Recently I posted a picture of my beach sand collection on some social media sites because after my recent trip to Australia and New Zealand, I added 4 new beaches to it. Well, I was amazed at the feedback I received! Many of you asked to find out more about how I do this, particularly how I display them.

First, let me tell you what this collection is all about. You probably already know that I love the beach. As a marine biologist the ocean fascinates me, and the beach is a truly restful place for me. So many of my family’s trips over the years have been to beach-y locations.

When we were first married, my husband and I had very little extra funds for things like souvenirs. But I wanted to keep some kind of memento from places we had been. We were gifted (very generously) a trip to Barbados for our honeymoon, and one of the beaches there was made of pink sand.

It was so stunning to see, but the pictures didn’t do it justice. So I grabbed a handful of pink beach, put it in a small zippered sandwich bag, and brought it home. It stayed in that little bag for quite a while.

Because we live in Florida, we took a few trips to the beach the next summer. I noticed that the sand there was very different as compared to my Barbados pink sand. Thus, my collection started.

Now I needed a place to store the sand so I could see it. The perfect solution? Glass spice containers. I found a really inexpensive set at a thrift store, painted some of the caps different colors and filled them with sand. I added little tags to each bottle with the name of the beach, its location, and the date we visited.

As my collection grew, I wanted a better place to display it as compared to its current location on top of a bookshelf. The little wall shelves from IKEA were a perfect solution. They are narrow, inexpensive, easy to install, and come in different sizes.

My traveling has increased over the years – one reason is due to my children having grown and the other is due to my traveling to film for science DVDs and to speak at conferences. So my beach sand collection has grown even more.

It is amazing to see how different each beach is. Beaches are made by the materials either on land or in the water near them. The wind and waves churn and erode those materials until they become small particles. If there is very strong wave action, sometimes the tiny sand grains are washed away, leaving a rocky beach. Volcanic land can cause black sand beaches to form from the crushed up lava. Pink sand beaches are made from small bits of shells and corals in the area.

There are also purple, green, orange, and red beaches, depending on the minerals in the rocks or shells in the area. It is truly a great way to remember where we have been as well as an inexpensive way to bring back a memory from our travels.

The post Collecting Beautiful Beach Sand first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

Camel humor.

Many folks think the Wednesday-dread is common only to those in a 9-5 job, but we all fall into this temptation of thinking that once we get over that mid-week hump, it is all downhill from there to the ultimate days of the weekend!

It is easy to face the work week with dread. For me, Sunday evenings would sometimes feel like that bracing moment just before you are ready to dive into very cold water. You tense up, wince, and just jump in. Get that shocking blast in the face over with and endure the challenging week ahead until the next weekend.

Well, I was getting ready to make to post on my Facebook page, rejoicing that the work week was half over, but then I realized I don’t want it to go quickly. I don’t want to be living from one weekend to another, just biding my time until Saturday and Sunday.

If we live that way, we are missing some of the sweetest life moments…mealtime, soccer games, and yes, washing dishes and doing laundry. Granted, those activities in themselves aren’t glamorous or celebrated, but they mean that we are doing life. We have food to eat, we have clothes to wash, we even have leisure time to take our children to sporting activities.

When I ask my kids what some of their greatest memories are, I get as many comments about those day-to-day activities as the vacations or weekend fun. They think back to those mundane moments just as fondly as those exciting ones. Why?

Because it is with the ordinary things that the extraordinary happens. An experience at a theme park only lasts a day or two. But the day-to-day memories with family are deeply anchored and cherished. An experience being a parent is a lifetime of joys. And even the sorrows and difficulties it brings make us get on our knees in prayer. They bring us closer to our God. I can truly say that being a wife, mother, and homeschooler has grown my prayer life. I know how good our Lord is, and how great His love is for me.

And I learned that by walking through the ordinary, not from a day at Disney World.

So don’t spend 5/7 of your life waiting for the weekend. Embrace the daily ordinary stuff and LIVE it!

