Some Recent Thoughts

I just thought I'd share a handful of things that we have been doing over at This Simple Home.

Household Binder Project
Taming My Child Collector (without taming her spirit)
Name Snowman
Blog Button
Clean Bedroom
Book Worm 
Chicken Pot Pie Recipe
Grocery Bag Storage
and more...















Hope you'll visit This Simple Home soon!!

An Announcement or Two...

Though many of readers like the idea of naming the children after the authors, as do I, but it also sounds like readers like to keep things simple.  I think we'll go with M, age 5, as Big Sis; E, age 3, as Brother, and our 3 month baby will Little Sis.  They will be known by those names here and at a new site...

I am just thrilled to share with you that I have created a new blog...This Simple Home.

Why would I want to write for another blog?  This Simple Home will be more focused than Live, Learn, Love.  Here, I talk about anything and everything, don't you think?  This Simple Home will focus on homemaking, parenting, and other important things in life like...books, food, faith, and children's activities...while keeping life simple.

I love to discuss home and family with my friends, both in person and through the blogging world.  During my teen years I lived with my bachelor dad, so I did not learn to cook, clean, and organize the way that other young women did.  It still shows today.  I have learned a lot over the years, but I am mostly "self-taught."  Because of this, I love to share what I have learned with others and blogging enables me to do this.

Would you come visit This Simple Home and maybe even consider following or subscribing?  

I will still post here at LLL occasionally this winter, but now my focus will be over at This Simple Home.  I hope you'll join me in this journey!

(I was really going to wait until the header was in place before officially launching This Simple Home...but I am too eager with anticipation to just keep it to myself.)

Owl Card for Owl Baby Shower

The Owl Valentine's Day card I made for my husband was featured with other great ideas for an owl baby shower.  Check the shower ideas out!

Featured On...

Today over at Offering Hospitality, they featured a guest post written by me that includes some tips about offering hospitality to strangers.  Check it out!

(I know that pineapples are a symbol of hospitality, but does anyone else think of the tv show Psych when they see a pineapple??)

Blog and Email Recovered

Shortly after my last post, the email hacker attained access to one of our accounts again despite the much more secure password.  It was the account associated with the blogs.  Unfortunately, it took many days to get it back.  We're not exactly sure what happened.

In the meantime I didn't have access to my blogs!  Currently I have access, but I'm still trying to figure out how to change the email address related to the blog.  I have taken three steps so far, but it hasn't been successful.

First, I changed the email in the profile.  Then I changed the email notifications for new comments.  I did those two things while still somehow being signed into Blogger, though I couldn't access the email account related to it.  It was not enough though.  I had forgotten to add my new email address under settings: permissions.  I have since done this, but I still cannot access the blog through the new email account.

Can you think of any other steps I should try to take?

I plan to resume regular posting tomorrow.  We did a couple of winter projects that maybe someone would be interested in seeing despite spring knocking at the door.  If not, the post can just document what we enjoyed doing.

Please note that the hacker removed all of my contact info, so all of our contacts are gone.  Feel free to email again or leave a comment if your email shows in your profile so we can be in touch again.

Just a reminder if you use the same password for several accounts, please change them!  It's best to not use words that are found in the dictionary as part of your password.  Try to include a variety of capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols in your password.  

Changing Blogger Email?

So today both of our email accounts were compromised.  My apologies to those of you who got the email saying I was in UK...And big thanks for those of you who came over to leave a comment to tell me.  (I just recently turned off the comment moderation and now just receive notification of comments, so I actually got to look at comments for a bit and know (not just guess) that the email was hacked into.)

This leads to another thought.  I had actually created an email address specific for this blog a while ago, but don't know how to go about changing the email on an already-created blog.  I would want to sign in to gmail and blogger with the same email address.  Any suggestions?  I know I could change the email under settings to have comment notification change.  I could also change my email in my profile.  But I still don't know how to change the email for the full blog.

It has been suggested that we create a password of at least 10 characters.  Of these characters, to be most secure, it should have 2 capital letters, 2 lowercase letters, 2 numbers, and 2 symbols, but still total at least 10 characters.  I thought I would share this in case you want to make your passwords more secure and more hacker-resistant.   (Suggested by someone who works with the national government.)

Of course a person should never duplicate passwords either, but you probably already knew that, like we did, but hopefully you don't do it either.

As of now, our email account seems okay (though we did lose a few emails today when the hacker deleted some recent emails).  Our other accounts also seem okay, especially now that they have better passwords.

For a few minutes we thought we lost our blogs!  Though I put more work into LLL, our family blog is where I document just about everything.  I would have been devastated to lose that!  My cousin told me she backs hers up to her hard drive every few months.  I'm clueless as how to do that, but it sounded like a good idea.

