Strawberry Season

We spent a few hours this past weekend enjoying some strawberry picking at our favourite local farm, the kids sampled and helped pick. Miss E thought she died and went to heaven just like last year. This year there was one difference, she was not eating the entire strawberry, stem and all! So with strawberry picking comes strawberry eating, and for me that means stains on a really cute outfit. Well that happened tonight, my mom was visiting so she took the shirt and tried her standby stain removal tricks but nothing worked. She came back downstairs and told me to google how to get rid of them, so I did. I came across a new website that gave me some great directions and it worked! Totally gone from her shirt on the first try. I could not control my excitement and my kids are in bed and my husband is at the gym so I just had to share with you all!

Instructions - How to Get Strawberry Stains Out of Clothes

Things You'll Need:
Vinegar
Baking Powder

Step 1 - Rinse stain with cool water and blot with paper towels (don't rub) to get off any excess that you can.
Step 2 - Combine white vinegar with baking powder. It does not have to be like a paste, no need to go too heavy with the baking powder.
Step 3 - Pour onto stain.
Step 4 - Let sit for 15 minutes. Rinse with cool water.
Step 5 - Wash in machine with cold water.
Step 6 - Check that stain is gone before placing in dryer as heat will set the stain.
Step 7 - Repeat if necessary but once usually does the trick.
Step 8 - If white material, hang outside in the sun to dry as the sun is the world's best bleach.

Thanks to ehow.com for this. I am so excited to know that I will be able to save many items from the trash can.

The first day of summer holidays...

...and this is what I find! It was not even 10am and I was on the phone with my printer when they come back being "kitties". Are they not cute?! Thankfully we only have Crayola in my house and there was no marker on my new carpet or walls!

Oh how much fun are we going to have this summer.

{Note to self: Lock all dangerous materials and items away; knives, cleaners, medicine and markers!}

Modern Work at Home Mom

So today I experience one of the joys of being a work at home mom. I am talking to a potential client on my Blackberry. She has called me because she loves my work and is interested in some graphic design work and having a logo designed for her new business.

I am outside at the time, walking my neighbours daughter home. The kids were all out playing in the rain, it is 5pm, and my husband just got home. He took our kids in to get dried off, I took my neighbour home. My Blackberry rings in my pocket and I think it is him telling me I am taking to long. What can I say I love to chat with my neighbours! I am home all day with small kids, forgive me Hun if I relish in adult conversation. Is it him? No it is a potential client, she got my number from my lindsaybrewda.com website.

I come into the house and he realizes I am on with a client, so he doesn't give me a hard time for taking a while. My little girl comes to me, I follow her into the family room for a moment and kept talking. She is behind me for a few minutes, I can't see what she is doing and honestly I am not paying attention. I am on a business call after all, and my husband was right there in the kitchen. Well all of the sudden she comes up to me with a wipe in her hand and I take her hand, notice as I am talking that her hands are covered in brown. I do the check in my head...

1. Did she get chocolate? NO
2. Is it mud from outside? NO
3. ...

This has a smell... OMG it is poo! My daughter has poo all over her hands and no diaper on which means... I look around for poo, picturing it all over my area rug and couch. All the while I am still chatting it up on the phone. Biggest talent of being a work at home mom is not letting the person on the other line know that everything is crazy around me. Heck I bribe my kids with treats if they will behave for important phone calls!

Well as I now know that there is poo on my hands, there is a little girl with poo on her hands, there is a diaper sitting on the floor with poo in it and I can't imagine what her butt looks like I give in. I tell the wonderful woman on the other end of my Blackberry that I am up to my elbows in poo and I really have to run. She laughs and tells me she has been playing with her baby trying to keep her quiet while talking to me, and totally understands! She offers right away to let me go and call her back. I know at this moment that I can't get a pen because if I did there would then not only be poo on my hands, my daughters hands, my floor, her butt, it would also be on my pen. I ask if I can call her back on the number she called me on, it showed up on my display. She said sure, I could call or email her back. I giggle and say thanks and I will get back to her as soon as I can. My husband takes and hangs up the call and I deal with the poop.

I have now had a couple of occasions with my sweet little girl and poop. You see, she is miss independent and she was trying to change her own bum. She probably realized that Mommy was on the phone and that Daddy doesn't like poop {thank god he does puke!} so the best option was for her to take care of it herself. Gotta give her credit for her go get em attitude. My son never did this to me, thankfully. So it is all new.

Oh the joys of being a modern work at home mom, talking business on my Blackberry while up to my elbows in poop!!!

I feel like a blog post in my new favorite book - The BlackBerry Diaries: Adventures in Modern Motherhood, by Kathy Buckworth

Going on a road trip!

Bright and early tomorrow morning my husband and I are hoping in his flashy red sports car and hitting the road. We are going on a road trip, without our kids! We are going to do a little shopping (for those of you Canadians who love shopping in the US you know what I mean) and my main place to stop is Target. Yes some might think that is nuts, but we don't have Target in Canada and there are so many items that I hear all about through my wonderfully great American friends and wish I could buy. So I have my list here and all ready for my shopping trip to Target!

This is the first trip without kids, ever! Yes it is just an overnight, but still it is 2 days with no kids. It is 11 hours total in the car without kids! It will be quiet (well besides the concert), there will be no fighting (unless the hubby bothers me) and I will be able to sleep in (ask me on Thursday if I was up by 8am). Oh my small small world!!

