A Shabby Chic Update

My great grandfather built these pieces for my mom when she was little.  My mom played with them, I played with them and now Sissy plays with them.  All 3 pieces were dark in color and didn't match Sissy's room.  I decided to shabby chic them to keep the old look while updating them to match her surfer themed room. 

I forgot to take "before" pics because I was so excited to get started!  Here's one I took before I got too far along!

This was my first time using chalk paint.  I decided to try Echo's brand.  There are at least 3-4 local chalk paint brands being sold here at the beach.  I used Dirty Wax on the pieces after I painted & distressed them.  

Sissy wanted to help paint.  I hated to say no (because the paint is SUPER expensive) so I let her help paint the bed interior. 

Once I get then back in her room, I'll take a good "after" picture.  

Wild Life at the Beach

This guy likes to sit in the oak tree behind our house in the evenings.  He showed up two days in a row.  He's amazing to watch, especially when he turns his head around to look behind him. 

On the same day this guy returned, I had seen a snake slither along our fence and a raccoon ran across the top of the fence!  It's amazing how much wild life you find here at the beach!

Loose Teeth?

About a month ago Sissy told me that she had a loose tooth.  A few weeks ago she told me she had another tooth loose.  Well, neither tooth has fallen out so I took her to the dentist today.  The news wasn't good - they had to pull all FOUR bottom teeth to make room for the permanent teeth to move forward.  She had 2 "shark" teeth that were coming in behind her baby teeth.  The baby teeth weren't falling out because the front roots weren't dissolving like they are supposed to when they come in under the baby teeth.

Thankfully our dentist is great.  She was patient, kind, and loving with Sis.  She had to do the exact same thing with her own daughter.  From her predictions, we'll most likely be seeing the ortho in about a year depending on when future teeth make an appearance.  

Before:

After:

The Teeth:

She's in a lot of pain at home but Tylenol and some Barbie, Life in the Dream House, is helping.  Her gums are really sore because her laterals weren't loose at all.  She had to work hard to get those teeth out. 

Sis did really well considering how difficult it was.  She cried a bit during the procedure but handled herself like a champ.  I am so proud of her.  Our dentist gave her Novocain without Sis ever really knowing what was going on - she did a great job on Sissy.  

Lots of cold food for today - smoothies, yogurt, and ice cream are on the menu!

She's looking forward to going shopping tomorrow after the tooth fairy visits.  The TF gives the kids $5/tooth because they don't get an allowance for doing chores (the price of being in our family) and they need a way to learn to tithe, save, & spend.  

Tea For Two

Since it's was "girls week" at our house, I decided to use my groupon for Ashes Boutique and Tea Garden and take my little girl for some Mommy & Me time.  

We dressed up fancy and practiced manners & etiquette while enjoying some tea, crackers, sandwiches with fruit and a dessert plate.  

A bonus was seeing Sissy's teacher's assistant while we were there.  She loves Ms Eppler and looks for her every Sunday at church too!

What a great way to end our "girls week!"

Homemade Organic Sunscreen

My son has a difficult time with sunscreen being applied to his face.  It bothers him and has since he was little.  I do not use traditional sunscreens because of all the toxic chemicals that get absorbed into your skin - if you think about it, all the healthy, organic, non gmo eating we do makes no difference if we rub chemicals on our skin and it gets absorbed into our bloodstream.  I also read that traditional sunscreens can do more damage to our bodies (cancer, hormone disruption, etc.) than the sun exposure!  My son responds worst when I rub sunscreen on his face with my hands.  The stick type is the best way for me to apply it on him.  Living here in the "Sunshine" state means we are exposed to the sun a lot and need to find a good way to keep him safe from too much exposure.

I've been wanting to make my own sunscreen for the past year but our apt wasn't the best place to do a lot of those crafty type of things.  I finally ordered all my ingredients and tried it out last night.  Sorry for the terrible lighting, it was after dark and I was stuck with artificial light.  The tubes aren't red - just a reflection of color off the mold.

I am so pleased with the way these turned out!  The sticks are for my kids' faces and instead of going on with difficulty as do many mineral based sunscreen sticks, these glide right on.  They also do not make my kids faces turn ghostly white.  It will make putting sunscreen on Little Man's face so much easier.  I had been splurging for Aubry, California Baby and Kiss My Face which have been approved by the EWG's Guide to Sunscreens as safe to use, but this recipe is just as safe and a whole lot cheaper!  

I purchased the empty deodorant tubes to use as sticks from Amazon.  They weren't cheap, but I think they will be worthwhile for my kids.  I plan to reuse them as we run out.  If you want to make a lotion bar like the heart shaped one above, you will need a silicone mold.  