The post What’s So Extraordinary about Wednesday? first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

But I am wondering if any of you feel like me? Maybe it isn’t the oil thing. Maybe it’s something else.

So instead of this being an encouraging post by showing you what I DO with my life and things that make me and my family healthy and happy, I am going to bare it all and tell you what I don’t do.

I don’t do the 30-day freezer meal cooking thing. Yes, I have tried doing 3 or 4 meals at a time, but honestly, with the many teens we have at our house, the bags often would get pushed to the back of the freezer and get forgotten. I do double a meal once in a while when I cook it so I can put the second portion in the freezer for later. But I just cannot do a regular freezer thing. I wish I could…

I don’t make delicious, healthful smoothies every day for my family. Yes, I have done it before, and I still will make a smoothie once in a while, but keeping all those fresh fruits and veggies on hand is difficult (it’s the same get-pushed-to-the-back-of-the-shelf problem as in the freezer). So I buy protein powder and make one of those when I can, as I throw in a few frozen strawberries.

Just NOT happenin’

I don’t do regular 6AM workouts. First of all, I am NOT a morning person and find it difficult to speak a coherent sentence before 7 or 7:30, so I am definitely not trusting myself daily to drive to the gym. Yes, I DO run sometimes and I try to get to the gym at least a few times a week, but I just cannot get myself to do it every day before the sunrise. And when the kids were little…it was even more difficult.

I don’t grind my own wheat into flour and bake my own bread. Well, I USED to do that. That was when we had a child who just couldn’t eat meat protein, so one way to add complete proteins into his diet was to mill dried beans and rice into flour and make muffins with it (of course, I added chocolate chips!). I got into baking bread for a while after that, but as our children got older, my teenage boys just inhaled food faster than I could make it, so we went to store-bought bread more often.

I don’t make lovely photo albums with our photos. I USED to do that, too, but not as much as I felt I NEEDED to, so my kids have photo albums that are definitely unfinished. And like most of you, the oldest got the most pictures and captured moments, and the rest… well…they got less. You want to find a picture of your high school soccer game, honey? Well, try to remember what year and season that was…I think it will be filed on my computer with the rest of the pictures we took that year. It’s in there somewhere!

I don’t keep a journal. Unless you consider this blog my journal. I just don’t have time to write about everything I am thinking about and everything I am doing each day. I will let my Instagram history be my “journal.” What was I doing in December last year? One picture shows a pile of laundry and me wondering when the mountain will be gone. Another is of me having lunch with some family members. I guess my “journal” entry that day was: Frustrated with why there is always laundry, but at least I get to eat out today!

I tried…but the weeds always won.

I don’t keep a huge garden every year. Some years, we planted beans, tomatoes, peppers, and the requisite other garden veggies, and we actually got some food to eat before the bugs came and destroyed it all. I just couldn’t keep up with the weeding, pruning, and organic pest control. I had kids to weed, prune, and keep bug-free, and I thought that was more important.

I don’t get regular manicures and pedicures, I don’t get to the dentist twice a year (more like every 10 months or so), I don’t regularly run a vinegar-cleaning cycle on my Kuerig. I don’t save 50% on my grocery bill with coupons, though I do get a deal once in a while.

Well, there’s a lot of other things I don’t do, and they tend to sit on my brain from time to time, making me feel inadequate and unproductive. I look at what everyone else is doing and feel like I must be spending my days sitting on the couch, watching soap operas and eating bonbons, because why don’t I have time to do what everyone else is doing?

You know the answer as well as I do, but we just don’t ever come out and say it. We all don’t do everything. And we shouldn’t expect to. We need to prayerfully consider what is important for us, for our marriages, for our children, and just do THAT. We may do some things religiously and beautifully, but other things we may never get to or when we do get to them, we just dabble a bit.

That’s OK. If you feel the pressure to do it all, then you will never do what is most important for YOU. Allow yourself to say, “That’s great for you, but I don’t think that is ideal for our family right now.” Allow yourself to think, “I am going to focus on the things that are good for me and not get caught up in something someone else is doing.” And then allow yourself to add a few things to your “DON’T” list.

