The Blended Blog TEst: Leslie

Behind the Blogger v3

"Behind the Blogger," "Leslie," "lisa," "Nicole"

Welcome to the 3rd edition of Behind the Blogger. You can read our previous interviews here. Today we'd like you to get to know Leslie from Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After, Lisa from Daily Style Finds and Nicole from Nick & Nik a bit better. Enjoy!

What's comfort food to you?

Comfort food is like an edible hug that warms you from the inside out. As a little girl, comfort food would have been my mom's fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy. Had that every birthday. And her warm from the oven homemade cinnamon rolls, orange rolls, and crusty loaves of homemade bread. Now that I am a wife, mom and grandmom cooking for my family, chicken pot pie, chicken and dumplings, biscuits and sausage gravy would be my top comfort foods at our house.

Pizza, Five Guys Cheeseburger & Fries, and DQ Reese's Peanut Butter Cup blizzard! (I also love beef stew and pot roast in the winter!)

Chips & Dip

Tell us about the coolest vacation you have ever been on.

In 1976, my parents took our family on a grand tour of many of the national parks in the western United States. Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Tetons, Mount Rushmore and just as many exciting cities. We drove from one place to another in the family station wagon. Good times.

As an adult, my coolest vacation was an all inclusive stay in Cancun, Mexico. Our resort was gorgeous...GORGEOUS. The food was delicious. The beach beautiful. I loved every minute of my time spent with my Prince in paradise.

I love NYC, so spending time there is one of my favorite things to do. I also enjoy spending time by the water - either the ocean or a lake. When I was younger someone in my family had a cottage at a lake - and I enjoyed spending time there, which is one of my best childhood memories. (And, where I really embraced my tomboy side, like walking around barefoot with a leech between my toes! Yuck!) I also went on an Alaskan cruise with my mom - almost 10 years ago.

Oh gosh, so many. Costa Rica is probably my fave - so much to see, monkeys everywhere. Rain forests are beautiful!

What did you aspire to do or be when you were in high school?

In high school, I read the book Christy by Catherine Marshall about a young woman who moves to Appalachia to teach the impoverished children there. I decided I wanted to be a pediatrician who worked in Appalachia. When all was said and done, I graduated with a major in art education. I did my student teaching with the poor children of the Smoky Mountains on the Appalachian Trail. And have worked with underprivileged children throughout my career.

I wanted to be a psychologist and drive a 5-series white BMW. Well, neither of those came to fruition -- I am not a psychologist, and I do not own a BMW.

An artist

Tell us something you admire about your parents.

There are so many things I admire about my parents. Their incredible work ethic. Their genuinely good hearts. Their intelligence, sense of humor and creativity. And their ability to save money!

My mom is my best friend and someone that would do anything for me. She is also a strong woman of faith - and a great witness to me who strengthens my Christian faith. My dad died suddenly two years ago. I did not get to spend as much time with him as I would have liked for many years, due to some poor decisions he made in his life; however, he was a generous and giving person. When I was younger, we loved to laugh together - and it is where I got my joking/prankster side. I miss him - and wish he wasn't gone so soon!

37 years of marriage. Something to be commended. I've seen them fight maybe 2 times ever.

What's your favourite book and why?

How can a librarian pick just one? I have a new favorite with every book I read! I guess my all-time favorite would be The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I developed a 'friendship' with Anne and felt as though she was talking just to me through her diary entries. She shares such insight and wisdom about life and the world she was hidden away from.

I am not an avid reader, so most of my reading revolves around daily devotionals. One of my favorite devotions is Jesus Calling. From time to time, I will read books about successful people to find out about their behind the scene stories - like Delivering Happiness (Zappos) and #GirlBoss (owner of Nasty Gal).

The Red Tent. It's something different to me every time I read it. I read it newly married. Again after being divorced, and then again after having 4 kids. I think all women should read it.

August 09, 2016
0 Comments

Summer Series: Fairy Lights DIM

"DIY Craft," "Leslie," "Summer Series"

August 01, 2016
0 Comments

Create28 Week 4

"abbie," "Alison," "carrie," "Create 28," "Katie," "Leslie," "lisa," "style," "style challenge," "Whitney"

June 28, 2016
0 Comments

Create28 Week 3

"christy," "Create 28," "Deena," "joy," "Katie," "Leslie," "Shaunacey," "style," "style challenge," "summer"

We are only one week away from the end of our Create28 series and we've been having so much fun! We hope that you have been playing along and enjoying yourself as well!

If you are new to this style challenge, we have brainstormed daily prompts for you to use to create 28 new-to-you outfits this month! Think of the prompts as little bursts of inspiration to look at your closet in a different way!

