New Blogs I've found

I found a new blog and I'm pretty excited about it. It's called http://www.likeawarmcupofcoffee.com and they are hosting a giveaway for a neat e-book called 31 Days to Clean. I'm always looking for tips on how to stay motivated to keep my house neat. The biggest thing I've learned and am learning is that clutter is NOT my friend - so I need to purge weekly if not DAILY! :)

My Household Binder

One of my favorite blogs, iheartorganizing.blogspot.com, posted a monthly challenge of getting together a family binder. I loved this idea. I've tried it before, but hadn't really thought through all of the needs I wanted it to cover and this blog really inspired me to start again - or rather (bashful grin), attempt to finish what I had started.

So...drumroll please... here's what I've got so far! :)

 

Here is the cover of my binder. I had fun decorating it a couple years ago so that it would be nice to look at. I kinda like the name "Plan Book" instead of Binder, so that's what I used instead. 

I keep my pens, pencils, scissors and any misc. other things I might need here. Then, for each section of my plan book, I scrapbooked a page to make it pretty to look at. Some sections still need to be added or updated still though. 

For my schedule section, I have my week at a glance, calendar (I might remove this later since I have one hanging on my wall beside the computer that I look at FAR more frequently), and I am planning on adding my daily schedule and school schedule as well. 

I got my week at a glance from http://www.mommytracked.com. 

My calendar is also from  iheartorganizing.blogspot.com. 

The menu section is where I have my meal planning page. I love, Love, LOVE what Jen did for her meal planning page - and so I printed off a copy of hers. 

It has everything I want to plan for to stay on track with loosing the last few pounds from my 3 pregnancies. I'm well on my way folks - and I'm super excited! It has a place to plan breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and dinner. I try not to snack in the evenings now, so this is another reminder not to!

I haven't added anything to my education section yet, but have plans for it. I'm planning on putting the homeschool curriculum's that I'm currently looking at here and possibly including a copy of the school plans for the week.  

Since I homeschool, I'm fairly busy so I don't have much time for projects and crafts, but here is what I would like to work on. 

I would like to take an inventory of our current movie collection. I have it fairly organized now, but would love to have record of it on paper as well. 

I also plan on creating a place to keep the library checkout receipt so I don't forget what library books I have out and when they need to be returned. :)

Since I'm new to blogging, I loved the fabulous BLOG ideas page, so I included a copy Jen made as well. 

She also had a page for gift giving, which I liked. I'm thinking about creating another section for financial information and if I do, this will be moved into that section. But for now, it's great to have this to list out all my family and friends that I need to remember to get gifts for. 

Ahh the cleaning page. I am a reforming-slob. We moved into my in-laws new house last month and I'm terrified that we will mess it up in some way before we move into our new home. So I've become a little obsessed with cleaning. 

I included Jen's family cleaning checklist and her home maintenance checklist. I want to be sure I don't forget to do something that I normally wouldn't think of doing so I can keep my temporary house looking new. 

I also liked a page from www.acleanheart.com so I included it to remind me of things to work on each month.

Woman's Day had a Spring Cleaning checklist that I loved too, so I included a copy of it as well. 

 

I have recently (as in the past 1.5 years) gotten back into exercising, so a Fitness section was a must for me. Homschooling my kids and a longer commute to the YMCA means that I don't go as often as I would like. 

I have several Jillian Michael's videos and I LOVE them. I found this challenge on Exercise.tv and printed it out so I would have a rotating schedule for my videos. 

I also like to look at exercise magazines like Oxygen, Fitness and Shape. When I see an article I like, I tear it out so I can try out the exercises, without having to cart around the magazine. If they are really good, I scan them so I don't destroy the original copy.

To loose weight when I first started to work out, I decided to follow some tips I read about and write down everything I ate. Click on the picture below to download a copy of my Food & Exercise Log.

I work out with a personal trainer 2-3x a week and she makes some suggestions on what I eat and how I could do better to stay on track to get down to the shape I want to be in for the rest of my life. It's not easy remembering to write down everything, but having this printed out helps a lot. 

Since we are planning on building a house in the new future, I have a section for House Plans. 