It is a good thing to DO.

The post I admit it… I Can’t Do What You Do first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

]]> https://www.sherriseligson.com/i-admit-it-i-cant-do-what-you-do/feed/ 2 https://www.sherriseligson.com/im-back-and-wow-what-a-thing-to-come-back-to/ https://www.sherriseligson.com/im-back-and-wow-what-a-thing-to-come-back-to/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:33:45 +0000 http://www.sherriseligson.com/im-back-and-wow-what-a-thing-to-come-back-to/ For those of you who are following me here, you may have noticed I haven’t posted anything new in a few weeks. Well, first of all, even though I have a blog, I do not consider myself a “professional blogger.” Those amazing folks have blog planners and often have several weeks of posts in various stages […]

The post I’m Back…And, wow, what a thing to come back to! first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

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For those of you who are following me here, you may have noticed I haven’t posted anything new in a few weeks. Well, first of all, even though I have a blog, I do not consider myself a “professional blogger.” Those amazing folks have blog planners and often have several weeks of posts in various stages of completion at one time. They EVEN will schedule entries to automatically post when they are not physically in front of their computers. More power to them.

I, on the other hand, am not so organized. Though I thoroughly enjoy sharing things on my heart here, a majority of my “non-homemaking, non-family” time is spent writing and filming curriculum or speaking and encouraging parents and students. As of yesterday, I arrived home from two major trips involving me traveling through 10 different airports in a period of 21 days. That’s right. During the last three weeks, I have been in the Miami airport, Heathrow airport, Nairobi airport, Kilimanjaro airport, Mwanza airport (Tanzania), Gatwick airport, La Guardia, Richmond, Atlanta, and finally Orlando, which is home. If you’re following me on Facebook , you might have seen some of the things I was busy doing.

I packed in to my schedule a trip to Africa, including speaking to families at a national pastor’s conference in Tanzania, doing two science camps (one for an orphanage school and the other for a school for some of the poorest families in the area), and a two-day safari on the Serengeti and into the Ngorogoro Crater (look it up…it’s amazing!) so we could do some filming for science instructional DVDs I’m working on.

I then returned to the States for one day before repacking my bags to speak at the HEAV conference in Richmond, Virginia, where I led a shark dissection for 120 students and did 5 speaking sessions on science/education/parent encouragement.

After all of that amazing travel, I was sitting in the Richmond airport Sunday morning, waiting to catch a plane home. I was tired but on a bit of a high, thinking about all I had the opportunity to experience during those last few weeks. Then I opened my phone.

I learned of the horrible shooting in my home town. How could this have happened? Though Orlando is known worldwide, it is really a bit of a small town, only getting its notoriety once Disney and the other theme parks moved in. Now all the eyes of the nation were aiming at us and trying to make sense of the horrific loss of life.

I felt I had to post something. So I shared this on my personal Facebook page:

“This is not a political post. It is not a religious one, either. This is a post to snap us all out of our bickering and infighting within our country so we can come together as Americans to stand against those who think they can brutally take human lives just because they don’t agree with what others think.

In light of the recent horrible shooting in Orlando and the tragic loss of lives (recent reports are saying maybe 50?), can we NOT discuss gun control or sexual orientation or other hotbed topics and all agree that this shouldn’t happen?

My heart this morning is where it was after the 9/11 attacks…as we felt the devastation on our own U.S. soil we dropped our political biases, our hate speeches toward each other and realized that as a country, we have been given the blessings of freedom. Terrorism and despotism and control by kings are not new… these are what our Constitution spoke against. That revolutionary document is what has given our country stability and enabled us to live in relative peace and freedom for centuries.

