Gedeons.com: Category Homemaking

Haven Challenge Day 4

Maggie — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:51:00 -0700

So it’s almost 4 and I haven’t done much today, I think posting my to do list gives me motivation. So here is today’s challenge:

1) Refresh Your Spirit (5 minutes)

As we’ve been doing all week, take a few moments to sit down with a cup of tea or coffee and quiet your heart before the Lord. Pray, read Scripture, and just encourage your heart in the Lord.

I encourage you to pick a special verse to meditate on today while you’re going about your homemaking tasks and write it down on an index card and put it in a central location as a reminder.

Share with us what verse or verses you are meditating on today.

Lil had a tough night going to sleep after her middle of the night feeding, so Mommy didn’t get to sleep after she fed Lil at 2 am, but I still did wake up at 6 and read my Bible (Galatians 6) and prayed between nodding off, and then went back to bed, John was gracious to get Hannah up and do breakfast and family devotions without me.

STOP: Is your morning routine done? Don’t move on to #2 unless it is!

Modified, but done.

2) Take Time to Plan (5 minutes)

In addition to writing out a short to-do list numbered in order of importance today like we did the past few days and thinking ahead to what you’ll have for dinner tonight, take a moment to plan some special way to bless your family this weekend. Maybe it will be something like breakfast in bed for your children, or a treat for your husband, or a special family activity. Think of something out-of-the-ordinary which will show your love practically to your family.

Share your to-do list today and tonight’s dinner menu, if you have a chance. Also, tell us about how you are going to bless your family this weekend.

To Do List:

Drink Lots of water! Also realized that I haven’t drank much water yet today
~~Nap~~ got in 1/2 an hour while both girls were napping.
~~Outside play~~
Finish yesterday’s laundry, plus a load and diapers
Quick pick up of house (20 min, tops), if things can be cleanish for the weekend I’d be thrilled, things picked up will help be able to clean tomorrow.

Dinner was brought by a friend, turkey chili, yummy. I’ll make some corn bread to go with it.

This weekend we’ll be having some visitors to see Lil for the first time, but if things are cleaned up we may be able to decorate for Christmas as well.

3) Do Something! (15 minutes or so)

Today we’re going to focus on maintaining the other rooms we have already tackled this week (entryway, living room, laundry room) and our bathrooms. Light a candle, put on your apron, turn on some uplifting music, and get working!

Set your timer for five minutes and do a quick pick up of your entryway, living room, and laundry room. Also, start a load of laundry if you still have some to finish up this week (like me!).

And then let’s get busy cleaning the bathrooms. If you have the time, feel free to deep clean them from top to bottom. However, if you are short on time, just pick up and put away anything that’s out of place, spray and wipe all surfaces with all-purpose cleaner, and change the towels. A quick-clean like this can take less than three minutes and can make a huge difference!

Post pictures of your shiny clean bathrooms if you’d like. Or, if you’re behind on any of the other challenges (like I still am on the laundry room!), feel free to go back and do those and post pictures of those completed challenges as well.

Off to get busy, I’ll be crossing off items as I go. Sorry, no pictures.

Helpful LInks

Maggie — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:06:00 -0600

So those of you that know me well know that homemaking is not my strong point. So in order to keep me going (or get me started) I read about it. Titus 2:3-5 and Proverbs 31 are well worn pages in my Bible. And there are several blogs I frequent that give good encouragement as well. These are written by ladies that do a great job of being Titus 2 ladies, even if they’re not older in years.

Crystal Payne at Biblical Womanhood has many resources and started a refresher series of Making your Home a Haven Monday’s. I jumped right in yesterday and have done my morning routine both days. It starts with me waking up and feeding the baby while doing my Quiet Time (although she hasn’t been cooperating and is waking up an hour before I want to so I feed her in bed and then get up to do my QT) this is also when I make up my to do list and do any computer reading. Then I started doing an “hour of moving”. So I’m busy doing housework for one hour, whatever needs the most attention. Then I’ll take a shower, make breakfast for the family and then we have breakfast and family Bible time. This gives a good start to the day and provides momentum to keep moving. I’m also trying to include Princess Olive in more of what I do, even if she just watches.

Home Sanctuary is another encouraging spot where she lists a small thing we can do to help make our home a sanctuary for our family every day.

Tammy’s Recipes has tons of wonderful recipes and she’s inspired me to bake all of my baked goods. So far I’ve done bread, pitas, bagels and cinnamon rolls and they’re all delicious. They’re much less expensive, I know what’s in them and often use freshly ground whole wheat and they’re much more delicious, plus Princess Olive likes to help me.

Heavenly Homemaker is another great site I recently found. She’s into healthy eating with real foods. You’ll find some good recipes with natural sugars and whole wheat.

