Search Results for: blog we thought we covered all bases

Are Tiny Holes Draining Your Energy Budget?

Eat your greens. Floss your teeth. Insulate your attic. While we weren’t energy-saving wizards, we thought that we’d covered most of the bases of healthy and energy-efficient living. But the energy bills kept on coming and the floors were cold. That’s when we realized that we were living in a sieve. It was a nice sieve. Bamboo floors, hemp curtains, walls painted in low-VOC off white. It was the blower door test that revealed the problem. Imagine this: a man comes to your door with something resembling a giant fan, installs it in said door, and seems to suck all … Continue reading →

Holiday Shopping Strategy

It is official, holiday shopping season has begun. In my house, tis the season of scouting for deals and trying to give meaningful gifts that our friends and family will appreciate while spending as little as possible. Both my husband and I are active players in the holiday shopping game, he finances the venture and often hits the stores after he gets out of work in the hopes that he can snag some great gifts on clearance and I scour store ads and online ads for great prices on things that we were thinking of buying as gifts. Black Friday … Continue reading →

Are You Ready For A Multi Racial Family

If you are considering adopting a child or children that are not part of your own race there are a few other things that you need to take into consideration. If you are considering it you are willing to welcome a child into your heart that does not look like you, great we did too. Have you considered that when you do welcome that child into your hearts that you will no longer be like the majority of other families? Are you ready for that? Have you given any consideration to what your friends and extended family may think? Think … Continue reading →

The Help Controversy

The movie The Help is really raking it in at the box office. It opened a few weeks ago and so far, has made almost $87 million in the U.S. It is still in No. 1 place at the box office but it has not been without controversy. In case you don’t know, The Help is about two African American maids working for white families in Jackson, Mississippi in the early ‘60s and a white woman who decides to write about the social injustice of the time. It is based on the book written in 2009 by Kathryn Stockett. It … Continue reading →

We Thought We Covered All Bases

We are not the traditional looking family and that is great with us. When we adopted our kids we could have said we want kids who have the same color hair, skin tone, and eyes so they would have matched us but instead we said we don’t care about any of that only that they were healthy and needing a family. That is truthfully what I think is all that matters. When we started the adoption process we had asked friends who are African American if they thought our child, if we adopted an African American child, would get ostracized … Continue reading →

Author Interview: Sandra Grey, the Conclusion

Thank you for joining us for our third and final installment of our interview with LDS author Sandra Grey. If you missed parts one or two, click here to get caught up. Sandra, you just released your first novel, “Traitor.” How long did it take you to write this book? I wrote the first draft in six months. But of course the first draft is not the entire process. I began writing in the middle of September 2005 and “Traitor” was finally ready for publication (including several months of rewrites, edits, waiting for cover design, title decisions, and reviews, etc.) … Continue reading →

Politics and Business

How much should you mix your politics and your home business? One of the great things about having your OWN business, is that you can do things your way and be as transparent and personal about things as you want to be (or as you feel comfortable with). Since this is an election year and it seems to be all about politics, I thought we might chat a bit here about combining our businesses and our politics (or not). Large corporations and all size businesses wrestle with whether to be political or not. If you look at donations to candidates … Continue reading →

Base Medical vs. Off Base

Base Medical vs. Off base What’s the difference from going to a doctor/midwife on base versus off base? Many come to this question when it comes time to move to another base or they find themselves pregnant. I have had to figure this out with each pregnancy and it would take a lot of thought of whether I wanted on or off and then if I could even get approved. Here are a few things to think about before you decide and a bit of my own experiences to help you along the way. We haven’t moved that many times … Continue reading →

Science at Home: Super Solutions

I recently went to a home schooling convention where I heard the term HENSE for the first time. The letters stand for the following: Home Educators who Never do Science Experiments. Being a closet scientist married to another closet scientist, the thought is incomprehensible to me. But, as I soon found out there are a variety of reasons moms don’t do science experiments. Sometimes the experiments don’t work and there is nothing worse than going through all that trouble to do a dud of an experiment. Sometimes the materials needed are so obscure or difficult to obtain, that it’s not … Continue reading →