Alternate Motivations

Well, it's that time of the year again! Everyone has resolved to get fit, get organized, etc. Me? I am working on getting organized again, but I have alternate motivations. I have some medical stuff coming up and I won't be able to do much for a few weeks, so I would like to have things mostly in order beforehand, both at home and at work.

It's funny, I've been following different organizing, homemaking, and productivity sites for years, so I've heard so many strategies and tips.... they all seem very repetitive sometimes and I start to see the patterns most of them use.

That being said, all the information in the world is useless if you don't apply it!

So it's January 1st and I'm jumping on the bandwagon with so many others, and there's nothing wrong with that.

The main focus is baby-steps to avoid crash-and-burn. I don't need to be Wonder Woman, I just need to be me. It is also important that I spend some time with my husband, and since I work full-time, I need to take small organizing projects here and there, so I'm not spending all of my home-time ignoring my family.

I'm going to work through 3 main systems and incorporate them into my life with baby-steps and all of the general knowledge I have.

1. Taylor from Home Storage Solutions 101 has a Facebook group called Declutter 365 that I am a part of. I joined sometime in December with the intention of starting today. She has created calendars with daily missions for decluttering and links to more detailed information. And there is a great community on the Facebook group that talk about each mission, ask questions, and share their accomplishments.
2. Flylady, of course. I had definitely fallen off this bandwagon, but I'm working on baby-stepping my way back. Her set up is a great system of routines and encouragement. The only problem I've ever found with it was incorporating her zones into the layout of my house, which is quite different from her 'norm', but all it really took was a few minutes to sit down and figure out how to mesh it together.
3. The Secret. Lol! I'm also part of a 'secret' Facebook group that is a spinoff of a forum I used to be on. I'm making the commitment to join in on more of those conversations for the community, encouragement, and accountability.

Happy New Year!

Thank you for joining me on my journey as a Homemaking Diva!!

Love,
Valerie :D

Please comment or send your questions to me on the Homemaking Diva Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/HomemakingDiva

A Welcoming Change - Peace

Well, it's a new year. 2013. It's going to take a while to remember to write all my dates properly... I'm sure I'll be erasing 2012 several times this week :)

A new year is a fresh start, resolutions, commitments, goals - all are floating through our heads. Yet, I'd like to caution you not to go overboard. The stereotypical 'get fit' resolutions that translate into 'go to the gym twice in January' resolutions are basically useless. We put too much pressure on ourselves, push really hard for a short while, then 'crash and burn'.

I'd encourage you to make smaller, incremental, resolutions.

I got a great form emailed to me from Marcia Francois called '2013 Intentions'. She asked us to choose a word for the year. I chose 'peace'. I want to make a calm home where we can relax and enjoy life. By focusing on my 'word for the year' I can more clearly choose my goals to fit inside 'peace'.

Naturally, clutter and chaos in a home takes away from 'peace'. So decluttering is on my list - my house definitely would NOT qualify for Hoarders but it can use some work. The main areas are decent but can be tweaked and the 'extra' rooms, especially 'my' rooms need overhauls.

BUT, I don't want to crash and burn, so I'm baby-stepping it. Easy as 1, 2, 3!

1. Knock out something small - Instead of writing down everything I can possibly think of to do, I'm spending some extra time flitting around taking care of the small tasks that don't take very long.
2. Just 15 minutes - This one's ingrained in my from Flylady, you don't have to do everything, just work on it for 15 minutes and make some progress. You'll be amazed at what you can do in 15 minutes!
3. Add to routines in babysteps - Don't add 25 things to your daily to do list today, add one thing and work at making it part of your routine, when you feel comfortable with that, add one more thing.

Will you 1-2-3 with me? What is your 'word for the year'?


Thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Love,
Valerie :D

Please comment or send your questions to me on the Homemaking Diva Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/HomemakingDiva or by email at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

Five Ways to Save Money - In the Bathroom

Nobody wants to light five dollar bills on fire, so here are some helpful hints to save some money:

1. Soap is soap: This one is directly 'stolen' from Flylady, the idea is that you don't need a different kind of soap for every single thing. Leftover shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, etc. can be used for cleaning the sinks, tubs and toilets. I keep bottles of hand soap and laundry detergent when they're "empty", add some water, shake it around and use that to 'swish my toilet (with a brush and some elbow grease).
2. Don't buy shaving cream: This one's for the ladies. Use shampoo or conditioner to shave your legs. I've been using conditioner to shave my legs for about a year now, and it works perfectly fine. The only difference I notice in the shower is that it's much easier to fit everything on those little shelves with one less bottle. You can use the same as you use on your hair, buy cheap stuff especially for this purpose, or use up a shampoo you didn't like.
3. Don't buy makeup remover: I paid $10.49 plus tax for a 125mL little bottle of L'Oreal makeup remover. Can we say expensive? NOW, I use Johnson's head-to-toe baby wash. A 444mL bottle runs somewhere around $7.00 plus, I water it down. I fill my L'Oreal bottle about 1/3 full, and top it off with water, shake and I'm ready to go. If it's safe for baby's eyes, why not mine? (Plus I have semi-sensitive skin, and no problems).
4. Use what you have: This always applies. We all have those stashes of "nice" creams and stuff for "special" occasions. Go ahead and use them. You are special all on your own, you don't need an occasion. 
5. Try cheap: Touch and go with this one. I've done the cheap-o Q-tips and was not impressed, so I only buy brand name for them. But I buy the cheaper "Daisy" razors, no name cotton balls and cotton pads. If it's something you use a lot, buy a small package of a cheaper version or brand and see if it'll work for you.

Thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Love,
Valerie :D

Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

A Simple Christmas - December First

Christmas can get so busy... I love FLYlady's babysteps... Holiday Cruising is what she calls it. I'm aiming for a simple Christmas this year.

December 1st!! We're embracing DH's Scottish heritage this Christmas :) Today we did 3 small Christmas things:

1. Added plaid bows to the wreath and put it on the front door
2. Put up the tree (pre-lit, simple) with just the lights and our new angel for now
3. I brought up the Christmas dishes (OK, mugs and 1 glass, plus some hot pads and tea towels) and put the dishes in the dishwasher, put 'regular' mugs right back into the same box and put the box back downstairs :)

I started the Christmas Baking with my sister at the end of October. We spread it out over 3 different days, making 2 or 3 things a day, doubling some recipes and splitting everything. We finished November 25th!

So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

Have great day!

Valerie :D

Christmas is Coming! But First: Company and Carpet :)

Confused by that title? :D Let me explain.

First of all 'Christmas is coming' - not very difficult to comprehend. I know many of you are groaning: 'But it was just Halloween, gimme some time!' Please don't get upset, I agree with you! It drives me crazy that there's Christmas stuff in all the stores already and personally, I refuse to decorate one iota before December 1st.

But! NOW is the time to plan and prepare! Flylady's Holiday Cruising Missions are in full swing, and the organizing sites are bursting with time-saving ideas. What's a Holiday Cruising Mission? Well, simplest way to put it is Flylady sends out one mission per weekday, starting mid-October, and she helps us to baby-step our way through preparing for Christmas. There's a fun little game behind it where you're pretending you're going on a cruise December 1st-21st and you HAVE to get everything done ahead of time. It's a great system, keeping you on track, one baby-step at a time.

While I'm not exactly following the Cruising Missions, I am baby-stepping my way through Christmas.

My sister and I do our baking together, and we've already planned what we're making, who's bringing which ingredients and supplies, and when we're making each recipe. This is our third year doing it, so we have it down to a science, I have a simple spreadsheet with recipe names across the top and ingredients down the side and the amounts of each ingredient per recipe in the middle with columns on the end for totals and initials (who's bringing what). We mostly make our same traditional goodies each year, so all I had to do this year was pull up last year's spreadsheet, do a 'save as' and make some minor tweaks. We're making 7 recipes, plus icing over 3 days together and we already did one day. We have fun and get it done, and THAT'S the Flylady way :D

