Since I’m on a major DIY kick with essential oils and beauty/cleaning products at the moment, and that big ol’ yard and dog house we bought also came with fleas, I concocted this totally organic linen spray recipe to keep them at bay inside our new home. AND IT WORKS.
Summer is finally here, and I can’t help but daydream about camping. I really love camping the idea of camping. Cozy sleeping bags, cute little portable eating and cooking gear. How fun!
I’m not a parent yet, but most of my friends are — and I have a select few whose parenting styles I follow very closely & will want to adopt when, if it’s meant to be, we start a family in the future.
The irony of trying to post a timely adoption story is that our new little love has been keeping us too busy to do much of anything but get her settled in, let alone do any writing.
Some of my favorite early childhood memories involve wooden puzzles from Germany given to us by our au pair, Claudia, and wooden toy trains and tracks at my Montessori school.
Probably the nicest thing anyone has done for us this year was right after Dante passed away in August: my mom made a donation in D’s name to contribute to the cost of training a service dog at NEAD
This weekend was pretty special. I’m not one to make a big deal out of a dog’s birthday (before this weekend we marked the occasion each year with a marrow bone from the butcher and a trip to the dog park), but since we knew it was going to be Dante’s last one, I indulged every crazy dog person tendency and dog birthday party inspiration I had ever collected.
For those of you who’ve read Shoestring for any length of time, you know that we’ve been super lucky to have parenting blogger extraordinaire Christine Koh as a regular columnist, sharing her Minimalist Mama expertise in these “pages” over the years.
For about 15 years, my best friend Jess & I had a Christmas Eve day tradition: we’d meet at the mall and bang out all of our holiday shopping together, while the place was completely empty — save us and a few hundred dads, who inevitably always turned to us for advice.