Each day of the month, one Blended Blog contributor will showcase her interpretation of the daily prompt. We are hoping that you will visit each blogger and that you will play along, too! You can use our hashtag (#theblendedblogstyle) all week on Instagram and then you can come link-up here on Wednesdays!

Here are this week's awesome looks!

On Thursday of last week, Katie from The Mishaps and Mayhem of a Solitary Life shared her Sunglasses Style with us! She has several super-cute pairs and posed the question, "Do you buy fancy, pricey shades or are you more of an inexpensive sunglasses kind of a girl?"

Deena of Shoes to Shiraz is the epitome of a Ballpark Babe! She showed us what she wears and brings to her kids' games and she created a stylish outfit to support her team. Go Jays!

Shaunacey from Simply Shaunacey talked about her Easy On the Go Style. As a busy mom, Shaunacey has to wear something comfy but she manages to look oh-so-cute, too! Nothing beats a pair of shorts and a detailed top for easy summer style.

Joy of Quilty Joy Joy talked us through her struggles with finding the perfect Chambray Shirt. She chose to feature a fun one with a little Western flare!

Leslie from Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After nailed her Pinned It and Did It look! She walked us through her process, created fun collages and showed us her final product!

And our last look of the week is from Christy of RSquared. Christy showed us how to wear Mustard Mania during the summer months and even combined the color with the summer off-the-shoulder trend!

I hope you are having fun seeing The Blended Bloggers interpret our style prompts! Tomorrow it's Lisa's turn to wear Lovely Lace! And here are the rest of the prompts for this week:

Make sure to link-up your Create28 looks below and on Instagram (#theblendedblogstyle)!

An InLinkz Link-up

June 21, 2016
0 Comments

Create28 Week 2

"Andrea Nine," "christy," "Create 28," "Deena," "Katie," "Leslie," "sheila," "style challenge," "summer"

June 14, 2016
0 Comments

Spring Cleaning

"Leslie," "spring cleaning," "Spring Fever"

Hi, dolls!

In this "Spring Fever" series, all of us TBB contributors have been pondering what inspires us or what we are inspired to do in the spring or maybe hoping to inspire all of you this season.

I tossed around a lot of of ideas for this post and asked everyone who knows me what activity they associate with me in the spring.

I think it was my daughter Brennyn who nailed it.

Spring cleaning.

I just happen to be at Brennyn's house in Ft. Worth as I am writing this, so we decided to call Lauren, my other daughter to see if she agreed that cleaning was the one thing that makes me feverish in the spring.

She did.

And then for 15 minutes, with Lauren on speaker phone and my granddaughter Cady in the back seat listening, my two daughters lamented the springs of their youth when their mother (me) would take all of the mini-blinds in the house down and put them in the driveway so we could commence to scrubbing them on our hands and knees.

Or how I would wash and iron all of the curtains (both window and shower), the windows inside and out and the screens, then struggle to put them all back on the windows again.

How I found...ok, 'found' somewhere a telescopic pole for attaching a squeegee or other cleaning devices in order to clean ceilings and ceiling fans and windows. We would wash the windows on both stories of the house with Outdoor Windex attached to the garden house and then squeegee them dry.

Maybe how I would backwash the pool and hot tub to get it ready for summer but always break out in a rash on both arms from struggling to switch the fiberglass-encased pool pump from filter to backwash.

Or those multiple trips climbing onto the roof of our two-story house to work on the swamp (evaporative) cooler each spring to change AC filters, remove lime deposits and hard water scaling while shaking in my tennies because I am scared of heights.

Ahhh, those sweet days of springs past.

I am afraid I about ruined spring break every year for my girls.

They were
~~probably~~absolutely thrilled to get to go back to school.

I tried hard to build in "an element of fun in every job that must be done, a lark, a spree, [but] it [was] very clear to see..." that I was no Mary Poppins or Alice from "The Brady Bunch".

Now-days it seems more popular to put off cleaning house in favor of raising somehow happier kids in squalor - as suggested in this free printable image from The Imperfect Homemaker.

[source]

Surely, there can be some kind of happy medium between an almost obsessive need to have the cleanest blinds on the block and overlooking floors your babies' feet stick to.

Now that I am older, though, it is harder for me to knock out the whole house during the week of spring break. And I don't have the good (albeit somewhat reluctant) help of my two daughters. So, in the past year, I have begun receiving emails and newsletters from Home Storage Solutions 101 for their "52 Weeks To An Organized Home" Challenge. Each week I receive an email with a particular house cleaning focus such as "How to Declutter Recipes and Cookbooks", including organizing recipes on Pinterest, the first week of February.

