Nifty Items I'm Eyeing and Would Like to Be Buying

These book boxes from twine (discovered via Design Sponge)

Robins Egg Soaps from Cambria Cove.

This green jacket from Anthropologie.

Scrabble wall art like this (endless possibilities if you made tiles yourself . . .) (discovered via Say YES! to Hoboken)

Easter cookies like these from Sweet Tooth Cottage (that I could order and enjoy without getting sick while making and sampling the frosting and dough). (Discovered via The Celebration Shoppe)

Eating by the Color

With color on my mind of late, I thought my kids would enjoy colored meals.  I was right.  They're all over it.  Last night was our "yellow dinner" and tonight we tackled the "green dinner."  Neither of these meals has involved anything gourmet (or meat, because we're vegetarian).  I do very much want my kids to eat the food, and plus I'm too time-strapped to get ambitious.

The yellow dinner consisted of corn on the cob, pineapple, bananas, pasta shells and pineapple-ginger smoothies.  My kids also had some veggie corndogs although they weren't strictly with the yellow theme.  The green dinner menu offered pesto pasta, green apples, kiwi fruit, cucumbers, green olives, avocados, broccoli, green snack peas, green jello, pistachio pudding, and green machine smoothies (love that this smoothie sneaks in SPINACH among other very good things).  Good stuff, and we had a blast with it.

What's up for the rest of the week?  Orange, pink, purple, and red.  Makes me remember an old song we used to sing in school:  "red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue.  I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too."

Well, here's to getting your kids (and yourself) to eat fruits and vegetables!

Chewing on Happiness

I recently discovered these Inside Out Carrot Cake Cookies at Trader Joe's, and they are bliss you can hold in your hand.  Like a moon pie, but with cream cheese frosting on the inside and super moist carrot cake on the outside.  Yes, they take me to a happy place.  I think if someone hooked electrodes up to my brain while I am eating one of those cookies, my brain happiness indicators would be lit up like a Christmas tree.   

Of course, the logical part of my brain knows that cookie ≠ happiness. But it helps.  At least temporarily.  The same goes for retail therapy, which (based on my own scientific studies) is even more effective than a cookie.  Neither habit, of course, is any good for you.  But I suppose you could do much worse than baked goods and UPS packages as far as vices go, right?        

Speaking of happiness, isn't this a lovely idea?   


Post Script:  Here's a very similar idea from Martha Stewart for zucchini nut bread cookie sandwiches.