Well we are excited! Why are we embarking on this adventure? Eddie Vedder is why. For those of you that don't know who he is, you needed to pay more attention to the grunge scene in the 90's, okay just joking! Eddie is the lead singer of Pearl Jam. He did a great soundtrack to an amazing movie "Into the Wild" and did a solo tour last year. We saw him in Toronto last August and it was amazing, a real intimate show with amazing music. That man can do amazing things by himself, I can't wait to see Pearl Jam in TO in August. I have been a fan since the beginning, but it is my husband who has really pushed the music back on us. The entire family loves it, really my 2 and 4 year old rock out and know the words to most of their music. Well he decided to do a couple more shows before the band sets out on their tour so we jumped at the chance to see him again.

Well enough about the music, I better get my butt off this computer and pack, I am leaving in 8 hours and I still need to sleep! I am so excited I am not sure if I will be able to sleep. Does that make me sound like a bad parent? I will miss my kids, honestly I will. Well maybe only for a minute!! Okay ask me how much my hubby and I talked about them while we were going. We both are so looking forward to getting away but I am sure we will miss them dearly.

Privacy

I am always plagued with the issue of privacy and my online business. This blog is a love hate relationship for me right now. I started this a long time ago to share with all of my followers, I wanted parents out there (my customers) to know that being a parent is amazing and hard all at the same time. When I first became a mom I was the only one I knew with kids. I felt very alone and had lots of questions. So I share because I want other moms out there who might feel the same way to know they are not alone.

Well because of this I put myself out into the open. 99% of the time I don't mind. But the odd time I get people who visit this blog regularly for other reasons. Those are the people who make me hesitant to post like I want to. Yes I know who visits all of my websites. I go to blogs because I like them. I love reading about others lives, that is what makes me visit them regularly. Well I am sure these 1% don't visit mine because they are interested in me. So this holds me back from writing here.

As I assess this blog and my writing on it I look at what is most important to me - my family. I will protect them over anything else and until I feel more comfortable sharing about our life I might not be posting here as often. I am sure just sharing this will make it easier for me to come back and write about my crazy life!

Slacking I know...

I have been bad lately with my blogging. These past couple of weeks have been crazy busy and I am just doing everything I can to keep my head above water!

I am loving life right now though. The sun is shining and the kids are enjoying time outside. My body is looking "hot" for the summer, first time in 6 years that I could actually attempt to wear a short skirt or short shorts again. All the pilates at my gym has really paid off. Have I said before how much I love pilates? Well I do! So much so that I have bought stuff to be able to do a lot of it at home. It really is amazing what it has done to my body in a short period of time, I just smile when I think of what I will be like in another 6 months.

I actually stepped on the scale on the weekend, something I don't do very often and I was surprised. It said 118lbs, I am 10lbs off of my pre kids weight of 108lbs! I never thought this day would come and I was okay with it. My body changed the moment I got pregnant with Kal and I was fine to weigh more. My boobs are bigger now so I knew there was a couple extra pounds there.

Most of my spring and summer clothes are too big for me now. Nothing to complain about, well except I don't really have a lot of money to buy new clothes. I am putting most of my income back into the business and paying off the debt caused by our move last June. So even though I would love to hit the mall for a shopping spree, and trust me there is a lot I want to buy, I won't. Thankfully I got my little shopping spree at my favorite store Lululemon for my birthday!

Oh I have to go pick up Kal from school, better run, enjoy the rest of your day. The sun is shining here so I know I will!

When you want to move on but...

some people just won't go away.

For months now I have been dealing with someone who copied the name of my blog, this blog. Not just anyone, a company the same as Grace Announcements.

A few months ago I posted a couple of frustrations on my blog. Within a few weeks I had found another company who stole my images and used them as her own on her website and a competitor who was using the same name as my "the mom behind the designs" blog for her blog name. When I wrote the post about it but I didn't include her name, her company name or a link to her site so there was no way to know exactly who I was talking about unless you knew her directly. Because at that time if you searched her blog name it didn't show up. Well she, who doesn't visit my websites or blogs {sorry I know you do and you did more than you said you did!} sends this childish email calling me unprofessional for my post and her sloppy seconds. Me unprofessional... her calling me her "sloppy seconds"... hmm I wonder who is unprofessional? She says how she didn't know she was using the same name as my blog; she says the only time she was on my blog was when I had my daughter back at the beginning of 2007. After my blog was named “the mom behind the designs”, yet she didn't notice it. She didn't notice the HUGE banner at the top that said The Mom Behind the Designs. I started using that name in 2006; she didn't until the end of 2008. So I look back through my traffic stats and there were regular visits from her little town on a regular basis. She goes on in her emails about my copying her and how much my work sucks, etc. She flat out says she will NOT stop using the name on her blog. I don't like her pushing herself as my “name”. It can become very easy for people to get confused when you have two mom's both of whom are designers, both of whom have the same business, both of whom blog about their life. She might as well change her name to Lindsay!! I posted the email she sent me, and I got a nasty email from either her in hiding or a friend of hers. They brought up again how much my work sucks and how people go to her instead of me. That it was horrible for me to do this to her and they felt so bad for her, yet I had still never posted who she was. How could all these people know her if I didn't say who it was? I decided to step back, at the time I was dealing with some personal issues and really didn’t feel like being brought down further by her childish behaviour. Well last week I got a comment on my blog (I didn't realize that I had allowed anonymous comments) about how my copied designs sucked and they were emailing my competition. I know again it was her; she visited my blogs and website 10 times that day.

I really wondered if others thought that posting that was wrong and unprofessional so moved past it. But then last week I get that blog comment. I know I can't make everyone happy and I don't ever expect to. You either like me and my work or you don't. If you don't move on, you will not succeed with trying to bring me down. I could care less about what you think! Call me your sloppy seconds or whatever else you can come up with, I don't care and you won't win this childish game with me.