Happy 34th Anniversary to My Wonderful Husband 🙂

Grab Bag Workout Warriors:

In case you get bored in the gym:

Grab Bag Sleep Snacks:

Super foods for super sleeeeeeeeppp.

Hot cocoa at bedtime!: Chocolate contains tryptophan to make you happy and relaxed, and chocolate is, in fact, one of the richest dietary sources of magnesium, a natural sedative that can greatly improve sleep. A deficiency of magnesium can result in difficulty sleeping, constipation, muscle tremors or cramps, anxiety, irritability, and pain.

Tea time: Just pick the right tea for bedtime: Try Valerian, chamomile, sage or lemon balm.

Go nuts: Walnuts. Super high in melatonin, which offers super sleep and is an antioxidant.

Cheers! Cherry! Juice!: ½-1 cup of tart cherry juice one hour before bed has been shown to improve sleep.

Seeds of change: If you have trouble staying asleep or wake frequently throughout the night, your serotonin and melatonin levels may be out of whack. Sesame seeds, chia seeds and pumpkin seeds all can help. Pumpkin seed powder is the new “warm glass of milk”. Try an evening snack of ¼ cup pumpkin seeds (or 2 tablespoons pumpkin powder), 1-2 tablespoons chia seeds and ¾ cup of unsweetened Greek yogurt.

Nighty Night 🙂

Grab Bag Good Tips:

Get rid of labels and sticky gunk: Equal parts veg. oil and baking soda… leave on 2-3 minutes and use your fingers to rub off.

When buying fruit and veggies, always soak them in a 1:4 ratio of vinegar and water to help remove toxins and pesticides. Leave them soaking for up to an hour, longer with nonorganic apples. At the end of the bath, sometimes you can even see cloudy like stuff in the water from the skins and waxes, and dirt on the bottom. The vinegar is KEY.

Put onions in pantyhose, and tie knots between onion. Plus it makes a freaky wall art installation 🙂

Place ethylene absorbers in your fridge. A set of 3 costs $16. These little pods absorb the ethylene emitted by fruits and vegetables to keep them fresh up to 3x longer. Here’s a handy list of ethylene-producing and ethylene-sensitive foods.

Grab Bag Inspire Me:

There’s a great website called Quora.com, where they pose all kinds of questions and the answers are shared and voted on.

Here are the top answers to the question,

“What is the nicest thing you’ve ever done that no one knows about?”

Anonymous

7765 votes

My ma has my kidney. 

I can never tell her. She would have never agreed. And she will regret it forever if I told her now.

She thinks it’s someone who sold it to us. And that she was so lucky to have got a “donor” within 3 months of needing it.

The amazing feeling of having done this for my ma is something I can never explain to anyone. No one knows about this – except my wife!

Anonymous

2802 votes

At 27, I used all my money to buy my parents a house. They didn’t know it was all my money at the time.

I sold a tech company for a small exit in 2010. Everyone was extremely proud of me, but no one knew the exact amount I made, but everyone assumed I did really well. In actuality, I only made just over a hundred thousand dollars. I purposefully hid the amount because I wanted to use all the money to buy my parents a house, and I knew that my parents would never accept me buying them a house with the money from my sale. So with no one knowing, I drained my account (after paying taxes) and bought my parents a 1-story house in Texas (where I grew up). I did this because they had been living in a small two-story house that, in recent years, could no longer accommodate my sick and increasingly wheel-chair-bound dad.

Everyone assumed I had made a large amount of money and that this was one of many things I used the money on. In reality, this was my exit and my dream gift. This gift allowed my dad to live out the remainder of his life in dignity and it brought a tremendous stabilizing force to our family life. It stands as the nicest thing I’ll likely ever do.

Since then, I’ve made more money, my dad passed away, and my mom lives in that house, now full of great memories. We look back with great joy at those last few years with my dad, and I’m glad I could make it as comfortable for him as possible.

Anonymous

2717 votes

One day as a young child I found $23 scattered on a field and it brought me great joy.

I’ve grown old, and I’ve never told anyone this but now when I walk past an empty playground or schoolyard I go in and take some money from my wallet and drop it on the ground.

Clare Tomlinson, Paramedic

544 votes

A few years ago one of my friends was really struggling for money, so I took her out for lunch and while we were out and about, I put £20 in her pocket so she would find it later on and think it was just money that she had forgotten about! She was one of those people that never would have asked for help and never complained about “being skint”, She never would have accepted a handout from anyone, so I thought this was the next best thing!

A few days later she told me about finding the money in her pocket and how pleased she was that she could use it for some food shopping.

To this day I have never told her where the money came from, and I never will. It was only a small amount of money (Which was all I could afford to give away at the time) but it meant a massive amount to my friend.

Lucas Mund, History teacher and trivia geek

222 votes

Just after college my wife and I were planning our wedding. Both of us did not have good jobs but had lots debt from college. We both were living at our parents’ houses until we could get enough money for the wedding and an apartment. We had a hard time even paying for gas to drive the 30 mins each way to see each other.

Then one day my mom found an envelope in her mailbox that had my wife and I’s names on it so she gave it to us. It didn’t have a stamp or address. Someone had just dropped it in her mailbox. Inside was $300 cash. No note, name or anything. That $300 went a long way for us at the time.

Now that we are on our feet, when my wife and I know someone is in need we drop $300 cash in their mailbox in a plain envelope. We have done this 3 times so far and we love it each time!

Grab Bag Brain Game:

Some language skills to practice! Good game with various types of challenges and levels.

THE RIGHT WORD

Grab Bag Funny Stuff:

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