Food Fun Family

Tips for Selling on eBay #SellOnEBAY

Lolli — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:37:25 +0000

My journey as an eBay seller…

After my 5th child was born back in 2005, I discovered and fell head over heels in love with a brand new trend – baby wearing. Yes, mothers have been wearing their babies for ages, but it wasn’t until my last baby was born that I started seeing women in the US wearing anything other than a Baby Bjorn.

I was fascinated by the idea of freeing my hands and wearing my baby everywhere without killing my back. Yes, I owned a few Baby Bjorns and a name-brand sling which I never liked. But when I happened to find something about making wraps, my parenting life was revolutionized. I wore AJ everywhere I went and became obsessed with shopping for fabric.

Everywhere I went, people asked me where I had gotten such an amazing baby carrier, and so I decided to go into business selling them on eBay.

My Mom and Roo Wraps were a hot seller. When I started selling my wraps on eBay, there weren’t any other homemade baby wraps on the market, so my cheaper-than-name-brand wraps with unique fabrics sold out faster than I could shop for new fabric. I loved it.

For several years, the profits from my eBay store funded all of our holiday shopping. I loved having a small business that I could run, not only with my kids by my side, but promoting mother-child bonding. And I loved having my own income coming in.

I eventually stopped selling wraps, but I have continued to buy and sell on eBay over the years. Of course, my years of selling on eBay has taught me a few things about what works and what doesn’t work.

My top 5 Tips for selling on eBay

Photos – Bright, clear, and uncluttered photos often make or break a sale. When taking photos of your items to sell, use a clean, uncluttered background with plenty of light. Take multiple shots of the item, showing different sides and angles if appropriate.
Description – Leave a detailed products description. I try to think of all of the questions I would ask if I were looking at this listing.
Communication – Send your sellers a quick note at the end of the sale thanking them for making a purchase and pass along the tracking information so they know when their package will arrive. Always remember to leave feedback.
Simplify shipping – One of the things that held me back from selling at first was the thought of having to go to the post office with little kids (holy torture). I took care of that hurdle by purchasing padded envelopes and stocking up on the free flat rate boxes from the post office. Anytime I make a sale, I simply print off a USPS shipping label on my printer, attach it to the package, and leave it with the rest of my out-going mail. No trips to the post office!
Use eBay’s Mobile App to list items quickly – back “in the day” when I started selling on eBay, smart phones didn’t exist, and I admit….sometimes it would take me a while to list items for sale. Now, I use the mobile app, which I downloaded to my iPad and my Android phone. Last month, I listed about 20 books and DVDs in about 10 minutes while sitting on the floor in my family room. It couldn’t have been easier!

How it works: With the eBay Mobile app, you can easily scan a product and the app will pull up product information and photos, research competitive pricing, and take additional photos with your mobile device. It was all so seamless and smooth I wanted to search the house for more things to sell!

Join us for a Twitter Party with $500 in Prizes!

I’m excited to join Splash Creative Media as a panelist for the Sell on eBay twitter party on Thursday. We’ll be sharing a ton more eBay selling tips and giving out a ton of prizes. Here are the deets:

Date: Thursday, November 15th

Time: 3-4pm ET/ 12pm-1pm PT

Prizes: We’re giving away $500 in eBay gift cards! (20 $25 eBay gift cards)

Where: The party is being hosted by Bumebox on ebay.com/sellonmobile. You must tweet from this location to be entered to win a prize. (Please note, this link will not be live until the day of the party!)

Hope to see you there!!

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post through Splash Creative Media on behalf of eBay. All thoughts, opinions, and eBay selling experiences are my own.

10 Reasons I Wish I Lived Close to Family

Lolli — Tue, 01 May 2012 01:40:28 +0000

When we graduated from college and made the trek across the country to settle on the East Coast, we left all of my extended family back in the West. I loved growing up with my grandparents and aunts and uncles and dozens and dozens of cousins. Holiday meals together, vacations in Tahoe together, and plenty of shared memories. We lived close enough but not too close. It was a perfect childhood (mostly).

But when CandyMan and I dragged our then-tiny family of three to the East Coast, we left all of that behind. For many years, my kids lived without cousins and aunts and uncles nearby…until my sister moved to the DC area several years ago. We were nearby…but not too close. It was perfect (for me and my sister and for our kids). My kids finally had the chance to develop close cousin relationships, and they loved having them around.

While my sister now loves a little further away, we’re still close enough for Spring Break and holiday get togethers, and my kids and I crave the time we get to spend together. But during normal months, we’re just a little too far away for spontaneous get togethers, and after the winter months, we realized it had been way too long.

Here are a few reasons I wish I loved closer to family:

1- Aunts and uncles are perfect mentors and confidants. I’ve seen my older kids open up to my sister about things they might not want to talk about with me (particularly boy and girl issues).

