You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their checkbook, right?
Well, while we’re not showing you our checkbook (partially because we don’t even have a checkbook anymore 🤗 ), we WILL show you the last 10 items we ordered off Amazon, which we thought might be fun for y’all to see!
a.k.a. Get to know us even better! 😂 (Feel free to sing “Getting to Know You” while reading this because that’s what’s playing in my head.)
I’ll give a brief explanation on some of them where applicable.
#1: Portable Outdoor Speakers!
Long-term, we’d love to put in a wireless speaker system or something for our outdoors space, but our backyard is HUGE!
So until we get that figured out, I asked Matt to find me the best portable wireless speaker system he could, so that if the girls and I were out by the pool, or in The Artist Studio, or even in the front yard gardening in the courtyard, we could play music from my phone wherever we happened to be!
He found me THIS speaker, and it’s been sooooooo fun for the girls and I to listen to music on a nice set of speakers outdoors. The girls love to carry it with the cool soft-ish handle. Plus, I thought it was inexpensive considering what some people pay for outdoor speaker systems. Why spend more than I have to? 😁 And this came at zero inconvenience of having a workman come out and deal with that.
Here are our Portable Outdoor Speakers. We LOVE it! Have already been blasting some good pool party music while we swim in the spring heat wave.
#2: Long Dry Brush!
Have you read about the benefits of dry brushing? I finally caved and bought a small one, then realized I wanted this long one too. Feels so good… I don’t even know how to explain it…so if you know, you know. 😆
Here’s the dry brush I have.
#3: Finally found My Perfect Hydration Pack!
I’ve been walking a lot more lately, whether it’s on a local hike, our neighborhood, or on the beach, and hate trying to cart a water bottle around.
After a LOT of trial and error, I found the perfect-sized hydration pack. So many were too large, or too small (I wanted it to be able to hold a snack or small lunch but didn’t want a massive hiking pack either), or the clips were weird, or it looked weird, or I didn’t like the hose, or it had a skeleton logo on it that just didn’t bring joy on a lovely hike in nature…😂 You get my drift. Jess is particular!
So, if you’re picky like me, learn from all my hours or hard work: this is the hydration pack I found. And dozens of walks & hikes later, I LOVE IT!
Sometimes being uber-particular is worth it. 🤗
Here’s my hydration pack.
#4-5: HOURS OF UNINTERRUPTED PLAY!
The next two items we bought were two enhancements to our girls’ Lego creations from scratch!
They’re really into building their own Lego houses from basic blocks, which is uber-creative, but they’re finding they want to create more of a “village” from their imaginations. (With pet shops, vet clinics, homes for animals…notice a trend?)
So even though we’ve tried to make them stick with what they’ve got, they only had 2 doors and 2 green base plates between them, so we decided to buck up and get them THESE and THESE.
Hours of uninterrupted play for your kids = GOLD.
#6: Pepper Spray in Cute Colors! 😆
Speaking of my long walks in #3, let’s face it: sometimes you just need to carry pepper spray when you’re a woman walking alone in isolated places. (I don’t have a lot of faith in my emergency cell phone button.)
And when they come in cute colors, it’s a double bonus. 😆
Here are the ones Matt got me.
#7-8: Non-toxic Sunscreen in 2 forms!
#7 is My favorite non-toxic facial sunscreen. We spend a LOT of time outside, especially now that it’s spring going into summer, and I’m trying to be good about always putting it on. It’s in a tube and I keep it in my topmost vanity drawer, not to be confused with…
#8. …funnily enough, the next item was this mini-sunscreen bar, which the girls and I love for our faces because it comes in a little bar and we don’t have to get our hands covered in sunscreen when we’re going out and about! (I keep 1 of these mini bars in my car and 1 in our entry & exit Drop Zone!)
#9: Earned item for my daughter!
My daughters earn their own money (that’s a whole other story—you’ll have to leave a comment below to let me know if anyone’s even interested in hearing about it because I would never get into this normally!).
And THIS is what she chose with her last savings goal.
(Quick backstory: Last year at the famous Monterey Aquarium, she saw this one and fell in love. Her doe-eyes looked up at me and asked if she could get it as her souvenir. I could immediately see this was not a normal kid “I want this” but true love at first sight. I looked at the price tag, then found it on my phone on Amazon, then made her a deal: if she could wait for it, I’d buy it for her. It was at least half the price on Amazon and is on sale right now! She loves it and named it Clara.)
Fast-forward to now: she has been saving up for weeks to “buy Clara a mate.” Her words, not mine. We searched online until she found the perfect one. His name is Clark, and here he is!
Welcome to my world.
It has been months and months since she got the first one, and she still sleeps with Clara in bed at night and treats her almost as carefully as a newborn baby. The new one is now added in and has become her new favorite!
#10: Epsom Salts!
I started having restless-feeling legs sometimes in the middle of the night—and solved it by simply taking a luxurious bath (in our extra-long bathtub!) a few nights a week with just a cupful of these Epsom salts.
Do you get overly excited about solving an issue naturally and not having to go get medication from a doctor? Because I do! 🤣 I’m SUPER thankful for all you doctors, but—no offense—I don’t want to see you in the office.
Here is the kind I get!
Are you still singing “Getting to Know You?” 🎵 hehe 😊
Next, you can Shop Our House (items we’ve bought, loved, & have been featured on our blog) or see how we organized our vanity interior in our Design Guides!
➜ Our complete list of every single home project is viewable HERE!
