Category: Home + LIfe

  • Do You Hate Freezer Meals? Three Reasons to Try Them Anyway

    Do You Hate Freezer Meals? Three Reasons to Try Them Anyway

    I used to hate make-ahead freezer meals. They never, ever appealed to me.

    Five or ten years back, my friends got into “freezer dump” meals. Like, really into them. They would post all these pictures online of ziploc bags layered with meat and veggies. They’d go on and on about how good the food was and how liberating it was to be freed from the “tyranny” of cooking and all I could think was: stop filling my Facebook feed with pictures of squished up RAW CHICKEN.

    Honestly, I didn’t get it at all, because a) I like cooking, and b) I don’t love making all my meals in a slow cooker. Oh, and c) nothing is less appetizing than the word “dump.”

    Freezer Meals: Attempt #1

    Despite that, the constant ringing endorsements convinced me to give it a try. And you know what? It was … meh. The method just never took off for me. Probably because of the word “dump”.

    Actually, my biggest hurdle was remembering to thaw food in advance. I know, I know — moving a bag of food from the freezer to the fridge is a silly thing to trip up on. But I never remembered to take the food out of the freezer!

    And yes, I know there are hundreds of Karens (middle-aged mom bloggers) and Sharons (old church potluck ladies) who swear that they always put frozen meat right in their slow cooker and they never get sick. My manual specifically said not to do that, though, and a quick Google search confirms that slow cookers let frozen meat linger in the temperature “danger zone” too long, giving bacteria a chance to multiply. Why risk it? Goodness knows I’ve been sick from food enough times in my life, thank you very much unrefrigerated-salad-bar-dressing-at-the-university-food-court.

    So fine, maybe once or twice I managed to plan ahead and thaw out my frozen-meal-in-a-bag, but then I got all confused about the actual cooking times.

    If the recipe says 6-8 hours, does that mean 6 or 8? If I plan for 6 and then my food needs 8, we’re going to be super hangry by the time we eat. Or vice versa — what if I plan for 8 hours and it’s ready after 6? I can’t let it sit there for two more hours — I hate mealy chicken and mushy carrots.

    You know what I just realized? It’s not freezer meals I hate; it’s slow cookers.

    Interesting.

    Freezer Meals: Attempt #2

    Back in August, I went to the library to grab a book that I had on hold: Good Cheap Eats by Jessica Fisher. While there, I randomly grabbed another book from the cookbook aisle called Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cookbook. I don’t know what possessed me to pick it up, given that I hadn’t yet experienced my freezer meal epiphany of 30 seconds ago, but I checked it out and took it home with me. (Funny enough, both books are by the same author, but I didn’t realize that until months later.)

    Flipping through the freezer cookbook, I could tell the recipes had potential. Oh a whim, I Googled the cookbook for reviews. What a surprise to see a glowing review by Katie Kimball on kitchenstewardship.com — one of my favourite blogs. Katie Kimball praised the Not Your Mother’s Make-Ahead and Freeze Cook Book Cookbook for not relying on canned soup or convenience mixes — everything is from scratch. Really? “From scratch” is my love language.

    So I dove in. I think I tried the Chipotle Chicken Wraps first — an immediate favourite. I’ve made them a half-dozen times since then and they never last long. My husband and I also love the burrito recipes — James eats the beef ones and I prefer the bean ones. They’re both so good.

    I’ve become hooked on the casseroles too. Fisher’s Chicken Divan with Cheddar Crust is straight out of my childhood, and I’m delighted that James likes it too — I never thought of him as a casserole guy. Oh, and the Shepherd’s Pie with Green Chile Mashed Potatoes? I could eat it three times a week and never get tired of it.

    I think what sets the recipes in NYM Make-Ahead and Freeze apart from other freezer meal recipes is that they don’t use the word dump the food is often cooked before it’s frozen. The meals taste better for it.

    But cooking everything in advance doesn’t sound helpful, does it? Does this method of meal planning actually save me time or money?

    Oh my goodness, YES.

    I can’t stop talking about how much better my life is. We’ve been freezer-cooking for six or seven months now and I can’t say enough good things about it.

    My evenings are less stressful. We’re eating better. We’re wasting less food. We are saving money. I do half the dishes I used to do. I thought about sending Jessica Fisher a Christmas card in December because I swear I love her like she’s family now. That’s how much freezer cooking has made my life better.

    And I want you to try it too.

    Three Reasons to Try Freezer Meals

    1. It Saves So Much Time

    Cooking for hours can be exhausting, I won’t lie. But it’s worth it when I won’t have to stress about cooking for the entire rest of the week.

    Spreading the various tasks out over a few days keeps me getting too tired. I’ve got a good routine going, and that helps.

    On Thursdays, I plan my meals and order the food. I sit down at the computer with my cookbook and a cup of tea. I check the online flyer for my grocery store, plan a few meals, and then submit my order online. That’s it — Thursday’s task is done.

    On Friday, I head over to the store and pick up my groceries. My store now offers parking lot service for $3, which means I show up sometime during my two-hour time slot and an employee brings the groceries out to me in the van. My kids don’t even have to unbuckle (but, of course, they do).

    The staff at my favourite location even bring out snacks and drinks along with our groceries, as if I’m doing them a favour by keeping my kids in the van instead of dragging them through the whole store while they whine loudly for a full hour because I won’t let them buy bright blue popsicles or play bumper cars with the shopping carts or free the lobsters from the live tank. Oh wow — I guess I am doing them a favour. Let’s call it a win-win.

    Once I’ve got my groceries and my complementary lime-flavoured fizzy water, I take everything home and throw it in the fridge. Friday’s task is done.

    On Saturday, I cook. I cook until I can’t stand up for one more minute. Honestly, I don’t mind it at all — like I said before, I enjoy cooking. CBC Radio has a bunch of good shows on Saturday too, which pairs nicely with a day in the kitchen. And if I’m lucky, I’ll use a recipe that calls for wine — if you add a grape or an apple slice to the rest of the bottle, you can call it sangria, which is perfectly acceptable to drink at 10:00 am while you sear five pounds of beef. Happy cooking day, indeed.

    Cooking multiple meals at once might sound complicated, but it’s not. Most everything has to be cooled before it can be assembled, so it doesn’t matter if I whip up the cream of celery soup three hours after the chicken is done — I won’t be assembling the final meals until the end of the day anyway. Sometimes I don’t even do that part until Sunday.

    And you might think that devoting a whole day to cooking doesn’t end up saving me any time. It does though — through the rest of the week, supper is almost effortless and I have half the dishes to do afterward. Ditto lunch, when I realize that hello, it’s 1:00 already, and I pull frozen waffles or grilled cheese sandwiches out to reheat.

    It’s more than a redistribution of labour, though. Cooking everything at once just doesn’t take as long as cooking the same amount of meals separately. My favourite tip is to cook lots of the same thing. For example, cooking enough enchilada casserole to cover three different meals takes less time than cooking three separate suppers.

    It doesn’t take much longer to cook two pounds of beef than one pound. It doesn’t take much longer to grate one pound of cheese than a cup. And when I do it all at once, I only have to wash the dishes once; if I were cooking a new meal each evening, I’d have to wash those same dishes every time.

    Wouldn’t that get boring though, eating the same thing three times in one week? No, because two of those casseroles are saved for some future date and this week I’ll be eating meals that I froze earlier in the month. And besides, I could eat a Shepherd’s Pie three times a week and never get tired of it, remember? There are green chiles in the mashed potato...

    2. Less Food is Wasted

    The second reason I love freezer cooking is that I’m keeping so much food out of the composter. I can’t count how many times I’ve thrown away moldy bread because we don’t eat it quick enough — extra painful when the bread is gluten-free and costs $7 a loaf. Now, I prepare eight or nine grilled cheese sandwiches at once and throw them in the freezer to melt later.

    Freezer cooking has changed my mindset completely. Everything goes in the freezer now. When I grate cheese, I grate the whole jumbo-sized brick at once — anything not used in a recipe is frozen and used another time. I don’t have to throw away soft, green potatoes anymore — any potatoes that are not used right away become mashed potatoes and frozen for later. Bread crumbs? They last forever in the freezer. Left-over waffles? I’ll keep them in the freezer until next week. Brownies? I don’t know, they might freeze okay. Ours never last longer than 24 hours, so I wouldn’t know.

    To cut back on food waster further, I freeze almost every meal in single-sized portions so I can heat up the exact amount I need. No more leftovers going soggy in the back of the fridge — almost nothing is wasted anymore. And, of course, that doesn’t just save food, it saves money too.

    3. Freezer Meals Save You Money

    Our grocery budget is still higher than I like, but I’m happy to say I’ve cut it back by a good 30% — maybe even 1/2. How are we saving all this money?

    One. I save money because I only cook what’s on sale. Beef is cheap? Then I buy a lot of it and only cook beef that week — I can do that because we already have a variety of chicken, pork, and meatless meals in the freezer. Or is nothing on sale? Fine, be that way. I’ll spend the weekend making soup or baking breads and rolls instead.