2- Cousins are a perfect extension of the sibling relationship. They love each other like family, but they don’t see each other so much that they get sick of each other.

3- When family lives nearby, you have a perfect low-cost staycation at your finger tips.

4- Holidays are so much better with extended family and a full table.

5- My own sibling relationships are so much better now that we are all adults….but I only see my other siblings once a year at best. My relationship with my sister Andrea has grown since we’ve gotten to know each other as adults.

6- Automatic babysitting network. I would have loved having my sister close by when my kids were little. Now, though, I send my older girls to her house for a few weeks during the summer to be mommy’s helpers. Kids and aunt and cousins love it equally.

7- This is very me-specific, but my sister Andrea and I dream about the day when we could live close enough where we could open up a photography studio together. I love that we share a mutual hobby and interests.

8- Opportunities to take off my “Mommy hat.” Especially when my kids were younger and under foot, I felt like I never had a true “day off” (or even an afternoon off) until I went to Grandma’s house. Just being near my family makes me feel a little more relaxed and a little less pressured to be “on” all the time.

9- It’s easy to lose track of what’s going on when you’re scattered. As easy as it may be to communicate nowadays, it’s still tough for me to really stay involved in my family’s lives when I am across the country from them (and on a different time zone).

10- Never having to travel for holidays. I know I mentioned holidays earlier. This is different. I love spending holidays with family, but I admit that traveling during the holidays is less than ideal. Knock out the travel factor and it’s perfect.

Do you live near family? What are the benefits and disadvantages of your situation?

How to Increase Family Bonding With Technology

Lolli — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:57:17 +0000

Some people would cringe after hearing what I’m about to say, but I’m going to stick with my opinion here:

A good deal of my family’s best bonding time is spent on electronics.

I used to think of technology – television, computers, mobile phones, iPads, iTouches, etc – as isolating devices. Often they are. But when used properly, they can connect the generations in ways that some face-to-face interaction fails.

Note: I am not saying that we shouldn’t turn off the computers, get out of the house, and enjoy some good old fashioned fun together. I place great value on the outings that we take together, the car rides to and from practices, the errands that we run together, and the meals that we cook side by side. We eat dinner together every night, with all 7 of us squeezing around the table. There are no phones or iPads or computers at dinner. Just us.

There is a time and a place for technology in the family, just as there are times where it’s appropriate to turn it all off. The key is balance and knowing when it’s the “right time.”

Below are a few of my favorite occasions to keep the devices turned on to increase family bonding…

How we use technology to build our family bonds:

Texting – I fought texting for many years. I didn’t want to get into the “craze” and didn’t see any reason to pay the extra money on my cell phone bill. Then my oldest daughter entered her teen years. We got a very basic pre-paid phone (by basic, I mean that she could make and receive calls and texts. That’s it.) and because we could text three times for the same price as a single one-minute call, we encouraged texting to check in (when she was ready to be picked up, etc). It didn’t take long for me to become a true believer.

Flash forward a couple of years. While I am still not an avid texter in general, I use texting regularly to communicate with my teen. it’s a “language” that teens are comfortable with and accept. Texting may open a door of communication for a parent that normally would be closed.

The Wii – CandyMan, my husband, was adamantly against owning a gaming system for years. After I successfully exercised with my friend’s Wii for a period of months, I was able to convince CandyMan that a gaming system was not all bad. We have spent more time laughing, dancing, and playing together with the Wii than ever before. I have made it a point to only purchase games that can be played together.

Skype – I love the way that Skype connects family members wherever they are – whether Mom or Dad are on a business trip, or the kids want to talk with their cousins in another state. One of our frequent uses of Skype, since CandyMan and I both work at home (with offices on different floors), is to send messages or quick questions back and forth via Skype. It’s silly but it works.

eBooks – Our Kindles and kindle apps on other devices have awakened the love of reading in my kids….and reading together. My two youngest kids love to see books on my iPad, and so we are spending more time reading out loud together than we have in a long time.

Touch devices and Apps – We currently have an iPad, an Android tablet, two iTouches, an iPhone, and an Android phone in our house. They are each full of apps and games. While those games have typically been played alone, we recently discovered an app called Draw Something (available in both the iTunes store and the Android marketplace – now Google Play). We have installed it on all of the touch screen devices and have multiple games going on within the family. We have So. Much. Fun.

For the last several nights after dinner, the entire family has congregated in the family room where we have sprawled out on couches and chairs and on the floor, helping each other guess pictures and then draw pictures to send off to someone across the room. CandyMan and I used to play card and board games together for hours way back when….but the kids just don’t seem to have the patience or the interest to regularly play card or board games together. Ages differences stand out, and people get frustrated. Not so with Draw Something. Everyone is enjoying themselves equally.