My prayers are with the families of those who lost loved ones yesterday. My prayers are for the doctors, nurses, paramedics, and police working to bring healing and order. And my prayers are for our country, seemingly spiraling out of control as we have forgotten where we came from and what made us so great.
Please join me in this. Don’t let the terrorists win by tearing us apart!‪#‎PrayForOrlando‬”

I wasn’t trying to garner followers with this. I was just trying to encourage us all to look at this event from a proper perspective. But God has used it as it has been shared and shared again. I pray that we all look at the insanity of that event and join together as a nation. I pray that we remember WHAT our nation was founded on and that Biblical principles are relevant today and are definitely NEEDED! And, finally, I pray that God will make himself known in the hearts of those who are seeking comfort and sanity in this crazy world.

He is there. He desires a relationship with His people. He offers comfort to those who are hurting.

~Sherri

The post I’m Back…And, wow, what a thing to come back to! first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

What? How can I say that?

Well, I’m just being honest. I knew the upcoming year was going to be filled with, let’s face it, hard work. And I just couldn’t be absolutely, completely happy about that on the inside. But as I faced this feeling year after year, I began to realize a few things.

You see, a productive life is a messy one. As a farmer, if you have oxen that you are using on the farm, then you will have a messy barn, won’t you? There will be hay strewn throughout their stalls and, of course, the byproduct-of-eating-hay strewn all over, too. That means there will be more work to keep things in order. And it won’t ever really be completely clean, will it?

I used to sigh out loud and think to myself as I looked over my house, “Yep. We live in a barn.” And this was before I really understood this proverb. It seemed that no matter what cleaning plan I had or what chore schedule I made, we always had messes.

But take another look at the first part of that verse: “Where there are no oxen, the manger is empty…”

I would sometimes let my thoughts go this direction, “If I had no children, of course my house would be clean and ordered. Or at least if I didn’t homeschool them, I would have a few hours each day to stay on top of the clutter.”

But, of course, I really didn’t want that. I love my children. I LOVED watching them learn and grow at their pace and with loving and supportive encouragement. I knew that they were a gift from God, and we felt that God had called us to homeschool.

And it would be work. So it would be messy.

But let me just say that ANY productive life is messy. We were created to work for a purpose. Many people think that work was a curse that came with the fall of Adam and Eve. But think about it. They LIVED. IN. EDEN…a place where the ground was rich, and there was no disease. So the plants grew richly. Adam and Eve were instructed to tend that garden.

Tending was work. The fall introduced toil, sweat on our brow, weeds, and disease. But work was a part of who we were created to be.

It gives us purpose, productivity, dignity. Ecclesiastes 9:10 says, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.

Working gives us great satisfaction. We have purpose and are productive. Of course, we then model that for our children…a good work ethic, working unto the Lord.

And mess will always be a part of that.

So as you begin your school year, smile a little when you see those little messes that pop up. Thank the Lord you have laundry to wash and food to feed your family. Be grateful for the work ahead of you. As our lives are filled with little ones who we are charged to raise, rejoice in the fact that our mangers are not empty and we are working for an abundant harvest.

Once you jump into that pool, after the initial shock you find that the water is refreshing and holds you up. Let’s focus on these things as this year begins!

Have an extraordinary day!

Sherri

The post Why Is Homeschooling So Much Work? first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

One of the challenges of having many children close together in age is that they all hit the teenage years at the same time. Now, three of our four children are boys and if you have any boy teens, you know that they are going through massive growth spurts and physical changes. That means that most of their day is filled with eating: breakfast, after breakfast snack, mid-morning snack, pre-lunch, lunch, after-lunch dessert, mid-afternoon snack, mini-meal, late-afternoon snack…and I could go on and on.

Needless to say, I had to find clever ways to extend our meal budget to feed them while still trying to provide a semblance of healthful foods.

One of the ways I did this was to have a “leftover” pizza night almost each week. Whenever we had any leftover meat, whether it was roast beef, chicken or even lunchmeat, I would quickly hover over it, claiming it as my own for tomorrow night’s dinner. In the same way that Gollum would huddle over “my precious,” when there was a lull in the dinner feasting, I would quickly swoop in with my arms, cradling the main course and say, “Dinner is over and I am saving My Precious for another meal tomorrow! Sure, you can have thirds, just not of this. Look…there are perfectly good string beans in that bowl over there!”