    Two. I save money because I buy in bulk. Unless I can find a better price (and I always check), I stick to club packs for meat, cheese, and anything else that comes in “family-size”. Well, I think I’m saving money when I buy in bulk. I know the price is better, but I also know we eat food faster if there’s a lot of it. I could buy a teeny bag of chips for $4 at the grocery store or a giant bag of chips for $6 at Costco — I’m still going to eat the whole thing over the weekend. Salt is my favourite food group. But you might have more self-control, so I’m sticking this money-saving point in for your benefit.

    Chicken Divan with Cheddar Crust, ready for baking

    Three. I save money because we aren’t running out to the grocery store 3-4 times a week. Before freezer cooking, I’d often come up with a food plan to cover the next day or two and then one of us would run to the store to grab whatever I needed. This worked fine when we had a deli down the street and our daily walk to the butcher was a lovely part of our day — but this habit of last-minute meal planning continued after the deli shut down and the grocery store sucks up a lot more money.

    You know how it goes, right? You run in to buy some chicken and lettuce, and then oh look, goldfish crackers are on sale! The kids love those. And maybe we’re low on milk? Better get some of that too. And what’s the current status of cheese? Yeah, grab some more, just to be safe. And on and on and on. It’s even worse when my husband goes for me because he hits the snacks aisle, knowing how much I love potato chips (refer to section above).

    When we go to the store once and only once, we don’t end up impulse buying. It’s like a bonus dose of willpower. Now if we run out of something like breakfast cereal (who am I kidding, my kids only eat Cheerios), we are forced to eat something else and wait for grocery day. It sounds like such a little thing, but those regular grocery store visits pecked away at our budget. Thanks to the less-frequent grocery store runs and the parking lot pickup service that I happily pay for, I might not even step foot in a grocery store for weeks at a time now.

    Four. We eat less takeout. Now if it’s supper time and I completely forgot to plan ahead, I can grab something from the freezer instead of running out for fries. And when it’s 10:00 at night and I’m starving, I throw a burrito in the oven. Having premade meals in the freezer has virtually eliminated our burger runs, and that has saved us money too. I can’t get over how much money even McDonald’s costs these days, let alone a good burger joint. (OK, I actually love Big Macs. Please don’t tell anyone, it’s embarrassing.)

    For years, I looked down my nose at freezer meals. Now we’re saving up for a big freezer to stick in the garage because I keep overfilling the one in our kitchen. If my kids weren’t always playing Minecraft on my phone, I’d be the one filling my newsfeeds with pictures of squished up meat in Ziploc bags, like my friends did all those years back. I’m proud of the work I put into our meals each weekend, though, so forgive me if a few freezer bag shots do end up on Instagram. I promise you that the meat will be cooked, the food will look tasty, and that I will never once use the word “dump”.

  • How Meal Planning Helps Anxious Kids

    This week I’m writing about simple ways that you can add structure to your homeschooling life.

    Look. I know that children — my children — thrive on structure, but as a hopelessly disorganized homeschooling mom, I struggle to give my kids that structure that they crave. It doesn’t come naturally to me.

    If my kids went to school, routine would be imposed on our home from the outside in. For example, if my kids went to school, they’d need to be out the door by 8:30 am, and they’d need to eat their lunch at lunch time. They’d need to do their homework before dinner, and they’d need to be in bed by 9:00 at the absolute latest.

    One of the joys of homeschooling, though, is that we can do things when and where we please. That makes me happy, but at the same time, that lack of structure can feel like chaos to kids who crave familiarity and security.

    Ugh. I mentioned that this doesn’t come naturally to me, right?

    Given that, I try to look for easy, doable ways that will infuse our lives with little bits of structure. And you know what I discovered? Creating a seven-day meal plan that we use over and over and over is one of the very most effective and beneficial ways that I can bless my whole family with predictability. Why?

    • I waste less time trying to figure out what on earth I’m going to cook that’s going to please at least one of my children.
    • I can spend money more wisely when I’m buying the same products more consistently.
    • My husband can see what’s coming and plan secret trips out to McDonald’s accordingly. (Honestly, how does anyone not like quinoa???)
    • The kids feel so much better when they know what’s coming ahead of time.

    That last point is key.

    Predictability

    Meal times are really, really stressful for us sometimes, and even just knowing which three meals are scheduled for the day allows my kids to feel a bit more in control.

    Back when River was preparing for her Celiac test, I made a seven-day breakfast and lunch menu that we repeated for six weeks. It was amazing. Normally meals in our home include a good dose of negotiation because no one ever wants what I’m making. Ever. Not even waffles from scratch with homemade whipped cream. But when I put a 7-day menu plan on the fridge, my kids were far more willing to eat the foods that were listed. I think that the reason was two-fold: they could see that their favourites were coming up soon, which made eating the lesser loved food more tolerable, and there were fewer surprises at the table, which meant fewer explosions.

    I loved that breakfast/lunch schedule. Unfortunately, we abandoned it when River started her gluten-free diet again — it was too hard to come up with fourteen different wheat-free meal ideas, and it was too depressing to list scrambled eggs every other day.

    I’m not a scrambled eggs fan.

    We still eat a LOT of scrambled eggs.

    It’s really time for me to do another list up. I generally like to do a solid four weeks at a time, but last year I did a meal plan to last all of 2017. 365 days. It was pretty great, when I used it. But then at some point in the year, we switched to a mostly vegetarian diet and all that meal planning went right out the window. Womp, womp.

    Structure in a Meal Plan

    On Monday’s introductory post, I mentioned that River went to a Waldorf school where they served the same exact food each day of the week. I looked it up and the schedule is as follows:

    Sunday: Wheat
    Monday: Rice
    Tuesday: Barley
    Wednesday: Millet
    Thursday: Rye
    Friday: Oats
    Saturday: Corn

    I know homeschooling Waldorf families that serve their kids a bowl of grains every day, following this schedule. That’s a pretty neat way to infuse the week with a sense of rhythm.

    Of course, we can’t follow this list to the letter because of River’s gluten-free diet, but I do find it helpful nonetheless in my own planning. I’ve been trying to do more baking for her using a variety of grains. So Monday we might eat rice with dinner, and then Tuesday I could bake a loaf with almond flour. On Wednesday I can make a flat-bread using soaked brown rice and millet, and on Thursday I can just use our favourite store-bought blend that uses chickpea flour and a mix of starches. Friday is oatmeal in the Instant Pot, Saturday might be cornbread (okay, probably corn chips) and Sunday might be quinoa. I like how having a weekly grain schedule reminds me not to rely on one or two grains for all of our meals.

    Want to keep it even simpler? Just do Taco Tuesdays or Friday Pizzas. Sunday Sundaes, even. Anything that creates a regular routine is helpful for kids that crave structure in their lives.

    I’m planning to bring the structured weekly meal plans back this month now that I know enough meat-free meals to fill out a schedule. But between you and me, I’m probably going to ditch making breakfasts from scratch for a while. I’m absolutely burning out, cooking three meals from scratch every day for picky eats that are just as likely to reject everything that I make. I’m just going to write in Cheerios on the meal plan for every single morning, and as long as we don’t post photos of our breakfast on Instagram, I don’t think anyone will know. 😉

    Find more ways to add structure to your homeschool days each day this week with my contribution to the iHomeschool Network’s 5 Day Hopscotch: Five Laid-Back Ways to Add Structure to your Homeschool Days

    Check out the rest of the iHN Hopscotch posts here…

  • A Printable that Teaches Kids How to Clean Their Room

    My mom loaned me her laminator once. Needless to say, I did not get enough sleep that night.

    OK, I know what you’re thinking: please tell me this isn’t a post about what you laminated.

    That’s crazy. In my mind, this could be a whole SERIES about the things that I laminated. In fact, it occurred to me briefly that I could do an entire new blog dedicated to all the things you should laminate, but then I thought — maybe not so eco-friendly? I mean, laminating as a lifestyle — that’s a lot of plastic. But a few laminated papers are okay? Maybe?

    You can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to laminate. For example, my husband is a person who loves to bake, so now he has all of his recipes printed out, laminated, and hanging on a hook in the kitchen. What does this say about him? It says that he’s married to a woman that’s sick of him looking up his recipes on the computer when she’s trying to watch Netflix.

    And me? The very first thing that I laminated was the “Teach Your Kids to Clean Their Bedroom in Ten Minutes” printable from HowDoesShe.com. What does this say about me? Probably that we’re one stuffed animal away from a polyester bonfire in the backyard. And it would be a huge fire, because seven-year-old Harbour has FIVE bins of stuffed animals.

    Harbour has a hard time keeping her room tidy with all those toys, and having me as a mother is no help. You know that I’m super disorganized. It’s just not my gift. Add four messy family members to the mix and I’m drowning in paper scraps, dirty dishes, and laundry piles. And that’s all by Monday afternoon, even though I insist on a clean house for Sundays.

    I want my kids to be better at cleaning than I am, but I struggle with how to teach that.

