Public Service Announcement! Today is April Fool’s Day, DON’T BELIEVE STUFF. Especially on the internet. This is not an April Fool’s Day post, just lots of pictures.

2013 is officially the best Easter I can remember. E got an (almost) 3 day weekend, the weather warmed up, and my children were adorable. My only complaint is that church didn’t have Sunday School during the Easter service, which means I heard exactly none of the sermon because I spent the entire time “shushing” two gingers who can’t sit still for an entire hour. They did, however, sit reasonably still for Fancy Brunch. The unlimited bacon and cupcakes definitely helped.

*Giveaway now closed*

I am blond-haired, blue-eyed, very freckled and of Swedish and English decent…but compared to the rest of my family I have a fantastic tan. E isn’t so much “pale” as “transparent” and the kids definitely take after him. With all that paleness comes the usual complaints – dry itchy skin, sensitivity to all sorts of soaps and additives and cleansers, and chapped cheeks from runny noses and cold air. On top of that, my husband has a mildish case of rosacea (I say mildish, since it doesn’t bother him much – “vain” is not a word in his vocabulary – but it is persistent.)

So when Aquaphor emailed me and was like “Hey, can we send you some Aquaphor to try?” I was like “You mean send me MORE Aquaphor? Since I already buy it in the giant tub since we ran out of the giant tub the Navy prescribed to E for his face? Yes, yes you can.”

They sent me the Aquaphor Baby Healing Ointment and the Aquaphor Baby Gentle Wash & Shampoo, both of which are favorites already in our house. The Healing Ointment is great on diaper rash, itchy spots and especially on the chapped skin on Evan’s face:

7:30 pm, right after bath. Poor baby. His nose runs and he wipes it with his right sleeve so the right side of his face is always the worst (We’re working on using tissues, I promise).

I used a teeny tiny bit of the Aquaphor Healing Ointment right before bed and…

8:00 am the next morning. Still a little dry but SO much better. Luckily a tube of Aquaphor lasts a long, long time so I just dabbed some more on throughout the day.

It even worked wonders on my thumb last night, after I burned myself lighting E’s birthday candles at 1 am (free tip: don’t play with fire when you’re really, really tired).

The Baby Gentle Wash & Shampoo is tear-free, fragrance-free and washes out really easily – all very important factors when trying to wash two squirmy kids who FREAK when you get water in their eyes or ears. Now that Caroline has hair long enough that I need to Deal With It regularly I appreciate that the Aquaphor Wash & Shampoo leaves it soft and shiny. It also took the marker right off both kids hands (and arms and knees and faces…) without drying or irritating their skin. We are Aquaphor devotees and I couldn’t imagine going through a whole winter without it.

To help YOU and your family enjoy your winter, Aquaphor wants to send one of my readers this amazing prize pack:

Bundle of Joy Package 

•  $50 Visa Gift Card
•  “Warm Buddy” to cuddle with
•  Ice Age Continental Drift (2012) DVD to watch with your family
•  A Pottery Barn kids picture frame to keep and share your memories!
• Godiva hot cocoa mix, perfect after a cold day
• Aquaphor Baby Healing Ointment  is a dermatologist and pediatrician trusted product that helps protect and relieve dry, cracked skin. It provides effective soothing relief for dry skin and its mild formula is safe for external use on your baby’s delicate, sensitive skin.
•  Aquaphor Baby Gentle Wash & Shampoo is a mild, fragrance free cleanser that gently cleanses both skin and hair. Enriched with soothing chamomile and provitamin B5, the tear-free formula is specially designed and clinically proven to be gentle for baby’s sensitive skin.

To enter, just leave me a comment on this post sharing something you’re excited about this month!  I’ll pick a winner on February 19th and notify them by email, so be sure to enter one when you comment! The giveaway is only open to US Residents who are 18 years of age or older.

p.s. The Warm Buddy in the prize pack is fantastic – it has a bean bag in the middle you can microwave and then tuck inside. Both kids love cuddling it after we’ve been playing outside and I swear it leads to extra couch naps. Exhibit A:

If you find that Aquaphor #WorksWonders, we’d love for you to take and share pictures of how your family is able to enjoy time together with us on Twitter and Facebook!

I was provided with the prize pack listed above as part of my review but no other compensation was received. All opinions are my own. 

And the winner is…Comment #1! (I love when Random.org choose #1)

Congrats to straderspiel for winning the prize pack! Watch for an email!

Today is my husband E’s 33rd birthday. To celebrate, he is going to work for 18 hours. Because of the storm I didn’t get to the grocery store for ingredients to make his favorite carrot cake. The kids and I didn’t get any We Love Daddy crafts done. Basically, he’s going to have the worst birthday ever (except for that one he spent in Boot Camp, I hear it was pretty lousy). I don’t think E is too upset with me though – he wasn’t very excited about turning 33. It’s sort of an in-between age – too young to buy a convertible and call it a mid-life crisis and too old to get good and drunk and whine about how old you are.