I pulled out my Holiday Control Journal (a free printable from Flylady.net) and I have all my little notes from the last few years. I don't use it quite how Flylady set it up, but I do have everything together. I added a non-Christmas section, and that's where I have my sheet of paper that lists how many kids we had for Halloween each year, so I have a good idea of how much candy to pick up. I also have my Thanksgiving meal planners in there - one page checklists of what order to make each dish, how far ahead... Sound like a lot of work? Saving Dinner just posted theirs and you know it's gonna be fool-proof :D

So I'm starting to THINK about Christmas now, plan a bit here and there, I've picked up a few things already. I got all the stocking stuffers already - a friend of mine had a craft sale with all kinds of pretty and useful and yummy things :D A word of caution: If you're picking up gifts ahead of time and hiding them, be sure to either note where they are (put a reminder in your phone's calendar to ding at you on, say, December 12th, and then you can wrap the gifts and put them under the tree) or keep them all in the same place. I have a spot in my house that I usually hide DH's gifts, and he hasn't found it yet, not that he's been looking. So I know where things are, because they wouldn't be anywhere else :)

ANYWAYS, what was the rest of the title? Oh yes! 'Company and Carpet' right.

So I'm having overnight guests on Saturday. They said they'd get here around 8pm and they're visiting someone else on Sunday before they go home, so I'm figuring a snack Saturday night plus breakfast Sunday morning. I'm keeping it simple, but fancy at the same time. Old bananas were reduced drastically a while back and they called to me, so I brought them home and made two loaves of banana bread. We ate one, but I froze the other, so there's my Saturday night snack :D

Also, I wanted to do something fun for breakfast. I have a cookbook that was a fundraiser for the hospital I bought at a concert and recently I've been trying some of the recipes. And guess what?? The chocolate crepes recipe (which is sooo good - oh yeah, I'm making that today, too for post-night shift 'breakfast' - see my post on shifting) it says to make the batter 1-24 hours ahead of time! (I actually didn't notice that the first time I made it, and didn't care the second time... whatever) So I can make the batter and the whipped cream to go with it (I do Dream Whip: packet + milk + vanilla = DONE) sometime on Saturday before they arrive and then breakfast will be a snap!

Really, I've let the housework slide a bit too much, so having company coming is a great deadline to get myself into gear. And THEN once I've tidied everything up, it's so simple to maintain and I can have a stress free Christmas!

Carpet: My last post was all about how I'd finished painting DH's office. Well, the carpet guy is coming on Friday, so I need to tear the old carpet out (it's cheaper if I do it, once I get into it, I'll decide if it's worth the $35 savings :D it's probably easier than you think). So not only do I have to prepare for company, I have to make space for the carpet guy. But that ALSO means that we can start setting up DH's office :D and then my 'Joyous Snowball' will start rolling down the hill!



Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

Have great day!

Valerie :D

Losing It With Leanne Challenge Day 14 - Still here!

January 25, 2011

Sorry about that! I am still here, really! :D You know how it is... life gets busy and all of a sudden you're way behind in your blog posts.

I'm still on the plan and having fun. I'm down about 4 pounds which is good for me. Slow and Steady, I like it! I kinda-sorta am on Losing It With Leanne Volume 2, but really it's a combination of weeks 1 and 2. I shared my lentil soup with DH and therefore finished it faster (plus I only made a half-batch because my crock cooker is little) so I'm still mostly snacking on the Kashi. I've been keeping my crock cooker busy with Dinner dishes, plus I've been busy and haven't made more soup yet, but I will make more tomorrow. It was pretty good, but I'm gonna try sauteing the onion and garlic before I start and it should be even better!

I've also been trying a new thing with the FLYlady motto Go for seven in 2011! There's a group of us FLYbabies on Facebook chatting and we came up with the idea of daily seven lists. Seven things that you want to do everyday - it's a spin on the FLYlady routines, as we aren't really good at that yet. My daily seven list is: Get dressed to shoes, Swish n Swipe, Devotions, One Load of Laundry (start to finish), Drink my water, Dishes, and Bless my Heart. If I get all seven done in one day I get a point, when I get seven points I give myself a small reward (I chose taking the time to scrapbook one layout) and when I get to 70 points I get $7 extra spending money for fun stuff. The points system is a little more complicated than that (I have other ways to earn points, too) so 70 isn't really that huge of a number for me. I've done six of seven today, and I'm off to do my seventh....right....now! :D

So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

Have great day!

