They say that takes just 21 days to make a habit. Several times in my life I have taken on this type of challenge to make habits stick or to even break habits in my life. This time I took the 21-day Listerine Challenge with my little crew. Because of Phoenix’s scary encounter with the dentist & my biggest failure as a mother moment, he & I have been very diligent about taking care of our bodies. We are walking to school {some days} skipping the 4th Oreo and have completely swapped soda & juice for water. Eating vegetables is still a battle we are fighting, but he has made a lot of changes. Now when I ask him what kind of snack he wants he goes straight for fruit instead of cookies, chips or candy. Now our next big hurdle is getting the father to eat something other than peanut butter & honey.

Ever since our scary dentist appointment I have been a complete mouth general with Phoenix & everyone else. The 21 Day Challenge & the products that Listerine provided us was hugely helpful in getting to our goal of better oral health & habits. My job now & forever {read: Phoenix has no more cavities} is to brush his teeth. Each morning after a mad dash to get dressed for school, pack lunch & eat breakfast Phoenix & I head to the bathroom to get his teeth cleaned. And each night before the 900th cup of water & “When will you go to sleep?” questions we head back to the bathroom to brush our teeth & gurgle with the Listerine’s Smart Rinse which Phoenix loves.

After I have done the initial brushing I bring Phoenix in on it because I think it’s important for kids to take responsibility in their health & well-being. This may include things like picking out his own clothes for school, making his bed, cleaning up his spot at dinner & now brushing his teeth after I have done it. Phoenix has a Transformer electric toothbrush which he loves which makes brushing fun for him. He also has a Phineas & Ferb toothbrush that Listerine sent us that we keep at my family’s house so no matter where he is brushing can get done. 

The Listerine 21 Day Challenge is now complete for us but the journey to a cleaner & healthier mouth isn’t. If you haven’t signed up yet to get involved make sure to check out their Facebook page & take the challenge!

Disclosure: I received products from Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Products Division and The Motherhood as part of my participation in the LISTERINE 21-DAY CHALLENGE. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

Right before Thanksgiving Phoenix started complaining about something hurting in his mouth. Like I do all his ailments I told him he would be fine & moved on. But after a few days he started complaining again & this time he mentioned it was his tooth. My husband who has seen his fair share of tooth issues immediately recognized in his son the same kind of pain he suffers from.

After a few days of using baby Orajel we realized we had a much bigger problem on our hand & we made an appointment with our dentist. It was a heart wrenching 2 days as we waited to get him in to see the doctor. I fully expected that he had a cavity & went in prepared for the news. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the number of cavities that my 4 year old had. Are you ready for this?

8.

8

8

8

EIGHT.

My son who’s teeth have only been in his mouth for like a day has 8 cavities. When they told me I fell off my chair. There were smelling salts involved in order to bring me back. The only comfort I took at that dentist appointment was that genetics do play a part in oral health & after reading a recent article in Parenting Magazine it said that tooth decay is considered a communicable disease. Children of parents who have a lot of cavities are more likely to have tooth decay as well. Remember the aforementioned husband? I’m a sucker for a cute smile, a tear or something clever & this gets Phoenix just about anything he wants at any time. I also struggle a lot getting him to eat so in order to just get him to eat something I’ll let him eat cereal for all meals. And now we have 8 cavities.

Please really try not to judge me too harshly. As parents sometimes things just slip through the cracks. Since that awful dentist appointment I’ve severely cut down on his sugar intake & frankly scared it all out of him, to the point where he doesn’t even like to indulge in the occasional cookie or lollipop.

So when The Motherhood contacted me about working with Listerine & joining their 21-day challenge I jumped at the chance. I’m really good about brushing his teeth everyday but did you know that brushing alone misses 75% of your mouth? Even with brushing twice a day you are still missing a large part of your mouth, allowing germs to grow.