After much research, these are the ingredients I used and why:

1/3 c. melted organic virgin Coconut Oil – has an SPF of around 8. 

1/3 c. organic Shea Butter – contains cinnamic acid, which absorbs UVB rays. It is generally thought to have an SPF of around 6.

1/2 c. tightly packed organic Beeswax – main purpose in this bar is to hold everything together, it is considered by some skin care companies to have antioxidant and moisturizing properties

2 T plus 1 1/2 tsp. Zinc Oxide – non nano & uncoated zinc oxide so that it isn’t absorbed into the skin

SPF FYI:
SPF 100 blocks 99% of UVB rays, while SPF 50 blocks 98%.  SPF 30 blocks 96.7%, SPF 15 blocks 93%.  When deciding how much zinc oxide to add, anywhere from 5-20% of the total solution is often used.  A higher number does not mean it's better!  More info on SPF HERE

Directions:
Melt the coconut oil, shea butter and beeswax in a double boiler.  Once melted, remove from heat and add zinc.  You may also add essential oils and/or vitamin E at this time.  I added lavender because it was the only non-citrus oil I had on hand.  Do NOT use citrus oils because it is believed to be phototoxic or make the skin more sensitive to the sun.  Carrot seed oil is a great oil to add to sunscreen because it is believed to have a natural spf of 38-40.  I plan to get some to add to my next batch.  FYI - these sunscreens will melt on a hot sunny day in your bag so you will want to keep them in a cool place and apply before they go out and reapply as desired.  For our days at the beach, I plan to take an ice pack along for the sunscreen so we can use it as needed.

We've also made our own organic lip balm.  If your little girl is anything like mine, she thinks lip gloss/lip stick is the next best thing to sliced bread.  We all know that much of that ends up in their mouth so I decided that if she had a hand in making, it as well as a say in the "flavor" (aka essential oil), she'd prefer the natural kind over the store bought toxic junk.  Thankfully I was right about that and she LOVES our homemade, organic lip balm and I don't have to worry about it absorbing toxins in her body.

Girls Week!

Ra and Andy are both away this week so it's a "girls only" week for me and Sis.  We have a long list of things we want to do this week.  Sis thinks that every moment of every day should be girl time, but I've convinced her that's not reasonable.  We have a long laundry list of things to do while our boys are gone.

Painting nails - possible pedis
Shell collecting
Lip balm making
Cookie baking
Swimming
Jewelry making
Tea for Two at Ashes' - reservations for Tuesday
Gelato from Joseph's
Custard from Whit's
Zoo trip
Rainbow loom
Shopping
Movie watching

We've made 3 batches of organic lip balm already - lavender, grapefruit and lemon.  We've watched 4 episodes of The Bible on Netflix and McKenna at least 3 times since Ra left.  We swam yesterday and tried to swim today but a storm rolled through.  The plan tonight is to have dinner on the beach and look for shells.  Maybe we'll swing by for dessert at the corner afterwards.

This girl is wearing me out already!  I splurged and got her this today:

$10 to entertain her = Money well spent!  

DanceTrance!

Sissy's BFF asked her to join DanceTrance with her over the summer.  It's located here at the beach (a short 7 blocks from our house) that offers kids dance/fitness classes twice a week in the evenings.  Think of Zumba for kids!  A bunch of girls from school all went together to do a trial class during the last week of school, but as far as we know, just the two of them have gotten membership passes.  We bought the girls a 12 class pass for $135 for the summer.  I think she's really going to like it.  The girls couldn't wait to show off what they learned.  I took a little video of them so that Sissy could practice it for next week.  Here's what they worked on in their 45 min class:

Aren't they so stinkin' cute?  I can't wait to see how they do by the end of the summer!

Sis and I rode our bikes to DanceTrance.  I met up with her BFF's mom at Lillie's - my FAVORITE little coffee shop here at the beach, maybe my favorite anywhere!  On our way home from class, we stopped off at Bio Max - the local health food store where Sis convinced me to get her a kid's green smoothie.  What a great post workout treat!

Our First Summer Field Trip

Today the kids and I headed south to Mickler's (pronounced by the locals as Mykler's) Landing.  It's in Ponte Vedra and is well known as the local beach to find shark teeth.  Ra was so excited, he came downstairs already dressed in his bathing suit and was ready to go even without breakfast!

We all ate and got ready then headed out.  The kids searched and searched and had all but given up hope of finding any teeth when Ra finally found one!  We were digging in a big pile of washed up shells and he pulled it out!

It was a beautiful morning to walk on the beach regardless.

Winner! Winner! Chicken Dinner!

