corporation, and supported by Iowa State University. The data entered into this app will help researchers make good decisions to further help the monarch butterflies and other pollinators and small animals.
To use HabiTally, users drop a pin on a map to mark their habitat and enter any key characteristics of the habitat. HabiTally will automatically calculate the size of the habitat based on the user’s entry, as well as auto-populate information about the milkweed density. Users can also enter whether they have seen monarchs in their habitat.
Bayer has been supporting the health of bees and other pollinators for more than 30 years. They are finding solutions to the challenges these pollinators face – and a lack of adequate food and habitat are some of those challenges!
Milkweed is a primary source of not only habitat for monarch butterflies, but monarch caterpillars’ diets consists solely of milkweed! Adult monarchs will only lay their eggs on milkweed plants. So really, nothing else will do and we need to make sure there is plenty of milkweed along the migration path for our monarch butterfly friends!
Not only is gardening a way to relieve stress, but simply sitting and enjoying nature is a stress reliever. The kids and I all love to sit and watch the bees and butterflies in our yard!
Painted Lady Butterfly – not a Monarch, but still a very special pollinator!
The Best Children’s Vitamins with Immunity Support is a sponsored piece. I received this product for free from Moms Meet to use and post my honest opinions. Compensation for this post was provided and this page may contain affiliate links.
The first semester of kindergarten was rough for our guy. He has always been pretty healthy, and he loves fruits like none other! We always assumed he was pretty healthy, but he came down with a cold and the flu TWICE during the first semester of kindergarten. How does that even happen, really? Either way, we knew we needed to boost his little immune system somehow, so I was on a search for the best children’s vitamins with immunity support!
Knock on wood, he has been relatively healthy this year, and he is pretty excited about taking his vitamins. We were sent this trio of vitamins for kids from Little DaVinci® line.
mighty vite is a sugar-free alternative to gummy vitamins for kids that stands up to the adult multivitamin standards. Formulated with Dr. Matt Hand, MO, an integrative medicine pediatrician at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, this kids multivitamin contains probiotics, cur cumin, and elderberry to support immunity and gut health.* It also contains a well-absorbed form of folate that your child’s body can use immediately to support a healthy attention span.* Little DaVinci® mighty vite contains high quality, evidence-based raw ingredients and nothing else. It is a ready-to-eat powder that is unlike any other. It addresses immune support, digestion support, and inflammation support*!
Little DaVinci® uses therapeutic levels of ingredients and potent formulas that are never watered down and no fillers are added. Their focus is on improving lives by producing natural supplements derived from real nutrients. I trust these vitamins for my kids, to keep them feeling great and their immune systems top notch!
These immuni-z vitamins are a natural lemon flavor and full of the zinc that your little ones need to help boost their immune systems.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
I love gardening. This year, since we moved, I do not have a big garden like I used to and I miss it. We have the space, but I’m not willing to dedicate a whole day to tilling up the land, but maybe sometime I will! We do have a little flowerbed in the back that I have planted peppers, onions, cabbage, and carrots in. Everything is coming up nicely! I have been intrigued by the fact that you can regrow your vegetables, and we recently were gifted the “Regrow Your Veggies” book, so I decided to give it a try with my new obsession – pineapples!
We go through pineapples like crazy around here. We can easy eat 2 fresh pineapples a week, either plain, in a smoothie, grilled, or my recent obsession: air fryer pineapple. You need to try that recipe!!
The book says that you can easily regrow your pineapple. It does take a few years to actually regrow another pineapple. (And for the record, I do realize that pineapple isn’t a veggie, but a fruit, but well, it’s still really cool!) We worked on this and just called it our daily science lesson.
Take the leaves off the very bottom and soak it in some water and in a few days, you will see roots growing. Then, just plant it in a pot with soil and you’ll have a super cool houseplant that should grow a pineapple in a few years! As much as we spend on houseplants, the fact that this one is basically free should make every plant lover’s spouse, like mine, super happy!
“Regrow Your Veggies” has information on how to regrow potatoes, sweet potatoes, ginger, herbs, and much more. It is well written and easy to read, for kids and adults. It makes a great family project!
I particularly like how it has information on care of the plants and how to take care of pests, like fruit flies, and issues like rot, mildew, etc. It even has recommended times to grow these plants and suggestions for light, climate, etc.
>>Don’t miss how to start composting, too<<
No Taco Tuesday is complete without the perfect side dish. Luckily, you have come to the right place! If you don’t like this recipe for Instant Pot Green Enchilada Rice, you can also try my Instant Pot Mexican Rice or Instant Pot Cilantro Lime Rice! But now, for the purpose of this post… green rice!
This Instant Pot Green Enchilada Rice is SO flavorful, and the secret ingredient makes is SUPER easy to make. Don’t worry about buying peppers, spices, etc, because I have the ingredient that makes it easy and perfect.View Post
We did our second round of Whole30 earlier this year and it was a success for me. I love how delicious fruits taste when I am completely off of sugar! This is a recipe that came from that experience, and also visit Texas de Brazil restaurant with my husband. So….they serve grilled pineapple, but it does have sugar on top. This air fryer pineapple recipe has no added sugar and is so so delicious! I also made a coconut whipped cream as a topping and you can choose to add a sweetener or not, but either way, it’s delicious and a great piña colada flavored dessert!
While everyone in the country is getting into a groove with doing their schoolwork from home, I want to share what is working for us, and has worked for us for years: the checklist. I have found that my boys thrive on checklists, where they can see what they need to do in a day or week long period, and then work at their own pace to get things done. When we homeschooled when my oldest was in kindergarten, schedules just didn’t work for any of us. It stressed me out because I had two little ones at home and doing the same thing at the same time every day was so stressful! That is when I started making checklists so we could see what we needed to do and not stress out about time and schedules. And that’s when I found that my oldest son THRIVED with this method and even started expecting and relying on his checklist! It was so helpful to all of us! He would check his list in the morning and start getting stuff done, sometimes even before I rolled out of bed. This checklist printable is perfect for homeschooling and/or chores!
During the summers, I used this same method for all three kids. I made them a checklist the night before and they knew what chores and responsibilities they had the next day. And if they needed more instructions without my help, I would have them use a checklist with specific instructions, like this bathroom cleaning checklist.
And now that we are schooling at home for the time being, these checklists are what is working for us. They can see what is expected of them and work to get it all done. I put certain rules into place, such as you can’t play video games until the checklist is done for the day, etc. Do whatever works for you!
Download this free checklist printable to do list and see if it works well for your family! Just click the image below to download the PDF!
Fresh fruits are our favorite, year round, but of course there is something about spring that makes us love them all the more! Fresh, local fruits are such a joy. I love buying a carton of raspberries and see my kids eat them with big smiles on their faces! My husband also loves raspberries, so I combined the delicious, fresh flavors of spring with a light raspberry cheesecake filling inside these cute, easy cookie cups made from store-bought cookie dough for this raspberry cheesecake cookie cups recipe!
Before I became an Instant Pot user, rice was something I ate, but did not really like unless it was prepared for me at a Japanese restaurant or by my mother-in-law. I thought of it as a filler, a side dish to make sure that I stayed full until the next meal. I was constantly burning rice on the stove or just resorting to the microwave rice packets. But then, I got an Instant Pot, and my opinions about rice changed! I started with Instant Pot Mexican Rice and my love for the Instant Pot…and rice only grew! If you have been to my site before, it’s likely that the Instant Pot Mexican Rice is what brought you here. It’s my most popular recipe of all time! I have made some other Instant Pot rice recipes, and collected some others in the list below. Scroll down, check it out and let me know what you think!
