The Photographer's Wife Parenting, Disney, Travel, Reviews & Other Randomness

As a working mom, I often struggle to come up with ideas of fun learning activities for Trent. Well, honestly, I’ve thought of many ideas, but I often fail when it comes to gathering everything that’s necessary to complete the activity. It’s nice when the activity involves items we already have at home, but it’s impossible to keep the house stocked like a mini Hobby Lobby. This is where TogetherBox helps solve that problem.

TogetherBox was created to make family together time easy. When you sign up, everything you need to have hours of family fun will land on your doorstep every month. You’ll spend less time researching, stressing and gathering supplies and more time spending quality time with your family.

Each box will come with 3-4 carefully crafted activities, experiments and games around a surprise theme. All activities are designed to appeal to a large age group so your whole family can enjoy their time together.

I love how the boxes have a theme. I think it’s very important to help teach children seasons and holidays, so TogetherBox will help create excitement over whatever relevant theme each box centers on. The theme of the box I received was Snow!

There were several craft activities inside and every single item needed for each activity was in there…nothing to add, no store to travel to to pick up something. It was all there and ready for fun…perfect for my lazy, convenience-loving self!

I decided our first activity would be to make a sock snowman.

All the items needed for each craft/activity are already in a separate bag…even the socks lol. The only thing I did have to use of my own was a pair of scissors.

Mommy did all the scissor and glue steps, but we did mostly everything else together…including dressing the snowman.

He looks like he wants to ask “Mom, what the heck is this?” in this next photo.

Admiring our work.

Of course, the other option is to let your child get creative in their own way with the items in the box. Trent loved the cups and straws and kept transferring the straws from one cup to another.

TogetherBox is sent monthly and several plans are available starting at $24 a month. To find out more, go to their website or connect with them on Facebook.

 

How about an amazing offer and giveaway?! The nice folks at TogetherBox are offering you lovely readers 50% off your first box with the code photographerswife!

Even better…the first TWO people to sign up using the code photographerswife will get their first box completely FREE!

So go sign up now to see if you’ve won - and then go have some fun while learning when your TogetherBox arrives at your doorstep!

 

I was thrilled to be accepted into the most recent campaign from Influenster - the Violet VoxBox!

Influenster is an amazing site that lets people try new products in exchange for sharing their opinion through social media. Sometimes they’ll send one product to try, sometimes they’ll send an entire box! I have been involved in several campaigns since joining several months ago and have come to love many of the products I’ve tried and even made some of them permanent fixtures in my life!

I received the Violet VoxBox a few weeks ago and have been having fun trying out the products that were included. I’m going to post individual reviews on some of the items over the next couple of days and will link to them in this post, but for now, I wanted to share the goodies I received!

Stay tuned for the reviews!

 

With it being a new year, many people are probably taking a look at what they want to accomplish in 2014. I’ll join the madness and share with you some quick tidbits about what I’ve been thinking about as far as 2014 goes.

 

What I’m looking forward to:

Cruise! Our last cruise was in May 2011 after we thought we would never cruise again (we weren’t exactly thrilled with our honeymoon cruise in 2006 - it was fun, but Brett was often bored). We were so glad that we took a chance on cruising again and now look forward to going on our first Disney cruise and having Trent with us. Sure, it’s for my birthday, but we chose Disney Cruise Line mostly for him and I can’t wait to see how much he loves it.

A summer in the pool. We had an unusually rainy summer last year, so I’m hoping we can enjoy the pool more this year…and maybe Trent will learn how to swim. That would be both fun and relieving, since I tend to stress out a little when it comes to Trent and the pool.

A 2nd birthday party. After having the 1st birthday party, we learned plenty of things to hopefully make the 2nd one a less stressful event. We haven’t started discussing anything yet, but maybe Trent will have some input on the theme this year.

As always, I’m looking forward to Halloween (dressing up and hopefully we’ll go trick-or-treating), other holidays, Disney trips and more.

 

Some personal goals:

-Read more. Now that I’ve replaced my Kindle with the iPad Mini (thanks Brett!), I have the Kindle App and would like to start reading more. Although I tend to favor non-fiction, I’d like to read a mix of fiction and non-fiction. I bought BossyPants from Tina Fey the other day but I’m still reading a book I started many months ago and just picked back up, but do you have any recommendations?