Organizing Junkie is another fun one and inspires me to be more organized. Right now I’m just trying to cut clutter as I go about my household tasks. I have a Goodwill bag constantly going and things are slowly but surely becoming more simplified.

I also just read The Total Money Makeover that I checked out at the library. This is an excellent book and Dave Ramsey has some other excellent resources for taking control of your finances. After reading this hubby and I sat down made a more tight budget and came up with a plan to get rid of our debt once and for all. This book is for everyone. It is definitely for those who have substantial debt and need a plan to stop the vicious cycle. But it’s also for those (like us) who have the typical American debt: maybe a credit card or two (even if you don’t carry a balance), a car payment, student loans and a house. I would even recommend it for those who don’t have debt but would like a plan for saving for retirement, kids college and just plain building wealth. So the housekeepers are canceled and our budget is a bit tighter, but we’re making headway on our car loan and this will be for just a short time that I believe will all be worth it.

Well that’s it for now, time to get moving again. :)

Oh.. the joys of a clean home!

Maggie — Sun, 04 May 2008 14:18:00 -0600

My home is clean! Clutter is at a minimal and what is left is in small piles to go through, bathrooms and kitchen are shining and the floors are freshly vacuumed. I love having housekeepers come once a month, it’s not enough to keep the house clean, but at least I have motivation, that things can get better when they look like this:

This before was taken a week ago, so it had improved some before this morning. Oh goodness, that’s embarrassing! But it is now all done and I can type in peace while my girls are asleep. Princess Olive fell asleep on the floor, poor girl1! At least there’s now floor for her to be able to do so. :)

So as you can see a major overhaul was desperately needed. I’d post an after, but I don’t know how to upload pics to the computer yet, so that’ll have to wait, but let me tell you it’s sooo serene, it’s wonderful. My task for today is to tackle the laundry. I have too many loads to count. Maybe 12 or more. But I am going to do it smart. Not all of those clothes are going to stay in this house. I found some basic guidelines for how many clothes one needs, and am planning on using that when I think my oldest needs 12 pairs of pants. :)

PS This was written last week, but I put it on hold to try to get more pictures in, I didn’t, so here it is anyways.

Kitchen Tip Tuesday

Maggie — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:32:00 -0600

I love Tammy’s site and I love Kitchen Tip Tuesday’s, so I thought I’d chime in this time. But since I haven’t been doing anything grand other than getting frozen food from Costco, to keep us from eating out during this seemingly busy/tired season. I thought I’d recycle an old post. I wrote up some guidelines on how we handle meal times for Princess Olive.

1. Once food is put on the table that is what is available for that meal. Sometimes for snack or the two earlier meals I’ll ask her what she would like, but once a decision is made that’s it, no changing your mind. And if I decide, and don’t give her a choice, that’s my right as a parent and she gets no say.

2. I don’t have a bite rule, if it’s something new I’ll try and help her eat it, but if she doesn’t want to eat I won’t force her. As someone who has struggled with their weight all their life I find it difficult to make my child eat if she don’t want to, no need to finish her plate either. I’m trying to make serving sizes closer to what she would eat as not to waste food, but if she eats a few bites of all the food groups I’m happy and John will eat the rest. :) (edit: I do now try to have her eat a few bits of whatever is served, as she’s older now and doesn’t struggle as much, but I won’t make a battle of it)

3. If she does not eat the food she does not get to eat until the next meal. Even if she does eat food she doesn’t get to eat until the next meal. The rare exception to this is if she eats a lot at a meal and then is still hungry a short time later, she may be going through a growth spurt, so she can have extra snacks.

4. If she doesn’t eat dinner she gets one cup of milk before bed, no more than that. She normally gets milk before bed and will sometimes ask for a second cup, if she ate well she may have it. But if she didn’t I want her to see that she is still hungry because she didn’t eat the meal, the one glass of milk is usually enough to make it so her tummy doesn’t hurt from being hungry and she’s able to go to sleep. If it’s during the day though I let her tummy hurt until the next meal. She has never gotten sick from this, never wasted away and usually eats a ton at the next meal. This also does not happen very often. (edit: she also now only gets 2 cups of milk a day, usually one in the morning and one before bed, we go through milk way too quickly and her Pull Up leaks at night if she has too much before bed).

So there is my kitchen tip on how to have good eaters. She’ll eat just about anything, since I don’t cater to “kid food” often. I enjoy “kid food” as well, so we do have it for our meal from time to time, but not separate from what adults are eating.

Check out more kitchen tips at Tammy’s Recipes.

