Lately my day to day life has been insanity. Just constant all over the place need to do this need to do that… all.day.long. I’m a work at home mommy who was blessed with an extraordinarily good baby who -loves- her sleep..but I’m so overtaken by my business that there still isn’t enough time in my day. I have days where I feel like I am really losing my  sanity because I am just so tired and still have about 342 things on my Lilly to do list!

Like I said above my daughter sleeps ridiculously well. We’re talking 12-13 hours every night and two naps during the day that last anywhere from 1-3 hours a piece. Thank god for that because my business has been SO backed up with orders lately that I really need that time to write back customers and work on their orders. Don’t get me wrong..I’m SO thankful business is good and I also get to stay at home with my baby girl. I know it’s because I work from home that we were able to splurge and get a pool and privacy fence this year on top of going to the ocean again for a week in August so it’s totally worth it. I do sometimes have to toss around the idea of hiring someone either to help me with my orders or watch Lelia a little bit while I get some work done but we will see. Right now I’ve been lucky enough to have my mom come on Wednesday for the past couple of weeks so that totally helps. Especially since we are planning on hosting Lelia’s blessing at our house in less than a month and need to get the house in order as well.

On a completely different note I use Adobe Photoshop CS5 a ton for designing things for my biz and came across a really annoying issue where I would send an item to print and it would print the wrong amount of copies. Let’s say I’d send job 1 to print with 4 copies, job 2 to print with 1 copy and job 3 to print with 2 copies..well job 1 would print whatever my last job’s copy request was..job 2 would print 4 copies..job 3 would print 1 copy and so on. Basically the printer is always one job’s # of copies behind..completely screwing up my print outs! I tried to check out the adobe forums but the adobe technicians are a waste of energy. Apparently this is a common problem for Photoshop CS5 with many brands and builds of printers and has been for over a year now but the techs blame it on printer drivers despite it happening with many different printers and only one application (CS5). I  found it crazy that not only is the problem still lingering this long but the one tech (ahemChrisCoxahem) had the nerve to be a douche-canoe to a customer looking for help. Fix your shiz!! For those of you who came across my blog because of this problem I did find a workaround that works for me in the meantime and may work for you as well. When you go to print make sure you click “print settings” and change the number of copies in that dialog box instead of changing the copies in the initial adobe print box. (I have to click the advanced tab within this settings box but your printer settings may be different.) I’ve found when I do this and then send to print the jobs print as they should. I don’t know why..but it works for me! So give it a try so you don’t waste a ton of expensive paper on copies you didn’t intend to print! 🙂

That ends my whirlwind of a blog post for now because the hubby just came in with hot dogs from the grill (and baby Leel’s is fast asleep!) Dinner time!

Now that I can drink caffeine again I had to attempt making my own copy cat frappucino (like Starbuck’s!). Especially since it’s hot out now and the usual hot coffee isn’t always so appealing. I looked around online and came up with my own concoction of things compiling a few recipes. It turned out delicious! I figured I would share since I came up with it myself so you won’t find the exactly recipe elsewhere. (At least..that I know of? Heehee)

Lilly’s Homemade Frappucino Copy Cat Recipe (Iced Coffee)

Ingredients –

2 tablespoons of flavored coffee OR a flavored K-Cup (I put 2 tbsp of Wegmans White Chocolate truffle into a reusable K-Cup filter)
4 tbsp heavy cream
2 heaping spoonfuls of Splenda
2 tbsp caramel syrup (I used Gloria Jean’s vanilla caramel syrup, purchased at their store in the mall!)
Just over 1 cup of ice

Instructions –

1. Brew your coffee on the iced coffee setting. (If your brewer doesn’t have this setting just brew it strong (5-6oz cup). If you don’t have a keurig you could probably just brew 2 tbsp of coffee with 5-6oz of water). Basically you want a strong coffee base!

2. Put ice in blender.

3. Add 4 tbsp of heavy whipping cream to your coffee. Stir and then pour over the ice in your blender.

4. Add 2 heaping spoons of splenda (or sugar if you aren’t watching your weight or hate artificial sweeteners).

5. Add 2 tbsp of caramel syrup.

6. Blend until smooth and frothy.

7. If you want to get a little crazy you can add some whipped cream on top now..I didn’t but I’m sure it would taste fantabulous. I just figured my thighs wouldn’t agree! 😛

That’s it! Mine turned out so yummy.

I am going to play with the recipe a bit and see how it turns out with some skim milk swapped in for the heavy cream to save some calories. I think the total calories for mine was 290 calories which isn’t too bad. Sometimes that’s all I have time for in the morning with a 6 month old so it ends up being my breakfast plus energy boost with the caffeine!

If you have any ideas or tweaks feel free to share them in the comments!