I know that organizing doesn't equal clean but for me, it is hard to clean my house until it is organized. Otherwise, it seems like I am just chasing mess from one place to the other and trying to clean around piles and stacks of stuff.

To the rescue, here is Home Storage Solution's calendar for each week's organization and decluttering assignments.

[source]

Apparently, the very first step in decluttering is setting up a declutter donation box in which you put anything you no longer want or use but things that could be useful to someone else. If you are like me, you come across those kinds of things regularly but unless you have some place to put them, that unwanted shirt, nick-knack, gadget goes right back stuffed somewhere in the house. With a donation box, you have somewhere to put that too-tight pair of shoes, those old bath mats until you can take them to be donated or put together a yard sale to sell them.

While you declutter and organize, you can also be cleaning!

To help organize your cleaning tasks, there are so many checklists and cleaning tips available on Pinterest.

Here are a couple I like.

Love the little boxes here where you can check off tasks as you accomplish them. Nothing better that crossing things off your spring cleaning to-do list. This one is from Not Quite Susie.

[source]

Or this PDF of home maintenance and deep cleaning tasks available at Yet Another Mom Blog, (no image) available here.

Or this 31-day calendar from Stain Removal 101.

[source]

And I love this very thorough guide from Artsy Fartsy Annie.

[source]

With all of my great free advice, you might think my spring cleaning is in the bag.

But with this crazy spring of injuries, sickness at our house and traveling for the birth of new babies, to visit my older babies and to present at the state library conference, I haven't even begun! I am hoping that if nothing else, with this post I can prompt myself to start making some spring cleaning plans before spring becomes summer.

If all of this sounds a little overwhelming or under-exciting to you, maybe this isn't the best time for you to tackle spring cleaning. And remember, nothing says it all has to be done at once. Or even in the spring.

One small step, small rule I have begun following that eliminates a lot of the clutter and messiness in my world is called the One-Touch Rule. Productivity consultant Ann Gomez suggests adopting this rule for processing each task the first time you touch it. [source]

You check the mail and stop at the trash can to immediately toss any junk mail. Open the rest of the mail, and put it in one place every single day and deal with it then and there.

When you come home from work, take off your coat but don't drape it on a kitchen chair, hang it up.

Touch it only once.

Kick off your shoes and put them in your closet.

One-touch rule.

Hope you can find something useful among these suggestions and links. I know we are all so busy these days that sometimes cleaning baseboards and ceiling fan blades seems trivial. But just making time to do that once a year can breathe new vitality and health into your home and the lives of those you love.

Funny story.

Today, at Brennyn's we were sitting on the couch watching TV when all of a sudden we heard an ear piercing screech coming from the hallway leading to the laundry room. We turned to find Brennyn's cat Sansa "embracing" some kind of live animal.

A mouse?

Worse?

I jumped up and ran toward Sansa and as I did, she let go of a big black bird...a crow...from between her front paws. The crow flew into the living room with Sansa close on its tail (feathers). Brennyn ran to open the back door and I grabbed Sansa up into my arms and the bird flew out of the house.

I went to the laundry room to try to figure out where the bird came from. I moved the dryer away from the wall to discover a hole in the dryer exhaust hose. The bird had come down through the vent leading out of the house, gotten stuck in the hose, and had pecked its way free and into the arms of our sweet Sansa.

So tonight we repaired the dryer.

Easy task but something I hadn't done before. We removed the hose and styled it like a boa before heading out to Lowe's for a replacement.

We got the dryer back in commission.

Then cleaned behind the washer and the dryer.

Mopped the laundry room floor, organized the laundry supplies.

About a hour's time but now the laundry room is in good shape.

One room tackled.

Check.

Do you spring clean?

If you have a favorite spring cleaning trick, please share in a comment below.

Would love to learn any new way to make things simpler or more fun.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hugs and kisses,

Leslie

Leslie is a regular contributor for The Blended Blog. She is transitioning into retirement and adjusting to the empty nest that is now her home. To fill her days, she is engaging in a whole lot of retail therapy, substitute teaching, volunteering, crafting and reading then blogging about it all at Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After. Leslie and her Prince Charming, Paul, live in El Paso, Texas with their two kitties Purrsimmony and Purrsnickitty.

April 18, 2016
0 Comments

Pages

Behind the Blogger v3

Summer Series: Fairy Lights DIM

Create28 Week 4

Create28 Week 3

Create28 Week 2

Spring Cleaning

About us

Newsletter Sign Up

Follow Us

Popular Posts

Instagram

FOLLOW US @ INSTAGRAM>

Blog Archive

Tags