A simple Christmas :: #tinyprintsholiday

It's been a pretty low-key Christmas season around our home this year.

I haven't put up quite as many decorations as normal, we're 5 days before Christmas and I'm still not done shopping, we didn't get our tree up until the 2nd week of December, we've only gone to 1 Holiday party, and honestly? Have loved it. I just sent off our Christmas cards yesterday ... normally I have this done by Thanksgiving! It's a daily temptation to not feel "behind" or "less than", but I've realized this Christmas season that saying "no" to the busyness and instagram-perfect life can feel like a deep sigh of relief.

If there's one thing I want you to take from this blog post, it's this simple message:

A) It's ok. Whatever you are doing and whatever you have or haven't done this Christmas season, it's ok. And...
B) It's not too late to send Christmas cards. :)

I teamed up again this year with Tiny Prints, who you may know that I adore. I love their designs, their paper, and the way they make it so easy from start to finish.

Wrapping gifts was so easy this year with personalized wrapping paper. You all know I'm a complete sucker for anything with our initials, names, or monogram on them... I can't help it!

Ask my husband, I spent over an hour this year just browsing their website trying to decide on a design for our card. TOO MANY CUTE CHOICES! I finally narrowed it down to a simple foil textured card ... I love the simple things!

I love the foil and embossed details! So cute!!

The packaging is also so important to me, so I love these envelope liners that seem to complete the whole thing!

I was "a little bit" indecisive this year when it came to picking our return address labels, and then once I thought I had decided, I saw the white envelopes! How cute!! So... I got all 3. :)

And the stamps! Personalized... and mailed right to me!! No brainer, friends.

So here we are, December 20th, and you're feeling like it's too late to order cards. GUESS WHAT... it's not! If you order today and choose "Super Rush Delivery", they'll be here before Christmas Eve! Or how about some New Years cards?? Another fun option!

I hope each of you have had the most perfect Christmas season... whether it's been jam-packed full of activities, or pretty empty like ours, soak it up and enjoy every last minute.

This post is sponsored by TinyPrints.com.  All opinions are 100% my own.  

I was compensated with some amazing cards in exchange for writing this post.

Sending Love! #tinyprintsholiday

Alright friends! Thanksgiving is over, so we can officially talk about all-things-Christmas without anyone complaining. :)

This is always my favorite season of the year, for the obvious reasons : the celebration of our Saviors birth, ahh... the coziness of our homes, time spent together with the people we love, red Starbucks cups, and CHRISTMAS CARDS in the mail!

If you know me, you know I'm a stickler for designs + quality + price. In most companies, you can typically find one of those three, or maybe two out of three if you're lucky. Tiny Prints has done it again this year - offering stylish, thoughtful, design-forward, high quality, reasonably priced cards. They'll always be my go-to company!

Tiny Prints has more than 'just' Christmas cards to choose from as well! Home decor, stockings, paper products, wrapping paper, gift tags, and so much more.

Once again this year, I decided to get some of my Christmas shopping done for some close friends. As I was browsing their site, I saw these notepads and thought they'd be the perfect gift. I love anything personalized!

Wrapping them was super easy with these gift tags. Clean and simple... my two favorite things.

Wrapping gifts is always very easy with personalized wrapping paper as well. Told ya - I'm a total sucker for anything with our name on it. :) I love that their wrapping paper is super thick with lines on the inside for straight cuts as well.

I love sending hand-written thank you notes out after Christmas, and Tiny Prints made that super easy offering cute designs with matching return labels.

Last, but not least, our Christmas cards!!!

This year, I chose the "Laser Cut" Christmas card... and friends, there's no way for pictures to do it justice. The paper is sooo thick and the laser cut is a perfect "finishing touch" for the card! I also love the matching envelope liners as well.

Tiny Print's laser cut design is on the 'forefront' of the stationary industry. I love them so much!

I also opted to have our address printed on the back of the envelopes this year (instead of labels), just for an added 'easy' bonus. I'm also hoping this will catch more people's attention with our new address as well.

However, if you're more of a 'label girl', they have so many cute designs as well. Check them out here!

As much as I love the cards themselves, one of my favorite features of our Christmas cards this year is our PERSONALIZED POSTAGE. What the what! Such a fun way to add another personalized touch to your cards PLUS skip a trip to the post office. Easy peasy!

So how about you, friends? Are your Christmas cards prepped and ready to send, or have you completely forgotten about it until now? I hope I've inspired you to check out Tiny Prints and get yours ordered soon!

Enjoy this amazing Christmas season!

This post is sponsored by TinyPrints.com.  All opinions are 100% my own.  

I was compensated with some amazing cards in exchange for writing this post.

