Coppertone CLEARLYSheer Sunscreen Review

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I absolutely love summer activities, but not always the heat and definitely not the sunburn that accompanies them! I'm all burn; it doesn't even fade to tan. Not the best combination. I've used all sorts of sunscreens and their either too expensive, too greasy, or too smelly. Finally, I've found a sunscreen that I actually really like.
Coppertone ClearlySheer is different and other sunscreens I've tried before. It feels light and clean after absorbing in just seconds. My skin actually felt softer and smoother after using it, but that may just be because I have dry skin. It also didn't cause any breakouts when I applied it every morning before putting on my makeup, which was fantastic since that in my mind is the purpose of facial sunscreen. It also wasn't shiny, but rather had a nice matte finish. And not that it matters as far as protection, but it smelled amazing. No sunblockesque beachy smell. It smelled of summer coconut and lime.

The lotion formula was my favorite but I also liked their waterproof spray. As always, it's important to rub a spray into your skin to finish applying. Also, no sunscreen is "once a day and done." This sunscreen is no exception- reapplication throughout the day is essential to protect your skin from harmful rays. I would highly recommend this sunscreen if you can find it.

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Disclosure of Material Connection:
All opinions expressed in this blog are those of my own, not of Coppertone, BzzAgent, or any other company affiliated with them, or the products.
I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” 

Homemade Healthy Banana Ice Cream

It's summer and dare I say, getting HOTTER by the minute! The weather makes me reminisce back to my childhood when I actually liked all this hot weather. One of the main reasons was the ice cream truck would come around my neighborhood two or three times a day and each time it did, I would beg my mother for money and when she usually said "No," I'd try and scrounge up change in time before the truck passed my house. Seriously, though, those superman popscicles, with the gumballs in them, where do you buy those? Not at the store as far as I can tell!

Well, I still love ice cream, but not the guilt I have from eating it. I like frozen yogurt, but even then, it's not always healthy. While it may be low fat, the carbs are usually out of this world. In my own happy place, I'm eating gelato from a giant waffle cone dipped in chocolate and sprinkles on the outskirts of Rome. In reality, though, I wanted to come up with a better option.
As a kid, my grandma used to make us "ice cream" by blending together frozen fruits- usually strawberries and bananas or blueberries that she picked and froze in the summer. I decided to pick an idea from those wonderful memories. I'm not a photographer with a sassy camera, just a sassy attitude, so all you're getting is the end shots of the product drizzled in chocolate sauce (homemade, too, but that's for another post.)

Homemade Banana Healthy "Ice Cream"

3 bananas, peeled, frozen
1/4 cup milk- more or less as you like it. I used skim, but it's way better with whole, 1%, or 2%.
A handful of frozen fruit- raspberries, blueberries, 2 apricots- whatever other fruit you want to add, basically. It's totally optional.
a tiny splash of vanilla

Put everything in a food processor or blender and let her rip until it forms a nice creamy consistency. I like it thick- my grandma never added any milk, but the milk makes a nice, creamy texture.

If you don't want to dig out the blender or food processor every time, you can whip up a whole batch at once with room temperature fruit and freeze it. It just makes the "ice cream" a little harder.

Marc Jacob's Daisy

I was lucky enough to try out the Marc Jacob's Daisy perfume at a party with my friends. OH MY! We are all seriousely craving springtime and this party put us in the PERFECT mood for spring!

With a bold floral scent and beautiful grapefruit and vanilla undertones, this perfume is our favorite Marc Jacob's scent so far!

 Natalie loved the Eau so Fresh by Marc Jacob's Daisy. It was my favorite scent as well. Here she is showing off her Daisy Chain bracelet... we'll get to that, later!

 The appetizers included mini cheeseburger pies arranged in a Daisy array. I made them fresh right before so they were extra delicious!

 We played several games centered around the flowers. My friends Kriste and Lenore were the winners and each won a small bottle of perfume!  Here they are showing off the fantastic Daisy product! They thought the vanilla scents were perfect for a perfume with Daisy overtones and said the scent was very fresh and "freeing."

