Runaway October

Every year I put off mail­ing my Christ­mas Cards until it’s almost to late. I hurry down to Michael’s and hope they have some­thing inter­est­ing left. Some­times I’m lucky, some­times I’m not.

So my goal this year is to get a head start on things. I’ve been look­ing at some of the var­i­ous photo christ­mas card offer­ings. Shut­ter­fly has always been a superb com­pany for me and my fam­ily. We’ve had mousepads, fridge mag­nets and beer steins made, among other things.

Check some of these gor­geous designs out:

I love this one because you have so many pic­ture choices and your fam­ily mono­gram. I’m a sucker for monograms.

Sim­ple and clas­sic. Again with the monogram.

How’s this lovely for bright and cheery?

Flirty and fit­ting for my neck of the woods, or should I say desert?

Love the vintage-y feel and col­ors. Very clas­sic layout.

I’m hav­ing such a hard time decid­ing! There are almost 750 designs in the Christ­mas sta­tion­ary alone. Yikes! All cards come with envelopes and Shut­ter­fly will either mail the cards to you so you can address and stamp them as you see fit, or they will address and mail them for you. Talk about a timesaver!

Don’t for­get the per­son­al­ized cal­en­dars too. You can add your own spe­cial dates and pic­tures. What a great gift for friends and family.

Throw­ing a New Years Party? Don’t worry, Shut­ter­fly does invites too!

Full Dis­clo­sure: Shut­ter­fly is pro­vid­ing me with 50 free Christ­mas cards for high­light­ing their prod­ucts. As with every­thing else I post about, the opin­ion is mine and not swayed by any­one else.

Blog­gers can get 50 free hol­i­day cards from Shut­ter­fly: http://bit.ly/sfly2010

Some­times it’s so nice to just wipe a slate clean and start over again.

Last years res­o­lu­tions were hit or miss.

1…) Stop cussing, com­pletely. Neg­a­tive

2…) Smile more. Kinda sorta, I guess.

3…) Spend more indi­vid­ual time with Declan and treat him like an adult. Yes and no.

4…) Cre­ate and add some items to my Etsy shop. Nope.

5…) Do more craft projects — for myself and with the kids. Yes!

So, once again I’m going to set some res­o­lu­tions and think about them ran­domly throughtout the year and feel bad when I don’t hit them 100%. Yep. Sounds about right.

1.) Stop cussing, com­pletely — How did I end up wih such a potty mouth? While I admit that Declan telling me my ass is too big makes me gig­gle, it’s also quite embarass­ing in public.

2.) Detox­ify the house — This one is dif­fi­cult because my mom buys her own clean­ing prod­ucts and calls me, jok­ingly, a tree­hug­ger for my choices. It’s just so easy to have things build up under the sinks. Thank­fully I clean so infre­quently that it’s not a real issue to toss every­thing. I’m also going to start “No ‘Poo“ing my hair again. I tried before while work­ing but couldn’t han­dle going out in pub­lic dur­ing the really wonky phase. Here’s a great Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity for it. We have an on again, off again rela­tion­ship with the health­ier beauty prod­ucts, mainly because of finances. I think it might be time to just suck it up and buy what I know is best for the fam­ily — not best for my bank account.

3.) ETSY — Seri­ously, why can’t I get this going? I’ve decided not to do any­more swaps, so maybe that will make it eas­ier? Wih the purc­ahse of a new sewing machine (50% off clear­ance sale) I’m definitly going to com­plete more projects, but I’d like to make a lit­tle extra cash too.

4.) Try to cut back on HFCS and MSG — With that com­bi­na­tion it leaves next to zilch to buy. Thank­fully Matt is on board with me and we’ve both done some research into the issue. Frankly it scares us.

Alright, I think that’s enough bab­bling. And the boys are wait­ing on me to watch a movie.

Thanks for reading!