Category: Style & Beauty

Dry Winter Skin

Come about November each year, I notice my skin, especially on my face, gets really dry. By mid-December, it’s so dry that it’s flaking. I’m habituatally consistent in making sure to use my standard moisturizer at morning and at night. But come the winter time, I found myself year after year, peeling off dry skin from my face and slathering on hand moisturizer on my face in an attempt to quell the flaky skin.

This year, I decided that I needed to find a better solution. Using my standard moisturizer that I use the rest of the year just wasn’t going to cut it during the dry winter months. There had to be a better way to take care of my skin. After visiting with my dermatologist and my aesthistician, I’ve found a combination of moisture warriors that work for me and don’t cause my break-out prone skin to break-out.

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Friday Favorites {02.04.22}

I’m sitting in the midst of a playroom that looks like a bomb went off in it. The kids are home for what seems like the millioneth day this past month because of a snowstorm shutting daycare (and the city) down for the day. Another day trying to balance work and taking care of the kids, while Nathan is on calls all day. It feels impossible lately. This phase of life. A period of time where the kids can’t be trusted to just sit and watch movies all day. Where a sickness, snow day, or emergency trip to urgent care (yeah, we had one of those on Monday), hijacks the entire day, and I feel left in a lurch to try to figure out the bare minimum of what needs to be done at work to attend to my number one priority, the kids.

I’m sure it doesn’t get easier after this phase. The hard just morphs into a different kind of hard. But I’ve found myself a lot this month wondering how I can keep up with this. How to make all of the pieces fit together, that are so far from fitting together right now.

Thanks for staying with me, friends. I gathered up a handful of favorites this Friday. Happy weekend!

The Chiefs game result was not a favorite of this past week, but cheering on the Chiefs with the boys this season has been so much fun! While Harrison flips between being a Chiefs fan and a Broncos fan, he’s starting to understand some of the rules of the game. Such a crazy and fun season!

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Friday Favorites {12.17.21}

I feel myself getting caught up this time of year in trying to have the perfect Christmas. Mostly ideas of peaceful cookie decorating, picturesque holiday movie watching on the couch with the whole family and a fire going, and doing all of the festive things like visiting Santa, looking at lights. And then there are little things too, for me, like wrapping each present perfectly. And I can find myself, if I don’t catch it early enough, with these high expectations of what this time looks like for our little family.

The holidays, and pretty much all special events, are better when I lower my expectations. When it doesn’t go perfectly, I don’t want my kids remembering a mom that was flustered and upset. I want them to remember these special celebrations as moments of joy strung together.

So as we head into this holiday week, I pray for you, friend, a week where we let go of the reigns a little bit. We lower the expectations of our children’s reactions and actions, the perfect picturesque holiday scenes we have in our minds, and remember that the best thing we can give our kids is a happy, joyful mom in the chaos and mess of it all. (And then let’s just all plan to have a virtual glass of wine together at the end of the night. ☺️)

Happy Friday, friends. And Merry Christmas week! ~Lauren

We went and visited Santa a couple weeks ago. I wasn’t sure how this would go, honestly. I was prepared for tears. Harrison hadn’t visited Santa since he was 1, and obviously has no memory of it.

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Christmas Home Tour 2021

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! (Second most wonderful, in my opinion. The first is the FIRST big garden trip to the garden center in the Spring. 😆. You guys know I LOVE my garden!)

Today, I’m inviting you all into our home decorated for the holidays! Plus, this helps me remember where I put everything when I go to decorate the next year. 😊

Come on inside!

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Fall House Tour 2021

It’s FALL HOUSE TOUR day! I little peak inside our house this fall. And a look outside, as well. This is the first year I really decorated for fall outside, and our patio looks so friendly and fall-ish! Why didn’t I do this ages ago??

Harrison looooooves the addition of the skeleton that talks when you walk by it. I saved some of my gladiolus bulbs and realized that their dried leaves were actually the perfect addition to my front pot to decorate for fall. It looks a little like dried cornstalks. But not as big. And free.

And these cute little planters are switched out for fall…

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Sticker Nails

It takes me a while to try out a fad. I really have to be convinced that maybe there’s something to it. That maybe there’s a reason that so many people like it. Maybe that’s the reason it’s taken me so long to try sticker nail polish. Years have gone by since I first heard friends and acquaintances talk about sticker nail polish. Usually I’d hear it in relation to a particular company, Color Street. And that was fine for everyone else, but having painted nails was just never my thing.

I’m tough on my nails. I can’t stand to have them long. They are used for digging in the dirt, peeling off stickers from objects that stickers should have never been stuck to, and just general housework. My entire life, painted nails only resulted in immediately a chip in the nail polish, followed by days of me slowly peeling off all remaining nail polish. Once it chips, I just can’t help myself! So I had resigned myself to just not being a fingernail polish person.

I’m not sure why I changed my mind, but I finally decided to give sticker nail polish a shot. After some research, I decided to try out Dashing Diva. Why you ask? Because I could order them from Target with the rest of my pick-up order. And convenience at this point in my life with two little boys running around is key.

And you guys…it changed my mindset about painted fingernails. I LOVED them.

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What’s Up Wednesday {08.25.21}

This might be my favorite post of the month. They’re the most fun to go back and read, it’s a little bit of food, a little bit of my Timehop addiction, reading, watching, all wrapped up in one post.

As always, I’m linking up with Shay and Sheaffer to share with you what’s going on in our life!

1: WHAT WE’RE EATING THIS WEEK:

We’re eating MY version of Iowa Girl Eats Cheesy Pasta Florentine, Asian Crockpot Pot Roast (the crockpot is coming back hardcore now that I’m starting to think about fall), and Parmesan Chicken Cutlets with corn on the cob.

2: WHAT I’M REMINISCING ABOUT:

We’re getting ready for our trip to my parents’ cabin in South Dakota. The last time we were there was 2019, and we looked like this…

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Amazon & Target Lately

I’m sharing some of the fun things I’ve ordered from Amazon and Target lately!

Magnetic letters || Waffleknit Shorts Jammies || Stroller fan || Portable high chair || Pouch lids || Waffleknit Long Jammies

Harrison’s been working on his letters at school, and we bought magnetic letters to work on them at home! Loved this option because they don’t have that choking hazard small loose magnets on the back like the ones we used to have when we were kids.

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Let’s Look At…Bathroom Organization

Once a month I link up with two of my favorite blogs (Shay @ Mix and Match Mama and Erika @ A Little Bit of Everything), to share a “look” into some little aspect of our life. Here’s a peak back at what we’ve “looked” at this year:

Today, we’re sharing…BATHROOM ORGANIZATION. This should be renamed to, look at the disaster in my bathroom drawers.

Disaster. I’ve tried to organizes our bathroom drawers, and it’s just never stuck. So, it’s usually just a mess. A mess on the bathroom counter. A mess in the drawers. So, here’s our mess…

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Fresh Paint for our Main Floor

When we moved in to our house seven years ago, there were so many things that we wanted to eventually change about our house to make it feel more like our style. What we found is, life gets busy really quickly. Pretty soon, kids come along, and it’s even busier, and that list of things to update/change goes on the back burner. BUT, after spending the past year plus living and working from our home, we decided it was time for a fresh coat of paint.

Here’s a peak of our kitchen “before.”

Although, not truly a before picture, because the true before picture would be missing some can lights on the ceiling that we had installed last summer, and the horrendous fan we had over our kitchen table.

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