Mommy Greenest

I didn’t request this junk mail catalogue. I didn’t order anything from this company or agree to be on their mailing list — yet, somehow, I am. Junk mail is the same thing as spam email — you buy or sign up for something and the company sells your information to another company, who sells it to someone else, and so on. 

And I’m sick of it. All that paper — those poor trees! Not to mention the carbon footprint of sending unwanted coupons, credit card offers, insurance solicitations, and catalogues to me and every other person who never asked for them. So I did a little research and discovered that it takes just a few minutes and costs nothing to get off of junk mail lists. Let’s do this!

As I shared recently, night sweats wreak havoc with sleep. Because they wake you up. Two, three, four times a night. It’s like having a newborn all over again, but the baby is your own damn self. And once you wake up sweaty, it’s really hard to get back to sleep again. I’ve tried sheep. I’ve counted backward. I’ve experimented natural sleep aids like melatonin, which seem to wear off around 2 a.m. and can leave me with a headache. I’ve tried the mantra I was given by my yoga teacher: inhale on “so” exhale on “hum,” which roughly translates to “I am the universe and the universe is me.” (But also reminds me of Winnie the Pooh, strangely?)

Sometimes these things work, and sometimes they don’t — and those times are hell.

So when Prima invited me to become an affiliate* and offered to send me a bottle of their Sleep Tight CBD natural sleep aid, I was intrigued. Want to learn more, score a 15% discount on everything prima — and, possibly, win some Sleep Tight (plus their cult-favorite Bath Gem) for yourself? Read on!

When my husband and I got married, back in the dark ages of the 1990s, custom invitations were prohibitively expensive. We’re both pretty creative and share a weird sense of humor and what we wanted — a four-part custom invitation “experience” created with translucent paper and card stock — was definitely out of our price range. So we did what any resourceful and relatively poor twenty-something engaged couple would do: We went to my husband’s work after hours and “borrowed” their industrial printers.

When you opened the envelope, the first card you saw was a cropped photograph of couple dancing — he in dark pants and she with a full white skirt that’s fluid with motion — with the word “wedding” printed underneath. Through the vellum, you could read our names, the date and time, and the location. But when you flipped over that card, the next revealed two monkeys above that information. 

Funny, right?

You kind of had to be there but honestly, the joke was on us. Because if you calculated all the time we spent printing and photocopying our custom invitations, manually cropping with the gigantic guillotine that I was terrified would cut my fingers off, and gluing the images onto the cards so that they were perfectly aligned (impossible), our wedding invitations probably cost six months’ worth of the minimum wages we were making at the time.

My, how things have changed. Spring is the season for announcements — from graduation to wedding to baby — and I recently discovered an online option that changes the entire custom invitation and card-making game. It’s ridiculously more affordable and totally easy-peasy — which is perfect, because I am way too old to “borrow” a printer. Want to learn more — and score a 15% off discount?