Make your afternoons a delight with this free printable

This is our third week in a row of free printable routine charts. We promise to move on to new and exciting topics next week, but we thought we would finish up the month of September with one more routine chart to get this school year off to a smooth start! Besides, we have heard from a few of you that these charts are helping and we have also had a few requests for additional charts. Namely, the Afternoon chart below.

Please visit Love and Life Cards on Pinterest here to download and print this Love and Life Cards Afternoon Routine chart!

Bedtime routine free printable

Last week's morning routine printable seemed to help out around our house and we heard from a few of you that a cute bedtime routine would also be good to keep handy. 

So... here it is!

Please visit Love and Life Cards on Pinterest here to download and print our bedtime routine chart. 

We also did a quick bonus "boy" or unisex version of the morning routine chart since we heard that some boys didn't like the little pink shirt as the "get dressed" icon. 

You can grab this version of the Morning Routine chart on Pinterest here.

Let us know if there are any other charts we can design for you that might make the days and nights run more smoothly!

Morning routine - free printable!

We are settling into this school routine now that my oldest is a few weeks into kindergarten and my middle daughter has finally started preschool. But with getting one on the bus before 8:00 a.m. and the rest of us out the door before 9:00, the morning can get a little, well... hectic. 

I decided to go searching around the internet for a morning routine chart that would help us all get our act together. I found some great ideas on all kinds of sites and free printables on iheartorganizing 

Super cute, right? I thought so too. This probably would have worked for us, but there were a couple of routine items that I wanted to change and I'll admit it... I just wanted to give it a little Love and Life style!

So I came up with this little chart 

Hopefully this will help to get us all to school on time. Please feel free to download the chart from Pinterest here and drop us a line if it helps your mornings run a little more smoothly!

What's in your lunch box?

This back to school thing has be obsessing over what I'm putting in my kid's lunch boxes. I did pack lunch for my preschooler last year, but I'm trying to spice it up a little this year making lunches that are healthier and hopefully more fun. At home we eat A LOT of peanut butter, but since our school (and most these days) is nut free, it becomes a little bit more challenging to find healthy foods that are easy to pack and that my children will actually eat.

The Simple As That blog has some fabulous ideas for school lunches

Smart School House has some good ideas for lunches including some easy substitutions to make meals all kids love just a little bit healthier

I have also found tons of inspiration from 100 days of real food like this delicious looking heart-shaped pancake sandwich... yum!

So now that I've found some inspiration for what food to prepare, what about all the stuff? There are so many containers, boxes, bags, ice packs, vegetable cutters, you name it out there right now. How do I pick which ones I need? Do I really need the fancy container? What about the cut out shapes? Can't I just raid the cookie cutters I already have rather than buy special ones? So what if my kid comes to school with a sandwich shaped like a gingerbread man all year, right?

I decided to go with the ziplock 3-compartment divided containers. I found these at Target in a pack of 2 for $5 so if it doesn't work out, no big loss. So far I have used the cookie cutters I already have which do include one large heart and many assorted sizes of stars. I may be inspired to branch out to other shapes as the year progresses. I have noticed that my 3-year-old who usually takes one bite of a sandwich and announces that she is done, will amazingly eat every bit of a sandwich if I cut it into a heart. Who knew? 

So now what I'd really like to know is, do you veteran school lunch makers have any words of wisdom for me? Great ideas for lunch?  Products you just can't live without? 

The love and life annual meeting

It has become a bit of a tradition over the past few years to hold our Love and Life Cards annual meeting over Labor Day weekend. This year we brought the team together again to do some relaxing and a bit of card talk.

We started the weekend out by gathering the team for an inspirational presentation. 

We did manage to get to the beach for a little team building exercise despite the rain.

The whole team worked tirelessly.

And of course the youngest member of the team was the MVP despite her rather outdated wardrobe. 

The Love and Life team is feeling recharged and ready to gear up for the upcoming holiday season. We hope you had a wonderful Labor Day weekend as well!