Now I am faced with the daunting challenge of getting my our oral care back on track. The Listerine 21 day challenge is the perfect vehicle to facilitate this. For every person who signs up for the challenge the Listerine Brand will make a contribution to help Smile Across America program toward their goal of connecting 210,000 children with needed oral health services in 2013.

If you are interested in participating in this 21-day challenge make sure to sign up for it at the Listerine Facebook page.

Disclosure: I received products from Johnson & Johnson Healthcare Products Division and The Motherhood as part of my participation in the LISTERINE 21-DAY CHALLENGE. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.

If I could give a new mother one piece of advice it would be this “Find your people.” I know not everyone is as lucky as I am to have a family that not only is so willing to help but also happens to be so close.

When Phoenix was 2 my village started to form. Shawn & I were faced with our landlord selling our house & the possible need to move to LA. We decided that the best thing to do was to move in with my family so that Shawn could go back & forth & not have to worry that Phoenix & I were alone. We lived with my parents for a year & a half before we made the very hard decision to leave & come here to California.

During that time we lived with my family we had an enormous amount of help & when we came to California we lost all of that. The first few weeks we were caught up in all of the newness of California & homesickness didn’t set in until my Mom & sisters came to visit. We spent several weeks of the summer hanging out laughing & painting our nails until we bleed Essie lacquer. When my Mom & younger sister left (the other two staying behind to try school out) my heart went with them.

At the end of October we got a call from my family telling us they were coming to California for good. I was elated. I was happy that I finally would be back with my family because I missed them terribly. But it wasn’t until I hit my second trimester that I realized how glad I was to have my family literally around the corner from me.

When we moved in with my family in Maryland my Dad cautioned us that it wouldn’t be easy us blending our two families & he was right. It wasn’t always Monopoly games & loud laughing. There were plenty of times that we got on each other’s nerves. We were close & sometimes that closeness got annoying. Sometimes I wanted to just shut away with the three of us & I’m sure my family wanted to walk around the house without falling on trains & Legos or even having to listen to Shawn & I fight for the hundredth time about picking up the towels.

It would have been easy many times to throw in the towel, yes, even with my family because we have been through the ringer the last 6 years believe me! But it has always been important to me that my children have what I didn’t grow up with, closeness to a large extended family. It hasn’t been easy, and we haven’t always agreed but I certainly could not have made it through a pregnancy with a preschooler & a husband who works constantly without my family, without my village. 

my family minus 3

It’s situations like these that the three-time Grammy® award-winning gospel duo Erica and Tina Campbell face in Season 2 of WE tv’s hit series Mary Mary as they balance being recording artists, mothers, and wives. MARY MARY premieres Thursday, December 6 at 10|9c and moves to its regular timeslot on Thursdays at 9|8c, beginning December 13. Watch a sneak peek here!

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of WE tv. The opinions and text are all mine.

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While I don’t consider myself to be a horrible mother like say maybe those you see on Teen Mom 2 (namely Jenelle) but I do realize that I certainly am a work in progress mother. I think what separates me from being just a total shit mother to maybe a moderately shitty mom is that I am willing to learn from the dozens of mistakes I make every minute.

One of the things that I think make me a bad mom is my lack on consistency. I have zero follow through & no poker face. I have promised timeout to a defiant 4 year old for 4 minutes only to allow him to get up after 4 seconds because he really does look so cute when he’s mad & really who cares if he writes on the walls right? Wrong.

I have said it at least 570 million times on here that you’d have a better chance of Lindsay Lohan getting her life in order than you do of Phoenix eating anything remotely good for him without a bunch of theatrics. I am convicted daily about his horrible eating habits & daily try to make small changes that are better for him. But it’s hard because I’m not consistent, remember?

However, for the last 6 months, several times a month Phoenix gets an awful 24-48 hour stomach & butt thing. It’s bad y’all. Once when I was still pregnant I woke up because I felt thick wetness, thinking it was my water breaking I jumped up…but alas it was not water. Bad. Bad. Bad.

