Anyone who’s lost a loved one to cancer knows how devastating the disease can be. Cancer effected my family when my Grandfather was diagnosed. Unfortunately, he didn’t recover and lost his life at only 62 years old. This caused terrible pain for the entire family, but was the worst for my Grandmother. Instead of spending their golden years together as intended, she spent the last 22 years of her life all alone as a widow.

Cancer is and always will be a horrible disease, but there have been many advances—one of the best being early detection. Anyone who is at risk for Prostate cancer needs to know about Prolaris.

Prolaris is a genetic test for prostate cancer from Myriad Genetics Laboratories that combines traditional risk factors with molecular assessment. Prolaris is the only test that measures how fast prostate cancer cells are dividing. The information obtained from this test greatly impacts the treatment choices that someone diagnosed with Prostate cancer would choose. 

 

Over 1.2 million biopsies a year lead to 240,000 prostate cancer diagnoses and 30,000 deaths. Prostate cancer is the 2nd leading cause of cancer related death in the United States. Since women tend to take the dominant role in health care and screening in our homes, we need to be more educated about Prostate cancer and in turn, to educate the men in our lives.

When it comes to health, knowledge truly is power, and Polaris wants you to be informed. You could also win a huge $2,000 giveaway! Sign up yourself and a loved one up for a series of 3 emails that will empower you with what you need to know about prostate cancer. 

$1000 for you + $1000 for him + better health = Winning Combination.

 

This post was sponsored by Prolaris and Myriad Genetics via Global Influence.

 

This post contains affiliate links and I may be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

Like many great companies before it, Blurb was actually started by accident. In the early 2000s, Eileen Gittins, Blurbs’ Founder, rekindled a passion for photography while trying to figure out her next career gig. She wanted to compile her photos into a nice coffee table photo book, but she only wanted to print a handful of copies. The conundrum was that every publisher was quoting her hundreds of dollars for each book!

She found this curious and frustrating. So she asked herself, are there other people like me who want to affordably create their own high-quality book from their photos? The answer, of course, was yes, and it changed her life—and book publishing—forever.

 
In 2006, Eileen launched Blurb, a simple book-designing platform and a publishing process that could quickly produce beautifully made books at game-changing price. All of these categories are available:

• Cookbooks
• Photo books
• Yearbooks
• Ebooks
• Magazines, and more

  Blurb doesn’t just help people make books and magazines, they also help market them by providing publishers with their own dedicated sales page. Blurb’s dedicated sales pages allows authors to:

• Make their book or magazine available to the public or by invitation-only
• Write a compelling book description
• Customize a preview of their book
• Share their book with others on social media

Blurb also created their publishing platform to work seamlessly with Amazon and Apple iBooks Store so authors would have even more options for how they sell their books.

There are so many remarkable things to share about Blurb – too much for just one post! So keep an eye out for next week’s post because I’ll be sharing some of my favorite Blurb tools and tips — which, if you’re like me, will leave you thinking … “I didn’t know Blurb could do all that!”

Oh! And I almost forgot to mention that now through 4/28 you can get 20% off any book you create! 

This post contains affiliate links and I may be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on my links.

Get ready to wrap your baby in the most adorable and softest fabric around. Eleventh Avenue just launched their exclusive brand of swaddle blankets called Captain SillyPants. These are the perfect swaddles to help your baby make the transition from womb to world, with a sense of safety, comfort… and style, of course!

Captain SillyPants Swaddles are offered exclusively at Eleventh Avenue and they are sure to be a huge hit! If you pre-order your favorite designs now, you can get these swaddles at Eleventh Avenue’s very limited pre-order price of only $18.99 (usually they are $34.99). 

These would make a great gift for any mom-to-be.

 

What’s the best thing to do when you wake up at 4:00AM and can’t fall back asleep? Clean, of course! Here’s a rundown of my morning cleaning adventure.

Project #1: Garage

I’ve been waiting for the weather to get warmer to tackle this monumental project. When it finally hit 50 degrees, I got busy. For such a small space, I’m amazed at how messy it can be—especially after a long, cold, snowy winter. Basically, the garage had become a dumping ground for our leftover boxes, newspaper, junk, and so on. To make this mess even worse, a lot of it was moldy/mushy because the roof is leaking periodically.

I sorted through everything, made 3 piles—keep, donate, trash—and tried to make a dent in the chaos. Most of the extra boxes are broken down, I threw away 3 bags of junk, and dropped off 1 big bag at Goodwill. Huge improvement!

Project #2: Trash Can

No, my whole day didn’t revolve around trash, but our main trash can had developed an off smell. I rinsed it out with regular cleanser and scrubbed off some stains, then rinsed it again, and dried it out. Believe it or not, it still wasn’t 100% fresh. I put some cranberry and almond oil on a cloth and rubbed that over the whole thing. Now it not only looks clean, but it smells good, too. I’m sure it won’t last long, but it’s just nice to know my trash can is clean and smelling fresh every once in a while!

Project #3: Kitchen

While my kitchen wasn’t too bad, I really wanted to deep clean every possible area. Suffering through food poisoning last week has made me very cautious. Plus, it was time to turn the kitchen back over from Passover. I’ll be 100% honest here: It was way too much for me. I cleaned the counters, trash can, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, sponged off the outside of every appliance, and felt ready to drop! My head started to ache and I was feeling dizzy, so I wisely stopped. I intend to finish the rest tomorrow if I’m up to it, but for now, I’m too tired.

After a very productive morning, I made a fresh fruit salad, and spent 2 hours with my feet up, watching Lifetime Movie Network. Not bad for a day’s work!

 

What have you cleaned lately?