 OK, the story with the Daisy Chains. Marc Jacob's and Crowdtap sent me a kick with bracelet making supplies to make daisy chain bracelets. Before the party, I decided to make one as an example. Being a teacher, this is just something I do. Well, it's a good thing I did. The little metal circles for the end of the bracelet had holes in them, so they kept slipping off the finished bracelet. That caused all the little beads to fall off. My husband soldered them, but then the soldered metal broke the bracelet thread. It was a bit of a mess. The end result was me tying two broken bracelets together. Most of the lobster claw clasps didn't work as well- eeek! My sister made one with me, but that was all. It was too much work and MUCH frustration to make them at the party.

 Our spread was delicious! Everyone brought a daisy-themed appetizer or dessert and we had a great open bar! So much excitement! After the movie, we watched "The Perks of Being a Wallflower." It was a great time with lots of food, fun, games, and so many delicious perfumes!

Instead of the bracelets, I collected together some of my old candlesticks and bought birds houses from Michael's and we each created a stand for them!

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All opinions expressed in this blog are those of my own, not of Marc Jacob's, Crowdtap, or any other company affiliated with them, or the products.
I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Shrimp Scampi Recipe and Review

It has been a crazy January! We thought surely after Christmas, January would be a bit more docile. Not so. I went back to work and am not working a full half-time which is lovely. Babysteps! I also began a second maternity leave in the afternoon at the same school doing the same job. What a blessing that has been!

We just bought a Jeep Patroit as well. My Stratus was such a fantastic car that served me well for so, so many years. It was time, though, as oncoming repairs would cost far more than the car was worth. We picked my new Jeep up on Friday and I've been enjoying it ever since! I've always wanted a Jeep.

It was perfect timing, too, as this January has been the coldest and snowiest on record. We've already had 5 snowdays, today being one of them. The weather has been so chilly and there has been so much snow, it's even too blizzardy to snowmobile up north! So it's quite canceled most people's plans.


John left this Monday for Kapuskasing, Canada despite the weather to do some extreme car testing. With him gone, I've been cooking up some delicious seafood creations! I have a freezer full of beef and chicken but also of shrimp, salmon, catfish, sole, crab, and lobster. NomNom!

I was given the awesome opportunity through Crowdtap by Campbell's to test some delicious products and host a party! I was compensated for a Campbell's Skillet and a Campbell's SlowCooker Sauce. There were a few snags I had. Between the weather, my party kit not arriving on time, and all sorts of snow issues, my party was thrown on a weekday evening with a few coworkers.

The dish was easy enough to make!

I used 4 ingredients:
1 Pouch Campbell's Skillet Sauces: Scampi
1 lb raw frozen peeled, deveined shrimp, tail off.
1 package pasta I used gluten free multigrain with quinoa
1 tbs oil

Optional:
Pepper to taste
Lemon to taste
Basil to taste

To begin, heat oil in a skilled. Add shrimp and cook until pink.

While shrimp is cooking, prep pasta by boiling water and cooking until al dente. Drain.

When shrimp are slightly pink, add the pouch of Campbell's Skillet Sauce and boil. Simmer until shrimp are thoroughly cooked, about 5 minutes.

Serve pasta with shrimp and sauce. I added seasonal veggies on the side.

Some of our thoughts:

The scampi sauce seemed a bit watery. Usually, my homemade scampi is thicker and more creamy. It didn't quite look like the package and wasn't as buttery as scampi sauce usually is, either. However, it was quite savory and blended very well with the shrimp and pasta. The dish was extremely easy to make and took very little time. For lunch, it served about 4 portions. There is no need to add excess salt as the sauce itself is rather salty. However, I did add a fair amount of pepper, lemon, and a bit of basil.

Want to join Crowdtap and participate in shaping brands through surveys, discussions, and exclusive samplings? Join through my referral link!

All opinions expressed in this blog are those of my own, not of Campbell's, Crowdtap, or any other company affiliated with them, or the products.
I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” 

Hershey's Spreads... Oh My! And a peek at my classroom!