    And it’s not like I haven’t tried. Back when our oldest, River, was just four or five, I’d send her to her room to clean it. She wouldn’t clean it though; she would cry until I either came in to help her or cry until I gave up and let her play. It was usually a combination of me cleaning and her playing.

    One day I vented on Facebook about how completely frustrated I was, and some friends clued me into the fact that she was a bit too young to take on cleaning a whole room by herself. Really? I honestly had no idea. From them on, I’ve tried to give her a hand — but nothing ever really improved. She never learned to clean the room herself unless I was there to direct her.

    I had the same trouble with Harbour. When she was 6 years old, I felt like she was more than capable of cleaning her room — but all she did was shove stuff under the dresser and the bed. Sure it looked neater (as long as you were standing upright), and yes, I felt better because I was able to vacuum most of the carpet, but it wasn’t really clean and tidy in the way I wanted.

    Why couldn’t my kids get this? It turns out that I needed to actually teach them how to clean, and the Teach Your Kids to Clean in 10 Minutes printable HowDoesShe.com was a game changer for us. Suddenly we had a list of steps to follow each and every time, breaking the overwhelming task of cleaning a messy bedroom into predictable, manageable tasks.

    It’s amazing. And that’s why it’s the first thing that I laminated and that’s why I want to share it with you.

    How To Clean a Kid’s Bedroom

    Let me take you through the steps.

    First, we sweep everything off the bed and make it. Harbour generally enjoys this step, but for some reason River hates it, and in her mind, every single thing that’s on the floor is only there because I just chucked it off of her bed. That means the whole messy room is 100% my fault. But we press on.

    Second, we put all the clothes — dirty or clean — back on the bed. This step is even more enraging for River because now the freshly made bed is messy again. She complains bitterly every. single. time.

    The third step is to put away all the toys or books that belong in the room. For Harbour and Forest’s room, this couldn’t be easier. We have the Trofast bins from Ikea, so it’s a matter of tossing toys into the right one.

    OK, back to that stuffie bonfire idea for a second — how toxic do you think the smoke would be if they caught fire? By “accident”, I mean? I guess the kids might catch on when they hear me call the city for a fire permit. Or see me dragging bins of toys into the backyard with a matchbook and a bag of marshmallows.

    Well, until I figure out a way to rid the house of 47 stuffed unicorns and all of their friends, we keep them all in Trofast bins from Ikea. In an attempt to keep things simple, I don’t even sort the toys much. If it’s plastic, stick it in the one plastic bin. If it’s silky, but it in the playsilk bin. If it’s cuddly, stick it in ANY other bin. 

    During step three, we come across a lot of things that don’t belong in the bedroom; we just designate a basket or a hamper for this and toss in all the stray toys, measuring spoons, half-filled shampoo bottles, watermelon seeds, and missing remote controls that we come across. I think of it as an amnesty basket: I won’t ask questions about why any of this stuff is in the room — I’m just happy to get it back. But the stud finder, Harbour? Really? Do you know how long we’ve been looking for this?

    The fourth step is to get rid of the garbage. This can be a difficult step if the kids have been drawing a lot. We generally put all the papers in a pile, sort the keepers out, and then recycle the rest of the papers. I drag the recycling bin right into the bedroom so anything that will be discarded is put right into the bin immediately.

    The last and final step is to sort the dirty from the clean clothing. This is another skill I’m working on with my kids. Grass stains? Dirty. Cat hair? Dirty. Nothing? THEN IT DOES NOT GO IN THE HAMPER! Eventually, the clean clothes get put away and the laundry is moved to the hallway.

    And that’s it — the room is tidy. This system doesn’t always take us 10 minutes — not by a long shot. Timing depends on whether we’ve kept up throughout the week. But for me it’s not so much about the time span. What I love about this checklist is that no matter how messy the room is, we know where to start.

    Make the bed. We can handle that.

  • Your Year-Long Meal Plan

    I LOVE meal plans — but I hate writing them up. I usually make them for 4-12 week periods, but this being the year of structure, I made one that would last 365 days.

    It seems a bit extreme, doesn’t it?

    The thing is, making a year-long plan didn’t take me all that much longer than making one for the month or the season.

    I’m sharing the steps that I went through so that you can make one too, if you feel so inclined. It’s not hard. Boring, yes, but not hard. If you decide to make one too, just make sure you have something good to watch on Netflix (and tell me what that is, because I need a new show to love!).

    Ready? Let’s get started.

    1 Create Categories

    Go ahead and open your favourite spreadsheet program. On the first worksheet, we’re going to brainstorm as many dinner meals as we can. Let’s break it down a bit so it’s more manageable.

    First, come up with seven categories of meals. The seven categories can be anything — for example, you could go with cooking method, like this:

    Sunday: simmer (think soups and stews)
    Monday: bake (maybe roasts? Definitely pizza)
    Tuesday: tacos (it is Tuesday, after all)
    Wednesday: bbq (okay, I don’t have a BBQ, so you have to figure this one out on your own)
    Thursday: stir-fry (except… what do you stir-fry besides a stir-fry?)
    Friday: slow cooker (pulled pork sandwiches. So good)
    Saturday: microwave (I’m not judging)

    Another idea? You could embrace stereotypes (now I’m judging) and cook your way around the world:

    Sunday: Italian (pasta and pizza)
    Monday: Chinese (have you tried this baked sweet and sour chicken recipe?)
    Tuesday: still Tacos (still Tuesday)
    Wednesday: American (ummm… burgers and fries, I guess)
    Thursday: Polish (perogies!!)
    Friday: Thai (all Thai food is amazing)
    Saturday: … I’ve got nothing. Australian food — is that a thing? Kangaroo meat and vegemite, I guess.

    Personally, I find it easiest to organize using a combination of meats and meal styles

    Sunday: Soup
    Monday: Leftovers
    Tuesday: Beef
    Wednesday: Chicken
    Thursday: Pork
    Friday: Slow Cooker
    Saturday: Misc.

    Yes, Misc.

    Saturdays started off as Fish, but that’s never going to happen in this family. Then I made it Vegetarian, and then I finally settled on Misc. It’s code for Bacon.

    2 Come Up with Dinner Ideas

    Once you’ve chosen your seven categories, type them as the headings for seven columns in your spreadsheet and get ready for some more brainstorming fun (the fun will probably come from the hilarious show you’ve chosen on Netflix).

    Under each category, write down as many supper ideas as you can. When I made my list, I aimed for 12 meals in each category, which would have me repeat each one 4-5 times a year.

    For example, Sunday: Soup

    • broccoli and cheddar soup
    • cream of mushroom soup
    • tomato-zucchini soup
    • tomato soup
    • potato-bacon soup
    • potato-leek soup
    • potato-parsnip soup
    • curried carrot and ginger soup
    • cream of celery soup
    • corn chowder
    • cream of cauliflower soup
    • chicken and ginger soup
    • thai chicken soup

    That’s 12 types of soup. With one soup scheduled each week, I’ll be making each of the 4-5 times this year. Although to be honest, these are suggestions more than anything, in case I get stuck. I suspect that most weeks will be “this is what I found in the vegetable crisper” soup, simmered in a broth and topped with a few herbs from the garden. It’s always good.

    Some of the categories can be easier than the others. For example, Pork only inspired a few ideas for me:

    • spare ribs
    • pork chops
    • pork fajitas
    • pulled pork (which I actually bumped to slow cooker Fridays)
    • ham

    That’s okay though. The lists under each category don’t need to all be the same length because you will loop through each one individually.

    One suggestion: it’s much better to have a short list of meals that you can make confidently than a long list filled with random recipes that you found on a gourmet blog.

    That’s not to say that you can’t experiment in the kitchen — you can certainly scrap a scheduled meal anytime you feel inspired to try something different. However, the whole idea behind this meal plan is to reduce your stress. And you know what? The day that you schedule a fancy new meal like Vegan Celery Root and Mushroom Lasagna will inevitably fall on the day that you come home to find your toddler painted a mural with Worcestershire sauce on your living room carpet. And your couch. And did you leave your new coat on the floor? Yeah, on your coat too.

    Don’t sabotage your meal plan with fussy recipes. If you stick with dinners that are basic or at least familiar, you’ll be able to do them even on days when you feel less energetic. Like last week: I was so tired, and the last thing I wanted to do was stand up make supper. Despite my lack of energy, I still made meatballs from scratch without any hesitation — because that’s what was on my meal plan. It was easier to just do it instead of coming up with something else. (Something else for us is always scrambled eggs. I’m so sick of scrambled eggs.)

    Once you’ve got your supper ideas typed out, move on to breakfast and lunch. These lists are both much easier: I recommend that you come up with one breakfast and one lunch idea for each day of the week and that’s it.

    I cannot tell you how much less my kids complain when they have a consistent breakfast and lunch schedule. My oldest is far less likely to whine about “homemade waffles with fresh whipped cream again” when she can see that pizza is coming up the next day. Homemade whipped cream, people. Kids.