The main reason that all of these things work – at least for us – is that the technology captures the kids’ attention. By reaching out to our kids WITH technology rather than trying to fight it, we are speaking their language and meeting on common ground. Because let’s face it, I am a technology-connected mama. I might as well use my knowledge of and ease around my gadgets to build bridges and strengthen my bonds with my kids.

For us, it is working just perfectly.

What are your favorite ways to bond through technology?

OldBooth App – My Family’s Newest Craze

Lolli — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:47:53 +0000

We’re a little obsessed…

Let me start off my saying that this is not sponsored. True story – I was looking through pictures on Instagram the other day when I saw a photo that cracked me up. The caption mentioned an app called OldBooth, so I checked out the App Store on my iPhone and downloaded the free “lite” version.

After playing around with it for a just a short time over the weekend (and seeing how incredibly entertained my kids were) I bought the full version ($1.99). It was completely worth it.

Really….what’s more fun than creating funny pictures of your family members (or taking shots of sleeping parents to use for fun…)?

Oh, yes, my friends. This is just the beginning. Can you tell who’s who?

It’s like looking through an old yearbook.

PS – there might be some cousins and grandparents in the mix…

And I’m sure they are going to LOVE these new pictures. Ha!

Sisterhood of the Bloggess’ Traveling Red Dress

Lolli — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 15:55:00 +0000

I wrote this post the day after BlogHer ended, and it has been sitting in my drafts since. I didn’t make it to BlogHer this year and was pretty sad about missing it until I attended a local HomeHer party for all of those who couldn’t make the conference.

I go to many local blogging events each year, but this particular one was different, and I was grateful that I was there instead of at BlogHer this year.

I was pouring myself my first plastic cup of Coke when I heard cheering from the other room.

Surrounded by women in jean shorts and sandals stood a woman in a fancy red dress.

“It’s the Bloggess’ red dress,” I heard.

I figured there must be a story behind the red dress, but it wasn’t until much later in the evening that I heard its history and its significance.

Every 5 to 10 minutes for the rest of the night, a different woman would walk down the stairs in the Bloggess’ red dress. Smiling. Stunning. Glowing.

Everyone looked different. There were short women, tall women, blonde, brunette, thin, well-endowed, dark skinned, light.

As each person took a turn trying on the red dress, the energy in the room began to change. Something was happening to us.

Finally, it was my turn. I followed Amy up the stairs and was right behind her as she took the red dress off. I stepped into the dress and Kristen fastened the corset back.

In less than a minute, I was ready for my debut. I walked down the stairs and the room cheered.

I felt beautiful. But I realized with a jolt as my picture was being taken that I had no idea what I looked like at that moment.

Photo by MammaLoves

Each one of us had walked down those stairs into a room full of other women without ever passing a mirror. Everyone looked gorgeous but that was not what we were focused on.

The magic of the Bloggess’ traveling red dress was the way it made each woman feel.

Later that night, after the dress had been put away, I was sitting next to Susan. She told me the story of the dress and how it had come to be at our party.

The red dress’ history started with this post from the Bloggess. The dress has been shared with many women of various sizes, shapes, ages, and backgrounds, including a trip to BlogHer last year.

Recently, Susan, who has been battling breast cancer, tweeted about the constant pain she has been in.

The Bloggess noticed the tweets, and a few days later the red dress showed up on Susan’s door step.

She knew she had to share it.

And so it was that the Bloggess’ red dress ended up at a HomeHer party in Maryland.

I’m glad I ended up there, too.

Photos of everyone else taken on @AmusingFoodie‘s phone. See all of the pictures on her twitpic stream.

My iPhone Tells My Story – Photostory Friday

Lolli — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:48:53 +0000

I met the younger kids at the park after school. It’s our old, tried and true, Fall and Spring afternoon routine. The kids run around and release their end of the day wiggles and I get off my computer and enjoy some fresh air.

Today I purposefully brought my camera to the park so that I could capture all the fun we’ve been having there. And I left me memory card up by my computer at home.

So I pulled out my iPhone camera instead, and as I took pictures of the kids and looked through the photos I had taken during the week, I realized that my iPhones camera was a pretty good record of everything I’d done during the week. Good enough for a post, even.

Between BlogPaws, hurricanes, and the first day of school, this past week has been an eventful one.

PS – it feels like ages since I’ve been able to sit down and enjoy a day of reading blogs. The summer, with all 5 kids home, work, and travels, really took a toll on my blog reading. My goal this week is to visit everyone who links up. So expect a visit from me!

