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A Bag to Match Mom’s Style - 20% Off!
Fashionable and Functional Gifts for Mom
This year for Mother’s Day get your mom something she will appreciate and something with the durability to last. Whether she’s a minimalist and only carries her necessities or if she loves a larger style purse we have a bag to match her style.
Get 20% off through Sunday, May 12 using promo code Bag4Mom.
~Laura Owens, Maggie Bags
Friday Pinterest Round Up
TGIF! It’s Friday Pinterest Round Up time and we have some terrific pins for you! Here are the coolest pins we saw on Pinterest this week:
- Shower Curtain + Towel Rod - This space-saving idea will be filed under “why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?” A great way to save space if you have a small bathroom.
- DIY Wine Bottle Fountain - A beautiful way to recycle/upcycle wine bottles!
- Plastic Bottle Greenhouse - This plastic greenhouse was built by school children (check out their story.) I bet in one trip around the city you could pick up enough discarded plastic bottles to make this.
- Cut & Come Again Lettuce - Certain lettuce varieties will grow right back (and quickly I can say from personal experience) and if you click through this pin you can determine which varieties are right for your zone.
What cool pins did you see on Pinterest this week?
~Laura Owens, Maggie Bags
Homemade Italian Tomato Sauce
With a bumper crop of San Marzano Roma tomatoes last summer, we had an abundance of tomatoes - I’m talking tomatoes in every crevice of the fridge. We decided to try making our own pasta sauce and it turned out soooooo good! Very delicious! And, like most recipes I learned something in the process 
First, I found out that this would have been much easier if I’d had a foley food mill. But instead we boiled them tomatoes to get the skins off and then pushed the seeds out. If you are not growing your own tomatoes I’ve included how to make this with canned tomatoes too. I used about 12 ripe Romas, boiled then removed skins and seeds. That doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of tomatoes (should have gone to the garden and picked some more I guess) so I ended up adding a can of tomatoes to mine anyway.
Ingredients
- 12-14 ripe Roma tomatoes or 3 cans of diced tomatoes (can get plain or with Italian seasoning in them, but will need to adjust the seasoning if you do)
- 2 T. olive oil
- 1 T. butter or margarine
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 medium green pepper, chopped
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1 T. white wine (yes, was going to use red but all I had on hand was white and it tasted good)
- Oregano, thyme, basil or Italian seasoning to taste
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1 bay leaf
Directions
- Put butter and oil into large pot. Add onions and peppers and saute until onions are clear.
- Add in everything else and bring to a boil, then reduce and simmer for 1 hour.
- If you prefer a less chunky style sauce, you can either put this through the food processor or use an immersion blender. Just don’t liquify it.
- Remove bay leaf. Put mixture into jars or if freezing (this freezes very well) put into ziplock freezer bags.
~Laura Owens, Maggie Bags
Simple Style Bailey
3 Great Fitness Apps to Keep You Motivated
About ten years ago, I was burned by chemicals in an accident at work. The skin refused to heal properly and I was placed on medications to help my skin recover. Though I greatly appreciated that those medications did their job, I didn’t appreciate that they caused me to gain over 100 pounds. It has been very difficult to lose that weight ever since and occasionally I begin to lose my motivation to keep trying. I’m always looking for ways to improve my chances of success and keep that motivation from waning. In that process I have discovered three great apps sure to help anyway stay on track!
MyFitnessPal
If you have explored any weight-loss and fitness apps for your device, you are very likely to have seem MyFitnessPal in the top lists. The experts say that having fitness friends increases a person’s chance of sticking to their health plan… and you have a friend in MyFitnessPal! It is as an amazingly simple to use app for tracking your meals and exercise. There is a barcode scanner that makes tracking meals a cinch. Handy charts help you see at a glance where you need to improve on certain nutrient intakes and shows your progress over selected time periods.
Ahh, but this post is about motivation. As you enter your exercises or complete your food diary for the day, the app will create a post telling your friends. You can also write status updates, similar to Facebook, that allow you to tell others how you’re doing that day. A handy News Feed right within the app allows you to read and comment on these posts. This is a great way to give and receive encouragement.
My favorite feature and the source of greatest motivation for me comes when you complete your food diary for the day. The app tells you where you could ideally expect to be in five weeks if you were to follow your plan the way you had on that particular day. It can encourage you to keep it up on good days and it can be startlingly eye-opening on the bad days.
MyFitnessPal is available for FREE on Apple devices, Android devices, Kindle Fire, and as a website.
Striiv
Striiv is a more recent discovery of mine and I have already roped in several of my friends and family members. There is much about this app that can motivate many people.
The first tool will appeal to gamers. As you walk, you can gain energy to build on your own “MyLand” within the app. If you play games like Farmville, you will be familiar with the basic concept. Completing tasks will earn you special animals for you land… and you’ll need energy to get it. I play with it on occasion. My mom has never opened it. It’s just a fun little extra that isn’t for everyone.
If you are more of a competitive type, Striiv has you covered too. You can add friends via email or Facebook. You and your friends will compete to stay on top of the leaderboard. You can also choose to accept challenges that push you to reach certain step goals or minutes of activity.
More of a team player? Great! You and a friend can work together to complete relay races or Walkathons. The Walkathons are my personal favorite feature. Complete 30,000 steps with a friend and Striiv donates a day of clean water to a child in South America! It has been very motivational to know we are doing something to help and improving our health at the same time.
Striiv can be connected to MyFitnessPal. Striiv will automatically add the calories you have burned through walking to your exercise diary on MyFitnessPal. Striiv is available for FREE from the Apple Store only, but you can also purchase a stand-alone device direct from Striiv or from several retailers. FYI: A quick search showed the best price was on Amazon.
Nexercise
My final favorite is an app called Nexercise. There is much to this app… leaderboards, chat, and monetary rewards. Yes, you can make money for working out! Nexercise uses a rewards program called mPoints that gives you points for activity. More activity… more points. (There is an earning limit of 200 points per day per mPoints app.) You can turn in those points for gift cards to popular companies like Amazon or you can donate the points to well-known charities like St. Jude or the ASPCA.
Nexercise is available for FREE on Apple devices, Android devices, and Kindle Fire. The mPoints feature is available on tons of apps and games across several device types.
The Striiving for Fitness Challenge
I have recently begun a new challenge on my blog that incorporates Striiv and MyFitnessPal. If you would like to see these apps in action, drop by and follow my progress. I’d love it if you’d join the challenge with me!
~Tonya - Tyrneathem
Tonya is a stay-at-home mom to a precocious two-year-old son that takes every opportunity to steal the spotlight. She’s wife to her romantic knight in mostly-shining armor. They live in Wisconsin in a house ruled by their two crazy cats. Perhaps naming them after goddesses was a bad idea. The family’s obsession with dragons inspired the name of Tonya’s blog… Tyrneathem means “Children of the Dragons.” The cast of characters above are woven through her posts about life, crafts, and whatever else pops into her head.
Friday Pinterest Round Up!
TGIF! Here’s the coolest and most repinned pins we saw on Pinterest this week!
- 7 Salad Recipes - These salad recipes will have your waistline shrinking and your taste buds singing!
- Upcycling Soda Pop Bottles - An inventive way to make trash into treasure!
- Shirley Temple Cupcakes - Yummy looking! Made with Cherry 7Up (wonder how they would taste with diet Cherry 7Up??)
- 12 Spring Wreaths - Terrific DIY tutorial on making very cute spring wreaths!
What interesting pins did you see this week?~Laura Owens, Maggie Bags