-Organize. Our closets, our extra room, storage areas, my files, everything. Since Trent was born, I’ve kinda been slacking a lot in the organizing department. I’d get some papers that need filing and would just throw them in a pile in my closet and before I knew it the pile’s a foot high! Brett has a large storage area in the crawl space behind his studio, so he wants to build some shelving in there so we can store more containers of stuff. In the process of organizing, I’d like to get rid of stuff we don’t need. I know we have a bunch of it, and I hope to be able to sell some on Craig’s List, but will trash or donate whatever is needed.

-Be more active and put some more effort into my looks. For several weeks (from August to October), we were pretty active as a family. We would do the Couch to 5K app around the neighborhood with Trent in the stroller and then we would let him play at the park for a little while. I loved how we were doing it together and how well we were progressing. But then Brett got really busy with the holidays, I hurt my foot when I fell down the stairs and it got cold and dark outside earlier…and we’ve been slacking ever since. I have been putting off buying any new clothes for myself until I reached my goal weight, so a part of me kind of slacked in the looks department too, not really trying to be my best and instead waiting to reach a weight where I felt it was worth it to try. Boy, Stacy and Clinton would tear me a new one if they read that.

-Write and publish an eBook. I already have the idea and a very vague outline, but once I finish adding all the Disney blogs I have on my list to my Disney site, I’d like to focus on the eBook and finish that. I’m really excited about it and the topic is something I can totally relate too…a very important factor in writing, I must say!

-Travel somewhere other than Walt Disney World (other than the cruise). Did I just say that? Yep, and mostly because I’m thinking a day trip somewhere else is something fun to look forward to, and if it happens to last longer than a day, well then that’s even better! I want to travel so many places, but don’t want to go too crazy while Trent is too young to remember or do many things. I definitely look forward to when he’s older and can participate in more activities, so I’ll save the big trips for then.

 

For Trent:

-Continue learning colors, numbers, letters…everything!

-Potty training? I would LOVE for this to happen sooner or later - wouldn’t we all!

-Learn to Swim

 

For the blog(s) - I say blog(s) because now that I have 2 websites, I try to split my time between them, but since they are so different, the tasks are different but I feel like these goals could be mutually beneficial to both.

-Post more often, both on the the blog and corresponding social media.

-Try taking more of my own photos.

-More videos!

-Create a schedule or task list to be more efficient with my time.

 

So, there you have it. Nothing too crazy, right? Good luck to you if you made 2014 goals/resolutions!

Last year, I didn’t really do a look back at the year, as I intended to wait until my blogiversary to do some blog recapping. But this year, I’d like to transition and do a little recap now of 2013.

In 2013, we watched Trent go from this….

to this…

We celebrated him turning 1 with a Monster Party.

I love how we now dress up as a family for Halloween…this year as Star Wars characters!

I shared several videos, including of Trent walking, his 1 year video, our beach trip, Trent vs. a Robot and Trent’s entire first day at Magic Kingdom from his stroller point of view!

Speaking of Disney, we went on 4 Disney trips…

1) Trent’s 1st Disney trip

2) A Disney trip to celebrate 2 birthdays and Father’s Day

3) Our October trip report is forthcoming

4) Our December trip is forthcoming, but here is a review of our night at Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party.

I was glad at how being Disney fanatics brought us some great new opportunities: I became a contributor to Dad’s Guide to WDW, which led to becoming a writer for WDW Magazine. Speaking of WDW Magazine, Brett’s Disney photography is featured throughout the magazine, which led to him creating his own Facebook page for his Disney photography, Disney Photo Snapper (follow him - the photos are amazing!). I also couldn’t resist and started a new Disney site, TheBestofDisney.com. I guess there really isn’t a day that goes by without Disney in our lives and I’m excited about our Disney adventures in 2014.

Here are some of my favorite photos from 2013…

Tonight, we’re being boring at just relaxing at home. We have a friend staying with us from out of town, so I hope he’s not bored out of his mind and wanted to do more…oops! Have a safe and happy new year and I’ll be back tomorrow with a look forward at 2014.

Whether you are hosting or attending a New Year’s Eve party this year or simply hanging out at home with close friends and family, ring in the new year with some delicious appetizers. When it comes to party appetizers, you want to make sure everything is tasty, but can also be small enough to grab and munch on while mingling and celebrating. Here are some appetizer ideas from Hormel if you still need some ideas.

We’ll start with one of my favorite appetizer items…Buffalo Chicken Dip!

 

Bacon-Wrapped Risotto Bites

 

Chili Cheese Dip

 

Potato Skins

 

Pepperoni Pizza Dip

 

Pepperoni Sizzle Sticks

 

This post was part of my involvement in the Hormel Extended Family Blogger Program. All opinions are my own and honest. Thanks for reading!