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli

To play Give Me Your Best Photo Story Friday, check this. Copy this code into your post and sign the link list:
<center><a href="https://foodfunfamily.com/tag/give-me-your-best-shot" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://mychaosmybliss.com" target="_blank"></a> Hosted by <a href="https://mychaosmybliss.com/" target="_blank">Cecily</a> and <a href="https://www.foodfunfamily.com" target="_blank">Lolli</a> </center>

Cube Dog – A Surprisingly Fun App for iPhone and iTouch

Lolli — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:00:05 +0000

Thank you to Cube Dog for sponsoring this review. For more information about Cube Dog please visit the Facebook page or download it on iTunes.

I keep reminding my kids (particularly my 10 year old son) that I did not get an iPhone so that they could play games.

I do have an iTouch for games, and the kids regularly play on it (anytime I need my iTouch, I know to ask KitKat or Twizzler. One of them will almost certainly know where it is). But the iPhone is mine.

I have several games installed on my iPhone, but not all of them capture my interest enough to pull me away from my never-ending to-do list. So I was slightly shocked at myself when I found myself playing a new game called Cube Dog as I sat in bed with the lights off. I really should have been sleeping. Instead, I was creating a trio of cute 3D animated dogs, which I named Neeta, Frida, and Keeta (what can I say? It was late).

After creating my dogs, I played games with them. Playing catch with a bouncy ball and petting them was super cute….but my favorite part, hands down, was the phone call feature. Your dog picks up his own iPhone, dials the number, and you receive an incoming call. Incredible.

I admit that I have kept my Cube Dogs to myself, because I’m a little afraid that the kids might become attached to these cute little virtual pets. AJ caught me playing earlier and was instantly intrigued. I can’t wait to see his face when one of the Cube Dogs calls him.

A few facts about the Cube Dog app:

It’s free!
You can create your own unique cube dog by selecting various parts and colors
The app utilizes full 3D graphics with ability to rotate and zoom
You can purchase extras within the app (just for fun, I purchased an extra accessory pack with additional body parts and a few games for just 99 cents)
Currently, the app is only compatible with iPhone 3gs and iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3rd and 4th generation (all require iOS 4.0 or higher)
Keep an eye on Cube Dog’s Facebook page to watch for a fun contest running June 13-17, 2011.

While Cube Dog provided me with the app to review, the opinions I’ve expressed here are solely my own and represent my honest viewpoint. Cube Dog, Clever Girls Collective and I promote Blog With Integrity.

Fun with Shaving Cream – Wordless Wednesday

Lolli — Wed, 04 May 2011 01:35:28 +0000

I never expected a can of shaving cream to bring all seven of us together at the same time, inspire so many smiles, and turn into something that the kids would be begging to do again next week.

An innocent cleaning out of the bathroom closet on my part became one of the best nights we’ve had together in a long time.

PS – as an added bonus, shaving cream cleans counters really well AND it makes hair soft and fluffy after washing. Just in case you wanted to know.

Linked up to Wordful Wednesday, Wordish Wednesday, and Wordless Wednesdays all over.

Are you playing along with Wordless or Wordful Wednesday today? Link up!
Want to grab my button?

Enough Pictures, Mom! A Wordless Wednesday Link-up

Lolli — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:00:53 +0000

I volunteered as a parent-helper for school picture day today. I think I’m rather pictured-out, too.

Linked up to Wordful Wednesday, Wordish Wednesday, and Wordless Wednesdays all over.

Are you playing along with Wordless or Wordful Wednesday today? Link up!
Want to grab my button?

A Glimpse Into my Life – Link Up!

Lolli — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 22:00:18 +0000

I am convinced that the iphone is helping me document my life like nothing else. Despite the fact that some of my family members complain that I am taking too many pictures with my new-ish phone, I am sold on it….and mildly addicted to sharing everything from funny kid quotes to pretty views on Instagram.

This week brought me everything from Spring blossoms to blanket forts to drives in the country to wig-wearing little boys who think peanuts are so named because they “look like wieners.”

Enjoy a glimpse into my life:

Hosted by Cecily and Lolli

To play Give Me Your Best Photo Story Friday, check this. Copy this code into your post and sign the link list:
<center><a href=”https://foodfunfamily.com/tag/give-me-your-best-shot” _mce_href=”https://foodfunfamily.com/tag/give-me-your-best-shot” target=”_blank”></a><a href=”https://mychaosmybliss.com” _mce_href=”https://mychaosmybliss.com” target=”_blank”></a> Hosted by <a href=”https://mychaosmybliss.com/” _mce_href=”https://mychaosmybliss.com/” target=”_blank”>Cecily</a> and <a href=”https://www.foodfunfamily.com” _mce_href=”https://www.foodfunfamily.com” target=”_blank”>Lolli</a> </center>