Lands’ End is helping families get ready to dive into swim season! The annual Swim Event offers 25% off of the company’s legendary regular-priced swimsuits and swim accessories. The sale inspires families to shop early to find swim favorites such as collections featuring vintage island prints or bold pops of color.

WHAT: Lands’ End Swim Event – 25% off all regular-priced swimsuits for women, men’s and kids and swim accessories including:

* Sandals

* Totes

* Beach Towels

* Water shoes

FREE SHIPPING: Sale includes free shipping with a $50 minimum purchase

WHEN: Friday, March 16 – Monday, March 19, 2012

WHERE: http://www.landsend.com

Spaghetti, Anyone?

While pasta is a great way to whip up a quick meal, it isn’t always nutritious. Pasta, especially white pastas, are loaded down with heavy carbs and little nutritional value. However, dishes like spaghetti are often a household favorite.

Instead of using regular spaghetti noodles the next time you make pasta for dinner, consider using spaghetti squash. For a larger family, simply grab a couple of spaghetti squash, bake them, and then pull out the spaghetti-like center. You can then slather the “noodles” with your favorite pasta sauce for a much healthier version of your fam favorite.

Soup du Jour

If there is one thing my family loves during the cold weather season, it’s soup. We love to make hearty soups and sit down with our favorite panini sandwiches. Recently, I have encountered the joy of making fresh, rich soups for my family, and there are no better veggies to use for these soups than squash. Butternut squash is an all-time favorite amongst foodies, but acorn squash and even pumpkin also make great soups. They are fairly easy to prepare too.

Everyone Loves Some Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes are a favorite, especially amongst younger children, but they don’t always have the highest nutritional value. With the heavy dairy products that are usually incorporated to make your average potato much more enjoyable, the nutritional content is quickly overridden.

Instead of using potatoes to make your next mash, consider using Delicata squash instead. They have a great sweet potato flavor and will provide a texture that the whole family will enjoy. You can even add in cauliflower and butternut squash to enhance flavor and nutritional content.

So the next time you are at the grocery store don’t skip over the squash and pumpkins. Shop around and see if anything piques your interest. You can even look up recipes on your smart phone to help you with your selection. iPhone, Samsung, and HTC phones all have access to recipe apps so there is no excuse for avoiding a great Fall Harvest dish!

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Problems with education are oftentimes the starting point of a child’s lifelong difficulty in becoming professionally viable. That is why it’s so vital that parents waste no time in making sure their children stay ahead of the pack when enrolled in school. Yet, national data consistently shows our children are much more likely to perform lower than the average maintained by the industrialized world as a collective. Many blame the school systems. Those who work within academia oftentimes blame situations at home.

People need to stop blaming each other and proactively find ways to make sure our children learn at an optimum level. We can easily start by looking online.

The web is awash with resources designed for helping young minds better adapt to sophisticated ideas and concepts. If your child is curious about the true nature of a scientific phenomenon, look it up on Wikipedia. Automatic reading helpers abound on the Internet, where advertising drives the majority of their profits.

Then there are resources that are completely devoted to providing children around the world with a free means to learn detailed lessons at their own pace. For example, the Khan Academy features thousands of hours of video geared toward teaching young persons the fundamentals of reading, writing, science, and math. These basic video lectures allow children to experience a secondary classroom for free, where they can pause, rewind, and replay the information as much as they want. Bill Gates even uses Khan’s videos for his own kids.

Our future relies on the education of our youth to improve. We can sit around and try and figure out who and what is to blame, or we can utilize preexisting options to do something about it ourselves. The resources are out there to make a difference. It’s only a question of whether or not parents find them and their children use them.

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When I started wanting to make sure I was making the right moves my blog friends told me to look at a search engine marketing blog for ideas. Basically for me, when I blog, I hand code into the post certain keywords that will show up in search engines. For example I will type the words pasta, marinara and recipe into a spaghetti post. It just makes it so that my post is closer to the first result you find when you search. It seems super techy but really its not. Its something every blogger can do to increase their ranking. Now if you are really looking for a way to work your marketing you can use marketing automation software to do all the hard work for you, of course this would apply better to large businesses not meager little blogs.