    Our breakfast | lunch schedule is as follows:

    DayBreakfastLunch
    SundayMuffinsGrilled Cheese
    MondayScrambled EggsGrilled Cheese
    TuesdayFrench ToastChicken Nuggets
    WednesdayPancakesNachos
    ThursdayOatmealRice Bowls
    FridayCinnamon RollsPicnic Lunch
    SaturdayWafflesPizza

    Finished your lists? Before you sign off on your meal plan, take a step back and see if it makes sense. Is there a day that you’re rushed with afternoon swimming lessons and dance class? Why not move your slow cooker list to that day so you don’t have to fuss with a meal on those nights.

    I originally had Grilled Cheese on Sundays and French Toast on Thursdays — but given that I bake my own bread on Saturdays, it made sense to move French Toast earlier in the week, when we have bread. Apparently, bread is important for French Toast.

    4 Create the Master List

    Once you’re satisfied with the general flow of your week, it’s time to create your master list. On a fresh worksheet, enter four headings at the top: Date, Breakfast, Lunch and Supper. I have a fifth column for Notes, where I paste in web links if I remember to. Which is almost never.

    In the first column, under Date, you’re going to enter every date from now until the end of the year. Don’t worry, it just takes a second. Type out January 1, 2017 (or whatever day you want to start on) and then grab the fill handle on the spreadsheet cell and drag it down down down until you’re at December 31. (I like to see how close I can stop to December 31. Often I’m off by a few years.)

    Next, you’re going to copy and paste all your fabulous meal ideas into the list. I’m not going to lie — this is pretty tedious, so load the next Netflix episode up. Or hey – you could get your kid to do the cut and pasting for you, and count it as a homeschool lesson in computers. There’s a good chance that your kid knows way more about computers than you do and will automate the process with macros or something, finishing in just minutes. But she also might go ahead and replace all your meal ideas with “pizza” as she goes. Gah! All that hard brainstorming work gone! Okay, let’s agree that we won’t let the kids do it. We can get through this ourselves.

    First, copy and paste your list of seven breakfast ideas into the first seven days of your master list. Then copy it again to the next week, and then the next week. Do it again and again until you finish the year. Do the same with lunch.

    Now for supper. Copy the first entry in your Sunday category (for me, that’s soup) and paste it into the first empty Sunday cell on your master list. Then go back and copy the second entry in your Sunday category and paste it into the next empty Sunday cell on your master list. You get what I’m saying, right? You’re going to copy the first category meal ideas to each Sunday on your mast lister. It’s a lot of back and forth, but you’ll get into a rhythm.

    When you get to the bottom of your category’s list, start again at the top and keep copying and pasting until you reach the end of the year. Move to the next category. One by one, populate your list with the meals that you came up with.

    A few tips:

    1. You might want to change the order of meals a bit while you go, and of course, that’s allowed. For example, I made a point to paste the chilis and stews in the colder months more often and skip them entirely in the summer months.
    2. You might also want to eat one particular meal (tacos, obviously) fairly regularly. When I made my master list, I pasted tacos every second Tuesday for the entire year, then I went back and filled in the remaining empty spaces with meals from the rest of the category.
    3. It works the other way too — there might be a meal that you want to eat less often. For me, that’s Spare Ribs. I don’t have a lot in my Pork category, but I can’t afford to eat spare ribs every single month. If you saw how many I eat, you’d understand why. To make sure that we weren’t eating spare ribs too often, I added four extra instances of Pork Chops to my Pork list.

    You might be wondering how you’re going to eat seasonally when your whole year rotates through the same meals. I’ve never found that to be a problem — I just adjust my recipes to include the fruits and vegetables that are currently available. For example, chicken wraps in the winter might have mashed sweet potato with cinnamon, while in the summer I garnish them with mango instead. Mmmm… those are the best. With Epicure’s Chipotle Aioli? AMAZING. I’m literally drooling as I type. Which is kind of gross, to be honest. I need to clean my laptop keyboard more often.

    5 Print Off Your Fabulous Meal Plan

    I suppose that you could go ahead and print the whole list out and stick it on your fridge, but that would be a bit much, no? I copied and pasted a week’s worth of meals into a pretty (well, not-ugly) Pages template and printed that off instead. I also included space to assign meal-time chores to my kids so that I know who I’m supposed to be nagging to set the table or peel the veggies.

    You might be happier to go paperless and read your meal plan off a screen, or maybe you like to write your menu plan on a laminated sheet that you can reuse week after week (which automatically makes you 47 times more organized than me). Do whatever works for you!

    And remember that you aren’t married to the schedule. It’s only a tool that will make life easier — there is no reason that you can’t ignore what’s written on any given day and have tacos instead.

    Chances are good that I’m doing the same.

  • DIY Doll Beds with Storage

    DIY Doll Beds with Storage

    These DIY doll beds are made from plastic bins, decorated to look like beds but leaving lots of room to store a growing collection of doll clothing. My favourite part? When your child outgrows dolls, you get a new plastic bin for your storage room. 

    I have a child who has trouble falling asleep. She’s often up until 11, 12 or even 1 am, and she’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

    I have talked to doctors, chiropractors and naturopaths about it. We have tried magnesium and melatonin. And yes, of course we have tried earlier bed times and earlier wake times.

    One doctor asked me what time she falls asleep. “Between 11 and I”, I replied.

    “And what time does she get up?”

    “Between 8 and 9.”

    He quickly did the math and then announced that she gets enough sleep for a child her age; I should stop worrying,  he said, because she just has a different inner clock than other kids.

    Ok, fine, maybe she gets enough sleep — but what about me?! My two-year-old doesn’t share her clock. My five-year-old doesn’t share her clock. No matter what time I’m up, I have a child up too. Unless it’s three in the morning and I’m eating ice cream from the carton, watching reruns of Fresh Prince on Netflix with zombie eyes.

    Must. Not. Give up. “Me” time.

    To be honest, it’s not as bad as it used to be. I’ve learned to live without my 8-10 hours of beauty sleep, and really, a nine-year-old that gets up 53 times a night to tell you what’s happening in a book that she’s already read 869 times doesn’t require the same amount of energy as a two-year-old who is big enough to reach the carton of eggs in the refrigerator.

    Christmas is the only time that I truly regret having kids that don’t sleep better. Because how am I supposed to make gifts when one of them could walk into the room at any moment?

    This year, I tried setting firm rules: if you leave your bedroom after 10 for any reason, I said, Christmas is cancelled. It worked pretty well, and it was blissful: two more whole hours to myself, every single night. And I wisely used that time to watch Poldark each evening before pulling out the sewing machine at midnight.

    Don’t judge. I know you understand. You know what it’s like to have a long day and have 600 things to do once the kids are in bed but you just. can’t. move. And Poldark! How do I pull myself away from that?

    Somehow, though, I managed to finish off the gifts about a week before Christmas (which is probably a record for me to be honest). I made two dolls beds, one for each of the Waldorf dolls that I made for Christmas 2013 and then fixed up last year.

    I found the tutorial on the Beneath the Rowan Tree blog — it’s such a genius idea. The beds are made from plastic bins, and even though they’re decorated to look like beds, the bin is still available to store a growing collection of doll clothing. Brilliant, right?

    And I’m sharing how I did it so that you can make your own.

    (1) The Bin

    I chose bins that were short, though I suspect that any bin size would work. My only real concern was to make sure that the bed was long and wide enough to fit each doll comfortably. (I ended up stashing the tops in our “where did all these lids come from?!” bin down in the basement. The mattress is stiff enough that it doesn’t need any support.)

    (2) The Bed Skirt

    My first step was to sew a skirt to cover the bed. The bed on the BTRT blog has an adorable dust ruffle (and there is a quick tutorial on the blog post) — but at 2am, sewing a super long piece of fabric with casing for elastic seemed like too much work. I did a more fitted skirt instead.

    Don’t think lazy — think modern chic. Lazy chic?

    To be honest, I think the dust ruffle would have been much, much less work, because I ended up adding darts to my fabric to make it fit the curves of the bin better. Yeah, a dust ruffle would have been far easier. I wasn’t thinking clearly though — you have to remember that it was after midnight, and that I was emotionally raw from Poldark, so I wasn’t thinking clearly. Especially after finishing that last episode. Wow.

    (3) A Mattress and a Pillow

    So what was next? Well, after I finished Season 1 of Poldark, I needed to satisfy my insatiable need for more British drama, which led me to rewatch Downton Abbey. Didn’t I stay up all night watching Downton Abbey last year when I made those gorgeous amber wrap bracelets? It seems that spending the wee hours with the Crawley family is a bit of a Christmas tradition.

    After a night or two of Lady Mary and the Dowager Countess, I was relaxed enough to continue on with the doll beds. With the bedskirt was finished, I started working on the mattresses.

    I pulled out two pieces of foam that I had purchased for the beds. I got them from a specialty foam store which cut the pieces down to size for me; all I needed to do was add a pretty cover, which I made using this DIY from the Ana White site.