We at first thought that he wasn’t being good about washing his hands when he comes back from playing outside so we got strict about the hand washing. Then we figured it was just the normal kid in school virus. When that theory started to fade we thought it could be some allergic reaction to fish because a couple of the times he got sick we had, had fish the night before. But our family doctor assured us that an allergy to fish probably wasn’t the case.

Fed up with the constant projectiles from both top & bottom holes I started doing some research & started realizing that his immune system wasn’t as strong as it needed to be & the reason for that? His sucky ass diet. And there the fight for vegetables kicked in again, but also a new daily aka consistent vitamin regimen was started here in our house. Not just for Phoenix but for the grown man who constantly finds himself sick but refuses to eat vegetables or fruit or anything that isn’t covered in a glaze.

I felt like a horrible mother when I finally realized what was going on. It’s not that I don’t know he needs these things; I’m not purposely letting him binge on soda, candy, cookies, & cereal. But I’m not hard enough on him when it comes to eating well & that has cost him.

We’ve been on this new daily vitamin super-duper Listen to your Mother & eat your vegetables kick now for almost a month & can I tell you that we have not had one day of vomiting?

But as is Murphy’s Laws for Motherhood I’ll wake up tonight covered regurgitated fruit loops.

This post is sponsored by Target up & up . up & up is an exclusive Target Brand that provides guest with high-quality, well-designed products at low prices. up&up offers a multi-vitamin for everyone in your family and offers a variety of form options from gummies to pills. 

I was provided with both a childrens multi-vitamin & adult vitamin for review, all opinions are my own. 

Every family has those stories that they love to dust off to get a laugh during the holidays or family reunions. With my family being as big as it is there is no shortage of embarrassing stories or family mysteries. One of my Dad’s favorite story to tell about me from when I was about 17 years old.

I’ve mentioned a few million times that I have a large family, 4 sisters & 3 brothers. Even though the boys are younger than I am I’m constantly terrorized, even now that 3 of us are adults. But that’s a brother for you. There is something about brothers where they think they are automatically entitled to anything and everything even if it isn’t theirs. I had one brother who ate all but 3 of our wedding cake samples from Duff Goldman. The box was clearly marked with “We will be sharing this for dessert DO NOT EAT.” but he ate it anyway & even told us which flavors to steer clear of.

But the family story in question is the time I thought my brothers robbed me.

We were living in Maryland and had been only for a few months. The part of Maryland we lived in was run over with deer. If you were up early enough in the morning you could see at least 20 of them running down the street. It was kind of magical. One early fall morning I made my way to beloved Honda Civic to head to work. When I got to my car I saw that my glove compartment had been rifled through and all of my change in my change compartment was gone.

I was so confused trying to figure out what was going on & who had gone in my car, when suddenly it hit. “The Boys!” I ran into the house & rounded up my brothers “Give me all my money back now!” granted it wasn’t a lot of money but it certainly came in handy when I spent my entire paycheck at the mall {ahhh. The good ole days} “We didn’t take your money we swear Alex.” I was perplexed. “You didn’t take it? Are you being honest?” the assured me they had. And that’s when it hit me. The boys hadn’t taken my money, the deer had*!

Yes. I had deduced that on the way down the hill that morning the deer had made a pit stop to grab my change. Why I thought this I have no idea, but I did. And I really believed it until I started telling my Dad over dinner. When everyone started laughing at me & asking how the deer would have opened the door I realized that I might be wrong. But stranger things have happened in the world, like Snooki having a baby. Anything is possible. 

The moral of this story? Deer don’t play**

*This story is entirely true. I honestly believed this.

**This is a hilarious video to back up my theory that deer don’t play, BUT the language is not safe for work & is a tad graphic.

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This story about thieving deer was brought to you by the folks over at Simplisafe. Don’t want to be robbed by deers? These guys can help you with all your home security needs & get you set up with a home security systems & wireless security system.