Valerie :D

Welcome to Homemaking Diva!

Welcome to Homemaking Diva!

I am not an expert, but I'm learning and I have great resources that I'm learning from! Right now, my three mainstays are FLYlady, Leanne Ely of Saving Dinner fame, and my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook.

I want to help new wives and homemakers see that it's really not that hard and that you, too can be a Homemaking Diva!

FLYlady helps me keep my act together and Leanne has been convincing me that cooking is not really that hard if you have a plan. And my cookbook is just a great reference. I'm sure that other cookbooks are great, but I just need one good reference cookbook and I bought this one on recommendation from my oldest sister (plus it's kind of fun that we both have the same cookbook and can do some things together and talk about cooking and baking with a common frame of reference).

If you haven't heard of FLYlady, you need to check her out. This is one lady who used to live in CHAOS and organized her home by using routines and by being nice to herself. She gives her system away for free, it's definitely worth your time to try it for a few months and you will see how much she can help you. I have been a FLYbaby (follower of the FLYlady) since May 29, 2008.

Leanne Ely is The Dinner Diva, and yes, I borrowed my name from her. She is actually a friend of the FLYlady and shares some of her recipes with the FLYbabies. She has two websites: LeanneEly.com where a lot of free resources, recipes, and her blog are, as well as SavingDinner.com where she sells menu mailers (a week's worth of recipes with grocery lists), freezer menus, and much, much more! She has published several books including her most recent, Saving Dinner (a new edition that came out this year, it's the same as her original Saving Dinner, but revamped and with Freezer menus added). I have this book and am loving it so far.

A little about me: I'm a stay at home wife, qualified as a junior-intermediate math teacher, FLYbaby, librarian, and internet junkie. I am doing my best to be a good homemaker and that in itself is half the battle: making homemaking a priority. Now, my DH is not forcing me to do any of this. He is wonderful, and when I was super busy in my final year of university and doing classroom placements for my teaching degree he took over the housework because that was fair. But now, I'm off and he's working, so most of the homemaking falls to me, and that's fair.

Now, today was a very good day, and I've gotten a lot done. We had an appointment in town at 9am, so we just grabbed some breakfast bars since we didn't get up early enough for a full breakfast (which is a little too normal for us) but we came almost straight home afterwards and I did an experiment and made 'egg mcmuffins': english muffins, eggs over hard, cheese, and peameal. They turned out great. I think I'll make them again tomorrow.

I'm doing Leanne's Rubber Chicken this week, for the second time. OK, I know you want to know what that is! Rubber Chicken is a cute name for this because it makes chicken flexible - hence, rubber chicken. It's basically one chicken eaten over three days in three different meals (not just leftovers). Day one is roast chicken with mashed potatoes and salad (I've been cheating and getting a cooked one from the grocery store, but one of these days I might try roasting a raw chicken), day two is chicken and bean burritos (using up the leftover chicken meat), and for day three you make chicken stock out of the bones and make soup that you serve with lots of bread. (I'm sharing all of this because I know I got this recipe for free, so I can share it.)

So anyway, today is rubber chicken soup, so I made the chicken stock shortly after 'breakfast' and I also put on some beef stock since I had a bone from a roast we had earlier in the week. That's just about done, so I need to finish up this post. Anyway, I made both stocks, and since there's only two of us, I'm keeping some of the chicken stock aside and will freeze it for future use (last time we had lots leftover, so I know I can do this). I'm also planning on making corn muffins with the recipe from the Saving Dinner cookbook I have.

And I have choir tonight. That's why I started the stock so early. So now, I'm not rushed. I also got a load of laundry done and put the dishes away. I know this all sounds like a lot, but this was a VERY productive day for me, I'm not this good all the time, but I don't need to be. I just do what I can, as I can. Take yesterday, for example. I was at my sister's house all day (which I tend to do about once a week) and we had leftovers for dinner and all I got done was hand washing the dishes. Life varies.

So anyway, thank you for joining me, and I hope I can help you! It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Please comment or send your questions to me at homemakingdiva@hotmail.com

Have great day!

Valerie :)
<><