    Warning: it’s one of those tutorials where you just have to blindly follow along and trust that it will work out beautifully. And it did. Honestly, the finished corners look so darn good that I didn’t want to cover them up with a fitted sheet, so I skipped the sheets entirely and moved on right to the doll pillows.

    Pillows are crazy easy, of course. I dare say that you could manage those even if you were watching that horrid Downton special that ruined Christmas for all of England in 2012. Like I did.

    Oh Masterpiece Theatre: why must you hurt us so?

    Sigh. I need see another shot of a mattress cover corner.

    I feel better now.

    (4) Doll Quilt

    I was so, so excited to make the quilts. I’ve been wanting to make a quilt for years, and this was my first try. Okay, technically I didn’t even do actual quilting stitches overtop (because tick tock, tick tock), but I still sewed a bunch of squares together and that was delightful enough for me. I probably broke all sorts of quilting rules but I don’t even care. Seriously. I have to jump on the quilting bandwagon for real.

    Once the squares were sewn together, I laid it on top of an old fleece blanket that I cut down, and then I finished it all off with plain fabric on the back. I followed this tutorial by Cluck Cluck Sew here.

    My one regret is not making the doll quilts bigger — they both could have used an extra row on both the top and the side — but I don’t know if I would have had a piece large enough in my fabric scrap pile for the backing if the quilt was any bigger. Meh. They work, right?

    (5) Doll Clothes

    I had originally planned to sew a whole bunch of doll clothes so that the bins wouldn’t be empty when the girls opened them on Christmas morning. I even cut out a bunch of pieces for the shirts and pants. Then, about half way through December, I realized that my project was taking a lot longer than I expected, given how much time at the beginning I had to dedicate to Poldark. Sigh. I’m such a sucker for dark, brooding Heathcliff-like characters, much to the chagrin of pretty much all of my friends.

    I decided that instead of staying up an extra hour or two each night to sew doll clothes and enjoy the sunrise, I would just go to a used clothing store for children and buy adorable clothes in the clearance newborn section.

    Yikes. What a terrible folding job. Clearly I did not take Marie Kondo’s advice to heart.

    Anyway, I had great luck at the clothing store, like always. It’s such an inexpensive way to get doll clothes and I highly recommend it if your family includes an 18 inch doll or two. I suggest that you bring your child’s doll along so that you can pick the clothes that work best, but I don’t worry too much about the perfect fit. It’s not like a doll is going to trip over a hem, right? However, if you do bring the doll to the store, I feel that I should warn you that you will be that crazy lady with a doll in the shopping cart, trying clothes on her and chattering to her excitedly when you find something that’s just perfect. It really is best if you can avoid talking to the doll while you’re there. I’m not so good at that.

    Oh well, it’s not like I’m going to see those people again, right? And now our two beloved dolls have brand new wardrobes tucked away in their own little beds, where they can get their full 8-10 hours of beauty sleep each night.

    I’m so jealous.

  • Let Go of Perfect

    Let Go of Perfect

    My grandma made me a ceramic music box with Santa Claus on it when I was little. Every year, my mother put it out on the coffee table on December 1 — and not a day sooner. I so clearly remember the ragged cardboard box that we stored it in, and the way that the old shredded newspaper fell to the table as I lifted the music box out. It was the same every single year.

    It would still be weeks before we put the tree up, of course. It was the 80s; Christmas wasn’t a two-month marathon in the 80s. But even without the tree, the music box meant Christmas to me. The music box was the start of the season.

    I have the music box in my home now, and I still love to pull it out at Christmas time and show it to my own kids. I haven’t found a place to display it yet, but that doesn’t matter — as you can see, it’s broken.

    Not too badly, mind you. Last year an elf lost his head, though it looks like my husband was able to glue it back on for me. A couple points on the star are broken off, and there is a chip at the front. The part that bothers me most is the tree; it broke off a couple of years ago, maybe more. The tree is the part that you turn to make the music start. My music box has been silent for a long, long time.

    We never got around to fixing it last year, and we didn’t fix it this year either. I’ll just put it back in it’s box as it is and we’ll store it with the rest of our Christmas decorations until next December. I don’t mind. It’s just one of many things that we didn’t get around to doing.

    Like our advent calendar: my daughter and I sewed a beautiful banner-style calendar like the one from this post, but once we put the calendar up, we did a total of … zero … activities from it. We scrambled to buy candles for our advent wreath at the last minute and we never lit a single one. My wooden spiral that I envisioned as a beautiful table centrepiece is still in the bag on my dresser. My Jesse Tree ornaments haven’t even been printed off yet.

    We didn’t go ice skating (no ice). We didn’t go skiing (okay, that wasn’t ever on my list). Scaredy Squirrel Goes to the Beach beat out the Christmas-themed storybooks under the tree every. single. night. We didn’t embroider the ornaments that I fell in love with, and we didn’t go carolling around the neighbourhood (but that’s on the list right after skiing).

    We didn’t see old-timey fireworks at Westfield Heritage Village, and we didn’t visit Dundurn Castle to see how the MacNabs celebrated Christmas in the mid-19th century, though I suspect that hasn’t changed since we went last year.

    It doesn’t matter though. We still did some things. We put up a tree. We put out our shoes for Sinterklaas. We watched our favourite Christmas movies and we listened to my three favourite Christmas albums 673 times. We made presents. We saw Santa. We spent more time at church. We hosted Christmas dinner. We ate turkey for a week.

    So who’s to say that we didn’t do enough? Why do we all have a crazy vision of what Christmas is supposed to be anyway? And who even came up with the idea of doing a different “Christmas” activity every day for 24 days? When I was growing up, we just ate the chocolate in our Advent Calendar and carried on with our day as usual.

    Thank goodness Jesus wasn’t born in the 21st century. Poor Mary might have gone nuts trying to create the perfect royalty-themed nursery (okay, so some of these are actually really cute). I suppose though that the whole rustic homebirth-in-an-open-barn might have appealed to the crunchy homesteading crowd. I’m willing to bet that it’s already a hashtag on Instagram. Even by first century standards, though, I think it’s clear that the God of the Universe wasn’t looking for “perfect” in the events of Jesus’ birth. Or maybe He was, but His definition of perfect can’t be found on Pinterest. Maybe His definition of perfect is more about doing what we can with what we’ve got — with humility and gratitude.

    Going forward this year, let’s be less. Let’s do less. Let’s focus less on the big over-the-top moments and embrace the small everyday ones. Let’s worry less when things don’t work out. Let’s aim a bit lower but appreciate a lot more.

    Let’s take a dream vacation, as an example. Maybe this year, you just can’t make it happen. Maybe you’ve been dying to take your kids to Disney World but it’s not in the budget, or you can’t get the time off of work. It’s okay. Be disappointed — but not too disappointed. When your kids are grown up, they’ll have just as many fond memories of a weekly game night at your kitchen table as they would of riding Space Mountain or meeting Cinderella.

    It might not feel like you’re creating memories when you’re in the moment. I get that. My game nights is often just a weekly exercise in frustration because my two-year-old keeps stealing game pieces and my five-year-old keeps throwing tantrums when she doesn’t win and my husband keeps wanting to play Risk, which is just the most boring game in the world. You too, right? It’s okay. Just keep showing up, because over time these weeks that turn into months and years will feel like perfection when we look back on them with a hefty dose of nostalgia.

    And Christmas? Honestly, I don’t think my kids are going to remember any one Christmas in particular. They aren’t going to sit around as adults and say, “Hey, remember back in 2016 when Forest was two and he had a wicked fever on Christmas day and he screamed and screamed at mom’s feet while she rinsed off the turkey and she cried and cried because she hates touching raw poultry and then the kitchen flooded and covered them both with water and in the commotion mom put the turkey in the roaster upside down and then later when she tried to flip it over, the turkey flipped it’s wing out and she couldn’t get the lid back on so she flipped the bird at the bird that wouldn’t flip and then she punched it so hard in the wing that it we probably should have reported her for cruelty to half-cooked animals?” No, at most they’ll remember how much they enjoyed eating the turkey. Or rather, how much they would have enjoyed it, if they all hadn’t refused to try turkey.

    What I know they’ll remember are the little things that we do year after year: the traditions, no matter how small they are. My kids will remember how their dad liked to hide Lego Santa in a fun new spot each morning. They’ll remember putting their shoes out for Sinterklaas on Dec 5 and their stockings up for Santa Claus on Dec 24.

    They’ll remember how much their dad loved to bake for the entire month of December. They’ll remember how excited I got every year to put my big golden star in the window and my cheerful bells on my door. They’ll remember how nice it was when the smell of pine filled the house, courtesy of my essential oil diffuser.

    And I hope that they will remember that the Christmas season didn’t officially start until I put out the ceramic music box that my grandmother made. It’s not perfect, but magic isn’t found in perfection.

    Remember that.

  • My Most Popular Posts from 2016

    Some old friends met me for a coffee recently and commented on my perfect life.

    My perfect what-now?

