Two sales ending 12/31 and upcoming changes on the blog

Hello everyone! We hope you had a wonderful joy-filled Christmas. May your New Year be merry, bright, and full of the hope found in Jesus.

I wanted to take just a couple of minutes and remind you of two sales that will be ending at midnight on Sunday 12/31. 

First, the discount code: Homesweetlife to get 25% off all online orders at Foodie Fuel ends Sunday night. These are terrific on-the-go snacks. I encourage you to order several of them now, so you will always have a healthy option when hunger strikes in the new year. If you'd like to read our review, just click over here. These are one of my two favorite new food finds from the Moms Meet WOW Summit I attended back in October. In case you hadn't noticed yet ... juicy gems are my other new favorite.  :)

Also, the big holiday sale over at Oral Essentials ends Sunday night. Get 15% off any online order with discount code: holidaysmile21
We have all been enjoying using these great oral care products. You know they are good when your husband claims them for his cabinet! If you are wanting to whiten your smile without the harshness found in popular OTC whitening strips - the discount makes the 14 day set of whitening strips only $34. You can read our review of the products here.

A couple of changes are coming to the blog in 2018. 

Possibly one of the first you will notice is that Arlene is discontinuing her Hand lettered songs feature on Thursdays. She is continuing her Monday Books With Bean reviews and wants to focus on them without letting her schoolwork suffer. Good choice girl! So please, make sure you stop by every Monday and read her book reviews. (She loves reading your comments!) 

Another change that you may have already noticed is that we are shifting our focus slightly when it comes to reviewing. Since Arlene is planning to graduate in December of 2018, we are accepting less curriculum reviews, although we are still going to be a part of the Homeschool Review Crew one more year. We will still bring you reviews of lots of interesting products, but the curriculum ones will probably be more of the supplemental items and less of the full curriculums. 

We will also have occasional reviews for: Bethany House, Tyndale House Publishers and Moody Publishers.

To fill that curriculum space, we have started reviewing more food, nutritional supplements and quality skincare products. We hope these honest reviews give you a chance to learn about new companies, as well making it a little easier to wade through the wide ocean of possibilities the next time you visit your local health food store.

We want to keep focusing on the four themes God showed us for 2017: forgiveness, fellowship, community, and honesty. I want to share my heart with you, and sometimes, it might be a little painful - for both of us. Hopefully you will stick around, even if one or two of those posts hits a little close to home. We can only grow as Christians when God refines and prunes us. May we accept that careful pruning to make us more fruitful!

On a cheery note: I've recently started an Instagram account to keep you up to date on all the fun things we are doing and seeing, even when there isn't time to write a post. Arlene has been helping once in a while, but mostly it will be my pictures. We hope you'll hop over and see what we've been doing! Find us on Instagram at: carolhomesweetlife

Here is a shot from yesterday, when my nephew introduced us to the fun of: Cat Tower

Have a Happy New Year!
Carol (& Arlene)

Design Your Day ~ A Moody Publishing review

Would you like to enjoy more of your life while still remaining a responsible adult, caring for your family, and exercising your faith? What if the solution actually lay in doing less each day, not more? What if I told you the answers you are looking for are found in a small, 140 page book by Claire Diaz-Ortiz from Moody Publishing?

I hope by now I have gotten your attention! We all have a desire to be more productive and accomplish more real work in less time, but we often lack the planning it takes to get there. In Claire Diaz-Ortiz’s newest book: Design Your Day she goes beyond the usual steps of telling the reader to be more productive - she shows us examples from her own life, and the lives of her friends, that illustrate the actual steps to making lasting changes in how we organize our lives.

Design Your Day: be more productive, set better goals, and live life on purpose is a refreshing change from the traditional productivity books widely available today. In her book, Mrs. Diaz-Ortiz shares practical ways to be more productive, while still leaving time to care for our families and our faith. This gem of a book is divided into two sections. Part One: Decide and Part Two: Organize. I recommend reading through the book twice in quick succession. The first time through will give you an idea of how your life might look different if you lived it on purpose instead of just drifting along. The second time through will take you longer as you work through each of the recommended exercises. They will help you find and define your goals and priorities for the season of life you are currently in.

I appreciated Claire’s reminder to look at your current season of life. Not every goal setting plan needs to start on January 1st, and not every goal needs to take an entire year to reach. If you are a Christian you are going to want to take time not only to think about your goals, but to pray over them as you refine your list. Claire’s words of encouragement shine particularly vibrantly in this aspect as she reminds the reader often that the reason we should want to be more productive with work is to be able to live a life of meaning, not just of accomplishments.

Design Your Day is as pertinent to a stay at home mom as it is to the President of a major corporation. Each step taken helps us to regain the best use of our working time so that the chaotic days become the exception and productive meaningful days become the rule. Working through the steps to be more productive while actually doing less each day causes the reader to evaluate how the techniques can be applied to their own work/life situation to create a win-win. 

If you feel like you are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere fast, this book is a lifeline. It can help you understand how to separate the list of what you currently spend all of your time on into things to keep, and things to either delegate or just stop doing altogether. We so often need a good friend to help us talk through this process of purging activities from our lives and this book reads as if you were sitting having a cup of coffee or tea with Claire in her own kitchen. Design Your Day is pinpointed accurate advice while still remaining conversational. It reminds us that is is possible to be productive, and still be a caring human being.

I was encouraged by the reminders to take the time necessary on each step, and yet to not drag your feet on the path to change. I do not like to be rushed while trying something new, and as a working and homeschooling mom I need to be able to adapt strategies to my reality. More than in any other time-management book I have read, this one focuses the reader on creating a plan that works in your own life, and not trying to superimpose the writer’s life plan over your own calendar.

In a world that keep telling us more, more, more, Design Your Day reminds us that less is ok. Less busyness, less failure. More meaning. 

As you take the steps one by one to reclaim your productive time, you are sure to find something special: joy. 

Design Your Day: be more productive, set better goals, and live life on purpose is available from Moody Publishing in either paperback or eBook formats. Visit their website for more details.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this product from Moody Publishing in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. All opinions are mine. I am disclosing this in accordance with FTC regulations.

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