trying a new hairstyle I found on Pinterest

I never was a girly-girl, and I wore borrowed sweatpants to my university classes until a friend of mine asked me to stop.

So this post isn’t about glamour or runway modeling. Instead, these are a few tricks and techniques I use to try to look presentable with very little time in front of a mirror.

Beauty tip #1: Under eye concealer. Laura introduced me to this magic potion. I dab 4 or 5 dots under each eye and gently blend with my ring finger. Using my least strong finger helps me be more gentle to that delicate under-eye area.

Beauty tip #2: High SPF facial sunscreen every day. I have read biographies of famous makeup artists, and this is their number one beauty secret. I guess it should be the top of my list, too, but hey, I’m no beauty guru.

Beauty tip #3: Natural bristle hairbrush. Reduce breakage and distribute the natural oils in your hair so they don’t all congregate on your scalp.

Beauty tip #4: Don’t wash your hair every day. Models don’t. I actually don’t use shampoo, but you don’t have to go that far. I now wash my hair with baking soda approximately twice a week and it has never been healthier. Washing less frequently reduces scalp oil production over time so hair stays cleaner on a day-to-day basis.

Beauty tip #5: Use a really good hair straightener (Chi in the US or GHD in the rest of the world) and heat-protecting serum. When I straighten my hair, I can make it do what I want it to do. I let my hair dry naturally and straighten it about once a week.

Beauty tip #6: Don’t pluck eyebrows too thin or leave too big of a gap between them. Leaving too wide a gap makes your nose look wider.

Beauty tip #7: Wash face and body without soap. I especially like gentle Cetaphil for my face. Washing without soap eliminates soapy residue and my need for a moisturiser.

Beauty tip #8: Dermalogica Special Clearing Booster for zits. I used to have terrible acne and still deal with the occasional spot. Dermalogica is the most effective, non-irritating pimple treatment I have ever used.

Beauty tip #9: Use natural mineral makeup. Laura introduced me to this brand, which enables me to quickly achieve a natural, yet polished, look.

Beauty tip #10: Smile! :)

Please note, I am not compensated in any way for mentioning specific brands; these are simply products I like and use.

I still have a lot to learn. What’s your favourite beauty secret?

David and I both love this chunei carrier from iHosa. I asked Ben to help me get the straps adjusted, but once he did the carrier fits just right. Since it is a torso carrier, reaching up is no problem, so it is easy for me to hang laundry on the line, retrieve laundry from the line, hang the next load… The waist belt is flattering (e.g. no muffin top even just a few weeks post-partum).

But the best part of all is that David quiets right down and often falls asleep when I get him on my back. Bliss…

Please note: this is not a compensated review, just a product I like.

One marvelous thing about getting rid of the stuff we don’t need is that it allows us to make room for better things.

For instance, Ben and I moved away from the US and 120v electricity 9 years ago. Since we were never sure if/when we would be moving back to the States, we used a power transformer with our food processor, blender, hand-held electric mixer, crock pot and other much-loved gadgets until we were sure we would settle in a 230v country.

When we made the decision to stay in Australia, it felt so good to Freecycle the big brick of a transformer that had been taking up counter space in our kitchen. But it was inconvenient to go back to mixing everything by hand.

We bought a 220v crock pot, and I began to search for an appliance that would allow me to mix and grind and chop, without having to replicate my kitchen-full of US appliances. I was thrilled to find a European solution made for small kitchens which did all of the things my old appliances did, and more, in one compact unit.

making lemon sorbet

Introducing… Thermomix.

Unlike my old food processor, I use my Thermomix daily, and it is much easier to clean. As a family with small children, here are items we make regularly:

• apple sauce
• butter, both plain and flavoured
• chopping garlic and onions
• hard boiled eggs – place eggs in basket, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• hot chocolate – made from cooking chocolate and milk
• ice cream, both instant and traditional
• icing sugar – making this on demand saves me having to have an additional container in the pantry
• mayonnaise, both plain and flavoured
• oatmeal/porridge – weigh in oats and milk, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• pizza dough – takes 2 min 11 sec prior to letting it rise for half an hour
• play dough – ready in 7 minutes
• rice cereal – grind the rice and lentils, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• smoothies
• sorbet
• steamed rice – weigh and wash rice in basket, add water, set to heat and stir, and walk away
• yogurt – for our family, in one year the savings from making out own yogurt pays for the Thermomix

The list above is almost embarrassing because it only scratches the surface of what we could be doing with the Thermomix. For me it is enough that this machine has made cooking from scratch easy, saved us time and money, broadened our food choices, and doesn’t take up much space on my kitchen counter.

If you would like to see more specifics about how the Thermomix works, this Canadian demonstration video shows the blade, bowl, time and heat functions, and the steaming tray.

Please note: this is not a compensated review, just a product I like.

Last night I attended the premier of filmmaker Lincoln Fenner’s documentary, More4Me. The documentary juxtaposes greed and materialism in the western world with poverty and basic necessities in the developing world.