    Apparently my blog gives people the impression that it’s nothing but sunshine and roses here, which is kind of hilarious. Life is not perfect. I generally suck at it. There is not a day that goes by where I don’t feel like a total failure at some point, usually because I’m fighting with the kids about messy rooms/skipped meals/messy kitchens/missing homeschool lessons/messy everything.

    If you want to know how my life is going, check out the dates on my blog posts. Have I put a few new posts up this month? Then we’re probably doing pretty good. Have 6 long weeks passed without a single update on my site? It’s likely that I don’t have time to write; I’m probably too busy searching the local school board’s website about late enrolment dates because I. am. done.

    I sat down to write my summary of Blogging 2016 with a bit of sadness. After all, I never have time to write, my traffic is down right now, my income was practical nil this year, and I’ve failed to master Pinterest in any way, shape or form. Probably because the lords of Pinterest keep seeing me post online about how much Pinterest drives me crazy. They hate me now. It’s mutual.

    So, 2016: lousy year.

    Or was it?

    When I set out in 2016, I made some very specific goals:

    1. Blog weekly. Ideally more than that. FAIL

      I did not blog weekly, but I did post 23 times, which is like every two and a half weeks? That’s not as bad as I’d feared. I can work with that. I’m not completely hopeless.
    2. Increase the traffic to my site. SUCCESS

      Why did I think traffic is down? It’s been better this year by far. And I plan to double it next year.
    3. Create a regular newsletter to complement the blog. FAIL

      I did not create a regular newsletter, but it’s still on the to-do list. Like, the top of the to do list. I might even send the first newsletter out tonight. Or not.
    4. Make a bit of money so I can chip in for household bills. FAIL

      Nope. Didn’t happen. Truthfully, this might have been my worst year yet in terms of income, but it’s because I didn’t go after sponsored posts. I just didn’t have time.
    5. Post on a big site, someday. Like the Huffington Post. SUCCESS

      I did this! I did post on the Huffington Post Canada site — FOUR times! AND I was lucky enough to have each of my four posts promoted on the HuffPo Facebook and Twitter accounts, AND one of those posts was translated into French and Spanish AND featured on the site’s home page! I totally have a screen shot (I’m such a nerd): you see my teeny-tiny face in column one, a post about the competitiveness of Canada on the international markets in column two, and then a big old tampon ad in column three — which is probably the only reason that I haven’t framed it ha ha ha.

     
    There were other successes too, not related to my goals. At the beginning of the year, I signed up for a free 6 week blogging mentorship course run by Julie Nowell.  She’s the one that connected me with the HuffPo editors, and she’s also the one who inspired me to try making a video for Facebook. Oh, the Easter Egg video. It’s been watched over 12,700 times now, though I suspect that 700 of those views are my own kids. Funny, but the other video that I made – the video of me ironing to promote a blog post – only garnered 350 views. Still, I can’t believe that over 300 people watched me iron pockets on a shirt.

    Other successes? One of my posts hit the StumbleUpon jackpot and brought 14,438 page views in a single day (an astronomical leap in traffic for me). Finally, I published another article in EcoParent magazine this year. You wouldn’t believe what a treat it is to go to a magazine rack at the bookstore and see my name in print there! Honestly, I feel like I might actually get to be a writer when I grow up after all!

    After making this list, I don’t feel so bad about the year at all. In fact, I’m excited — and I’m excited to see what happens in 2017.

    I’ve set some more goals, though they look suspiciously like the same ones I had for 2016:

    1. Blog weekly. Ideally more.
    2. Grow my traffic.
    3. Write a regular newsletter to complement the blog.
    4. Make a bit of money so I can chip in for household bills. Actually, my goal is to make enough money blogging that I can hire childcare once or twice a week — so that I can blog. Because I love it.
    5. Post on a big site, someday. Like Well Family on the New York Times website. Lofty goal, I know. But you never know…


    Are you curious to know what posts were the most popular in 2016? Here’s a list of the top posts, based on page views — but before I get to them, let me thank you for being my reader. I keep hearing that blogging is dead, so I’m delighted to have found people who will faithfully visit my site, leave comments, and share my posts with their friends. I never, ever thought I’d love blogging as much as I do, and I suspect that part of the reason I love it so much is because of all of your support. ♥

    Top 10 Posts of 2016

    #10: Our New Favourite Toy

    “The tree had to go. It didn’t take long to cut down at all – in fact, I don’t know why I didn’t just do it last year. Oh right. The crippling guilt.”

    #9: Letter from a Homeschooling Mom

    “School moms, I don’t know how you do it. … You somehow manage to drag your kids out of bed and then feed them and dress them and groom them enough to meet the generally accepted level of hygiene, and you do this all before 9:00am.

    I can confidently say that this is simply beyond my skill level as a parent.”

    #8: Adding Poetry to our Day

    “I had no idea that I would love these little lessons so much.

    Simple? Yes. And so perfect.

    Not too long, not too short. A pleasant mix of “teacher-led” and “independent” learning, covering grammar, poetry, picture study, and copywork using quality literature. The Charlotte Mason in me was like, “wwwwwwwhaaaaaaaaat??!?” (Just kidding, the Charlotte Mason in me is far more articulate and dignified and even has a haughty British accent.)

    #7: Our Kitchen Makeover

    “I didn’t love my kitchen but I didn’t hate it either. But now? Now it’s the most beautiful space in our house – you’d never believe it was the same room!”

    #6: Emeibaby Review

    “Harbour was more difficult to get in. First, you cannot adjust the carrier’s body while the child is on your back (unless your double jointed, I suppose). This meant I had to put her on my front first to do the adjustments while she did her best to claw my face off and escape (refer to paragraph two). The fabric is clamped tightly in the rings, which is great because you know that it’s secure but a bit more difficult to manipulate when your child is punching you in the kidneys.”

    I don’t even know why this post gets so much traffic. I don’t see many shares on Facebook or Pinterest. I’m baffled.

    #5: My Favourite Decluttering Tips from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

    “I grabbed a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo from the library, in hopes that rereading it would give me a jolt of inspiration. Instead I was reminded that I’m the only person in North America that doesn’t love that book. Oh, right…

    I read this book a few years ago, expecting to fall madly in love with the Konmari method. Instead, I nearly sprained my eyeballs because I was rolling them so much. Why wasn’t Kondo’s charm working on me?”

    #4: Tutorial: Easy Last-Minute Fairy Wings

    “I was left with two wingless fairies on my hands.

    I wanted to get some gorgeous silk wings from a toy store down the street. But when I casually mentioned them to my husband, he casually mentioned the garage door that broke last week. And the iPhone that I shattered on the weekend. Not exactly the best week to be buying fancy costumes.”

    #3: Wayfarers: My Pick for a Charlotte Mason Homeschool Curriculum

    “When I downloaded the curriculum samples, I discovered that the curriculum was more than just history; it was science, geography, composer study, art, literature, Bible and more — all conveniently scheduled in a day-by-day planner.

    It was the open-and-go Charlotte Mason homeschool curriculum that I was looking for. Cue church bells and angel choirs.”

    #2. Making Amber Wrap Bracelets II: The Tutorial

    “This post is for all the moms out there with a stash of old amber necklaces just begging to be made into something new and pretty. Because if you’re anything like me, those necklaces have been gathering dust for half a decade now. Go on and dig the necklaces out of storage – I’m going to show you how easy it is to make a wrap bracelet using the amber beads.”

    #1: The One Item Every Settlers of Catan Fan Needs from Ikea

    “On Saturday night, we set up our Catan board with the hexagonal shapes and the number discs, then we placed the frame carefully over top to keep everything in place. It fit perfectly. Like, so perfectly that every future Settlers game should come with a $6 gift card to Ikea.”

  • My Favourite Decluttering Tips from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

    I reached a point sometime in June where my house suddenly felt clean. Not as clean as my mother-in-law’s house, of course, but clean by our standards. And then it was still clean the next day. And the day after that.

    On that third day of cleanliness, I panicked and took the kids camping for the night — anything to get them out of the house and keep the clean streak going. A last-minute camping trip was easy to do because I could find everything quickly. You know, because my house was clean and tidy. I didn’t have to do four loads of laundry first or dig the air mattress out from underneath the Christmas decorations. We basically packed up the van and went.

    Of course, I realized the stupidity of my plan when I returned with three filthy kids and beach’s worth of sand in our bags. But the kids took a bath and I did two loads of laundry and then, after maybe an hour of tidying up, everything was put away and the house was clean again.

    Huh.

    The following week, my house was still tidy and I remember being a bit … bored. I didn’t know what to do with myself. One day, I cleaned the window in the front entrance out of desperation. Turns out, the glass isn’t as frosted as I originally thought. Another day, I attacked the window sills and the baseboards in the kitchen — on the same day! Crazy, right?

    How did I get to this new-found level of clean? A big part has been months and months (and years) of decluttering.

    Decluttering

    For the past few months, my decluttering strategy has been simple: every time we’re going to be driving past our favourite thrift store, I fill up a bag or two, throw it in the van, and donate it that day.

    It’s usually not difficult to fill up a bag — except then it was. Suddenly I was at a point where I would wander from room to room and not come up with a single thing that I should really get rid of.