Looking forward to a quieter weekend!  If you have any advice on changing emails, please share!

Book Publisher Blogs

You might follow plenty of book blogs, but have you ever considered following a book publisher's blog?  I actually follow several.  I enjoy them because they give the inside scoop to new releases and overall books.  Often they have giveaways...and with low entries.  I recommend that you know the publisher and the type of books they typically carry.  Have fun with it!

I wanted to share with you that Moody Publishers has a new blog called Inside Pages.  This is their first week, and they are having quite the celebration with giveaways.

Happy reading!

Hospitality...

We recently had a really cool experience where a blogging friend became a real-life friend!  ( In the summer of 2009, our daughter M participated in a summer swap with Sissy.  Sissy is the daughter of Jenny from Academy at Thousand Oaks and Vegan and So Forth.)


M and Sissy definitely felt that they were best buddies though they had never met.  Over the past year, Jenny and I have been getting to know one another.  Well, Sunday night we got to meet!  Jenny brought her family to our home in PA all the way from Arkansas.  They stayed two nights with us before moving on to Philadelphia and NYC.


(Another blogging friend and I met and became real friends, too, but she was "local"-just an hour away...to meet Jenny, I invited her to stay with us.  Risky?  Possibly, but we were both comfortable with it since we had already established a relationship.  We hadn't even talked on the telephone until 2 hours before their arrival!)


I have to say that our visit couldn't have turned out any better!  Jenny was just as great as I expected her to be!   It was wonderful!  Jenny and her family are really quite sweet.  And my daughter mostly shared, which was a huge concern for us.


This was the first time in many years hosting a friend overnight though we have many overnight family visits throughout the year.  It made me really think about what I needed to do to be a better hostess.


First things first (for me)...FOOD.  I have my favorite meals and desserts that I like to make for company.  With any company a hostess needs to consider dietary considerations.  Jenny is a vegan!  (Her family eats mostly vegan, too.)  I knew I needed to seriously consider this and not take it lightly.  It's important to them, so it needed to be important to me.  With any special dietary requests, whether by choice or medically necessary, I think it's just important to ask lots of questions.  I was so excited to learn that most pasta is egg free.  I emailed Jenny so many questions asking about foods.


We kept things simple with only having to serve one dinner.  (They stayed two nights, and arrived after dinner the first night.)   I decided on spaghetti so everyone could have something familiar!  Jenny suggested a can of black beans be added to my spaghetti sauce for additional protein.  My family had meatballs.  This was served with a salad.  Easy!


For our lunches we just had peanut butter and jelly.  This may not be what most serve their company, but it works for me, and it worked for them.  Paired with some apple slices and carrot sticks...lunch!  Knowing most breads wouldn't be ideal for them, I made white bread that had no butter or milk in it.  It was my only dairy-free recipe, so I went ahead and made it.  Oatmeal was served for breakfast.  Easy!   I decided on a seriously easy vegan peanut butter fudge that was really tasty.  It was the easiest fudge I have ever made, and I will likely make it again, though I hope to try it with butter at some point.


We have a small dining room and an even smaller table in it. (Our cat used the table for about a year while E was learning to not eat kitty food.) The big kids (not E) ate in the dining room while the grown ups and E ate in the kitchen.


I asked Jenny what would be good to have on hand and made sure I had soy milk for them and margarine.  I loaded up on fruits and bought some extra salad toppings.  My biggest suggestion for anyone hosting guests with special diets is to ask lots of questions!


Of course there is more to hospitality than just the food.  Our spare bedroom is no guest room!  Yes, there is a bed in it.  But there is also an elliptical machine and two large desks.  Yes, it a very tight space.  The spare room is also our catch all.  The week before they arrived, I gathered up all the random papers and just stuffed them in a box and closed the lid.  I didn't have time to sort through them, so I didn't.  It was so liberating to just get it put away!  The spare room also had a spare computer monitor, broken printer, and speakers.  We were finally motivated to recycle them!


Our girls shared a bedroom and E moved in to our bedroom for the visit so the boys wouldn't be awakened by him in the middle of the night.


Since they like to travel and visit lots of places, we went to a Maryland lighthouse that was close by.  It was a lovely hike.  Later that day we went to a store we like called Good's Store (maybe a PA Dutch department store).  Along the way we stopped at a covered bridge, and just enjoyed the farm scenery.  The next day we took the free Herr's Snack Factory tour, which was really awesome.  We just didn't have enough time to get to Lancaster for some additional fun there, but they saw a few of buggies around.

Turkey Point Lighthouse

While they were here I learned that I really can keep my island clean for longer than from the time I go to bed until the time I wake up in the morning.  It just takes some extra work! 