Up too late

Maggie — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0600

So I didn’t post Saturday evening as promised. I didn’t quite get as much accomplished as I had hoped, although it was a good day. Our master bedroom and bathroom were cleared of clutter and I finished going through my clothes and shoes. A nice pile started to go to Goodwill. We also went swimming as a family and had a nice evening together as a family. We drove for a little bit and took a look at how the reconstruction is going from the fires. Some of the houses look almost done, others are just leveled lots and some of those leveled lots are for sale. I can’t imagine needing to rebuild from scratch, yet it could’ve just as easily happened to us, I’m still amazed our complex was unscathed.

So since yesterday didn’t go quite as planned, today I worked some more. I went through the girls’ clothes to make room for the laundry, did the kitchen and dining room and started on the living room, when we decided it was time to go to bed, but now it’s after midnight and I can’t sleep! If I’m still not tired after posting this I’ll get back to work.

Here’s a before shot of my bedroom: and another:

And here’s after:

Nifty, I can post pictures now. And do you like me new theme. Hubby did that for me, he’s so nice. :)

Looking at the after picture I need to see if I can clear out under my bed, but that’s great storage, I just need a way to hide it. And I decided to take the shoes out of the closet to make room for other things that we don’t access as much. Ok, off to bed or to finish the living room. I’ll post more pics in the next few days. :)

Saturday Marathon Clean

Maggie — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:35:00 -0600

So, I know I haven’t written in ages, but life happens. Here are somethings going on:

Princess Olive turned 4 and we had a grand party at Momo and Dodo’s house.

Princess Olive also started going to speech twice a week to help her catch up to her peers.

Princess Peach started rolling over and is almost sitting up on her own as well (she can for a few seconds anyways).

The two princesses get a long great. They love giggling together.

Sorry for such a quick recap, but that is not the main purpose of this post. The main purpose of this post is to track my progress in my mad cleaning today. We had a very busy few weeks. We were in Sacramento for a couple of weeks and then we had water damage in our master bedroom due to a neighbor’s negligence, so we were out of our room for a while and even out of our house a few days and then we had to remove everything off the floor in our room, including the closet so they could replace the carpet. Add that to my normal messiness and our house is a disaster.

I was able to get the insurance covering the damages to agree to pay a friend to help me put the closet and room back together, so a good friend came and helped me do that last week. But now there’s still everything else. If I knew how to post pictures, I’d do before and after, but that would probably be too embarrassing anyways.

For those of you (if anyone is even checking this site anymore) who knew me in my younger years, know how messy I can really be and right now almost my whole house looks like my room did growing up. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since then, but then all of a sudden I’m back to my old ways. One of the biggest desires of my life is for my home to be a haven for my family. For me to really be that Proverbs 31 woman that provides good food, clothing and shelter for her family. And also is so gracious to her family and those around her. I have such a long way to go. Procrastination and a lack of diligence are my greatest sins in preventing me from accomplishing this for my family.

So here are my big motivators for working hard today.

1. To give my family a happy home, although this aught to be all I need it’s not, so I have more 2. I have until Monday or a friend is going to come while I watch her kids and do it for me and then my things are at her mercy. 3. Housekeepers are coming on Wednesday, so they need clear surfaces to clean (isn’t my hubby nice to do that for me once a month! :) ) 4. I want to devote several days of nothing other than potty training Princess Olive. In order to do that I need a clean house and food for easy meals. 5. I would really like our Sunday to be a day of rest on a regular basis.

Princess Peach is done nursing (laptops are great for multitasking) so here I go. I’ll let you know what all I accomplish at the end of the day.

2008 Goals

Maggie — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 10:50:00 -0700

This blog is well overdue. John and I set up goals for 2008 and I wanted to share them with you.

1. Not to miss a day spent in the Word and prayer. Some days this may be just 5 minutes reading a Psalm, other days it’ll be a bit more, but I want this to be something that takes me through life I want to grow a passion for God’s Word and the best way to do that is to be in it.

2. For us to each lose 40 lbs. That’s less than a pound a week and we could both use it. To help me I’m using this website. It is designed for pregnant moms and a way to modify it for nursing. It tracks my calories and nutritional info and exercise. They also have another site here for those not pregnant or nursing (men can use this one too). This has helped me make sure I’m getting in all the food I need and I lost 4 lbs the first week! One of the greatest things about it is it’s free!

3. Homeschooling. We both want our children to be homeschooled, but I have not been diligent to make it happen. Granted our oldest is only 3, it won’t be long before she’ll need some more structured schooling. So we’re starting preschool today! I purchased this curriculum and printed out the appropriate worksheets and purchased some craft supplies.

4. I desire to have a better working cleaning/organizing system for keeping our home in order, this has also been one of the biggest pit falls for me to homeschool and many other things that I would like to do. I’m going to give FlyLady another shot.

5. We have a few financial goals as well. My part of them is to work on spending less money on groceries and household items. So I’m going to try my hand at couponing and bargain hunting. I’ve found some great resources here. This is exciting for me as I’ve always felt like I spent too much money on our groceries, but also felt like I wasn’t being extravagant and I was trying to shop the sales, so I’m going to give coupons a good 3 months to see if it’s worth my time. I think it will.

