in the thicket

Three months worth of plans and once when planning worked for me

I've tried so many different cleaning and organizational systems over time! I know there is really no perfect system, and that the system isn't really the problem, the problem is me not doing what I intend to to. Or not even having a plan for what I want to do, just having some vague "oh, I should do that" thoughts that flitter through my mind occassionally.

The girls and I were so proud of ourselves this summer. We made a plan, and we stuck with it! Our vehicle kept getting really gross last year, like gross to the point of "I should go park in the corner of the parking lot because I don't want people to see inside when I open the doors or look in my windows!" kind of gross. And I can't blame the girls entirely, there was a lot of stuff tossed on the front seat too, and that's my territory! We are usually so tired when we get home that we were just lazy about taking our stuff in the house and getting rid of trash.

Well, at the start of the summer, we spent an afternoon of really cleaning the car out well. And we decided that we WOULD keep it clean. Guess, what, we did! For most of the summer, about three months! Bathing suits/towels/books etc all came inside when we got home. I stopped giving them snacks in the car, that helped a lot with trash. The girls both kept noticing and commenting, "Mommy, our car is STILL CLEAN!" We were pretty impressed with ourselves!

There's a sad end to this tale... things got messy/gross again. Still not sure why, but I think we need to revisit that goal again, because I know we can do it! And they know it, too. It's not always fun or easy, but boy it feels better to ride around in a not-nasty car. We're not going to impress anyone with our snazzy 14 year old (yep) Ford Explorer, but at least when it's clean we won't be grossing anyone out!

Three months seems to be a nice chunk of time, to me. A season, really. And there are different levels of activity that I can manage in different seasons. I think that this winter will be a good time for me to focus on getting some projects done around the house, since we are home more and outside less. Here's some tentative plans for some bigger projects I'd like to tackle. If I get any of them done, maybe I'll blog about them here!

January goals:

Recipe/menu planning: Reorganize current menu binder to hold only those recipes that I really use, and put in a bigger binder. Come up with a list of family favorite meals and where I find the recipes (in binder or cookbook- I can't be bothered to copy recipes that I have in a cookbook, unless I decide to get rid of the cookbook!) Make it pretty and useful. (Wish I could do something like Sarah from Memories on Clover Lane did and make an actual cookbook, but that's a bit much for me right now!)

Bill/Budget organization: I've looked at a couple of different systems, and I'm intrigued by this binder method of filing bills and planning for bills, seen here... and I like Sarah at Clover Lanes simple approach to tracking spending in her budget notebook, too. (These are really two different things, and I should start doing both!)

February goals:

Painting: I have lots of painting projects... two bathrooms upstairs need to be painted, and also both girls have furniture that could use a coat of paint. This would probably keep me busy the whole month! Not sure if it would be bad to paint when it's cold outside, hope not!

March goals:

Pictures: I have never tackled organizing our old photos, and need to research how I want to handle this. Also, I don't regularly print photos for us to enjoy, or the scrapbook pages I've created over the years, so I need to come up with a plan or routine for doing this. And I would like to put some pictures in the frames I've purchased and never filled!

Purging: Revisit closets, drawers and spaces that haven't been addressed for a while in preparation for spring cleaning in April/May. I tend to regularly do this with some parts of my house (kids' toys, drawers in kitchen) but I need to do this in my attic and bonus room as well.

Okay, I think that's plenty to keep me busy for a few months! I have other projects that I don't want to assign to a particular month, though...

Other projects to fit in:

-Create a canopy to go over my oldest's bed, out of tulle- something sweet and girly, a DIY project. Also would like to create a bulletin board (cover with fabric?) for her, and change out some artwork in her room and update photos. (Probably good projects for February and March!)

-Encourage my husband to organize tools and such in the garage- it's a mess out there!

-Thrift and search for better dressers to replace ones falling apart in our bedroom and for additional storage in other parts of the house. Maybe paint them, so possibly do this in February.