The point: all of us with at least $2/day are rich.

Governments and businesses know this. They bombard us with encouragement to constantly buy something newer, better, and more extravagant. Items that once were luxuries are now considered necessities (for instance mobile phones, restaurant meals, and TVs).

We consume more and more, and even borrow to do it, and yet… studies show that despite our unprecedented affluence, we aren’t happy.

In fact, when we choose to indulge ourselves, we miss out on better things. The joy of giving a child the only gift she might ever receive. The blessing that comes from saving lives through providing clean drinking water. Hope shared with families given livestock to breed and feed their families. And untold benefits from providing the problem-solvers of the future with reliable solar-powered laptops.

It was fun to get out and see a film – my first in a cinema in years! More4Me was a thought-provoking reinforcement of what I recently read in the book Affluenza, with the addition of highlighted opportunities to use money well rather than wastefully.

It’s been a little over a year now since we first started using Pear Budget to track all of our expenses. It’s a great tool, and I highly recommend it. Here are some of my thoughts.

Things I love:

When I enter a receipt on the day of purchase, I can add that day’s date with a single click. (Entering a different date is almost as easy.) The single click is an incentive for me to enter receipts the same day, which helps me: (a) stay on top of the receipts so they don’t form a huge pile I dread, and (b) remember any expenses where I didn’t get a receipt, such as a coin-operated car wash, or a cash payment for Nikki’s violin lesson.

Editing receipts is easy – simply click the ‘edit’ link next to the relevant receipt, and you can change anything: the date, amount, category, or tags.

When I make a cash sale, for example through Gumtree, I simply enter a negative receipt in any category I choose. For instance, when I sell a piece of furniture, I can enter it as a negative receipt (e.g. -$30) in ‘home maintenance’ and then spend that money on paint.

When a category is overspent, the total turns red. Scrolling through the ‘Review Your Spending’ page allows me to quickly see any holes in our budget. When things are tight in one area there is usually some wiggle-room in another, and I like to tidy things up at the end of each month (my own personal war against red categories!).

Some tricks I use:

Transferring money between accounts takes a couple steps. For instance, if we’ve run over on our ‘grocery’ budget, but ‘drycleaning’ has extra money, I can enter a $30 receipt in ‘drycleaning’ and a -$30 receipt in ‘groceries’ to move the money across.

In order to save up money in a category, I rename the category with an asterisk, e.g. ‘medical – dentist*‘. When I go around repairing holes at the end of the month, I do not remove what looks like extra money from any category with an asterisk. This way we should end up with enough money to pay for all four kids’ braces.

Something I’ve learned:

Pear Budget keeps things simple with three basic types of categories: ‘Income’, ‘Monthly Expenses’, and ‘Irregular Expenses’.:

‘Monthly Expenses’ should only be used for categories in which you spend the exact same amount every month. We had our phones under ‘Monthly Expenses’ for a time since we were billed a monthly amount. However, we sometimes went over that amount. When I checked that category by moving it to ‘Irregular Expenses’ it showed we were really in the red there, a fact that was never apparent in ‘Monthly Expenses’.

‘Monthly Expenses’ are also a black hole for savings. We were putting $50 a month into our ‘emergency fund’ for a while, but then we had something come up where we took some money out of our ‘emergency fund.’ When we were putting money in and when we took money out, we were guessing how much was in there and how much was left after we spent some of it. So, ‘emergency fund’ had to move to ‘Irregular Expenses’. Once we moved it over, everything was clear.

A feature I’d like to see:

I enjoy being able to enter my own custom tags for each receipt. To make this feature easier to use, I would appreciate a drop-down or autofill (after I’ve typed the first few characters) for my frequently-used tags. I tend to not remember what tag I used last time. So in the case of a purchase of something that has a warranty, I might have filed various warranty purchases under “warranty purchase” “large purchase” “warranty” or “keep receipt”. Overall I probably don’t need to use more than 20 or so tags, and if my frequently-used tags popped up somehow when I was entering a receipt, I could be much more consistent in the tags I use and therefore use the search function more easily.

Summary:

If you are having trouble, like we were, figuring out where your money disappears to each month, OR if you dislike entering your expenses in your current budget tool, I would recommend a free trial of Pear Budget. After that it’s less than $5/month, which we consider a reasonable price to pay to demystify our finances.

Please note, this is not a compensated review, just a product I like. However, if you would like to subscribe to Pear Budget using this link, I will receive a free month of the service.

UPDATE: I have posted a review of our first year with Pear Budget.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A scientist and an engineer fall in love, get married, create a budget.