But it still sucks not to get to do something special on your birthday, so the kids and I are going to work on it. In the mean time, please enjoy photos of  the 6th worst storm in recorded New England history:

Another 3 inches and it would have been over the snowblower

She only lasted 2 minutes before she fell in a drift and told me she was ALL DONE

This is my cat, she’s cute  (and a little gingery) too

Happy Birthday Daddy!

It’s that time of year again, when we’re waiting to find out if E’s going to be promoted switching jobs it’s sort of complicated and everything is up in the air. We’ve done this for several years now, including the time we got surprise orders to San Diego while I was pregnant, so it might feel like you’ve read this post before. (I assure you this is new, I’ve just whining about the same things AGAIN.) So far, things have always worked out and we’ve managed to stay put in Connecticut, much to my delight and E’s…less than delight. He likes the place, just not being passed over.

I’ll admit that in past years I was sort of relieved E wasn’t promoted. That’s a shitty thing to be happy about, but the logistics of moving are so overwhelming in our current house-owning state. We bought when the market was still high (not at the peak, thank God, or we’d be so far underwater on this house we’d never get out) so selling it without shelling out a huge chunk of cash is going to be hard. It’s even harder to realize that all the work we’ve put into it won’t bring us any return on investment and we’ll have to start over at zero dollars.  Not being a home owner has its advantages…but I love my home.

Beyond the financial aspect of moving, there’s the emotional aspect of leaving somewhere I’ve lived longer than anywhere else in my life. Actually, I’ve living in this HOUSE longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life – before this, my record was all 4 years of high school in my parent’s house in Virginia. I moved every single year of college, then twice three times in the first year of marriage. The funny thing is, I used to like moving. I grew up in a military household and thought I could keep doing it indefinitely. But the truth is, being settled is comforting. A support system is important to me, especially as a mom. I have mom friends. My kids have kid friends. I have a mechanic, a pharmacy, a preschool, a library card, a favorite playground, and a zillion other things I don’t want to leave.

But. Even after I’ve said all that out loud (and to myself many, many times) I am not going to freak out if we have to leave. We are still in the easily-movable years with the kids where they adjust and make friends quickly. The Navy comes with a built in support system for families so I wouldn’t be starting for the bottom of a sad, dark pit – more like half way up a ladder that reaches the top. Starting over without the enormous costs of a house could give us the freedom to build our savings faster and splurge on things like family vacations more often. If E got promoted we might actually see him on a regular basis, instead of just waving at him as he runs out the door for another 36 hour shift.

To be totally honest, a lot of our moving options sound kind of…exciting. San Diego. Hawaii. Japan. Guam. Yes, it would be insanely far from our families, but they’re all limited-time-offers (and I am SURE my friends and relatives would find a way to visit me in Hawaii). We have friends in a lot of those places already. Even if we get transferred to somewhere on the East Coast a change might be good for us – what better excuse to purge all our unnecessary stuff, get organized and start fresh? I’m almost ready for that kind of challenge. Almost.

There is just so much uncertainty in our lives for the moment, thinking about it and NOT thinking about it both take a huge amount of effort. I don’t have the energy for much worrying on top of the thinking too, but please excuse me if more of this leaks out of my head between now and the end of April.

I really like taking the kids to do Fun But Educational Things, which is why we spend most of our extra time and money on memberships to places like the aquarium and Mystic Seaport. Up until recently it’s usually been much more about me than about them, since they couldn’t care less where we go as long as they can run around in circles while I say “Look! Nature! Science! Historic Crap!” All they’re really interested in is pushing buttons.

Unfortunately, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make all of our visits the kind of amazing memories I have from my own childhood. Nevermind the fact that I’m sure for every beautiful spring day at Old Sturbridge Village churning butter in a bonnet there were probably 14 visits to some dumb museum where I whined the whole time about how booooooring it was can we go hooooome now? I need to pin a note to the inside of my purse that says “They are TWO and THREE, don’t WORRY” so when I’m digging for some granola bars to stop the ear-splitting whining from the double stroller I remember, oh yes, they are TWO and THREE I don’t really need to WORRY if they aren’t interested in the finer points of blacksmith…ery.

All in all, it wasn’t too bad for an outside adventure in January. We’ll definitely be back in the spring to see the sawmill in action and in the summer for the gardens (There’s an antique carriage rally in June! That is EXACTLY the sort of event I will greatly enjoy forcing my family to attend!) I’m tempted to buy a membership but SIX memberships (well, five memberships and a season pass to Sesame Place) seems a little…excessive. Maybe I’ll hold off until the kids are old enough to appreciate all the history a little more.