Good morning...

I'm a natural Night-Owl. I do't know about you, but I do my best thinking after dark! I'm getting to be less of a night-owl out of necessity (or merely pure survival) from having kids. Moms know if you don't sleep when they sleep... you don't sleep period. Well, I just so happened tonight to get *ahem* distracted on the internet. When the house is quiet and I'm browsing all sorts of new fun crafty sites or reading blogs... well, the time sometimes (read: frequently) just gets away from me.
So long about 1:30am I glance at the clock and do that, "Oh crud!" thing where you ponder the laws of the universe and mentally curse the one that disallows rewinding time so you can go back to, oh, say 8:30pm again, and get a good nights sleep to deal with all the Mom-ing you'll be doing when the sun comes up. Since I could of course not rewind time as I so desperately wished, I took my thimble-sized pregnant bladder to do it's business and crawled into bed to stick my cold feet on hubby's legs. (Something I'm sure he appreciates ever so much. But he's such a good egg, he never complains about it.)
After laying there for a grand total of 3 minuites I begin to feel the congestion coming on. You know what I mean. When you're preggo it seems like every allergy you ever thought about comes out to play for 9 months solid. You can go all day only blowing your stuffy nose 12 times and then the second you lay down you're suddenly magically so full of ick you can't breathe and feel like you are choking. Which is precisely what happened to me. And now, even blowing my nose 12 times a minute cannot seem to tame the clogged-up ick in myh lungs. After nearly choking three times, gagging, and deciding I'd rather get back up than choke to death or throw up, I decided to make a cup of tea! Or rather a whole pot of tea! But instead of digging out the teapot or filling the coffee maker, I decided to use an open pot so I could breathe the steam while my water boiled and the tea steeped. So I made my tea, enjoying the minty delicious smelling steam and hoping it would help my ick problem.
While the tea steeped, I sat back down at the computer with the pot steaming in front of me, to keep busy until it was drinkable. Suddenly I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye and a really BIG spider was inches from my elbow, rapelling down the wall. I was scrambling to switch hands with my tea, grab a tissue, and smoosh the little big bugger before it escaped. I managed to spill some hot tea on my chest but the arachnid vanished behind the computer tower. *sigh* I am reminded of the time I had one run up the mousepad onto the mouse, on my hand, and run out to the end of my thumb faster than you could blink. It was a big as the end of my thumb and to see it sitting there just chilling out was rather disconcerting. I'm not an arachniphobe but I draw the line at having them use my thumb as an easy chair. Particularly when I can't tell if it's a harmless wolf spider or a highly poisonous hobo.
But anyway, back to my pot of tea. Now, usually Sleepytime Tea is one of my absolute favorites! It's relaxing, it's delicious, it smells heavenly... Except that the dishwasher must not have cleaned that pot out so well. My delicious tea tasted just like... boiled dirty sock water. Not that I've ever tasted boiled socks but it tasted like what I would imagine dirty sock water would taste like. Oh well, I wasn't really in the mood for tea anyway.
So now I'm off to bed, hoping the sock tea steam unclogged my breathing tubes enough to get to sleep. Now that it's 3:00am... The kids will be waking up in precisely 4.3 hours so I'd better get in there and take all the sleep I can get. I think a Mama-nap will definately be in the schedule tomorrow today.

Skin MD Natural Shielding Lotion - Review & Giveaway!

"Skin MD Natural is a shielding lotion that helps the skin restore its integrity and enhance its protective functions so that the skin is able to heal naturally and regain its youthful appearance. Skin MD Natural works by bonding with cells of the skin's outermost layer to form an invisible shield. This layer of protection prevents environmental irritants and pollutants from penetrating the skin, while locking in the skin's own natural oils and moisture, helping heal dry skin, leaving skin feeling silky and smooth. It is dermatologist recommended and hypo-allergenic. It is also fragrance, colorant and paraben free, so it is safe to use for the whole family."