Thanks, Christy for introducing us!!  Look what happened by having the Super Summer Swap!

A Little Break and Something to Look Forward To

Our wireless router died, and though I am very thankful for companies that replace products under warranty (woo-hoo!), I won't be blogging here for a bit.  

BUT in a short bit, I will be offering a CSN giveaway!  If you are shopping for an ottoman coffee table, or just about anything else online, check out CSN stores!   Take a look now...because the winner will choose how they want to spend their $45 gift code at any of the 200 CSN stores!

See you next week!

Tag...I'm It

Christy from Superheros and Princesses has some questions for me to answer.  And I actually did it!

What is your favorite fictional book? To Kill a Mockingbird is probably my all-time favorite.  (Click to read what I said about it last month.)

What was your college major?  If you did not go to college, what would your major be today if you had to pick one?  My major was Elementary Education with an art concentration.  Looking back, I wish I had a reading or special education concentration.

If you could visit one place in the world, where would  you go?  I really want to see the Sequoia National Park some day.

What is your biggest challenge as a mom?  Discipline.  No doubt about it.

What did you eat for breakfast today?  Cornflakes and orange juice.    

What kind of music do you listen to most often?  Honestly, I tend to listen to audio CD's in my car and kitchen, so the music I listen to most often is children's music.  Yep.  But if you are wondering what music I prefer to listen to it's probably oldies on the radio or Christian music CD's.

What is your least favorite chore?  Just one?  Scrubbing bathtubs might top even ironing.

Pretend that money is no object and you need a new outfit; where would you go to buy it?  JC Penney's petite department?  I don't really know how to shop except at stores like Boscov's, Kohl's and JC Penney, but Penney's is probably my favorite.  


Now I get to ask my friends some questions!   However, instead of "tagging" several blogs, I'll just let you decide to do it if you want.  It was fun!  You could even just leave a comment if you'd like.


If you had to spend (not put in savings) $500, how would you spend it?  (I would get an upright freezer!)
What is your favorite adult fictional book?
What is your favorite children's book?
What is your biggest challenge as a mom?
What do you enjoy most about where you live?
If you could visit one place in the world, where would you go?
What is your favorite meal to make?

Disclosure

This is a personal blog written by me. These are just my opinions and experiences. I cannot offer any  guarantee that you will have same experience as mine.

Other than product for review purposes, I am not paid to share my opinion. If I ever choose to accept payment, that will be stated in that post.  I often share my opinion on products that I have purchased or borrowed (typically from the library).  Regardless of how I come by a product, I give an honest opinion.

The only advertising here is from Amazon. I like and use the site regularly, and am an associate. This means I get a tiny percentage if a reader makes a purchase through them by going through any of my links. (When I say tiny I mean about $4.00 over the course of several months.)

If you leave your email address in the comment section, please note that this will be seen by anyone, and not just me.  If this makes you uncomfortable, feel free to email me.  In the event of a giveaway, you can also email me and I will count your email as entry.  I would never give, rent, or sell your information, however, if you win a giveaway, I would need to pass along your contact info. After submitting to the sponsor, it would be out of my control how they would use it; however I have had no negative experiences with this.

Please contact me at with any questions or concerns.

Last Updated: September 2010

Makeover

Woo-hoo!  My friend, Jennifer, from My Two Happy Homeschoolers put together a great new look for the blog that I really love!  I think she did a great job bringing my favorite colors and the viney leaves.

Her site is a great source for homeschooling ideas-preschool fun and early elementary...definitely worth checking out for some great ideas.

Thanks, Jennifer for a great new look...now if only I  could get a makeover.

Right Click Disable

Designer Blogs explains how to right-click-disable on your blog.  Not only that, a box also pops up to warn the person clicking they need permission to proceed!  I love this!  (You can see it in action by trying to right click on this blog!)  Get more information here.  It was really easy to do!  Of course, there are ways around this, but I do like the idea of a little alert for someone who mistakenly tries to copy a picture or text.)

Now if everyone would just give credit where credit is due...I try, and I hope you do, too!

Absence Makes the ♥ Grow Fonder

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed that I have not been posting as often recently.   Though this post may be titled poorly...oh well.  I am still going to share good books, resources, and fun ideas, but I am trying to be better rounded and more purposeful with my time, which means not posting daily.  Please don't get me wrong; blogging has great purpose: learning and sharing ideas and developing relationships (that is MY short list).  

I am trying to spend more time with the children when they are awake and more time cleaning and organizing when they are napping.  I also want to be more purposeful in my Bible study and even recreational reading.  After they go to bed, sometimes I will blog as I watch television with Derek...and sometimes I won't.  