I'll be thrilled if I do even some of these things within this time-frame. They all should be done, but I am usually a lot slower to tackle projects than I'd like to be. Maybe this will be the kick in the pants I need!

 

 

Blowing the dust off and making some changes!

After considering what my blogging goals are, I've decided to make some changes! I have just created a blog where I will post specifically about homeschooling and family life, located at Dogwood Homeschool. Homeschooling is an important part of my life and certainly occupies a lot of my thoughts, time and energy. It is not my only interest, however, so I hope that this blog will become a place where I can write about my own personal interests... books, home arts (decorating, cooking, celebrations), Christianity, my quest to take better care of myself, parenting issues that don't specifically pertain to homeschooling, and maybe even some photography and digital scrapbooking again if I can fit that into my life!

So, if you are specifically interested in my homeschooling posts, you might want to follow my new blog. I'm writing for myself here, not any specific audience, and I anticipate that some months I might write a lot about books and other months I might blog about home decorating projects. Some days I might have the occassional deep thought or two that I want to get down in written form. Who knows! I just need a place where I can explore my own interests and passions that are not necessarily "child-centered" (though so much of my life really is, it's just the season!)

I will be "cleaning up" this blog shortly and I hope to update the header and overall look. I will leave all my posts here for the current time (including homeschooling posts) until I can figure out if it's possible to move them or not. Otherwise, I will just move forward with posts on this blog and hope that I will have a chance to write here regularly.

 

Putting my chef hat back on

I really hate that when I get "too busy" that cooking good food is one of the first things that I drop doing. The lure of "easy food" is often too tempting, even though I don't really "believe" in eating that way. Buying and preparing the best-quality food that I can afford is one of my "ideals" yet it is one of the hardest for me to be consistent with.

I have to remind myself that good food doesn't have to be fancy or hard. I am sure that I make it much harder than it really is! At times I get in a wonderful routine of planning, shopping and cooking and though it is a lot of "work" it is just what I do. Then something will happen- travel, a prolonged illness of a family member (for example this spring I dealt with my youngest having pneumonia), or just putting too much stuff on my calendar. Then I call on my husband to "just pick something up" and also allow some more convenience foods to appear on the menu when I do cook. I always experience the consequences of this- feeling blah, getting tired of eating the same kind of food (because take-out food/fast food in our budget is actually all rather similar after a while), a sense of guilt about both spending money on food away from home and all the food that I wasted or is sitting unused in my freezer.

I'm trying to come out of a LONG season (really since Easter) of not eating that well or cooking that well. Way too much fast food (usually Wendy's, Chick-fil-a, Char-grille, a sandwich shop, pizza, chinese or sometimes Panera or similar) has been consumed. They are OK for a *very* occasional treat, but definitely not food to live on! (And really, I could do without eating at any of them again... though I know life being what it is, I will eat there sometimes.) They are all really incompatible with my dietary goals and what I like my family to be eating. And obviously not good for the budget- $10-20 for our family. I can always cook better quality food with leftovers for less than that. Really my husband and I have eaten more bad food than my girls- they are content with pretty simple foods that I can easily cook at home, but my husband in particular gets "tired" of the kind of food my girls eat.

Sometimes I feel like I need to be a magician to cook for my family, though I know it's not true. I'm trying to reduce grains in my diet, and eat more fruit/veg, protein and good fats (no industrial oils, which is why fast food/take-out is really a big no-no for me.) However my girls do fine with grains and seem to prefer them, though they do love chicken and beef and each have an assortment of fruits/veggies that they happily eat. (Yay!) I would like my husband to eat more like me, and he's agreed to make a commitment to cut out his nightly snacking on chips (baked lays usually) or chex mix, for a month, to see how he does. I'm OK with my girls continuing to eat grains (though I try to add butter or cheese or pesto or chicken broth to them when I can, to help with blood sugar and increase nutrition) but I do need to consistently provide more good protein/fruit/veg for them... too often the quick meals I make for them are grain-based with maybe a side of fruit. So I'd like to make it more like other good stuff + side of grain. So, it is challenging to think about the different nutritional needs of my family plus the taste preferences (husband won't eat tomatoes or potatoes, one daughter won't eat crunchy vegetables, one won't eat broccoli, nobody likes peas or cooked greens other than me.)