Hershey's Spreads Review

So recently, I had the opportunity to try some Hershey's Spreads! It's a new product by Hershey's which is similar to Nutella- only there are other flavors as well, like chocolate and almond and plain chocolate. I received the chocolate with hazelnut flavor so it was very similar to the Nutella I'm used to.
If you know me, you know that chocolate is one of my favorite foods and I could just eat it all day long, so I was especially excited for this Sample and Share. Additionally, it came RIGHT before the massive Polar Vortex smothered Michigan and my neighborhood with two and a half feet of snow. I was able to enjoy HERSHEY'S Spreads all to myself, though I wasn't able to share it with as many friends as I would have liked as I couldn't leave the house!
I loved the texture of the spread- I thought it was firm enough to work as a dip but fluid enough to spread onto toast. It goes with almost anything sweet or salty :) I ever ate some with blueberries for a sweet and sour twist- it was delicious!! While I love nuts, I'm not nuts about hazelnut. I feel I would have enjoyed the Chocolate with Almond more than the Hazelnut. The hazelnut seemed to add even more sweetness to the already sweet chocolate, thus masking a lot of the other delicious notes with, well, sweet.
My favorite pairings were using the spread in a parfait with fruit and pretzels as well as with my oatmeal in the morning and dipped shortbread cookies.
I would CERTAINLY recommend HERSHEY'S Spreads to a friend! I myself am excited to try the Chocolate with Almond flavor.

In other news, my new job is just fantastic! It's a dream job, only part time. Elementary students are just my favorites to work with! Every grade has it's ups and downs, and I loved working with high schoolers, but an elementary setting just feels right.

Here's a little pic of my desk in my classroom. It's about half the size of a regular classroom with tables, a few computers, and some filing cabinets (OK, TONS!) I just adore Dr. Seuss, so I created a Dr. Seuss bulletin board with revolving quotes :) (I also added black behind the quote... talk about a headache!)

Want to join Crowdtap and participate in shaping brands through surveys, discussions, and exclusive samplings? Join through my referral link!

All opinions expressed in this blog are those of my own, not of Hershey's, Crowdtap, or any other company affiliated with them, or the products.
I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” 

Framed Burlap Pumpkin Patch for Halloween/Fall

So basically, I've only been using this site to host images. What gives!? The lest I can do is combine both my review/freebie site and this one. I'll have to look into that...

Yeah, that type of stuff might scare you, too
if you saw it outside your window every night.

I think fall is my favorite season for crafts. Between all the beautiful colors I can use, the materials available to me, and the delicious roasting foods, I just can never decide where to start! However, I dislike halloween. Maybe it's from my childhood gore-crazed neighbors who set up scenes from "Saw" and other scaries every year in their yard. Large floating feet? Nope. Someone burried alive? NOT for me. Spiders, snakes, witches, black fog, ect- no way.

HOWEVER, we did dress up our puppy, Maya! If you haven't met Maya yet, she is simply the sweetest, most charming dog. She LOVES love, other dogs, people, kids, and chewing on everything. We got super lucky. She was a bumble bee. She didn't mind wearing a costume, but she LOVED chewing it! This is the first and last costume she'll be getting.

Anyway, onto the craft! As I stated before, I don't like Halloween. All the decorations I could find were somehow directly related. I thought about painting pumpkins, carving pumpkins again, maybe putting some tied up cornstalks outside, but I wanted something festive for inside, too. I found some cute jeweled owls at Michael's and put out my painted "Thanks" wine bottles. Our living room colors are already brown, red, ect, so that room doesn't need much sprucing. I finally figured out something to put in the kitchen, and this is what I came up with :) A framed pumpkin patch!

Framed Burlap Pumpkin Patch

They were super simple to make and were even easier with my awesome Silhouette I won last year in a Thanksgiving customer appreciation drawing from ConsumerCrafts.com. You'll need:

variety of papers (pumpkins)
scrabble tiles
burlap or other fabric
frame with glass
hot glue or strong fabric adhesive
scissors
Silhouette (or scissors or punch for pumpkins)

Cut a piece of burlap to fit the inside of the frame with extra to wrap around the glass. You'll be gluing the burlap onto the glass and wrapping the extras around.