Other than some serious cleaning and organizing, I have some sewing to do.  The first is a spring purse for me.

Here is a taste of the past.  I love the fabrics for this spring bag, however it is too small.

This is the bag I made for fall/winter.  It is the same pattern, just a bit bigger.  You can see and read more here (including a link for the free pattern).

 I purchased the fabric this weekend.  Does anyone want to guess what color it will be this time?  

Let Others Reply to Comments

For those of you who blog using Blogger, I thought I'd share how to make it possible for other bloggers to reply to your comments.  You just need to go to your dashboard, click "edit profile."  Then click "show e-mail address."  Don't forget to save it!

It makes communication so much easier!  Hope this helps!

More About Me

If you are interested in knowing a bit more about me, then head over to Adori Graphics.  Today I am featured in her Blogger Uncovered.

I answered questions that her readers asked about me.  This was a lot of fun for me.  Take a moment to check  it out!  FYI, Louise (AKA Adori Graphics) is the designer of the background and header of this blog.

Blogger Uncovered

For the next few days you can visit Louise at Adori Graphics to leave a question for me.  Make sense?  Haha!  I didn't think so!


Louise offers a weekly feature called Blogger Uncovered.  She introduces a blog and the blogger, and her readers get to ask that person questions by leaving a comment on the introduction post.  Later, she will pass them along to me, and I will answer all of them!   Questions can be about anything you like...if I haven't shared it, and you want to know, just ask!


Louise offers great blog designs.  She will create you a new design (for a fee) but she also has great freebies, too!  Both this header and background were designed by her and are available in her freebies.   She also has a lot of good  blogging tutorials.  Be sure to check her out, even if you aren't interested in leaving a question for me!  

ABC and 123 is a great resource for anyone looking for play, craft, and school ideas for preschool and school-aged children. Live, Learn, Love was featured today!

Live, Love, Learn on Live, Learn, Love

Live, Love, Learn Live your life, the way you should, Love the life you have, Learn from the mistakes you make. Live your life on the path, that seems so hard to take, Love your life now, for your furture's at stake, learn to hold tight with all your might, to the one's you love, for you never know when they'll be out of your sight. Live your life, for heaven's sake, love your life, come what may, learn to accept the things you cannot change. Live with the things you can, Love your neighbor as yourself, Learn to do your best, and God will do the rest. Live, Love, Learn as the world turns. Nora Eason http://www.poemhunter.com/ I found this poem and just thought it would be appropriate to share it here.  Although the teacher in me wanted to edit it, especially to include a capital letter at the beginning of each line, I did not.

Photo Collage (Affordable Christmas Card Picture)

For those of you who love photos and are frugal, you might appreciate this, especially if you do a photo with your Christmas cards.

Last year I could not find a photo Christmas card with two or three places for pictures at any of the sites I wanted to use to print them. I don't like the idea of spending a lot of money, because in reality, many people glance at the pictures and never look at them again. At the same time, I know that others just love to see how the children are changing (or in our case last year, get introduced to E).

I have been using Picasa, a free digital photo hosting site by Google, for several years. Picasa allows you to crop, straighten, fix red eye, add text, mess with the lighting, and make COLLAGES! I was thrilled when I realized the collage part. Collages can be in grid form or stacked. It took some time to get used to how to make it work because I am fussy. You know, I wanted this picture under this one, and that pictured angled just so. A grid would have been very easy though, but it's not my style. (But a great idea for scrapbooking mini pictures.)

Here is last year's collage that we included in our Christmas cards. I loved how it came out. A picture of the family, the kids, and one each of M and E. Since we just moved into our home, I included a picture of the house, too.

Each photo collage costs the same as a regular 4x6 inch print (or whatever size you choose to make). Picasa allows you to pretty much print wherever you want whether it's Walgreens, Wal Mart, Snapfish or 20 or 30 other places. I'm not exactly sure what our plans are for this year's Christmas photo, but I do know that I won't be buying Christmas photos, even if they are cute.

I enjoy "creating" and get much satisfaction from it, even if it's just a photo collage.

I just loved the pictures of M (age 2) and E (2 months)!

One more thought. In the past I have taped all the photos we get to our fridge, but it got to be too much, and I didn't leave them up year round. I'd love to use the photos we get to remember and pray for our friends and family. What do you do? Do you have any suggestions for me?

Vanilla Joy has a tutorial for creating collages with Picasa. Honestly, I don't think you need it if you just go in and play. If you give Picasa a try, let me know!

Oh, and for those of you who blog with Blogger, Picasa will load your pictures directly to your blog, fully edited! (I have found I can only post four pictures using Picasa, but I'm not sure if that is my fault or not. If you use Picasa and can add more, let me know!)