When we got home, Ra pulled out his shark tooth chart he got from Andy last year and determined it was from a Mako shark.  He then proceeded to tell me that this shark is the fastest of all the sharks and one of the top 5 most dangerous sharks.  I don't know why I bothered to double check his facts, but I did and of course, he's right.  You can't fool Ra when it comes to sharks, he knows his stuff.

Vroom! Vroom!

I decided that after spending too many hours of our 3 day holiday weekend working on the house, that we needed to take a break and do something fun.  For our family that means getting out the motorcycles!  Andy took Ra on the back of his CBR 929RR (sports bike for all you non-motor heads) and Sis and I on my Honda PCX150 (scooter).  We headed south through the beaches on A1A and then turned east to go through Ponte Vedra along the beach.  We came out at Mickler's Landing and then made the loop back.  It was a beautiful drive.  Sis was with me and kept saying "Mom!  Look at that house!"  There are a lot of huge, beautiful beach houses through there.

Here we are on a pit stop to fuel up.

Celebrating Hard Work

In 4th grade you don't receive any grades for homework but if you complete all your work each marking period, you are rewarded with a breakfast at school.  Ra went the first marking period and decided it wasn't great, so he didn't want to go again - even though he earned it every marking period this year.  We didn't blame him - Krispy Kremes, fruit and muffins isn't that exciting to us either.  To reward his efforts (and Sissy's 100% on every sight word test, spelling test, and memory verse test every single quarter) that we'd take the kids out for breakfast instead.

It's always a toss up between the Beach Diner and the Metro Diner.  Ra usually choses Metro and K chooses Beach.  Sometimes mom and dad choose the Beach Hut to change it up.  We decided that this past Monday would be a great time to take the kids out for their breakfast reward.  You can see from Ra's mug which restaurant won out!  That boy loves his hot chocolate!

So proud of both my kids and all the hard work they put into their school work.  They are both smart kids but they also work hard.  I'm most grateful for their work ethic.  

Date Night!

One of our favorite places for date night happens to be one of the best kept secrets at the beach.  There is a cute little place called Royal Palm - on Royal Palm Road in Atlantic Beach.  They have a wine/beer store as well as a tapas restaurant.  You can purchase a bottle of wine a retail price and they will charge a corkage fee (something I haven't heard outside of Utah) so you can drink your wine of choice at dinner.  Their food is OUTSTANDING.  We've been there a few times now and just love it. They have enough beer choices to keep Andy happy as well.  They even carry Stoudt's!

 The cheese mezze platter is awesome!

I'm so thankful for our fabulous babysitter who loves on our kids so we can go out and catch up with each other every few weeks.

School's Out For Summer!

I feel like I should play a little Alice Cooper for my kids every year on our way home from school - I use to, but haven't since we moved back to Jax.

Our first full day of no school meant lots of friends!  We had my friend's 2 girls over.  One daughter is in Ra's class and the other is a friend of K's.  She's a year older than K and they get along well.  We also had Ra's best buddy over because his mom was at school.

We spent most of the day in the pool, shooting marshmallows with our marshmallow shooters, riding scooters, eating shaved ice and LOTS of watermelon, firing off nerf guns and playing hopscotch.  What a fun way to kick off summer!

After a full day of fun, Ra asked if his buddy could sleep over.  Well, what else would complete the kick off to summer, right?  

Starting off our 2nd day of summer vacation with a swim and green smoothies

Group cannonballs into the pool

My Brave Little Girl

It's no surprise that I don't like reptiles...Snakes are a reptile and you all know how I feel about them. While cleaning the pool yesterday, I found two drown lizards in the skimmer basket.  There was NO WAY I was reaching my hand in there to pull them out.  I asked Ra and he was freaked out so then I asked Sis.  She agreed to pull them out by hand for $5!

Yes, Ra held her hair back so she could reach in for the one floating on it's back at the bottom of the basket.  She is a lizard hunter.  She catches them alive at our house all the time - and now she catches them once they've died too.  Bless her...What would I do without her?

Post Graduation Celebration

Because she wanted a special treat, we rode our bikes down to the corner for a little "Happy Cup!"  We love being able to walk or ride everywhere we want to go here at the beach!

Graduation Day!

Yes, in KDG, they have a graduation.  It's essentially a patriotic end of the year program with the kids dressed in miniature cap & gowns.  It was pretty cute.

She was so proud of graduating from KDG!  Andy stopped and got her some flowers and that made her super happy!  Her teacher is one of the sweetest people I've ever met in my entire life.  She has a heart for children like I've never seen and lets her light for Jesus shine wherever she goes.  We were so blessed to have Mrs. Hatman this year.  She's meant the world to both me and to Sissy.

How can I have a FIRST GRADER already?  Time sure does fly!