I used my Silhouette to cut out a bunch of pumpkins with all my different papers but you can use scissors or a punch instead. Or just buy cutouts from the store, I saw some again at Michael's.

Next, I lined them all up and placed my scrabble tiles on the bottom.

Finally, glue them on BEFORE glueing the burlap onto anything. I had to use hot glue to get everything to stick well to the burlap.

Finally, glue the burlap, centered, onto the piece of glass that came with the frame. You could use a heavy piece of cardboard as well.

Wrap the excess around the edges and trip if you need to. Especially with burlap, because it's so thick, you have to glue the excess edges down to the back of the glass. Otherwise, it may come unglued when things brush against it and start to wiggle around the frame.

It hangs gorgeously in my kitchen!! Festive without all the connotations!

Mocha Cappuchino Knockoff!

What a great week it's been! Absolutely beautiful! John's been a bit busy working on his class and work to notice, but I'm hoping that dies down. Here's a picture from the other night. I finished working out to find that my husband had built our cat a house out of pillows. She stayed in there ALL NIGHT and didn't think we could see her :)

We had a game night this past weekend and it was so much fun! It was great to be able to see everyone during that long dull stretch of time during the winter after Christmas when everyone kind of hibernates. (Us, hibernating!?) We've gotten extremely lucky, there are snowmobile tracks all over our area! Right behind our house is a giant field with four wheeling tracks that some local snowmobilers have taken to. They've also taken to driving straight through our lawn and plowed driveway to get there versus the streets. One day...

Anyway, this morning I couldn't find any substitute jobs, but the rest of my week is booked, so that's possitive! In the meantime, I've been working out and, since I don't much care for most meats and am getting sick of shrimp and tuna, decided to get some of those DELICIOUS Bolthouse Farms juices!!

 If you've never tried one of their amazing blends, you're missing out. My favorites are their carrot-orange, vanilla chai tea, and mocha cappuccino. They're so good, you just can't help to drink the whole thing! However, there are some MAJOR drawbacks- they're expensive! These two are the 32oz size and cost me $4 each at Kroger this week, but there are only 4 servings in each.  The other night after a workout, I didn't want to break into any protein powder because there's taurine in it and I wanted to sleep, so instead, I had some of the vanilla chai tea. Oh. My. Goodness. Having assumed they were good for me I had never looked at the label... until I was tossing and turning and not able to sleep. They are LOADED down with sugar! So much sugar! Now, I am trying so hard to eat healthier and sugar is my one catch... no wonder I like these! So anyway, I wanted a healthier option and cheaper, too! So I came up with a recipe for my own. I'll figure out the chai tea one later. Here's my finished product :) It's just as tasty! I wasn't going to add NEARLY as much sweetener as the Bolthouse blend, but since I prefer dark chocolate anyway with less sweet, it doesn't bother me.



Bolthouse Mocha Cappuccino Knockoff

•  1.5 cups skim/fat free milk
• 1 tsp cocoa powder
• 1 small packet (1 tbs) agave nectar
• 1.5 cups coffee (I used the medium Keurig setting and a Starbucks dark roast. Add more or less depending on the strength you want your drink. I like mine strong, so this is what I added.)

Brew coffee. Add agave nectar and cocoa powder while still hot. Mix in milk and add ice.Depending on how much ice you add, it will change sizes.

It's not a total match, but it's delicious and only clocks in at 100ish calories for 8oz instead of 160 with 16 grams of sugar from agave instead of the 28 or so that Bolthouse has. These are total approximates using MyFitnessPal, I haven't actually measured everything and don't plan on it!


In other news, I'm doing the spring craft-show at Nat's high school again with my aunt. It's only a day, and only Saturday, and obviously no where near Christmas, so we'll see how it goes. I have a TON of "Mother's Day" tags to add to my books that can be easily taken off, so I'm hoping it'll make them more of a selling point! Here's a picture of my newest creation line. They measure 4.5"x2.75" and are cute as a button! I made all these little mini "Scrabble Tiles" and I just want to eat them up! This is my "fruits of the spirit" book. I made this sweet little tea time one that I'm FINALLY keeping! It just looks too perfect next to me vintage teapot candle.