Author: Big Mama

I know.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with stripes. But right now I am on Team Stripes. Of course I didn’t realize this until I looked over the majority of things I chose this week and went “Huh, that’s a lot of stripes”.

So I want to tell you about a new cool thing I found. It’s a site called StyleUp. You sign up and fill out a questionnaire that asks where you live and what your everyday style preferences are. And then they email you every night with a picture of an outfit idea you can wear based on the next day’s weather forecast in your area with links to where you can buy the items to make that outfit.

And you can rate the outfits they send you based on whether you like them or not so they can figure out your taste and send things that are your style. It’s like a personal stylist. I felt that you should know.

Now for what I’ve found this week:

1. vida stripe top

Piperlime has a ton of stuff on sale right now including this cute Ella Moss top. It also comes in a cream and tan combo if the red freaks you out. I tend to like red for a while and then don’t wear it again for five years.

It’s kind of the same way I deal with Chinese food.

2. gypsy lace top

I think by now we all know that I am a big fan of the lace top.

3. rain dance dress

This is really cute. And I love that it’s versatile. You could belt it. You could wear it with a denim jacket over leggings. Or you could be twenty-five years old and wear it with a great pair of sandals.

The options are almost endless.

4. ocean mist top

This doesn’t look like something I’d normally wear and I’m not sure why I was drawn to it. But it just kind of looks like spring time.

5. magic leggings and famous camis

Okay. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about leggings. As in, are there leggings that help suck everything in and smooth things out?

The answer is yes. I bought these magic leggings (Why did I just say that in my head like Forrest Gump talking to Lieutenant Dan?) in the fall and I love them. They’re kind of spandex-y and suck things in and the material isn’t cotton so things don’t stick to them like they do with other leggings.

Spanx also makes leggings but they’re three times as expensive. I haven’t tried them, but it would be hard for them to beat the magic leggings.

And then the camis. It seems like everything requires a cami under it. And I like these because they are long, but can still be worn with short things. Plus, they also smooth out any lumps or bumps.

6. honeysuckle dress

I love this color. This would be so cute for spring.

Yes. I realize it’s just mid-January.

7. hatch handbag in emerald

Remember last week when I linked to this purse but it was sold out in emerald green? Well, it’s back in stock and I just thought you should know. I adore it.

8. earnestly striped tee in gray

This is just what appears to be a really comfortable striped tee in a longer length that could be thrown on with jeans. It also comes in other colors than gray.

9. green preppy pendant

Not only is this a precious pendant, but Heartstrings, the manufacturer, of this pendant is donating a portion of the profits to “Helping Honduras Kids” to help provide education and a home to children that have been abandoned, abused and/or neglected.

And Carol and Company is joining their efforts by also donating 10% of the profits from any of their behind the glass pendants to Helping Honduras Kids.

10. the cameron dress

Love this. Great by itself or with leggings or with jeans. And it’s from a store called The Impeccable Pig. How cute is that? They just opened one in San Antonio and they have some really good stuff at great prices.

And that’s it for this week.

Y’all have a great Friday.

My day got off to the best start ever yesterday. My friend Laura texted me a picture of a freshly baked chocolate croissant from Trader Joe’s around 7:00 a.m. And I jokingly texted her back “What time are you bringing one over for us?”

About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and Laura’s daughter stood there holding a bag with two warm chocolate croissants in it.

I don’t really know that life gets much better than that. And y’all weren’t lying about them because I took one bite and was transported to a bakery in France.

Which is really weird when you factor in that I’ve never actually been to a bakery in France. But I have been to La Madeleine several times and that’s like France and this was better than that.

Okay, I just have a few quick things today, but the last one is a giveaway so make sure you read until the bitter end.

1. My book

Um. It’s less than a month until Sparkly Green Earrings is released. And I alternate between being excited and wanting to throw up. It’s kind of like pregnancy but without a good excuse to eat a dozen donuts in one sitting and wear pants with an elastic waistband.

So here a few book related things (Is this becoming an outline? It feels very fancy.)

A. I have a Facebook page for the blog and book stuff now. Please let’s not call it a fan page because belch. (I meant to type “blech”, but I’m going to leave it as “belch” because it seems equally appropriate.)

Anyway, I’m going to try to post all book related news there, so you can like my Facebook page if you want. It’s Melanie Shankle-The Big Mama Blog.

