Books & Writing Archives - Page 2 of 14 - simple.green.organic.happy.

The Ultimate Homemaking Bundle: 76 eBooks and More for Under $30

April 25, 2015 By Robin Strong Elton Leave a Comment

Hey.

Are the inmates running the asylum?

I hear you.

When you’re young, you think about what it’ll be like: getting married, becoming a mom, having your own home.

You want to make a special place that’s a magical mash-up:

a school,
a playground,
a refuge,
a “fix it” station,
a “you can do it” pep rally, and
a safe place for personal expression, sharing and growth.

Guess what? It’s hard when reality breaks in. Real life includes…

…laundry, diapers, and never-ending meal prep… money worries, gritty floors, soap scum, and stains that won’t come out of your favorite shirt… holiday stress, and teaching the kids to read (and master long division)… a husband who works long hours, a kid with the sniffles, stomach aches and a fever… and a secret dream to run your own little business from home.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I love reading books full of tips. It’s refreshing to get a new perspective, even if every tip or bit of advice isn’t quite right for your house and life. Just the process of trying new ways of doing things and examining what works, what doesn’t, and why can be an eye opening and transformative experience.

With this in mind, Erin and Stephanie created the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle. Because as rewarding as it is, homemaking is hard work and it doesn’t always come easily.

The Ultimate Homemaking Bundle is just for you. And me.

It’s a complete library of carefully selected eBooks, eCourses, audios, online conferences, and printable packs designed to help you turn your house into a home… without all the overwhelm.

What’s in the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle?

… a complete library of 99 eBooks and eCourses to help you nurture beauty and productivity in your home and family relationships.

Cleaning… create a healthy, toxin-free home
DIY/Homemade… fun and frugal ways to express your personal style
Devotionals and Faith… take a break from the daily grind to renew yourself
Finances… build a budget that works
Cooking & Meal Planning… serve easier, tastier meals in less time
Holidays & Special Events… brighten up old family traditions and create new
Homeschooling… homeschool with grace and ease
Marriage… heat up your marriage
Motherhood… find peace, balance & joy in mothering
Organizing… conquer the clutter and simplify your life
Pregnancy & Babies… enjoy a healthy pregnancy and prepare to nurture your baby
Health & Wellness… soothe aches & pains with natural remedies
Working from Home… hone your talents, live your passions and earn money to help your family

Is the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle worth it?

In a word… yes!

To be absolutely certain, Erin and Stephanie asked questions, tried techniques and just about drove themselves crazy making sure that the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle was the very best homemaking resource anywhere.

They dug through hundreds of websites and connected with dozens of authors and teachers.

And worked together to make these resources the most affordable possible.

And They Were Delighted to Help…

The result? This collection is a fraction of the price of what someone would pay for each resource individually!

For a short time, the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle… a complete library of:

76 eBooks
6 eCourses
1 audio download
2 online conferences, and
14 printable packs

…99 carefully selected resources designed to help you nurture the beauty and productivity in your home and family relationships… is only $29.97. (A total value of $984.74.)

That breaks down to 30 cents per book.

Your 30-Day 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

If for any reason, you decide that the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle is not for you, then please send an email to customerservice@Ultimate-Bundles.com and we will refund 100% of your investment. No questions asked.

Don’t Forget the Bonuses…

Of course, no Ultimate Homemaking Bundle would be complete without the generous, inspiring gifts donated by companies that understand homemakers like you. Every gift is yours to keep and enjoy.

Choose 1 FREE Online Class from Craftsy (Select from 24 of Their Most Popular Classes – Up to $60 Value)
1 FREE Kids Discovery Box from Green Kid Crafts ($19.95 Value)
FREE $15 Credit to Hope Ink PLUS 2 FREE 8×10 Art Prints ($71 Value)
FREE 90-Day “Good Deal” Subscription to She Plans Dinner ($15 Value)
Choose 1 FREE Stylish Spring Scarf from Deborah & Co. ($20 Value)
FREE $80 Healthy Moving Class Credit ($80 Value)
FREE 90-Day Pro Membership to ListPlanIt ($30 Value)
FREE 65 Tyndale Rewards Points to Be Used for a FREE Book or Towards Any Book of Your Choice ($15 Value)

Now It’s Your Turn

Just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women’s work at home, while only the doing of little things, is just like the golden gleam of sunlight that runs through and brightens the whole fabric of civilization.

-Laura Ingalls Wilder

The proven, simple, and effective skills you need to transform your house into a home are all waiting for you in the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle.

This is your chance to get all the love, support, guidance and inspiration you need to nurture the beauty and productivity in your home and family relationships with proven, simple, and effective tools that really give you a boost as a homemaker.

But time is running out! The Ultimate Homemaking Bundle will only be available from 8:00 a.m. EST on Monday, April 20 until 11:59 p.m. EST on Monday, April 27.

After that, the shopping cart closes and the deeply discounted price is gone.

Act now!

Click here for more info or to buy now.

Read the fine print about this bundle and read the answers to frequently asked questions about the bundle.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate for The Ultimate Homemaking Bundle, which means I will receive a % from sales that originate from my links.

Sports Movies to Inspire that “Go For the Gold” Feeling

February 20, 2014 By Robin Strong Elton Leave a Comment

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.
―Babe Ruth

Disclosure: I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team, and they’ve equipped our family with a streaming account to drive discussion.

So, like pretty much everybody else, we’ve been watching the Olympics. (We take the Games seriously. Check out the Elton Family Extreme Winter Olympics 2010 here.)

We think Bobsleigh is fun to say (BOBSLEIGH!!) and the double luge is insane (the guy on the bottom does the bulk of the steering, but he can’t see the track, did you know that?!), and I was only able to bear a little bit of the ice skating (I HATE when they fall, I feel so terrible for them).