All things Christmas! #TinyPrintsHoliday

Oh I'm so excited for the Holiday season coming up... anyone else?

I love the "coziness" of this season, the quality time spent with our favorite people, and decorating for Christmas.

And the contagious excitement from my boys! The best.

Of course, if you know me at all, I also love the giving and receiving of Christmas cards. December is by far my favorite "mail" month - long gone are the days of only getting bills and magazines, and we start to receive some old fashioned snail mail.

This year I teamed up with Tiny Prints - one of my favorite companies to work with. I love their stylish, thoughtful, beautiful designs, and their quality can't be beat! I'm a little bit of a paper snob, and love their high-quality choices, as well as the option to customize and personalize it all.

They have some really great products to choose from, in addition to their Christmas cards! Stockings, ornaments, wrapping paper, gift tags, and so much more!

This year I decided to get some of my Christmas shopping done with Tiny Prints, so I ordered a few ornaments for some of my closest friends. I love how they turned out!

Packaging these gifts were super easy and fun with their gift tags and personalized wrapping paper!

The wrapping paper is very thick, and has lines on the inside so you can cut straight. Very helpful for someone like me :) 

A little bit obsessed with all things personalized :) The gift labels are so easy to stick on a package and call it done!

Next up, our Christmas cards! If you know me in person, feel free to skip over this part so it's a surprise when you get our card in your mailbox... ha!

This year I chose the Letterpress cards... man oh man, it is hard to see the detailed embossing in a photograph, but in person they are BEAUTIFUL! 

And the envelope liners to match, of course! How fun. 

Last but not least, the finishing touches of the "package". The return address label! This year I chose a "wrap around" design, and love them! 

So how about you guys - have you already chosen your cards? Are they prepped and ready to go? 

If not, you still have plenty of time to order from Tiny Prints! Have fun choosing a card, and good luck! Too many cute designs to choose from. 

:) 

This post is sponsored by TinyPrints.com.  All opinions are 100% my own.  

I was compensated with some amazing cards in exchange for writing this post.

The chief of online coupons.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am a little bit crazy about a good deal.  I love second-hand stores, craigslist, and coupons.  I'm not overly crazy like, "you should be on that crazy coupon show" type of person, but I do love a good deal.  I refuse to pay anything full price when I shop online because with a simple search you can almost always find a coupon to use for your purchase.

The first site I always check is Couponchief.com.  Yes, I was asked by them to write this review, but I'm being honest when I say that.  In my opinion, they have some of the most reliable coupons available, not to mention some of the best.  Coupon Chief is super user-friendly and allows you to search for the specific retailer to see what online coupon codes are available.

For example, Sunday I got the itch to get a few items for myself.  By the way - I'm super annoying about spending lots of time online shopping but never actually buying anything.... does anyone else do that? Anyways, once I had added everything to my cart, I checked Couponchief.com to see what coupons Kohl's was offering.

They had about 50 coupons available, plus some printables in case I wanted to go into the store as well.  It's as simple as copy&pasting the coupon code into the box when you check out, and you can save money... easy peasy lemon squeezy.  

The one thing that stands out above other coupon sites for me (besides their user-friendly site and reliable coupons), is that you can get paid to share coupons with CouponChief.com's Pay-2-share program.  There are 4 simple steps to this program and it sounds like a complete win win situation to me.  Once you upload a coupon, you get paid 2% of each sale that is made from the coupon you uploaded.  Get out of town!  Love it.

Another thing that CouponChief.com has that others doesn't, is their Coupons-4-causes program.  I love to donate to any kind of good cause... and now you can shop your favorite sites, save money, AND donate to a great cause at the same time.  Love!

All of that to say... I highly recommend this site and because I love y'all so much, I want you to use it too!  Save money, EARN money, and donate to a great cause all in one website.

Disclaimer: This is a paid review brought to you by couponchief.com.  

While I was paid to review their site, all opinions are my own.  

And honestly, I use it in real life, and you should too.  

Your thoughts.

I had a tooth removed today.

Yeah, ouch. I am having issues talking right now because of the pain/swelling and frankly? I am having issues enjoying anything about this day. It was a bad experience and I need to step back from the situation, ask for your thoughts, and re-evaluate.

The farthest back tooth on my top left side has been hurting me for a long time. My dentist in KC told me years ago how I needed to have a crown put on in order to prevent it from cracking or breaking. Of course I didn't want to shell out the $100ish at the time, so I kept putting it off.

He was right, and it eventually cracked. See? Here's the picture.