My publisher is also working on setting up a few book signings for anyone who wants to meet me and buy a copy of the book at one of the stores I’ll be visiting. Let me clarify that this is not quite a nationwide tour. As in, I’ll be in San Antonio and Houston. I’ll be driving to them in my 2006 Volvo station wagon.

As of now, I’m doing a signing at Barnes & Noble at San Pedro in San Antonio on Tuesday, February 12th at 7 p.m.

And one at Books-A-Million at Katy Mills in Houston on Saturday, February 16th at 1 p.m.

The good news is if you show up we can probably hang out and visit since it will just be you and my dad.

(You’ll be able to know it’s me because I’ll be the one sitting at a table reading Beth Moore’s book So Long, Insecurity.)

2. DotMom Conference

I drew the winner of the two tickets to DotMom in Frisco on February 22-23. So if you haven’t received an email from me that means you didn’t win.

But I really wish you’d still attend. It’s going to be amazing and I guarantee you won’t be sorry. Tickets are still available, but going fast. You can find out more here.

3. Lauren Chandler – The Narrow Place

My friend Lauren Chandler, who is married to Matt Chandler from The Village Church in Dallas, has recorded the most beautiful album called The Narrow Place.

I downloaded it about a month ago and have listened to it over and over again, especially while cooking dinner at the end of a long day because it takes me to a happy place. Even though it’s a Narrow Place.

(Get it? I made a little joke.)

Anyway, you can download it for only $5.99 on iTunes, but I also have three copies to give away today. All you have to do for a chance to enter is leave a comment on this post. I’ll leave it open until Sunday and then choose three winners.

Even though you’re all winners to me.

By the way, I think my finger is a little bit better. Just in case you were wondering.

See y’all tomorrow.

So I really appreciate all the concern about my pointer finger even though I now have a fear of scorpions and brown recluse spiders that I’ve never had before. And I love y’all for your concern because when I told P last night that I had something on my finger, he replied “A fingernail?”

I also feel that you should know that no one in my real life even called me yesterday to express any condolences for my bad finger even though I know they all read the blog daily. Or maybe that’s just what they tell me. Or maybe they’ve all realized I may have a tendency to sometimes be a hypochondriac and my finger fell in that category.

But the truth is it still hurt. So I decided to take y’alls advice and made a paste out of baking soda to see if it might draw something out. And I put a band-aid over the baking soda paste on my finger because I was in the middle of cooking dinner. But then later I went to take a hot bath so I could soak it in Epsom salts and when I pulled the band-aid off it pulled off the top part of my cuticle. Thus, my finger is in worse shape than ever.

And there’s still no splinter to be found.

I just told this whole tale of woe to P and he told me if I haven’t taken the time to even bother looking at it under a magnifying glass then he doesn’t want to hear about it.

Anyway, I’m sure it will be fine. And I know it’s not a spider bite because one time a spider bit me on my back. I don’t know what kind because I’m not a spiderologist, but it was so painful and created this big blister and in hindsight I probably should have gone to the doctor. However, that’s been at least twelve years ago and it seems to have turned out okay unless you count the times I have an urge to climb the wall of a building using a web I just shot out of my fingers.

And this has nothing to do with anything, but while we’re talking about heights (which technically I was) I have to tell you that yesterday I drove out to a part of town that I don’t frequent because it’s far and I’m somewhat of a hermit. They’ve recently built a new overpass and I’d never driven over it before. I have an irrational fear of driving over a fairly new overpass because it hasn’t been tested by time. What if they built it with a bad batch of concrete or something and it appears to be okay until the 1,000th car drives over it and the whole thing falls?

I’ve also had a recurring dream since I was young where I’m driving over a big overpass and all of a sudden the road ends because it’s still under construction but I didn’t know it and I’m just stuck there on the edge about to fall.

Feel free to analyze that at will.

In other fear and odd creature news, we have a new pet.

He’s an amphibian. Which is a step above a reptile, but equal to an insect in my mind.

Caroline has named him Larry.

P found him on a job site yesterday. He was planting some palms that were brought in from Florida and there was Larry, practically frozen, resting on a palm leaf. Let’s just hope he’s truly a Florida native and not a Cuban refugee because things could get ugly with immigration issues and we could end up as the subject of a Lifetime movie entitled “Not Without My Frog”.

When P walked in with him I was on my way out the door to pick up Caroline from school and he suggested I call Gulley to see if Will might want a pet tree frog because Will has been campaigning for a bearded dragon and free tree frog seems close enough.