Anything I find that might be useful in the house building process I try to keep here. Like this page on countertops. It has some great information comparing all the different countertops and their pros/cons. 

I keep my address labels here - or did until we moved. I haven't updated them yet, so this section is also blank. But it's the last page in my book, so I'm ok with it being empty for now.

Thanks for checking out my plan book. :)

Thanksgiving Kryptonite

We went to Nashville for Thanksgiving and visited with Tom's family. While there, we played an innocent, friendly game of kickball, followed by another friendly, innocent game of soccer to pass the time until Thanksgiving dinner. Until the moment I ran to kick the soccer ball. See, I'm very competitive when it comes to sports - even during friendly games. I just want to kick my own butt for the fun of it. That's why my trainer calls me SuperMom!

This time though, I was trying to tone down my crazy competitiveness and just play for fun because, who really cares who wins or loses in family soccer? I was doing well, just playing hard enough to break a sweat, but not too hard. Then it happened. I went to kick the ball and my knee made a noise. Not a good noise either. I don't know what happened to the ball - if I actually kicked it or not, but I do know that I was in pain - and lots of it! When moments like that happen, when you are having so much fun and don't want to stop, that's when you try to convince yourself that the pain isn't that bad and it's going to go away if you just give it time. Then there is that very small voice that says, "Uh oh" and you know it's bad, but you don't want to admit it, because admitting it would make it true.

So back home we went, my husband Tom carrying me back, since I obviously couldn't do it myself. We enjoyed thanksgiving dinner and the rest of our time with family, but I had my knee packed in ice, still hoping it would be ok. We drove home the next day, and I took it easy for the rest of the day.

I have a wonderful friend at church who demanded that I come to her husband's PT clinic that afternoon. So I went, hoping he would agree my knee was just needing time to heal. However, after doing some tests and asking some questions, he recommended I see a doctor. :'(

So I made an appointment to see a doc and off I went. When I saw the doctor, he did more tests, along with an Xray of my knee, then said that I'd need an MRI to see how bad off my knee was. ARGH. So I got the MRI done, and had got the results sent to my dad while I waited and waited for the doctor to get around to looking at the MRI to give me my results. My dad finally got the cd in the mail and took a look at it, and told me that I'd torn my ACL and meniscus. AGAIN. :(

This means surgery. I had my knee repaired about 11 years ago, so it's done well up until now. But I've gone and ruined all that good work, after one friendly game of soccer. Something about being SuperMom (a nickname I earned from my trainer while working out) - and I forget that I'm not a kid anymore and I just run around like a crazy person - and unfortunately this time, craziness caught up with me. Now I've finished all the PT to get my knee ready for surgery next week.

I still am hoping I'll wake up and find out that it was just a bad dream. But, life throws curveballs sometimes, and even SuperMom get's taken down by her kryptonite. Thankfully I have a good surgeon that I will be meeting with next week before my surgery and hopefully will get everything fixed up quickly.

Still sucks though.

Wow! What a day.

It is 8:40 am and I am not looking forward to the rest of the day.

Since I went to bed last night, I awoke in the middle of the night to my daughter sobbing because she had diarrhea and didn't know what to do about it. It took a while to calm her down enough to get her cleaned up - then I had to spend some time cleaning up the mess off the floor. Needless to say, I was exhausted so fell back to sleep quickly - hoping for a good day, despite a potentially sick girl. No such luck. When I pried my eyes open at 8am the next morning, I heard my youngest daughter shouting, "I need to go Pobby!!!" rather urgently. I crawled out of bed and discovered that she was a naked poopy girl who was wanting to use the toilet that was currently occupied by first daughter who was attending to her business there.

Yup, Nikki had removed her poopy diaper and was gleefully running around, butt naked, shouting her favorite mantra these days, I quickly cleaned her up before she decided to make it worse while the "Pobby" was in use. I decided it was time for breakfast, so headed to the kitchen where I discovered mashed banana all over the counter. Actually, they weren't just mashed on the counter - somebody found a knife and SLICED them first, then carefully put the "evidence" away. I have no idea which child did it - but Tommy & Becky both claimed it was Nikki, so I'm sure that's entirely possible. They might have even caught her in the act and tried to help me by putting the knives away since they knew they weren't allowed to touch them. I sure wouldn't put it past her.

