Shaklee Product of the Week | Get Clean

How often do you buy dishwasher detergent? Monthly? Every few months?

Today I'd like to talk to you about one of my favorite Shaklee Get Clean products: Dishwasher Automatic Concentrate.  Have you tried it before? If not, you're going to want to!

Here's the lowdown on it:

It takes more than two and one-half boxes of Cascade powder (45 oz.) to clean the same 48 loads.

The deep, enzyme-activated cleaning power gently removes tough stains, leaving dishes and glasses sparkling clean.

Dissolves quickly and completely, getting to work straight away.

Absolutely no chlorine and no fragrances, which can pollute the air that you breathe.

Comes in a handy resealable pouch with measuring scoop

Concentrated

Biodegradable Surfactants

No phosphates

No chlorine

Plus, it is a money saver! I was looking at my past orders and I last ordered the Dishwasher Concentrate on May 21. I'm still using the same bag...and we run the dishwasher every day! So I paid $9.50 (member price) and 8 weeks later I still haven't run out! Does your dishwasher detergent add up like that?

We just love the entire Shaklee Get Clean line. The Get Clean Starter Kit is amazing. It has everything you need to clean your entire house naturally. And it includes the Dishwater Concentrate, along with a handy dispenser! The Get Clean Starter Kit is our best selling Get Clean kit...it outperforms over 20 national leading cleaning brands, saves you THOUSANDS of dollars in cleaning products, and is good for you and the environment!

Before we switched to Shaklee's Get Clean products, we were using the Cascade Packs...you know the ones that have the powder and gel in them? They worked just fine, until I accidentally bought some that were 'powered with Gain.' Oh my gosh, we couldn't even use our dishes after washing with those packs.  The stench of Gain was everywhere and we could taste the detergent in our drinking glasses. It was disgusting. Which got me to thinking about how many years we've been ingesting the funk (as I like to say) from our dish detergent. Yuck.  

So now we're saving money and keeping ourselves healthy!

Let's connect on Facebook! Join my closed group Healthy Happy Life, or stop by my business page at Healthy Life, Happy Life and say hi!

Homemade Hazelnut Spread | Easy Recipe

My family loves Nutella. I mean, who doesn't?

Side note: What we don't love about it is that it contains palm oil. While we're not what you'd call treehuggers, my husband and I strive to take care of what we've been blessed with. And one way we've decided to take care of our planet is to stop buying products with palm oil. If you're not familiar with the reasons why the use of palm oil is harmful, then take a look at the Rainforest Action Network's Palm Oil Fact Sheet. 

So I put out a request on my Healthy Life, Happy Life community page for alternatives to Nutella. I received some great responses, one being a recipe for homemade hazelnut spread! Woot!

The boys and I made it today and it is so good!

Here's the recipe I received. My adjustments are in red.

Homemade Hazelnut Spread

1 cup blanched hazelnuts

1/2 cup canned, full-fat coconut milk (I used boxed coconut milk)

1/4 cup coconut nectar or maple syrup (I couldn't find coconut nectar and I don't like real maple syrup so I used about 1/8 c of agave nectar and 1/8 c of sugar)

1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1/4 tsp. vanilla

2 T. coconut oil or ghee (I used coconut oil)

pinch of Celtic sea salt (I used grey salt)

Toast the hazelnuts at 350 degrees for 10 minutes; remove the skins if they weren't already removed by using a damp cloth to rub them. (I highly suggest you buy hazelnuts without the skins if you can. It was a royal pain to remove them myself!)

Put nuts in food processor and pulse until creamy- scrape bowl a couple of times 

Add coconut milk, nectar or syrup, cocoa, vanilla, coconut oil and salt and continue pulsing and scraping sides until creamy.

Store in the fridge! Yum!

The flavor of this is on point...so tasty! Ya'll definitely have to try it...if you do, please let me know how you like it!

I'd love to connect with you in my Facebook communities! You can like my Healthy Life, Happy Life page or join my Healthy, Happy Life group (this is a closed group). It's growing and we're having a lot of fun!

Banana Blueberry Muffins | Breakfast Recipe

Hello, hello!

I hope you've had a great week! I wanted to share this super yummy recipe with you, Banana Blueberry Muffins!

For some reason, I was having a major craving for some homemade blueberry muffins. So off to the internets I went in search of the best muffins around.