(Disclosure: I may or may not have been the one to put the idea of a bearded dragon in Will’s head. He mentioned wanting a pet lizard and I’d just seen a dad walking out of Caroline’s school with a bearded dragon he’d brought in for show and tell and he told me “Bearded dragons are the golden retrievers of the lizard world”. And, in my mind, if you’re going to get a pet lizard you may as well get a friendly one so I told Will about them and the rest is history.)

(Gulley likes to act like this annoys her, but we’ll see who’s annoyed when she walks around with the golden retriever of the lizard world perched on her shoulder.)

Gulley answered the phone and I asked her if Will wanted a pet tree frog and she immediately said, “No. But this is a good way to make sure I quit answering the phone when you call.”

Point taken.

And so P gets out our old crabitat and turns it into a frogitat. By the time I get Caroline home from school, Larry has taken up residence in our kitchen and P is googling “What do you feed a tree frog?”

Crickets. You feed him crickets.

But they have to be alive.

Caroline, of course, was thrilled in that way she’s always thrilled during the first forty-eight hours a new pet enters our lives. If history has taught me anything (other than not to dig in my shoe for pointy things) it’s that eventually Larry will join a long line of neglected animals and I’ll have to set him free in the backyard to roam amongst the hermit crabs.

But in the meantime Caroline kept saying all night, “I can’t believe I have a new pet frog.”

Yes. That makes two of us.

Listen.

Y’all are a veritable wealth of information. Gulley and I were talking yesterday and said we can’t wait to go to Trader Joe’s with a list of all the things we need to try. I’m especially excited about anything that translates to easy dinner because who doesn’t want that?

I’m sitting here watching The Bachelor while I’m typing this because I believe in the importance of quality television. And I just have to comment on a couple of things:

1. Do those girls realize when Sean picks someone up in a helicopter for a date that it’s not actually his helicopter? Because they react like OH MY WORD HE HAS HIS OWN HELICOPTER! HE’S LIKE BATMAN!

Except he’s not. It’s not his helicopter.

2. Most of these girls seem to have attended some sort of special enunciation class conducted by the cast of The Hills where they learn to talk through their nose and add extra syllables to words.

“I mean, I really like Sean, like REAL-LEE like him, but you know I’m here for HIM and, UM, not to make friends with the other GIRL-ELS”.

Maybe this is an indication that I’m getting old. Or maybe I should put down the remote and read a book.

Why can’t I quit you, Bachelor?

3. What the heck, Chris Harrison, with the addition of the practical joke date? It’s like he’s just allowed the whole show to jump the shark for his own amusement.

You can’t possibly know this about me but practical jokes make me so uncomfortable. Especially when the people involved don’t even know each other and are on national television.

In non-Bachelor related news, (SPOILER ALERT) how about poor Edith on Downton Abbey? What about her jolly hair? Did he forget how jolly her hair can be? I don’t understand how he could wait until the last minute to do that.

(Do you see how I’m trying to be vague in case someone ignores my spoiler alert? Did what? I DON’T KNOW YOU’LL HAVE TO WATCH THE SHOW.)

And, finally, on a non-T.V. note (YES. I have something to say besides T.V and it’s very important. Just wait.)

I did something weird to the pointer finger on my left hand.

(Speaking of jumping the shark, I think my blog just did.)

I know you won’t sleep until you know the story so I will share it with you. And, good news, you may sleep like a baby at some point while I share.

Last Thursday I put on my Uggs. I believe I mentioned last week that I spent an entire day running errands in my Uggs and yoga pants because I’m trying to singlehandedly bring sexy back. But I neglected to mention that when I first slipped on my Uggs that morning, there was something pointy in the toe.

So I pulled off my boot and reached in to pull out the offending item. And I never saw what it was, but it really hurt my finger when I grabbed it as pointy things often do. Which is why you shouldn’t grab them willy-nilly out of the toe of your boot.

I couldn’t see any visible mark and even though it felt like a splinter or something, there wasn’t anything there that I could see. But then it woke me up in the middle of the night with that feeling that my fingertip had a heartbeat. Like on Elf.

(I wasn’t wearing a green elf suit though. I just want to clarify.)

The next morning I woke up and it seemed to hurt a lot less and so I decided it was just one those bruise things you get like if you ever prick your finger on a rose thorn like Princess Aurora did except I guess that was a spinning wheel and not a rose.