I was thinking about what sets the Olympics apart from other televised sports. Partially it’s the global aspect, and partially it’s the sports we don’t get to see every day (the world clearly needs more curling). But mostly I think it’s the emphasis on The Dream, the working together for this moment, the uplifting backstories, the overwhelming positivity, versus the focus on negativity, the missed shots, the rivalries that you see in most pro sport coverage.

It’s a lovely thing to focus on: how a dream, a support system, teamwork, and a whole lot of determination and hard work can mean a moment of a lifetime, even if you don’t get the gold. And if you fail, well, your whole country feels your pain. (Probably a lot of others, too.)

After the Games are over, after the ice and snow melt so the kids can’t pretend to compete in speed skating or BOBSLEIGH!! for another year, you can still keep that enjoyment of athletic competition, perseverance and go-for-the-gold spirit going by watching some of these movies as a family (they’re all available on Netflix streaming).

I can personally vouch for the Air Bud movies; my brother loved these when he was young and my daughter has watched every one in existence. I have some issues with plot lines with holes you could drive a Peterbilt truck through, but they definitely reinforce the feeling of teamwork and anything can happen if you try. (And, of course, it’s really fun to watch a dog play ball. Any kind of ball.)

1. The Short Game
2. The Kid
3. The Pistol
4. A Mile in His Shoes
5. Winning Favor

6. The Mighty Macs
7. Like Mike 2: Streetball
8. Air Bud: World Pup
9. Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch
10. Air Bud Spikes Back

They’ll help inspire your kids to imagine themselves as Olympic hopefuls, whatever their sport may be.

Cass hasn’t decided yet.

Adults and older kids can extend the Olympic feeling by streaming titles like The Fabulous Ice Age (a new Netflix-only documentary that tells the history of figure skating), SEC Storied: Lolo Jones, Usain Bolt: The Fastest Man Alive, Backwards (about an Olympic-hopeful rower), and Lindsey Vonn: In the Moment.

And with any luck, the Phillies will have an inspirational season we can enjoy as a family, too!

What are your favorite Olympic events?

How about inspiring sports movies?

Bonus! Here’s a tutorial to make your own medals.

Family Movie Night

November 30, 2013 By Robin Strong Elton 1 Comment

Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you.

And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about.

Because it gave you such an emotional response,
it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.

―Tim Burton

Disclosure: I’m a member of the Netflix Stream Team, and they’ve equipped our family to stream movies for discussion.

Every weekend, we have what I call “Family Culture Night” — a movie night that involves a movie I used to love, or that stuck with me for whatever reason. Movies that have become part of my emotional make-up, that I’m hoping to also make part of my kids’ emotional DNA.

Some movies we watch because they’re funny, some because I’m forever quoting them and I’d like my kids to get at least some of my jokes, some because they had a hand in shaping who I eventually turned out to be.

This month the Netflix Stream Team was invited to watch a movie based on a book with our kids (inspired, I suspect, by the release this month of the latest in the Hunger Games series, although my older kids were more excited about Ender’s Game, which is apparently based on a book they both read and I didn’t know existed. So many games!).

I wanted to watch A Wrinkle in Time and talk about theoretical physics, as did Maverick. But I made the mistake of saying I was worried that it wouldn’t live up to the book, and I think I was sunk once I planted that idea in their mind.

Mav and I were outvoted and we watched James and the Giant Peach.

It’s funny, although I read the kids most of Roald Dahl’s offerings for children when they were novice readers, I never read any of them when I was young. Jeff did, though, so my own first experience with James and his giant peach was when Jeff wanted to see it in the theatre, back when it was first released in 1996.

It’s magical and weird, like all the movies based on Dahl’s books, but where I saw it as just plain weird at 20 years old I now see it as delightfully odd. My viewpoint has softened, having read the book and watching it with my kids’ perspective, watching Cass dance around to the songs (I had completely blocked out the fact there were songs!)

Afterwards, like with most of our “culture night” films, we talked about the movie. More etching of emotional DNA 🙂 Some thoughts we came up with:

With all truly good books, you lose something in translation when made into a film. Some of the poetry. Even when the movie is fairly true, using dialogue taken from the book’s pages, it seems stilted. Some things are so much lovelier read to yourself.
That said, some books really work as movies because the visuals add something to the story, and we think that’s true of James and the Giant Peach. It does a good job of capturing the magical and weird.
James and the Giant Peach was not directed by Tim Burton (I was sure it was!). Before, I’d attributed the common denominator of Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda to being Burton films. Turns out, the common denominator is just the fact that Dahl is weird. Matilda was directed by Danny DeVito; James and the Giant Peach by Henry Selick. Selick also directed The Nightmare before Christmas (which I also thought was a Burton film), Monkeybone and Coraline.
Remember how kids in Matilda would get locked in the chokey when they were bad?
It’s somewhat surprising that there aren’t more attempts to censor Dahl books, given how many seemingly innocent books find themselves banned from schools, and how horridly adults tend to be portrayed.
Why are there so many orphans in kids’ stories?
When are they going to make a movie of The BFG? Would it be any good?

I highly recommend your own Family Culture Night, it’s fun to relive your old favorites through your children’s eyes, to see what stands up to the test of time and what movies just don’t make any dang sense once taken out of their pop culture context. (This is especially fun around the holidays!)

Start young and your kids will keep on doing it, week after week. Even when they hit 16 and don’t really want to do much with you anymore.

Movies based on books always make for lively debate… I want to say you should always read the books first, but maybe that’s not always true.

13 Movies Based on Kids’ Books,
Available for Streaming on Netflix

What movies from your emotional make-up have you shared with your kids?

What are some noteworthy (for better or worse) movies that are adaptations of books?

Do you always read the book first? Any movies where you wish you hadn’t?