Congratulations to our winner Sarah D.! Contest is now closed, but read on for GREAT New Year’s Eve party ideas. What are you doing New  Year’s Eve? No plans, you say? Well, we bet you have some gal pals in the same boat. Why not invite them over for an easy appetizer party and ring in the New Year together? With a little help from our friends at The Pampered Chef and their you can easily make an elegant appetizer buffet for your girlfriends to enjoy. We’re giving away this cocktail shaker and ice bucket to a lucky girlfriend to help you have a successful girls night in. But we’ll have to hurry to get it to you by New Years Eve, so this contest will end Sunday, December 27. Read on for party ideas and contest details. Read the rest of this entry »

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With swimsuit season staring us in the face, we’ve been thinking a lot about fitness. Getting in shape is definitely one of those things that is better with a girlfriend. It’s so much easier to stick to a fitness regime when you have a partner to check in with, to cheer you on, even to commiserate with you. So, we girlfriends-in-chief have embarked on another little fitness quest together. This time, we’re working on our tummies! Read on for the details, as well as a few more easy suggestions for getting fit with a girlfriend. And, we’d love to hear your suggestions, as well!

You may remember a while back we did the Mama Mio Bootcamp for Butts, with good results. Well, our girlfriends at Mama Mio came out with a Bootcamp for Tummies and we were two of the first lucky ladies to try it out! First of all, we simply adore Mama Mio products. They smell heavenly, they are loaded with high- quality ingredients, they are smartly packaged, they are labeled with good humor,  and most importantly, they work! For the Bootcamp products, Mama Mio has teamed up with exercise specialists to create targeted, efficient exercises that you can realistically do in just minutes a day. (For the tummies bootcamp, maternal fitness expert Julie Tupler developed the exercises.) The tummy exercises are easy to do, and you can literally do them sitting down (in the car, at your computer, anywhere!) The rest of the regime consists of two skincare products: Tummy Toner Skin Tightener and Get Waisted Body Shaper—each of them a great product on its own. If your tummy is puffy, crepey, and mom-like, you will see a difference from using these products. We’re into about the third week of our bootcamp, and we both are seeing our waists look more whittled, and the look and texture of our skin has definitely improved! One important lesson we’ve learned from using Mama Mio products is that by paying attention to a body part and treating it nicely, you actually start to feel better about it! And when you feel good about yourself, you look good!

So, here’s our point: Doing this bootcamp together is much more motivating than doing it alone. We can check in with each other and say “Did you do your exercises today?” or “How’s your tummy doing?” It’s fun to hear each other’s progress and share in each other’s successes. If you are “stuck” in your fitness regime, we challenge you to call up a girlfriend and get her to be your fitness partner. Just give it a try for 30 days and see how much better fitness can be with a girlfriend!

We’re all about easy, quick, ways to fitness, so here are a couple of our other fave ways to get fit with girlfriends:

Wii Fit Club: Invite your girlfriends over to work out on your Wii together. Using Wii Fit or the new EA Sports Active for Wii, you can create indivdual profiles and track your progress together. Do you workouts at home, then get together once a week for a check-in and group workout.

Walking Group: Maybe it’s from reading the new novel Wildwater Walking Club, but we’re newly inspired to walk! Walking and talking is seriously good for the soul. Take to the sidewalks, hiking trails, or woodland paths with your girlfriends at a regular time. Invest in a pedometer and pledge to reach 10,000 steps a day. 

Your turn: Do you exercise with girlfriends? We’d love to hear how that is “working out” for you. Give your fingers a workout and tell us in the comments! Read the rest of this entry »