    I had plateaued.

    When I realized that all the obvious clutter was gone, I knew it was time to take my decluttering to the next level. I needed to consult the master.

    The KonMari Method

    I grabbed a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo from the library, in hopes that rereading it would give me a jolt of inspiration. Instead, I was reminded that I’m the only person in North America that doesn’t love that book. Oh, right…

    I read this book a few years ago, expecting to fall madly in love with the Konmari method. Instead, I nearly sprained my eyeballs because I was rolling them so much. Why wasn’t Kondo’s charm working on me?

    The book started off okay, I guess. I was happy to sort through my clothes and purge. But then I was told to rip the best pages out of my favourite books and throw the rest away. That made my left eye start to twitch, but I persevered, covering old twitchy and reading on with my right. The advice got kind of random.

    I read that I’m supposed to empty my purse every time I come home (p. 153), but that doesn’t really apply to me: I have a one-year-old. Believe me, my purse is dumped upside down on a regular basis, and the contents of my wallets are liberally distributed every other day. This has not made my life better.

    On another page (112), Kondo tells me to routinely put all of my spare change in my wallet and nowhere else. That’s ridiculous — why would I store my money in one place, allowing my sticky-fingered daughter to steal it all at once? No way, I’m cramming my money in the couch cushions where it belongs — my kids will have to work for their money.

    Rereading the book just confirmed that I must live on a different planet than Kondo. If I understand her correctly, folding my socks together like lumpy potatoes is depriving them of a chance to rest (p. 81). I’m also failing my clothes because I don’t run my hands over my shirts and pants while I’m folding them to transmit positive energy and make them feel appreciated (p 73). I’m pretty sure that my clothes aren’t alive. You know what’s alive? The three children that are destroying the house while I tell my pants about my day.

    Then, at the end, the book gets down right depressing as Kondo talks about her childhood:

    “Because I was poor at developing bonds of trust with people, I had an unusually strong attachment to things. … It was material things and my house that taught me to appreciate unconditional love first, not my parents or friends. (p. 180)”

    This is the point of the book where we all awkwardly look at the ground, desperate to avoid eye contact. Hey, what’s that over there? A stray sock? Thank goodness! Let me put this book away and roll that up like a cinnamon bun! Oh that quirky Kondo, isn’t she charming?

    All that being said, there are a few memorable pieces of advice in this book that have made a noticeable change in our home — advice that made the book worth reading (twice).

    My Favourite Decluttering Tips from the KonMari Method

    (1) Designate a spot for everything.

    So much of my clutter will always be clutter because it doesn’t have a designated place of its own. Now if something doesn’t have a home, it doesn’t stay in mine.

    Until last this summer, our vacuum didn’t have a home and so it was always in the living room or the middle of the hallway or the bedrooms. Always in the way. And since I can’t live without a vacuum, I had to find it a home. Same with our brooms and our floor mop. I reconfigured the hallway closet, and now those things have a place where they belong and we’re not constantly tripping over them.

    Children’s artwork, chalkboard chalk, river rocks, stray lego pieces, etc, etc — they all have a home now. It’s made a huge difference.

    (2) Store your shoes in your bedroom closet rather than at the front door.

    I’m pretty sure I laughed out loud when I first read this. Can you imagine kids trudging through the house in their muddy shoes, and then kicking them into their carpeted bedroom closets? Actually, that would never happen, given that I can’t even get my kids to put their shoes in the closet that’s six feet from the front door.

    However. After I finished my condescending chuckle, I realized that there are a LOT of shoes in my front closet that I don’t wear that often. Rain boots, for one. My nicer sandals. My older flip flops. Possibly my running shoes, but I’m not ready to admit that yet.

    Once I realized that there is no reason that these “sometimes” shoes need to take up space in the front closet, I moved them to the bedroom closet. Inspired by the immediate difference that made, I moved the jackets that we rarely use to the bedroom closets as well. It’s not like it ever rains this year, so why waste hangers in a cramped hallway closet for rain coats? I can just pull them out if my rain dances under the full moon ever actually work. Hey, don’t say I don’t do my part for the farmers.

    (3) Does it spark joy?

    I have mixed feelings on this piece of advice, actually. I understand what Kondo is saying. Everyone has a couple shirts that they love, right? Well, why not just keep the few items that you absolutely love and discard the rest. Then, no matter what you wear, you’ll feel like a million bucks.

    But it turns out that it’s easy to take this too far. It took me awhile, but finally, I got rid of all the clothes that I hated — horribly clingy or tight or worn out things that I bought before I had my three kids. I was a decluttering MACHINE. But then we had an unexpected visit to a funeral home a couple weeks ago and I discovered that have nothing even remotely formal left. I ended up choosing a long casual cotton skirt and a tank top, and then I tried to hide the whole underwhelming ensemble by wearing an overtired toddler in an elegant ring sling on my front. It didn’t really work. My one-year-old was not aware that he was a key part of the ensemble.

    I love the idea of a trendy 33-item capsule wardrobe made up of only items that I love, but I’m actually going to have to buy clothes to get there, and I believe that I will require another book for that. If anyone finds something along the lines of The Life-Changing Magic of Finding Clothes that Fit, please let me know.

    (4) Don’t feel obligated to keep something because it was a gift.

    The purpose of a gift is to be received and then the gift’s job is done. This is advice that I’ve read in several different books but I still have a hard time accepting. I just feel so GUILTY when I donate something that was given to me by a friend or a family member. Until this summer, we still had 13-year-old wedding gifts — unused — stored in our garage. I finally cleared them out along with many other things that were given to us over the years. I have to believe that everyone who gave us gifts over the years wants us to be happy and healthy and will therefore understand when something needs to be passed on to another family. I think. I’ve decided not to consult any of those people first. It’s probably for the best.

    Once I was able to part with those things, I was able to tackle other sentimental clutter with a surprising efficiency. Photographs of people I barely recognize from my childhood. Old hideous craft projects that I’ve been hanging on to because I did them with my beloved grandmother. Souvenirs from places that I can’t even remember the names of. It’s all gone and it made a HUGE difference.

    It’s true that decluttering is addictive. Seeing how much cleaner and lighter my house feels makes me want to purge more and more. Yet when I walk through our rooms, I can’t even remember what I’ve gotten rid of anymore.

    I still need to tackle my basement and my garage. We’ve done a lot already, but we could do so much more. I’m not up to reading The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a third time, so I’m looking for new inspiration. What have been your favourite decluttering resources? Leave a comment here or on Facebook and let me know!

  • Why I Wouldn’t Let My Child Do A Ropes Course

    Thank you for visiting my blog! If you enjoy it, you might also enjoy Mom vs the Wasps, which is a fun post about facing my fears for the sake of my children. Well, mostly it’s about me running away from wasps.

    Do ropes courses teach our kids valuable life lessons?

    I sure hope not, because last week at the zoo, I refused to let my 8-year-old even attempt a ropes course. In my defence, there wasn’t enough time. We had already spent hours looking at the animals and playing in the splash pad and I had dinner plans back home. Nope, there would be no ropes course.

    Okay, to be honest, I never had any intention of letting her do the course anyway. Why would I want my sweet child precariously balanced 30 feet above my head?

    I’m terrified of heights. I’m the white-knuckled passenger on the airplane that screams with every bump. Flying? I don’t even like bridges. In fact, that day on the way home from the zoo, I refused to drive over the 131-foot-high skyway and I drove around looking for some sort of lift bridge instead. Sure, it made us super late, but I thought with a little luck, we’d get to see an enormous ship sail past. Who doesn’t love ships? They let people travel at sea level, where we belong.

    Apparently, my daughter doesn’t share my love of the ground. She wanted to do the rope course, 30 feet up in the air.

    I have personal experience with rope course obstacles that are 30 feet in the air. I did a rope challenge when I was a teenager and I can assure you that I learned nothing. Zero character development whatsoever.

    It was at camp with my church youth group sometime back in the 90s. These were the good old days where we could cross from Canada to the US without even photo ID, though it baffles me that we would leave our free healthcare behind. Especially when we did terrifying ropes courses and played games like dodgeball with frisbees, which is every bit as painful as it sounds.

    I loved my youth group. I thought the people in it were so cool – much, much cooler than I was. I really wanted to impress them, and one boy in particular. Of course.

    On the morning of the ropes course, we were all sitting in the dining room eating our breakfast and I overheard my crush talking about the course finale: the Leap of Faith. He was listing the handful of girls that planned to try it and he sounded impressed. That was all the motivation I needed; I decided to do the jump.

    What is the Leap of Faith? Imagine walking through a forest and finding a tall tree with all the branches cut off, except for stubs left behind to act as footholds. Halfway up the tree, the branch stubs are replaced by staggered metal brackets. At the top, the tree trunk is cut clean off, leaving a small flat surface to stand on. A trapeze bar is suspended a few feet away — your goal is to jump from the tree and catch it.

    Crazy, right? And I was going to do it. To impress a boy.

