Plan with Me: Christmas Week

Lately I have been using the Happy Planner by MAMBI for the last couple months. Previous I used the Erin Condren vertical (January through August) and horizontal (September through October) layouts for this year. I decided to give MAMBI a try, it's affordable and good quality for what you pay. I do really like Erin Condren and one day I might go back to it. For now, this is what I'm using. 

I use sticky notes and page flags to mark the important things or not-so-important things. This week nothing big was happening.

For this week I used stickers from Planning Roses and wood printed washi tape from Michael's.

I used the "to do" headers over the morning section with heart checklists. I plan to use them to keep track of my daily checklists.

Since these stickers are made specifically for the Erin Condren I lined the bottom section of the boxes with the lighter wood washi.

I also labeled the day boxes with "today" headers.

I used the full boxes from the kit during the week and one in the upper lefthand corner. I normally don't use these, but I like to for holidays or special occasions.

Using some of faux washi and functional included in the kit I filled in some of the white space. Once again, I usually don't plan this way, but it was fun! I also put wash at the bottom of the other two rows of boxes.

Once I added the final stickers my spread looked like this! This sticker kit is my style, almost to a tee! Our home decorations are in the same rustic theme.

I also snuck in a couple tassel banners from Rory's Sweet Addictions. They are my favorite to annotate birthdays. This week happens to be my Dad's and Husband's birthday!

And here's how my final layout looks! I'm in love!

I needed up adding a side bar on the left to keep track for important things, main to-do's, my goals, my workouts, and main things for next week.

I hope you all enjoyed my plan with me. I absolutely love planning and organizing my weeks. It's relaxing to me and helps me feel less stressed.

Follow me on Instagram @kandilorene to see more of my planner and more pictures of my spreads.

Until next time,

Kandi

Our Christmas Tree

This year we finally get to spend the holidays together. Last year my husband was deployed, it was our first set of holidays as a married couple. So, this is our first Christmas as a married couple. My husband likes to decorate like Who-ville exploded, I prefer to decorate a little more lightly.

Last year I barely decorated; just enough to make it feel like Christmas. So this year, I let my husband decorate as much as he wanted. 

We are moving in January to a larger house (finally!), so the majority of the decorations were centered on the tree!

Our very first Christmas we started the tradition of getting a yearly ornament and a couple fun ones. We have started adding on your dog, Zero, to the family ornament since he gets spoiled like no other. Our fun ornaments are usually centered around The Nightmare Before Christmas. We are both basically grew up on the film. 

It was also important to us to keep traditions of our childhood going. David's family hung stocking of family pets who have passed to keep their memory alive. We have two stockings on our tree for Charlie, David's cat who was his childhood pet, and Galena, my cat who I got right after college who was madly in love with David. Yes it's a sad thing to keep these on the tree but these two cats helped shape us in ways you wouldn't think.

We tried, and I stress the word tried, to get a good photo of our little family in front of the tree. It wasn't quite successful but in the years to come it will be a funny memory.

Until next time,

Kandi

Viva Las Vegas

We really do take vacations for just the two of us. Our vacations are usually trips to visit family who live far away. With the military life style we don't get the opportunity to get away as often as we would like. So when we get to, we make the most of it!

It seems like like we have started a tradition of getting away, just the two of us, for a few days. Two years ago we spent a few days at Disneyland. But this year we went to Las Vegas! We have been wanting to visit Vegas for so long, especially before we have kids. 

Our first night we went to the top of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris hotel. If you can, I highly suggest it! It was so amazing to see all of Vegas from so high up. The Paris hotel is pretty centered on the strip so you get a view of almost everything!

During our full day we literally walked the whole strip! It was a long walk, we are talking something like 6-ish miles. Our hotel provided a map of the strip (when they tried forcing us to buy tickets for a show) so we set off to see it all!

One of the things we had on our list was to see the Titanic exhibit at the Luxor. We were going to buy tickets from Groupon, but then waited till we actually got there after I read about the TIX4TONIGHT ticket stores. Forget Groupon and for the ticket stores! The original ticket prices through the Luxor were $35 per ticket; Groupon was $28.50; and we scored from tix4tonight paying only $23! That was a savings of $24! 

The exhibit had a ticket rule of no photography, but I'm a rebel and of course snapped a few photos. That was before my flash went off and I almost got us kicked out of the exhibit!

Over all the exhibit kind of sucked. I'm a huge Titanic lover (have seen since I was really little) so I have seen these multiple things about it. I saw this exhibit in 2000 and I remember it being longer and having more artifacts to see. We visited a Titanic exhibit in the Anaheim last spring and it was way better! There were film clips explaining things about the wreck and more artifacts.

Another thing we did to save money on food and drinks was to bring some of our own. I pack some granola bars, oatmeal packets, a sliced up sub sandwich from Vons, yogurts, gatorade, cans of beer, and wine. I also brought an empty water bottle to put some wine in to drink while we walked around. I carried beers in my purse so David could have a few while walked around. Each drink is about $7 and up! No thank you!

We did splurge and get Fat Tuesday's twice. They are are alcoholic slushie drinks and oh so delicious.  For Vegas and the drinks being a foot long, they were super affordable! They were $14 for the initial drink and $11 for refills. When we had dinner at Treasure Island our first night David got a mixed drink and it was $12.

Visiting Vegas at the very end of November we were able to see the holiday decor begin going up. Lots of the hotels had beautiful Christmas trees and other decorations. Sadly we weren't able to see the seasonal garden set up but at the Bellagio since it wasn't set up quite yet. At least I was able to convince David to get a "kissy" photo in front of the big tree.

Until next time,

Kandi Lorene

Erin Condren Horizontal Life Planner Purple Spread

Hello Everyone!

For 2014 I fell in love with the Erin Condren Life Planner... and I fell into the world of decorative planning. I have always used a paper planner, well since middle school. And now that I think about how long that's been... well it seems like a long time!

When the 2015-2016 planners by EC came out I fell in love with the horizontal! I still miss the vertical at times and one day I might go back to it, but at the moment my brain is working in the horizontal format.

I began going sticker crazy trying to find practical and functional stickers that fit the horizontal. I know you can cut down the vertical sticker (and I have multiple times) but I wanted to cheat some days! After the cost of buying stickers on Easy became pricey very quickly, I began exploring ways to make my own.

Avery has a great web site that you can make stickers within their predetermined formats. I strongly suggest their 1.5inx1.5in boxes that you can make plenty of things with!

Then I discovered that Silhouette has a free design program and I went to town! So many ladies on the EC Horizontal group on Facebook expressed their want/need for this spread, so here I am to deliver!!

Please download and use at your pleaser! All I ask is if you use this spread please give me the credit for it like you would any other sticker shop! I put lots of time into this and would love to continue designing layouts for ladies in the future. Feel free to tag me in you Instagram posts (I'm at @kandilorene) or on Facebook (also @kandilorene)!

I plan to use this spread for the week of November 2nd-8th! I hope so of you ladies join me and I can't wait to see your spreads!

How I plan on printing my stickers:

1. I will be printing my stickers on Avery sticker paper (here) or you can print on regular paper and use sticky adhesive on the back!
2. Follow your printer directions to print them correctly
3. And cut! I will be cutting these by hand, I do not own a cutting machine.

Please give me all type of feedback to help me make these better in the future! 

Get your own Purple Spread by Kandi Lorene

Always,

Kandi