I have eczema, and those of you with similar skin conditions can vouch for the fact that it's really hard to find a lotion that doesn't make it WORSE, let alone helps much at all! I personally have to really be careful of what my skin comes into contact with. Regular dish detergent, if in contact with my skin for multiple or prolonged time, causes my skin to blister, ooze, and scab. Many lotions make me itch so bad it could drive a person insane. When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I worked in food service. My tender wrists became so damaged from the cleaning substances used to keep the place sanitary that I wound up wearing extensive bandaging on my wrists with rubber gloves over top and customers began to wonder what I'd done to myself. The boss forbade me from washing dishes to limit my exposure to the dish detergent, and I was using a prescription steroid cream to try to reverse the damage to my skin. To this day I have a faint oval scar on one wrist and the other has a large patch of skin that looks about 5 years older and wrinklier than the skin around it.
When I was contacted to try out and review Skin MD Natural's Shielding Lotion, I was skeptical at first. After reading through more of the plethora of information on their website, my curiousity was piqued! I really wanted to know if this lotion was as different as it claims to be. Having tried hundreds of lotions over the years, I think I would have settled for a lotion that didn't make me itch. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Shielding Lotion works so well, beyond what I had imagined, that I don't want to ever use regular lotion again! My face is really weird. It has patches of dry flaking skin and patches so oily it's gross, all on the same face at the same time right next to each other. It drives me INSANE because face lotions either make the greasy spots greasier, or the dry patches peel, or both, or makes me break out... Face lotion is such a nightmare. So I got this new lotion and put it on after a shower and left it on for several days without soaping it. I wanted to know how long it would take before my skin got so oily I couldn't stand it or I started breaking out. To my complete shock, my dry patches were smooth and non-flakey, my oily places stayed non-greasy, and my face stayed looking amazingly smooth and blemish-free for 3 days. It was the freakiest thing I've ever seen! No kidding! So now I'm totally sold on this stuff. Like I don't think I could ever go back. It's AWESOME. :D
I am completely sold on this lotion! And anyone who knows me knows that I'm a real skeptic when it comes to lotions. And facial lotions are a nightmare, trying to find something that balances the oily spots and the dry spots without breakouts... I literally am still in shock when I see how well this lotion works. I'm like, "This has to be some optical illusion becuase it can't possibly really work this well!" Lol! And it isn't even specifically a lotion FOR the face! It's for hands, face, body... everywhere. After putting it on my hands and the old-eczema-skin patches on my wrists my skin feels sooo soft! I am putting it on my belly over my Stretch Oil to help seal in the moisture and prevent stretch marks. :) Then my 3 year old wants to pet mama's soft belly skin... which is kinda weird but sweet. And lets me know my moisturizing routine is working!

WIN IT!
Skin MD Natural has generously offered a giveaway! One lucky entrant will win a bottle of Skin MD Natural's Shielding Lotion to fall in love with for themselves.
To enter, click HERE.
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The opinions expressed in this review are my own. Results may vary for others. I was provided a free product to try out for my review, and the opportunity to host a giveaway. No other form of compensation was received.

February Giveaways!

http://everypreciousjoy.blogspot.com/2010/02/february-giveaways.html 
First, here are some awesome giveaways I have found! Check back frequently as I will be removing the ones that are over and adding new giveaway links as I can! Please click on a date to see a few select giveaways ending on that date.
Giveaways By End Date:
February 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

NEW! •• Familylicious Reviews is giving away a Hygeia breast pump! What I love about it is that it has a recording feature so you can record your baby's sounds to help with let-down. I wish I'd had this with my first when getting let-down for the pump was so difficult! ENDS FEBRUARY 14th! (DT)
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Linky Time!
••Other blogs' Linky lists of giveaways:
- (Ongoing) Ice Fairy's Treasure Chest
-(Sunday) Take Time To Smell The Rose and A Giveaway Everyday
-(Tuesday) Two Of A Kind Working On A Full House, Real Heart Prints and Shawn Anne's World
-(Wednesday) Wee Finds
-(Thursday) Piece of ME and I Thode You So
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Your turn! :) MckLinky up! You can still link your giveaways even if I have already highlighted them above. ;)
In the space that says Link Title, remember to include 3 things: YourBlogName - Giveaway Title [End date]. Does not have to be in that exact order but I do need all three in some order or another please. Link to the giveaway post specifically, not just to your blog in general.
PLEASE make sure you follow these easy instructions so it is easy for me to maintain and easy for people to view and use. Alot of people have not been doing this and it makes maintaining the list much harder and more time consuming for me. This is not an unreasonable request in the least: most giveaway linkups require this same format. You can use proper format and copy and paste it the same (proper) way to all the linkys you use. If this gets too hard for me to maintain due to people not doing this as I have asked, I will stop fixing them and have to instead delete any that I don't have the time to fix. So you see why it's not only courtesy but is also important to use the BlogName-GiveawayName[EndDate] format. (In any order. You can do End Date - Blog name - Giveaway or Giveaway - End date - Blog name or whatever as long as they are all in there.)
ALSO please note: I will immediately delete any entries that are innapropriate and further links from that blog may be deleted if I don't have time to screen them. A good way to look at it is if you wouldn't want your 13 year old daughter to have one or read the review in your words then DON'T LINK IT HERE. This is supposed to be a family friendly blog and when I've got people posting giveaways for ...um... 'romantic props' or something it is extremely embarrassing and upsetting to find that on my blog where my friends' innocent children could see it.
Your link WILL BE DELETED IF it links to a post that:
**Contains profanity, nudity, or inappropriate inuendo.
**Does not contain a blog giveaway.
**Endorses abortion, divorce, adultery, or things that are anti-God, anti-moral absolutes, anti-ten commandments, etc.
**Endorses a product/company that endorses abortion, divorce, adultery, or things that are anti-God, anti-moral absolutes, anti-Biblical commandments, etc.
**Is not appropriate for an innocent child to view.
This is what I believe in, and to allow links on my blog that go against that is something that I cannot do in good concience.


Entries will stay on the list until they expire (until the giveaway ends).
I will try to delete expired giveaways daily to keep this list fresh and easy to view.
I will create a new list each month. This MckLinky list will run Feb. 1st-28th. Check back March 1st for a new list.