    One by one, kids in my youth group did the jump. Some of them caught the trapeze bar with ease. Some of them touched it but didn’t get a good grip. They all seemed to be having fun, unconcerned with things like gravity laws or basic common sense.

    I was one of the last people to go — probably because I was terrified. By the time my jump came, at least half of the group had gone back to the lake to cool off, but there were still a handful of people left to cheer me on as I triumphantly jumped my way into a cute boy’s heart. Or to watch me fail spectacularly.

    I put on my safety harness and I started the climb up, up, up. About halfway to the top, I felt queasy.

    Don’t look down, don’t look down.

    I kept going, all the way up. I struggled to manoeuvre onto the top of the tree. Why did it look so much easier for everyone else? Gripping the brackets tightly, and I moved my knees up onto the tiny platform so that I was kneeling. Then I forced myself to let go of the brackets.

    Don’t look down, don’t look down.

    I lifted one knee up and placed my foot down in its spot. Then I lifted my second knee up and put my other foot down. I made myself stand.

    I vividly remember that my toes were hanging over the edge because the surface of the tree top was so small. Actually, for years I’ve assumed that I exaggerated the experience in my mind. We weren’t possibly that high. It couldn’t be that narrow. Then I found this photo here on an abandoned blog — there are a couple more on this post. Again – this is in the US where hospitals cost money.

    I stood there on that tree, 30 feet in the air. I was dizzy. I was terrified. I wondered how on earth I was going to get back down. People were cheering for me from the ground but they were just background noise, muffled by the blood pounding in my ears. I didn’t care about being cool anymore; I just cared about being on the ground. And not peeing my pants in the process. I briefly considered climbing back down but I was 100% sure that I would fall flat on my face if I tried.

    So I jumped.

    Well, jumped is a bit of a stretch. I fell forward with my arms halfheartedly stretched out in front of me so that it would look like I was trying to catch trapeze bar. I didn’t even touch it. The rope caught me and I was lowered gently to the sweet, sweet ground where I belong.

    And it was done. I looked around for the boy that I wanted to impress but he wasn’t there. He never saw my jump. Apparently, he was crushing on some other girl, a pretty older girl who had the good sense to ditch the rope course and tan by the lake instead. I walked my pasty-white self back to my cabin alone.

    The only life lesson that I learned that day was that you shouldn’t jump off a tree to impress a boy, but to be honest, that’s not a situation that comes up very often. I suppose I could have worked out some greater lessons about peer pressure or being true to yourself, but I didn’t dig that deep. I just swore off rope courses.

    Until now, that is.

    I saw the look on my daughter’s face when I dragged her away from the ropes course and I realized that my fears were holding her back. I need to stop that. I want my children to ride roller coasters and try zip lines and drive over skyways while I hyperventilate in the passenger seat. I can’t let my fears rule their lives.

    So I suppose we’ll be heading back to the rope course at some point this year so that she can give it a try. She needs to face her fears. Just as soon as I work on mine.



  • How to Stop Feeling Like the Family Chauffeur

    Do you sometimes feel like the family chauffeur? Yeah, me too. But I’ve found a way to get rid of that feeling…

    The year-end dance recital was last Saturday, so like moms everywhere, my week was a blur of rehearsals, sequins, makeup, and hairspray. And that was just me.

    That’s right, I danced.

    On stage, in front of hundreds of people, I stumbled across the stage in a sparkly Irish dress that was used in a dance competition some 20 years ago. My hair was styled with a simple braid across the top of my head, which really let each and every grey hair stand out. My make up mostly consisted of red lipstick that we found stashed in the bottom of a purse that my mother-in-law passed down to River last year.

    AND THE DRESS?

    Here’s the costume. I think I looked like some kind of a mash-up between an Irish dancer and a high school cheerleader, with a touch of the Joker from Batman thrown in. After he’s been hit by a sparkle truck. Incidentally, I went to the high school where the recital was, and my clothes fit me just as bad back then too. Sadly, that was the year where I was still trying to look good in clothes — the year before I realized that Grunge was the answer to every insecure teen’s fashion troubles.

    irishdress

    My kids and I go to a dance studio that offers inexpensive dance classes — I’m talking $2/class/week — for the entire family, all at the same time. That means that in one giant, chaotic gym, you will find a creative movement class for toddlers, a Zumba class for adults, a hip hop class for teenagers, and a ballet class for younger kids. And my class — adult’s Irish dance.

    It’s crazy and loud and the music is all mixed together; I think I’ve practised my Irish two-hand to a Britney Spears medley more often than to a traditional Irish song. Regardless, I love that when I’m doing my class, my five-year-old Harbour is 20 feet away doing ballet while my eight-year-old River is upstairs doing tap and my one-year-old is so overwhelmed by the sensory overload that he just sits like a zombie and stares at it all for the 45 minutes until I’m done.

    Then Harbour heads across the gym to Acro and River switches to Irish and I take the toddler into the hallway where I sit with a friend and consume twice the amount of calories that I just burned off in the form of Coke bottle gummies.

    It’s actually a pretty great way to spend the evening.

    Last year, River was the only one of us to take a class. I peeked into the adult class a few times — a friend was in it — but I knew that it wasn’t for me. I have two left feet. Well, two left flippers would probably be more accurate. But then, at last year’s recital when I saw this big group of adults having a blast on stage, regardless of their age or skill level, I decided to sign up for a class. I figured that I could dance at the back of the group if I was terrible, right?

    Nope.

    I was to dance a two-hand with my friend, which made “hiding at the back of the group” as planned much more tricky. Well, impossible really. The two of us went on stage. My friend gave me the “start dancing now” squeeze because I can’t keep time to save my life, and then we danced our short dance and I managed not to fall flat on my face. I’m pretty sure that I started on the wrong foot once or twice, but between my big white sparkly skirt and my friend’s big orange sparkly skirt, I couldn’t see our feet to check. Probably for the best. Thankfully, my friend is such a skilled dancer that she was able to move us around the stage easily.

    And then we were finished. We 1-2-3’d to the back of the stage, where River was waiting to start her 3-hand dance with the son of my dance partner and the daughter of my coke-bottle-candy-enabling friend.

    I could never have predicted that I’d be prancing around on a stage along with my kids in a dance recital at the age of 36. But it was so much fun — way more fun than the years that River took lessons and I waited in the hallway with her younger siblings.

    This year, I was a participant instead of a chauffeur. And it made all the difference. It turned dance night into a fun night rather than a hassle.

    I’ve found that as a mom — especially as a homeschooling mom — it’s far too easy to be sucked into the role of chauffeur, and the lessons and appointments and activities just become stressful. Life gets wrapped up in schedules: who needs to be picked up, who needs to be dropped off, who should be napping right now? (Usually me.)

    I used to think it was all just a part of parenting. When I first thought about only choosing extra-curricular activities that offered me something as well, I felt really selfish. Yet just last year, I had a talk with River about picking activities that were fun for Harbour too. After all, it wasn’t fair that my middle child had to be dragged around to all sorts of different activities that she wasn’t even participating in, right? And I didn’t feel guilty at all. Actually, I remember feeling really good about teaching my daughter empathy. So why is it any different if I steer my children towards activities that I can participate in as well?

    There are other benefits beyond my own enjoyment to doing things together. I like that on dance night when Harbour is doing her ballet class, she can look across the gym and see me practising some tricky Irish steps. Well, tricky for me, at least. It’s probably good for her to see me mess up over and over. And over. She sees that I’m still having fun. She sees that I’m working hard to learn a new skill. She sees a whole bunch of adults that have decided to keep on learning, regardless of their age. That’s a pretty great thing for a five-year-old to absorb week after week.

    I wish there were more family-oriented activities, like family karate class or family yoga or family ukulele lessons. Family pottery mornings? We’d sign up! Well, no we wouldn’t because we’re barely functional before noon, but we’d be reluctant when we said no.

    As you plan your summer, you might find that your weeks are less stressful if you make a point of choosing activities that your entire family will enjoy. And no, that doesn’t mean you have to do the activities yourself, just that you’ll enjoy them. Maybe your daughter likes t-ball the best, but soccer will let all your kids participate at the same time AND there’s a Starbucks drive-thru on the way there. A mocha, some shady trees and a good book? I’d go for that.

    Whatever activities you pick, the key is to consider your entire family — including yourself. I don’t think it’s wrong to tell a child that they can’t go to a camp or a weekly lesson because it will inconvenience the rest of the family. In fact, I believe that it’s teaching my kids a community mindset. In theory. Honestly, it’s still really hard for me to say no.

    But I’m trying my best. I keep telling myself that we can always sign up another year if we want, right? After all, “no” can mean “not right now” instead of “not ever”. Who knows? No could even mean: “not until you’re 36.”

    I've found that as a mom -- especially as a homeschooling mom -- it's far too easy to be sucked into the role of chauffeur, and the lessons and appointments and activities just become stressful. Life gets wrapped up in schedules: who needs to be picked up, who needs to be dropped off, who should be napping right now? (Usually me.)