Dusting myself off to try again

Life can really be complicated sometimes. When you concentrate on one area of your life you can do good there, but then, I find that other things start to slip. Add in some outside attacks and, all of a sudden, your house looks like a tornado hit it.... or is it just me?

I started working as an Administrative Assistant for The Salvation Army about a year ago. And it is fantastic, I love my job. However, I am still trying to get into a reasonable home-life routine where I still have take the time to do some extra housework in the evenings and weekends. We've been scraping by OK and my husband is great, but I often feel like I should be doing more.

Add to that the fact that someone broke into our house last week, and now it seems that much worse and that much more noticeable. Not only did some stranger violate our home and cause damage and steal things, but we've had the police over a few times, the insurance company sent a contractor over, I had my brother-in-law come (as he is also a contractor) and pretty soon, the workmen will be here to fix things.... that's a lot of people coming and going, and things are definitely NOT "company ready" around here.

Oh well, what can you expect, really. I do have a good reason for being so distracted. I believe I have most things organized for the insurance people, we're just waiting on a little paperwork and then we should be able to have the repairs done.

Now is the time to take inventory and move forward. With baby-steps I can make good progress on the house and soon I'll be able to add some Christmas prep work!


It really is fun to be a Homemaking Diva!!

Love,
Valerie :D

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

Thinking About Christmas?

First off, I have to tell you, yes, in my opinion, it is still way too early for Christmas decorations and music. But, now is the perfect time to plan!

It's mid-November, craft shows are in high gear and we're starting to get into make-ahead season. Now is the time to set aside some extra time and some extra money (if you haven't already) to make sure that Christmas doesn't surprise you.

I encourage you to spend some time thinking about what you are going to do this year. Just ask yourself some questions and write down the answers:

• Who is on your gift list?
• How much money do you plan on spending on gifts?
• What might you get for each person?
• Are there any crafts you need to get going on?
• How many get-togethers do you want to go to?
• Are you hosting any of these get-togethers?
• What goodies are you going to bake?
• What baking can be made ahead?
• And don't forget your family traditions!

November is a great time to get started on crafts and baking. A friend of mine has a craft show every year with her mother and one or two other vendors. I always go and usually get all my stocking-stuffers there.

My sister and I bake together, and we had our first session on Saturday. It was extra fun this year because now my seven-year-old niece is old enough to help (not just busy-work 'help' but actually help). We make our list, pick our dates and split the groceries. It's always a lot of fun.

If you start planning now, you can beat the rush and avoid the malls on crazy December Saturdays. If you can swing it, try going on a weekday-day during November to get a head start on your gift buying.

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

Countdown to the Holidays - Are you Ready?

Well, tomorrow is Turkey Day for me. Doing what I can now to make tomorrow easier.

I made the marshmallow salad (family tradition, NEEDS to be made 1 day ahead) and the white bean dip (from Saving Dinner, CAN be made a day ahead), I also chopped up a large cucumber, carrot, some celery, and a yellow bell pepper, and put them in a large zipplerware (ziploc + tupperware = zipplerware) container covered in water in the fridge. They're for dipping in the white bean dip, I'll fish them out with a slotted spoon tomorrow :)

That's three things ready and done. I also washed all the dishes and did a 15 minute tidy. Now I can relax, play with my sewing stuff, read, and hang out with my husband. (Which are great things to do on a holiday weekend!)

Tomorrow, I'm making the garlic smashed red potatoes in the morning, and having them on keep warm in my crock cooker all day (with a little butter over the top). Plus I'll cut my bread for stuffing before we leave to pick up my in-laws.

Sometime around noon will be time to preheat the oven, make the stuffing, and prep the bird. When the turkey's halfway done (or so) I'll make the pumpkin pie and pop it in the oven, too.

Gravy and the green beans are the only things that'll need to be done last-minute and they're both pretty easy.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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

Countdown to the Holidays! - Thanksgiving Prep

Hello everyone!

Since I'm making Turkey Dinner for my in-laws on Monday, I'm trying to spread my prep work out so I'm just doing a little each day.

Today I turned my turkey over (hoping this will help it thaw more evenly) in the fridge. I went over my recipes again and pulled out the rest of the ingredients I needed out of the freezer so they will be thawed in time.

I got out my turkey roasting pan (which I pretty much only use for Thanksgiving and Christmas) and washed it along with the rest of the dishes. DH put the dishwasher on for me, and I'm having my normal laundry day.

I'll also have a '15 minute tidy' later on, to baby-step the whole 'cleaning the house for company' thing. It's not too bad, just needs some touch ups. :)

It's cool and rainy today, maybe I'll do some baking, too. We'll see.

Are you getting ready for the big day?

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

Coundown to the Holidays! Getting it Together

Well, they DID actually have turkeys in stock yesterday morning, yay! So now I have two. One is defrosting in my fridge for Thanksgiving and the other is waiting patiently in my chest freezer for Christmas.

If you're cooking a turkey this year, it's time to get it thawing :) And  while you're putting the turkey in the fridge, you might want to clean it out. Not clean-wash, clean-declutter. Well, you can clean-wash if you want to. I'll be cleaning out my fridge today to make room for Thanksgiving.


While I was in town yesterday I also picked up bread at Westons - so much cheaper than the grocery store. They bake the name-brand bread and deliver to the grocery stores. What the stores don't sell the day of, gets returned, and I can get one-day-older bread at the Westons thrift store for less than half price! I was nice and grabbed two squished loaves as part of my purchase - they can be for stuffing.

Today is Thanksgiving grocery day for me. I'm going to look at my Thanksgiving Planner and pull the recipes for the dishes I picked. Then I'll check the fridge, freezers and pantry for what I already have and make a grocery list for what I don't, then it's off the the store! Shouldn't be too much. I already did a 'normal' grocery trip. This is just holiday 'touch-up'.



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

Frugal Hospitality

Some of you may remember last time I told you that I was going to try and be especially frugal for the next while as we just invested in a sectional.

On Sunday, we decided to invite my in-laws over after church. This is frugal for us because we often end up going to a restaurant for lunch. But that meant I needed to figure out what to make. :)

Brunch is always a delicious and frugal choice. It doesn't get much cheaper than eggs and toast. Especially since I get my bread from Westons for 99 cents! (They're the bakery that makes the bread for the grocery stores. Whatever the grocery store doesn't sell gets returned to Westons and sold in their 'thrift store'. Bottom line, the bread is one day older and a heck of a lot cheaper. I go when I can and get some for now and some for the freezer.)

I almost made lasagna for dinner, but that meant buying a ricotta, and the day ended up being way too hot to turn on the oven. I decided to make burgers. I originally didn't want to because I'd just pulled the ground beef from the freezer and knew it would be VERY cold on my hand mixing it up later. But then my brain clicked and I decided to let Todo do it. Todo is my stand mixer... we named it that because it's shape reminds us of two droids from Star Wars, one of which is called TODO-360. (Yes, I'm weird.)

But aside from the fact that I've named my stand mixer, it really IS handy and makes a good burger. I used the Basil Burgers recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook and the regular 'blade' in the stand mixer. Want to know ANOTHER ground meat trick? Doesn't matter if it's meatballs, meatloaf, burgers, or something else. Mix all the 'stuff' together first, THEN add the ground meat. Everything goes together faster and more evenly.

So we had burgers for dinner, and I had everything on hand for them. Score more frugal points!

We all enjoyed each others' company and tried out the new sectional while watching some episodes from Shark Week :)

None of it cost me a cent!


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

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