And I would wrap up and mark my hoarded meat for tomorrow night. [DO NOT EAT!! MOM’S]

Years ago, I started a list of meals made from extra beef or chicken for times just like this, when we had (forced) leftovers.

One of my favorites was Margherita pizza. It was inexpensive, fresh, easy-to-make, and delicious!

Here’s one I made recently using sliced roast beef.

The basic ingredients are:

Pizza dough (three small loaves)
Roast beef slices (about ½ pound)
1 large bag fresh spinach
3 Roma tomatoes, thinly sliced
½ onion sliced into slivers
2 tbsps chopped garlic
2 tbsps balsamic vinegar
2 tbsps olive oil
8 ounces goat cheese

For the pizza dough, I used one package of Rhodes frozen bread dough. Follow the package directions to thaw (it takes about 2 ½ hours at room temperature). When I have time, I make my own pizza dough. It’s easy and much less expensive. If you do a search on Pinterest, I’m sure you will find lots of recipes to choose from. You also can buy fresh pizza dough at most grocery stores, too.

Once your dough is thawed, oil two large cookie sheets. Preheat oven to 375 degrees (Note: depending on your oven and where you live, temperature may need to be adjusted.)

Take one of the loaves and split it in half, adding each half to one of the other two loaves. This will make two larger pizzas instead of three small ones. I find it is helpful to add some oil to your hands so that they don’t stick to the dough. If you use flour, it just makes the pizza crust dryer. Take each lump of dough and gently begin to stretch it out in the air with your hands. Hold one side at a time, allowing gravity to pull the dough down. As you move your hands across the edges of the dough, it should begin to more easily stretch out. Once it is about half the size of your cookie sheet, place the dough down on it and continue to stretch it out to form a large rectangle (it takes a little work, but it will eventually spread out). Repeat with the other ball of dough. Lightly cover dough with a towel until time to put toppings on.

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Don’t worry if your dough doesn’t stretch all the way to the edges of the pan. As it rises, it will.

For the toppings, add a little olive oil into a skillet, and heat to medium temperature. Add onions and garlic and saute’. Now add the spinach and sliced roast beef, stirring until the spinach has wilted.

Evenly distribute the meat mixture over the two pizzas. Add sliced fresh tomatoes. Now sprinkle balsamic vinegar over the top, then the crumbled goat cheese. Bake pizzas in the oven for 25 – 30 minutes until edges are browned and cheese just begins to get toasted on the edges.

If you want to cook both pizzas at the same time, you can place one on a top rack and the other on a lower rack of your oven. Then switch them after about 15 minutes of cooking. You just need to watch them more closely if you do this. I had to do it this way because my kids would go through both pizzas so quickly that I needed them to be done at the same time!

The beauty of this “recipe” is that it can be so easily modified. You can change the meat to chicken, ground beef or shredded pork. You can leave the meat out altogether. You can swap the spinach with sweet bell peppers, mushrooms, olives, or whatever veggies you have on hand. You can add pizza sauce. You can change up the cheese with mozzarella or cheddar. One of our family favorites is to use shredded chicken, add barbecue sauce, and top with cheddar cheese. You can go Tex-Mex by adding salsa instead of pizza sauce.

I like to add spinach on most of my pizzas because once it is cooked down, it is almost invisible among the other toppings. But it adds a great boost of nutrition.

Have fun experimenting with the combinations. You will be extending your food budget and making something that is always fun to eat!

The post Quick Gourmet Pizzas from Leftovers first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

When my kids were younger and learning to do these chores, I remember biting my tongue when guests would use our bathroom.

The kids cleaned in there this week, not me.

Oh, and they were the ones who messed it up in the first place.

It was a struggle to balance the feelings of realizing that our life with little ones included some beautiful messes, wanting our house somewhat sanitized for guests, and being frustrated at looking at all those dust bunnies under the couch taunting me.