Anyway - I figured by this point, today was going to be an AWESOME day. Of course, with such an awesome beginning, why wouldn't it be awesome? So, for lunch I put the kids in the car so we could meet Daddy for lunch somewhere. I called him on the phone to see where to meet him. While on the phone with him, I realized that the road was especially rocky today. Like REALLY ROCKY! So I figured that it probably wasn't the road. I got out of the car and sure enough, it wasn't the road. The car had a flat. Tom told me I shouldn't have asked what else could go wrong. I laughed and told him I figured that with the morning I had, at some point it was bound to get better - and that I wasn't trying to jinx myself by asking what else could go wrong.

Thankfully he's a wonderful husband and father and suggested that instead of us driving to meet him for lunch, he would come home so we could have lunch together and he would re-inflate the tire to get it back home - and some other time we could get the tire fixed. Ahh - my hero! In so many ways. :)

Funny Kiddos!

My kids have been hilarious today. My morning started off with Nikki coming up to me and announcing "I kitty-cat. Meow!" then she pretended to lick me. I don't really remember the other two pretending to be animals like she is today.

Then later, I asked Tommy to choose 5 chores he wanted to do every day.  He told me. "I'm going to pick up my room, put away all my cars, build something cool for you, wash the table, and sweep the floor.

This is the "something cool" he made for me today. Pretty impressive for the first day, I think. :) Now, if he can keep this up, I'll be very impressed. 

Then while he was sweeping the floor, he asked me if he would still have to do his chores on Sabbath. I told him "yes, we do." Then he told me - "But it says in the bible, we shouldn't do any work on Sabbath!" Apparently his sabbath school lessons are finally sinking in! :)

Caught red handed!

Our youngest is our trouble maker. She manages to get into some amazing trouble without much trouble on her part it seems. Today as we were getting ready for church, she found a jar of red food coloring gel - and painted her hands and her sister's bedroom door. Of course, since she is also a thumb sucker, she dyed her lips bright red as well. So, I assume you could say that she was caught red handed - literally today. You think eventually she would learn, but I think she enjoys the attention. :)

March

I have found some blogs that I'm very very excited about. First - I found a blog on how to style girls hair: www.princesshairstyles.com. I haven't done much with my girls hair yet, because they are still fairly young and don't have a whole lotta hair yet, but SOMEDAY they will. and I'll be ready. With a hairbrush in one hand, and barrettes and hair-bows in the other. :)

Than I have found two sites that have wonderful information on diy house fixups and design ideas. Bower Power and YoungHouseLove are two wonderful sites that I'm falling more in love with the more I read about them. :) Soon those sites will probably have info on child-friendly decor because they are expanding. :) ha ha!

As far as my goals for this year, I've succeeded so far in at least exercising 3-4 times a week. For some reason I just can't seem to get that 5th day in yet - but I'm hoping. :) ExerciseTV.tv is a great place to go to find videos of workouts & inspiration. I'm also enjoying visiting Fitness Magazine's website as well. They have a really cool tool for logging your exercise & foods - to help inspire you. Plus a lot of great workouts to get you ready for summer. Yay!

The getting better organized thing is still a work in progress too - I'm reading a great book called "The House that Cleans Itself" and I love what I've read so far.

Now if I could just put into practice the things that I'm learning from this book, my MOTH book , and Flylady - Tom would be thrilled and I would be ecstatic!

I know that someday I will have the house kept the way I imagine it looking in my head - so I keep plodding away. Some days are wonderful - tommorrow should be one of them since we're having family visit so that means the house will be much better. Still not as perfect as I want it to be - but I haven't given up yet. :)

I've also planted some seedlings for this summers "small" garden. I'm hoping to have better luck with some of the vegetables this year - Earthboxes are wonderful - I just wish I had better access to the sunlight.

Well - I've got a busy day tomorrow - lots of cleaning/sweeping/dusting & putting away of items left out. Wish me luck! :)