And sometimes when I go back to actually buying food it is easy to cringe at prices. An organic pastured chicken for $4.50 a lb- yikes! But a meal at Wendy's costs $15-20 and is really almost like throwing money away! I can take a $12-16 chicken (*gulp*) and roast it and make a meal out of that, have some meat leftover for something else, and then make stock for other uses... at least I believe that I can, having never been able to bring myself to buy a $16 chicken. (I'm thinking about it, though!) I usually go for a better-quality chicken (like $8-10) but I would love to buy the best quality I can. I really need to think about how much money we've wasted on eating out and use that to help me get things in perspective.

Another thing that is helping me get my chef hat back on is just thinking about how it feels to cook food. I love cutting up vegetables and fruit. I was so inspired by a beautiful fruit salad I had this week at a church function... a lovely variety of fruits cut into really tiny pieces to match the size of the blueberries and champagne grapes. I did not enjoy any of the junky food I've eaten recently as much as I enjoyed a scoop of that fruit salad. I also love sauteing vegetables, eating food that my husband has grilled, and enjoying fresh fruits and salads. The smells, tastes, and textures are so important. And those things are often blunted or just strange in mass-produced food.

So, here's to putting my chef's hat back on. I hope that I can both keep in mind that cooking is important for me and my family, the best choice for our budget and our health, and also can be fun. I also love to get inspiration from different websites out there, here are a few of my favorites that have inspired me recently!

Joyful Abode

The Pioneer Woman

The Healthy Home Economist

In Search of Lost Time

Kitchen Stewardship

I'd love to hear what inspires you to cook and keep cooking, even when it seems like a chore or just one more thing to do! :)

Word for the year: Nourish

I am not making official New Year's resolutions, though I am refocusing on some areas of my life, and getting back on track with those. I'm aware from some homeschooling and scrapbooking folks that some people like to chose a word to focus on or be inspired by for the year. (Like I said, I don't know all the details, but it seems like a neat concept to me!)

One word that is constantly on my mind anyway, in part because of my interest in following a "Nourishing Traditions" style of eating is the word "Nourish". It's such a great word, and one that I feel is very relevant to my life as a wife, mother, friend and of course, child of God...

From dictionary.com:

nour⋅ish

 –verb (used with object)

1.	to sustain with food or nutriment; supply with what is necessary for life, health, and growth.

2.	to cherish, foster, keep alive, etc.: He had long nourished the dream of living abroad.

3.	to strengthen, build up, or promote: to nourish discontent among the workers; to nourish the arts in one's community.

So this year, I'm going to prayerfully try to nourish myself and my family... spiritually (participation in church, prayer, Bible study, getting to know people from our church), emotionally (spending time encouraging my husband and children, just spending positive time with them), physically (chose ways to be active in my home, cleaning, gardening, exercising, and encourage my family to do so as well) and of course nourish with food. If there was anything that I learned in 2009, it was that it really does matter what I eat... when I eat nourishing food, I reap benefits throughout all areas of my life. But at the same time, I need to fight my tendency to excessively focus on one area of my life, and keep sustaining and strengthening other relationships and aspects of my life.

I'm following a somewhat unconventional path with food for myself in particular, with some modifications to suit my family's appetites and particular needs/restrictions. I might blog about that some over the next few months. There are food bloggers who are very confident in their opinions, and I don't want to be them, really. I'm just looking to record my own experience and what is working for me, not to influence others, mostly so I can look back and have those "aha!" moments. Maybe with time I'll gain the confidence to start participating in different "blogging events" that the traditional foods blogging community hosts, but for now I'm happy with my obscurity. :)