Fast-forward ten years later, and our budget-tracking spreadsheet has at least 50 different categories. Despite this level of detail, I have no real idea of where we stand unless I look at our bank account balance.

photo my mum took of my dad with a pear at Apple FunPark

Pear Budget stood out as an alternative to our spreadsheet madness, and I signed up for a free 30-day trial in December which convinced me to purchase a full year of online service. Here are a few reasons why I love it so far:

1. super easy to enter (and edit) expenses and income – I admit I now enjoy entering receipts
2. convenient “tags” field to add notes – much easier than adding a comment to a cell in Excel
3. you never have to press a “save” button or worry about backing up any files
4. enter that month’s income and that month’s expenses – if you purchase something you’ve saved for before starting Pear Budget, you can put in a receipt with a negative amount to show that you already had the money saved
5. owners Charlie and Sarah are very responsive and love to answer questions – they really do want to make it easy to keep track of your budget

I will continue testing this online budgeting service to see if it stands up to real life, irregular expenses and all. Stay tuned for a more thorough review in a few months. If you have any questions you’d like me to try to answer as I’m poking around, just let me know.

Please note, this is not a compensated review, just a product I like. However, if you would like to subscribe to Pear Budget using this link, I will receive a free month of the service.

Robin asked for a review of the LIKEaBIKE we bought our children for Christmas.

The short answer is that the LIKEaBIKE is fantastic! A stress-free child-led introduction to cycling.

Nikki gained confidence by riding around and around the living room. Then one day she asked to take her LIKEaBIKE outside.

She practiced in the back garden, and later I shot some video as she maneuvered around a parking lot, down a grassy hill, and along a wetlands trail.

This short clip shows her riding, turning wide circles, and stopping.

Please note, this is not a compensated review, just a product I like.

Oh the joy and wonder of having access to a public library!

I borrowed Eric Carle ‘s board book Pancakes, Pancakes! Nikki devoured this book, and after four or five readings had it more or less memorized. She can now correctly identify a sickle , flail , water wheel , millstone , and butter churn and knows what they do. More relevant are the portions of the book that call for measuring, pouring, and stirring, which Nikki proceeded to demonstrate for Michael.

After the pancakes book was such a hit, I went back and asked the librarian for suggestions on childrens’ books that give greater detail about how things work. Nikki’s favorite of the librarian’s recommendations is A Taste of Honey by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace . After I read the story a couple times, I asked her the opening question posed in the book ‘Where does honey come from?’ To which she replied, ‘down there’ while pointing down. I was a bit mystified, until I realised she was referring to this illustration:

Before reading this book, I did not know about honey extractors or why beekeepers’ suits are white . Such fun that Nikki has taken a definite interest in books that I find interesting as well. And the timing is especially convenient – this is happening right after a move that enables us to borrow books from a library. Once Nikki has a book memorized, she doesn’t mind hearing it again (and again and again) but she and I both prefer something new. Three cheers for the library and librarians!

This afternoon I turned the tables. After reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Nikki, I asked if she would like to read the story to me. Here is her version of events. Her spoken words are in bold , and her sign language is in italics .

[Opens book. Points to egg. Turns page.]
Hot (pointing to sun). Bounce, with splayed fingers (her version of ‘pop’). [Turns page.]
Eat (this goes on for several pages). [Turns page.]
Cry (points to her stomach). [Turns page.]
Happy . [Turns page.]
Big! [Turns page.]
Butterfly .

I recently came across an absolutely fascinating book in the ‘practical parenting’ section of the local library. Why Boys are Different , written by an educational psychologist, is easy to read and is based on recent research (published in 2004). The book aims to dispel misconceptions (‘Is it true that boys are better at science than girls?’ ‘Are boys less verbal?’) and give parents practical tools for maximising their sons’ potential.

Ben and I bought this onesie for Michael, just in case our little boy is interested in science and technology !

As I am spending a lot of time nursing these days, I was encouraged by the following reasons Dr Macmillan gives why breast milk is sometimes especially good for boys (p 85):

• Breastfed babies are only half as likely to get multiple ear infections as bottle-fed babies. (Boys are more vulnerable to ear infections than girls.)
• Breasted children have IQs more than eight points higher at the age of eight than bottle-fed children whose mothers are similar in terms of education and socio-economic standing. (Good for girls and boys, but especially boys whose emotional development is more vulnerable.)
• Thyroid hormone, present in breast milk, helps brain cells to survive and mature. (Boys are more vulnerable than girls to birth trauma.)
• Variation in breast milk flavours plays an important role in taste development. (Boys may benefit from this stimulation to their senses more than girls, since testosterone is known to decrease sensitivity in a related area, the sense of smell.)
• Breastfed babies have fewer lung, stomach and urinary tract infections than bottle-fed babies since there is a large array of immune factors in breast milk. (Boys’ immune systems are thought to be weaker than girls’.)
• Taurine, an amino acid thought to play a special role in neural development, is present in breast milk. (It’s beneficial for both boys’ and girl’s brain development.)
• Breast milk contains more than 167 different types of fatty acids; such fats are essential to the process of myelination . (Boys’ brains develop more myelinated networks than girls’, so they have an even greater need of these fatty acids.)