Sally's Baking Addiction popped up and her recipe (along with her photos) looked super yummy! Of course, when someone's blog is named Baking Addiction, you know it's gotta be good, right?

So my little baking buddy and I got right to work making the muffins. Oh my, they are wonderful! I highly suggest you try them!

Here is Sally's recipe

Makes 15 muffins. Each muffin is 131 calories each based on using nonfat vanilla greek yogurt and unsweetened almond milk. Muffins taste best the next day, like most banana bread recipes. Muffins remain fresh and moist stored at room temperature for up to 5 days. Muffins freeze well, up to 3 months.

Ingredients

• 2 and 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour (or mix of whole wheat and all-purpose)

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/4 cup honey

• 1/2 cup light brown sugar, loosely packed (or dark brown sugar)

• 1 cup mashed very ripe banana (about 2 large very ripe bananas)

• 1/4 cup nonfat vanilla greek yogurt (or any yogurt)

• 1 large egg, beaten

• 3/4 cup milk (almond milk, soymilk, cow's milk, rice milk)

• 1 and 1/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

Preheat oven to 325F degrees. Spray 15 muffin tins with nonstick spray.* Set aside.
In a large bowl, gently toss the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon together until combined. Set aside.
In a separate bowl, mix the honey and brown sugar together - it will be thick and lumpy. Try to get out as many lumps as you can - a fork works well to break it up. Add the mashed banana, yogurt, and beaten egg. Slowly pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Gently begin to fold it all together. It will be very thick. Add the milk slowly and continue to gently mix the ingredients together. The milk will thin everything out, but the batter will still remain thick. Gently fold in the blueberries. Do not overmix the batter, which will lend tough, dry muffins.
Divide the batter between 15 muffin tins. Fill all the way to the top. Bake the first 12, then the last three in another batch. Fill the empty muffin tins halfway with water in the 2nd batch to ensure even baking. Bake for 17-18 minutes until very lightly browned on the edges. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean. Allow the muffins to cool completely.

Notes

*Do not use cupcake liners, muffins will stick to liners.

What I'm Reading Wednesday

Happy Wednesday to you! I hope you've been having a great week so far. Ours has been good...so hot and humid, but good!

Here's a few links to some of my favorite blog posts over the week. Enjoy!

Jessica over at Definitely Maybe writes about the goal of her blog. I so appreciate the honest of what she writes and her aspirations of being a Godly wife and mom!

Jenny at Conscientious Confusion is talking about tips to getting back into shape after kiddos. She is a pilates instructor and also teaches kids yoga (FUN!). Her tips are real life and practical. I so love tip #2, but you'll need to check it out for yourself. Jenny, can you come to my side of the metroplex and teach pilates please??

I perfuse Young House Love a lot and just drool, drool, drool over their projects. Have you seen their blog? Basically, they're this young, spunky couple who buys homes fixes them up all the while blogging about it. Then they flip it and start over on a new one. I wish I had their talent (and energy!)


Have a great day!

The Day I Dumped My Purse

If you're a woman, you probably have a purse. If you're a mommy with more than one kid, you probably have a gigantic purse/backpack/diaper bag.

And if you have one of those, you probably reach into it several times a day and bring out the exact opposite of what you were expecting. Crackers, crumbs, wipes, pacifiers, receipts from 6 months ago, melted chocolate, 4 nonworking pens...you get the idea.

I dumped my purse a few months ago in a desperate attempt to get organized and stop getting sticky fingers every time I dig into my bag. Ya'll had fun with it and I loved reading your comments and comparisons!

So here I am again, in another desperate attempt to clean and organize. Here's what was found today. (Note: my bag is a good sized Petunia Picklebottom diaper bag. It holds a lot. I think it holds too much though)

Let's get started on the madness, shall we? The day I dumped my purse I found:

• 6 receipts from 6 months ago
• 1 hand sanitizer
• 1 empty pack of tissues
• 2 empty bottles of lotion
• 1 FULL bottle of lotion (it's my favorite...smells amazing...and works!)
• 1 bottle of sunscreen (this stuff works...no nasty parabens)
• 1 hairclip and 7 clear hair bands
• 1 bottle of Hyland's Teething Tabs. (my children are not teething, so...)
• Various melted candies and cookies
• 2 unopened McDonald's toys (Yes, I do McD's in moments of desperation.)
• 1 snack cup, which was empty, thank goodness
• My bag of essential oils
• Wallet
• And an iPhone 3S. It doesn't work. I'm not even sure whose iPhone it is because I have a 4S and hubs has the 5. Um...