(Personally, I find Princess Aurora to be the least compelling of all the Disney princesses. She just doesn’t seem very warm. Granted, she spends most of the movie sleeping, but I think Snow White is much more likable. And she adapted to living with those dwarfs so you have to believe she wasn’t very high-maintenance.)

The point is now it’s practically Tuesday and my finger doesn’t seem any better. It still feels like maybe something is in there, but I can’t see anything. And, frankly, I’m at a loss as to what the next step should be in my finger rehabilitation.

Thank you for your concern.

I know this kind of riveting material is what keeps you coming back to read every day. I just hope my finger makes a full recovery so I can keep typing.

Well.

Our weekend couldn’t have been more uneventful. I mean, we had fun and had some friends over on Saturday night and cooked fajitas, but that doesn’t really translate to great blog material.

I think, truth be told, that we were all recovering from our first week back in the real world and needed some time to just relax. Caroline and I both stayed in our pajamas almost all day on Saturday and Sunday and it was delightful.

On Friday night we met my sister and her family and Mimi and Bops for Mexican food. And at some point around ten-thirty that night I started feeling like I was coming down with some sort of stomach bug. So I crawled in bed and did my best not to move or think about food for the next twelve hours. And I had a real low moment when Caroline decided to snack on roasted seaweed while sitting right next to me.

As it turns out, I guess it was nothing but I still don’t feel quite right.

So since I clearly have nothing interesting to write about (if you doubt me, please re-read the above paragraph about my stomach bug that turned out to not be a stomach bug) and I’m trying to watch the Golden Globes before switching to Downton Abbey in about thirty minutes, I thought it might be a good day to ask y’all a question.

I finally went into our new Trader Joe’s on Friday. I’m not sure what took me so long but I think part of the reason is because the parking lot has been insanity every other time I’ve attempted to go. And I bought the honey mango shaving cream that my friend Paige raves about and a few different types of lotion because I am a sucker for a good moisturizer.

But I didn’t buy any food items. Frankly, I felt overwhelmed and unsure of myself.

So my question is this: What are some items from Trader Joe’s that you and your family enjoy? Any snacks I need to know about it? Cookies? Beauty products? Has anyone tried those lavender dryer bags because I was so tempted to buy them.

Please share your findings. And the next time the parking lot isn’t insane, I’m going to go try them for myself.

This is going to be a fairly brief Fashion Friday because I had a busy day and I desperately want to get to bed at a decent hour.

There was one point today where I realized I’d forgotten to eat breakfast and lunch (WHAT? WHO AM I?) because I was so busy running errands and I called in some Mexican food to pick up and actually honked at a car in front of me because he was driving so slow and I was desperate to get home and eat my food.

Also, I ran all my errands while wearing yoga pants, a fleece and my Uggs. With that in mind, you may want to take my fashion advice with a grain of salt.

But here are a few things I liked this week:

1. polka-dot chiffon shirtdress

I saw this in Old Navy yesterday. I even tried it on and it’s cuter on than this picture would lead you to believe. Also, it comes in gray.

I think it would be really great with leggings. And maybe a belt depending on how you feel about belts.

2. chevron delight cardigan

Caroline was sitting next to me earlier and we both saw this at the same time and said, “Oh! That’s cute!”

It’s not very often we agree on fashion these days so that feels like a win.

3. softest boat-neck sweater

I don’t know if I like this in this bright yellow, but it comes in other colors and it’s a good length.

4. laced in snow blouse

I really love this. Put a cami under it, throw on some jeans and cowboy boots. Perfection.

5. checked shirt

I’ve been looking for a good plaid shirt. And this one is on sale and comes in different colors.

6. monday morning top

One of these days I’m probably going to get sick of chevron. But that day is not today.

7. hatch handbag

I really like this bag. I like it the most in the emerald green but it’s sold out. So this is good, too.

But did you know that Pantone declared emerald green the color of the year for 2013. True story.

8. little birds embroidered shift dress

This is really darling. And I’d love it with leggings and boots.

9. high-low sweater

I like stuff like this. Because you can throw it on with jeans and boots and be comfortable yet appear put together. Says the girl who wore her yoga pants and Uggs all over town today sans makeup.

10. zola earrings

Kendra Scott is offering an extra 15% off sale items right now. Just enter the code cheers15 at checkout. There are lots of cute things, but these earrings in pink might be my favorite. Would be perfect for spring.

And that’s it for today.

Y’all have a good Friday.