6. This isn’t a top goal, but I would also like to re-do my blog, maybe even get a different site for it and write regularly. But for now all of you will just have to put up with my sporadic posts about random things as the other goals are taking top priority.

PS I am going to be going through previous posts and using different names for our girls. The oldest will be referred to as Princess Olive and the baby will be Princess Peach. We want to protect them as much as possible and so this will be our new standard.

2 questions, need feedback

Maggie — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:03:00 -0700

Question 1:

For those of you with tiny littles, when do you do your weekly house cleaning? Like vacuum, dust (not always weekly), bathrooms, mop, etc. Do you split it up over the week or do it all in one day. I like the idea of doing it all in a day and having a clean house for the weekend (if done on Friday), and just doing basic maintenance over the week (keeping things tidy and spot cleaning, as needed), but am afraid of it being too much in one day. But my home is very small, so it shouldn’t take too long, especially if things are already picked up.

Question 2:

What’s your favorite Christmas music? And other music for that matter? I don’t think we’ve bought more than 4-5 CDs since we’ve been married, and even then our music collection is in the hundreds, it’s old and outdated, and we only have a few Christmas CDs that are also old, especially when I insist that we listen to them from the day after Thanksgiving all the way through Christmas, and possibly New Years. :) Some of the Christmas music we have we both dislike, but still play it so we have a little more variety. :)

Challenge Day #3

Maggie — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:39:00 -0700

So yesterday I didn’t even get half of the things done on my to do list, which is fine, I wasn’t expecting to get it all done, I wasn’t sure what to expect with being home alone with the 2 girls really. But I am glad I did have a list, as I could’ve easily wasted time I did have. I am going to re-order my list though and make it much shorter for today. I really needed a nap yesterday, but I pushed and folded laundry during Princess Olive’s nap and then ended up exhausted by the end of the day and this morning. So nap is now #1, even if I don’t do it first, it is top priority. Taking the girls outside also is going to move up, it’s good for all of us. Here’s my new list:

~~Drink lots of water…this also needed to be moved up so I would see it first.~~
~~Nap when/if both girls are sleeping at same time, at least rest when Princess Olive naps~~ got in 1/2 an hour of sleep and feel much better
~~Take girls outside~~ it had been so long since Princess Olive got to play, it was a good time, but very warm!
~~Plan meals~~
~~Clean kitchen (this means wash dishes and quick wipe of any spills, not thorough clean job)... should’ve been done after breakfast, but I woke up late, so it didn’t happen~~
~~Grocery~~ the first time with both girls, I’d say it went well. :)
Make list for thank yous… writing them will have to wait
~~Some laundry… at least 1 load, maybe more~~ it at least got started

Crystal’s planning challenge for us today is to make another to do list and to plan dinner, she said we should aim to have it done by lunch time, so the afternoon goes smoother, but that’s not going to work for us today as I need to go to the grocery in order to make dinner. We’re going to have bbq pork pizza. A good friend brought us over some pulled pork for sandwiches for dinner, and we’ve had it 2+ times for dinner and still have more, so now it’s time to get creative. :) It shouldn’t be hard to make, since the meat is already cooked, and I found a recipe that I think will work.

Her other challenge is to finish all our laundry and clean the laundry room, I may wipe down the washer while I’m doing my 1 load, but I’m not going to organize my little closet today. I need to focus on our living areas to stay tidy, the laundry can stay cluttered until another season in my life. If I can tidy my living room that would be great, but it’s not even on my list, so it can stay how it is for a while, John doesn’t mind it, so I shouldn’t either.

Challenge Task #2

Maggie — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:53:00 -0700

So I’ve done my morning routine and am now ready to start thinking about day #2’s planning task. Crystal wants us to make a to do list of no more than 10 items and work 10 minutes in our living rooms. So here’s my list:

~~Finish the girls’ laundry, including diapers~~
~~Order more cloth diapers~~ This took a long time, it took me a while to find a supplier that had all the diapers I wanted in stock, oh well it’s done, and in a week or so we’ll be able to use cloth diapers all the time.
Clean entry way (yesterday’s challenge)
Clean living room (today’s challenge)
Nap when/if both girls are sleeping at same time, at least rest when Hannah naps
~~Work in pantry/fridge~~
Plan meals
Grocery
Take girls outside
Make list for thank yous, write them
~~Drink lots of water (I haven’t been doing great at this and know it effects my energy levels)~~ I didn’t start out well with this, but did do better in the afternoon

I’ll be crossing the items off as I do them, so check back to see how far I get, I’m not counting on getting to all of it, but if I have the time and energy, I’ll need a plan.