This week I am traveling to Atlanta to speak at the Teach Them Diligently Convention. One of my workshops is titled, “Homeschooling and Homemaking: From Misorganzation to Miss Organization.”

One section of the workshop deals with trying to get a handle on these areas that can be hard to stay on top of. I call these cleaning issues Detail Cleaning, because we don’t necessarily need to do them each week, but if we never do them, we’ll have deep, dark corners of our home that make us shudder as we walk by.

The idea behind this chart is to divide your house into eight sections. Your house sections will look a little different from mine, depending on your house configuration and what chores are more important to you. You may want to include one for a large back porch or a garage. You may not have a room dedicated as a school room, but you might want to include a long hallway, foyer, and storage closets.

Once you have your divisions, then all you need to do is dedicate 30-45 minutes in your week for detail cleaning. I do mine on Friday mornings. So on my calendar, every Friday morning at 10:00 has Detail Clean. Now how do I know where to clean? I look at my chart. The first Friday, I will clean areas in my kitchen. I pull things off the counters and clean behind them. Gone are those crumbly toast crumbs! I pull out the step ladder and wipe down the top of the fridge. I clean the kitchen window and wipe down the vent hood over our stove with grease cleaner.

The next Friday I will tackle detail cleaning in the master bedroom, getting the ceiling fan, using the vacuum hose to get under the bed, wiping down our blinds, and other detail areas I don’t get to each week.

You see, these are areas that we just can’t tackle during the regular weekly cleaning. It also gives us a chance to hit those areas that our kids might not be covering while doing their chores. And if we designate a time to do them, we can be sure eventually they will be covered. In fact, if we follow the chart, these areas will be cleaned every other month! And without us having to overfill our schedules. Just 30 minutes a week!

Now let’s say you have a field trip planned one Friday. That’s OK. I find that if I have something on my calendar, then I will make a point to move it to another spot in my schedule so I am sure to do it. If it isn’t on my calendar at all, I never seem to get it done. So look for a small space of time Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning. And if you just can’t get to it that week, just push that detail cleaning area to the next Friday, and you’re good to go.

It is so important that we intentionally take time to plan. If we don’t, the unimportant things will easily fill our days. This is one way I have found to get a small handle on some areas where I have felt out of control.

The post An Unbelievably Simple Plan for Cleaning Success first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

Hanging file folders in a file cabinet work well, but file cabinets take up space, and you can only have so many of them.

Years ago, I began using magazine files to store many of my papers. Magazine files are designed for storing magazines, and they are oriented in a portrait layout instead of the landscape layout of traditional file cabinets. So how do I use these portable containers for organized storage?

Enter the backpack folder.

It is designed with the dividing tabs on one end of the folder and a side opening for easy filling. They fit perfectly inside magazine files, allowing you to have an organized method of storing your important papers. Never seen them before? Actually, backpack folders are easier to find than you may think. Of course a quick internet search will provide you with plenty of sources to purchase from, but I have found them in Target and even the dollar store.

I love using this method of storing paperwork!

Because magazine files only require shelf or desk space, you can store this file system anywhere. I have a designated spot on a bookshelf for most of mine, but I also have some on top of a desk and a decorative one on a shelf with other materials. It hides my stuff in a beautiful way but also keeps it handy when I need it.

And because the magazine files are self-standing and portable, you can slide one out and bring it wherever you need it in your house.

When it comes to household organization, I like to think outside the box. I look at the available space I have and try to make it as useful as possible. This is one “trick” that has worked great for me.

If you are struggling with a paperwork monster that is difficult to contain, let me encourage you to try several methods until you find one that works best for you. But don’t invest in expensive storage containers until you do a trial run using maybe boxes and folders you have on hand. Then when you find something that works, you can be on the hunt for fun and pretty containers. After all, if we have to keep things organized, we can at least do it in a beautiful way!

Have an extraordinary day!

The post How Magazine Files Can Help You with Storage first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

Yes, it builds skills and teaches them a good work ethic, but it also helps me out!

