Saturday Surfing

Finds of the Week

• 17 Books to Read Before the Movie Hits Theatres This Year, Hello Giggles — a bunch of books to add to my reading list!
• A Fight as U.S. Girls Face Genital Cutting Abroad, NY Times — Holy cow, I had no idea
• Her Party, The New Yorker — an essay from Thomas Beller about his daughter’s 7th birthday party and the emotions of childhood
• The Secret to Not Fighting With Your Kids About Their Messy Room, Carrots for Michaelmas — It seems so obvious, and yet…still working on getting over my idea that our house has to be a preschool…
• What you do vs. how you do it, Steady Mom  — sometimes it’s not the things we have to do that drain us, but the way we are doing them.  This fits in really well with a recent re-examination that Chris and I did on how we get things done around the house.

This Week’s Pins:

If you are reading this in a reader, go to my blog to see the pins.

See more on Pinterest

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Also, a little note:

If you visited my blog today, you may have noticed that I tweaked a few things. There is a fun new header. I added some bright pink that I’m not 100% sure I love but am going to try out for a bit, I cleaned up the sidebar a little…

And I added a few sponsor links.

This is the first time in five years of blogging that I have had any advertisements on my blog. As I’ve written, this year was already a tricky year for us from a financial perspective with our sale on our Wyoming house falling through, and things are about to get shakier with my medical situation. Thus, after much debate, I thought I might try out adding few advertisements as a means of possibly helping us out in some tiny way over the next few months. I want to be very clear: my content is going to stay 100% the same; I will not be writing sponsored posts and my writing will not be influenced in any way by sponsors. All that has changed is that there are now 6 small ads in my sidebar. Further, I’d like to emphasize the fact that the six businesses I chose to work with are all businesses that we use and buy things from on a regular basis.

The businesses I chose to work with are:

• Earth Mama Angel Baby, who makes the lotion and soap I use on the girls, plus my most recommended natural nipple butter for the early nursing days
• GroVia, one of the brands of cloth diapers we use
• Gymboree, where at least 80% of my girls’ clothes are from
• Shutterfly, from whom I regularly order photo prints, cards, and am planning to order those photo books on my 30 Before 30 list
• Tea Collection, another of our favorite clothing shops
• zulily.com, that daily deals site I am addicted to (most recently for learning and homeschool supplies, but when we were on Nantucket and in Gillette, I regularly bought all kinds of clothing and shoes for myself and the girls off of here)

Hopefully these ads will not be too off putting for anyone, but if they are, please leave me a comment and let me know! I’m not committed to this, and I would much rather have my readers than an extra $5 here and there. As with everything in life, I’m looking at this as the chance to try something new, which can easily be undone with the click of a button.

Thanks for reading and namaste,
Amber