If you have decided to start a business online, or a blog that makes you want to make money and keep making money you need to either pay someone to look over the books or work them yourself. What I mean is you have to see where your market is, where you are finding pockets of money and where you can invest further to make a better return on your investment. For example, companies hire me to write posts about various things, they know that I have a certain page ranking, and certain following and number of subscribers so they know if they pay me more, I will reach more people than if they pay another blogger less that has lower traffic and influence. If this is still too much for you to digest, don’t fret, you can use an online marketing suite to help keep you on track.

I myself have got to a point in my blog career that I need to be taking special care to track everything and think about where I want my blog to go and the realization is that I absolutely have the creative and passion covered but I need help with the business end. My college classes might shed some light on that for me but if I get impatient I will keep looking at the marketing blogs to get some ideas!

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Of course back then I wasn’t even Serendipity Mommy. Back then I would buy HTML for dummies books and learn tidbits of coding to help create the sites, for instance I would use HTML forms to create a questionnaire, such as check marks or radial buttons to choose yes or no. You see them on sites all the time! Even on this blog there is a mix of HTML coding and CSS codes to make it all look pretty for you, one in particular is that if you go to my contact page you will find the one and only form on this site. I think its surprising for visitors to learn how much bloggers like me actually spend behind the scenes or “under the hood” in the middle of the night to work out kinks and errors so that our visitors have a pleasant visit. Sure there are some that contract that work out but you would be very surprised to learn that a good number of bloggers in all content areas are actually very savvy on design and coding. I think of us and closet coders. We are geeks but we aren’t ready to let people know it just yet LOL

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I mean I am incredibly busy, which is even more reason to have pampering days just for me. Let me set the scene. I arrive at the spa early in the morning and swim in a pool. I have a fantastic brunch with lots of fresh fruit. Then I get a fancy robe and slippers and get a massage at noon. After a gourmet lunch I am taken where I get a nice skin treatment. And then I am handed glasses of wine as I get a mani-pedi. After this I am taken to a spiritual place where I can meditate and do yoga with some aromatherapy.

And finally to close the day out for the best spa day ever I am taken for a gourmet dinner where I get an extra foot massage to relax the last of the tension out. I want to look and feel ten years younger when I step out of an experience like that.  Thanks to the internet and so many ways to find places like that, my task should be easy. And you know what? I DESERVE IT. I work hard at college, I am a mom, and I work hard at my blogging too so I think i deserve just one day full of pampering!

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Edy’s wants you to get involved.

Through their site, they have listed over 100 organizations from city parks, food banks and community gardens etc. who have told their touching stories in the hopes of getting your vote. The top 20 organizations with the most votes will win an orchard from Edy’s Fruit Bars and planted by the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation!!

A little incentive! :

Beginning July 1,when you vote for one of the organizations vying for an orchard at www.communitiestakeroot.com, and you’ll receive a coupon for $1 off Edy’s Fruit Bars.  After logging your vote, you’ll receive a link to download the coupon (limit 2 downloads per person, while quantities last).

Go vote! How wonderful will it be for the winners to have an orchard of fruit trees? If I had someone local to vote for here I would vote for the schools to start a community garden. We live in a rural area and I am sure the kids could use some education in growing food and having healthy school meals!

*Marketed as Edy’s® Fruit Bars in the Midwest and East, and Dreyer’s® Fruit Bars in the Western states and Texas.

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Are you a big fan of Glenny’s healthy snacks? If so you better run over to Facebook because they are giving away a $100 gift card!This is one of those few companies that carries organic items AND gluten free snacks too which is harder to find than you would think in a normal store. If I won I would spend it all on 100 cal brownies and organic marshmallow treats probably!! What are you waiting for? CLICK BELOW and you will go right to the contest on Facebook!!

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I like to have coffee in the mornings but need to WAKE UP. Also need to have another wake up coffee in the afternoon. When I’m not interested in waking up as much, I like to have a cup of Flavored coffee. I love anything with caramel and my most favorite flavor of coffee recently would have to be caramel mocchiato. I don’t buy coffee at places usually I make it at home. If I can, I order it and then just buy flavored creamer. I find its cheaper sometimes to get gourmet coffee in bulk online. Its not that I don’t like shopping I just prefer to have coffee shipped to my home and I am grateful there are companies that offer that.

Coffee really does have some good health benefits too. I think the most surprising one I know is what my chef told me, he said that if you have a cup of black coffee everyday you can lower your diabetes risk by a third. That is an amazing benefit!

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Disclosure: This was a sponsored post.