{crack is on bottom, the white thing in-between is food, ha!}

Every time I tried to eat anything it was painful because food would get lodged up in the crack. I had to use my waterpik after I ate anything and particles of my tooth would come out, because the tooth was so weak and just literally falling apart.

A couple months ago I went to a Dentist here in town that, of course, wanted to fix it. {this was before it was painful} He gave me an estimate to have the work done and it was going to be about $1200 out of pocket. Not going to happen. My Mom suggested I just have it pulled... it's the farthest back tooth and no one will ever see it obviously.

Fast forward a couple months and now with the constant pain I was in, I knew I needed to either A.) shell out a bunch of money to have it fixed or B.) have it pulled. If you know me or our financial situation at all, you know option A just wasn't happening. So I made an appt with a different dentist in town that came highly recommended by friends of ours AND my pediatrician.

From the moment that I sat down in the chair this morning they were trying to talk me out of having it pulled. The dentist even made numerous comments about it, but the most annoying one was, "so every time you have a tooth problem you're just going to have it pulled?" He sent in his office manager to talk to me and give me all my financing options for having it fixed instead of pulled. The hygienist asked me at least 2 times "are you sure you want to do this?"

I finally broke down in the chair. Obviously I did not want to have to pull my tooth. But lady, I cannot afford it... $70 vs $1000? What part of that do you not understand? I get it, I realize that obviously it would have been more ideal for me to keep this tooth rather than having it pulled. But I just felt like they were completely insensitive to the fact that I simply stated that I could not afford any more medical expenses and so rude to ask me over and over and over again. Seemed like a money-thirsty dental office and I'm seriously annoyed about it.

How much is too much... I mean, how many times do you have to tell someone "no" before they stop bothering you? Reminds me of when you shop at Old Navy and they ask you 7 million times while they're scanning your clothes if you want to open a credit card.

Am I over reacting or is this "complaint worthy" to you? I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

Rave.

Too often we hear negative things about companies. Complaints about customer service or about products in general, so today I am here to rave about a couple of companies that have knocked my socks off with their customer service recently.

{and no, neither are paying me for the reviews... although if they stumble across my blog I am gladly accepting gift cards and/or free merchandise, ha!}

First off ... Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Not only do they have the best coupon policy around {always mailing 20% off coupons, and you can use 1 coupon per item... so if you buy 4 things, bring your 4 - 20% off coupons that you have, and they'll apply them to each item instead of your total purchase} ... awesome in itself. The coupons also never expire. Sweet dude.

But what always amazes me is their return policy. Most companies (cough, target, cough) require that you have a receipt or gift receipt or else they will give you store credit for the lowest price they have sold that item for recently - jerks.

For my birthday this year, I bought a Keurig machine from them. Love it, can't say it enough. I had a really terrible coffee aversion when I was first pregnant with this baby, and so Tyler took the Keurig machine out to Colorado with him when he left to go work there. During that time, the pump stopped pumping water so we needed to return it, but Tyler did not have the receipt OR the box! He called BB&B asking them what he could do (thinking they would refer him to the manufacturer) ... they told him to just bring it in, even though he didn't even have the box. They looked up the transaction with our debit card, and let him grab a new one off the shelf, not paying a penny. Seriously... awesome.

Next up ... Zappos.com

Tyler has always sworn by this website when he buys any of his shoes. What we always do is go shoe shopping at the store, find the shoe we like, and then buy them off Zappos because it's generally cheaper, if not the same price. They always have free shipping, unless you upgrade to the overnight option. Tyler bought some Sketchers work boots/shoes from them in April, before he left for Denver. He has always worn Sketchers for work and is happy with them. This time around, one of the shoes was defective. It started falling apart right away, while the other shoe was just fine... so we knew it was just a 'lemon'. He stopped wearing them but didn't even bother to try and return them because he figured, like most companies, they had a 30 or maybe 60 day return policy. With his new job and 12 hour shifts he recently wanted to buy a different pair of work boots, so I told him he needed to try and return his Sketchers first. I logged on to their website only to find that they have a 365 day return policy! An entire year! Not only that, but they pay for the shipping to return them back to the factory. Sa-weet!!

While I was on their website, I thought I'd check their prices for Keen's for toddlers. Tyler bought a pair of Keen's right after we were married and loves them to this day, so he was all about me getting Jaxon a pair. They had them on sale - normally $50, on sale for $24. Less than half price, with free shipping? Sign me up.

THEN... Zappos decided to upgrade our shipping from regular (3-5 business days) to overnight for FREE! So the next day, look what showed up at our front door:

Aww, little camo Keen's. Adorable, right?

It is so nice to receive good customer service in today's "the customer is NOT always right" economy. If you decide to shop at either of those places you have a great experience also!