Well, one of the problems we have had is identifying whose clothing item belongs to whom. (Sorry, after 21 years of teaching grammar to my kids, I just have to use the “who” and “whom” correctly – it sounds so formal, and you guys know I am not a very formal person!)

Anyway…I had read about so many strategies to remember who gets which clothing item: sewing on colored tags (lots of work), sticking with certain wardrobe colors for each child (not happening), different brands for each child (DEFINITELY not happening), just make mental note as to who gets what (Now you’re just being crazy!).

None of these methods seemed doable to me. We have three boys and a girl. When the oldest outgrew something, it went straight into the drawer of the next boy, then the next, and so on. And when the youngest boy outgrew his clothes, I am not ashamed to say that some of those items ended up in our daughter’s drawers (maybe with some lace added).

I was not about to sew and re-sew different colored ribbon tags, and I knew my mind couldn’t keep track of which child had which shirt, so I needed an easy, inexpensive method of marking their clothes in a way that I could alter the markings as the items passed down from child to child.

Enter my secret weapon:

Yes, a simple Sharpie marker. I mark a single black dot on the tags of my oldest son’s clothes (even the toes of the socks). Then when an item gets passed down to the next child, I add a second dot. The third child has three dots on his tags, and the fourth child has four dots. No re-sewing or elaborate buying plans necessary!

I keep another marker in the laundry room to re-mark any tags that become faded, but that is all I do. No step-by-step program. No expensive materials. Just dots on the tags. And if my third son gets a new shirt for a birthday or Christmas, I just put three dots straight onto the tag. Everyone will know it is his. For shirts that have no tags, I try to find a hidden spot on the inside seams (unless it’s a white shirt). And that’s it. It takes care of 99% of our problems.

No more comments like, “You are wearing my shirt again!” or “Mom, all my shorts are missing!”

So with the sorting out of the way, we can get down to business and defeat the Huns finish folding the laundry.

I hope this is helpful to you – or at least a bit entertaining. Have a great day!

The post An Easy Way to Mark and Identify Hand-Me-Downs first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

We have four children in our family – three of them are boys – and once they hit those teenage years, I had quite a challenge keeping them fed. In fact, if we couldn’t find one of our sons, it was very likely we would find the lower half of him sticking out of the refrigerator or the pantry. If you have boys, you might want to stop putting money in a college fund and instead save for their teen food consumption. I’m just sayin’…

Well, whether you are having guests for lunch or you are packing a “light snack” for your son and his friends, this is an easy, delicious, and inexpensive way to do it.

I recently found these amazing ciabatta rolls at the local WalMart grocery (not a super center, just a grocery; but the super centers may carry them as well). They are so delicious. For subs, I particularly like the onion and poppy seed rolls. I buy two packs which will make 12 individual subs.

First, lay out a bunch of paper towels on your work surface and separate the buns. If you keep them lined up, they will be easier to fill.

Now for the condiments. You can certainly add what you like here, but I spread a thin layer of real mayonnaise on one side of the buns and then add my “secret ingredient” on the other side.  A while ago, I was introduced to this delicious submarine sandwich dressing. Well, I usually don’t like to buy pre-made dressings because they always have ingredients that I cannot pronounce, and they are pretty expensive. So I saved the container and figured out how to make my own.

One half cup each of red wine vinegar and olive oil. Add 1/2 tsp each of dried oregano and salt plus 1/4 tsp pepper. Shake well and drizzle on bread.

Now add the fillings. I like to use turkey and swiss cheese or roast beef and provolone. Then a slice of tomato and lettuce. It feels like you are dealing cards on game night!

Once all the fillings are doled out, close the sandwiches and wrap them up. I like to use aluminum foil because it holds together well and keeps the moisture inside. If you don’t want your food to touch the foil, you can place a sandwich on a piece of paper towel first. But before we wrap them up, here’s one more look at this yumminess!

Gorgeous!

Now wrap them up, and they are ready to bring on a picnic or wherever your day takes you. Carry them in a cooler so they will stay fresh.

One more look!

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