So I have all this stuff in my bag but what I don't have are the two things that are crucial to a mom of a toddler...wipes and diapers. How long I've been driving around without those things and haven't needed them is beyond me!

Your turn! What odd things do you find in your bag?

Have you joined my Facebook group yet? It's growing quickly and we're having lots of fun!
 

Let's thredUP!

Have you heard of thredUP?  It's an online consignment shop for kids and women's clothing and accessories.

I don't know about you, but I have a lot of clothes that my boys have outgrown that are still in really great shape. We can all use a little bit of extra money, so trying to sell clothes is a great way to bring in a little extra cash. However, it can be a pain in the rear...at least for me. I've tried several ways of selling my boys clothes and haven't been successful.

Garage sale - I had NINE boxes filled with clothes ranging from newborn to 3T. At our garage sale, I think I sold five items. And I had items priced cheap...like $.50-$2!

Selling via Facebook groups - There are TONS of FB groups that are Buy/Sell/Trade, but I had a lot of people trying to bargain with me before coming to see what we have, or not showing up, etc.

Just Between Friends consignment sales - I've never participated in one of these, but I've had friends who have. I get very mixed reviews on them. Some love it, some say, "Never again!" I signed up this spring to sell, but didn't read all the fine print before I spent a ton of time pricing my items. You have to HANG everything on hangers (that you don't get back!) and then spend at least an hour waiting on them to approve your items. And I've heard that a lot of items don't sell, so they get marked waaay down and you make less profit.

Enter thredUP. It's so easy. You order a bag, fill it with clean, like new clothes and drop it off at a UPS store. It's all free to do. They inspect your clothes and let you know which ones are accepted and at what commission. You get paid via PayPal or you can use your credit in the shop. The clothes that they don't accept are sent off to be donated to those in need. It's a win all around.

So, I ordered my free bag a few weeks ago...it's huge! I grabbed a TON of the boys' old clothes, washed them, folded them, and sent them back to thredUP. Within about two weeks I got a notification of what was accepted and how much my commission was!

To be honest, I was at first a little frustrated that my commission wasn't more and that they didn't accept even half of my items. But...after thinking about it for awhile, I came to this conclusion. thredUP is a business...a big business with lots of employees and overhead. They need to make money, not just give it away. Plus, their qualifications on clothing items is pretty strict, and I totally agree with that. They want like new items so they can give you the most commission and get the best resale price. So now I understand why my commission wasn't what I was expecting.

But, it's way more than what I got from my other tries at reselling the clothes, which was NOTHING!

Will I use thredUP again? Absolutely. They're fair, their customer service is superb, and they support a great cause.

Check them out when you can and get $10 off your $20 order! You can click on their ad on the sidebar. Have fun shopping AND making some extra cash!

FREE Shaklee Membership | Sign Up Today!

Can I get a hip, hip, hooray??

It's back...my brand partner, Shaklee, is offering a FREE membership to anyone who purchases products in July!

Here is a little information about our Shaklee memberships and why I think you would love it!

When joining my Member Team you:

• get discounts on all Shaklee products (save 15% on everything and even up to 25% on some!)
• receive shipping specials
• get your own secure ordering website with LOADS of health information
• receive 100% money back guarantee on all products - no questions asked!

Now, here are some answers to questions you may be asking yourself:

• There is no yearly renewal fee. Joining as a Member is lifetime!
• There are no minimum orders EVER! You can order once a month, or once a year...it's up to you!
• You are not obligated to sell Shaklee, nor are you automatically a Distributor. If you want to get paid for sharing Shaklee, please apply here.

In addition to Shaklee's 100% money back guarantee, we offer

• 100% guarantee that the ingredients listed on the label are in the product
• 100% guarantee of quality controlled product formulations that ensure product safety, purity, reliability, and performance.
• 100% guarantee that we use the finest quality ingredients available. 

Experience the Shaklee Difference! YOU DESERVE IT!

It's so easy to get started. Just go to my website, shop for your favorite products and join as a member during checkout!