Menu Planning

So I've been making menus and then grocery lists from them for years off and on. When I'm "on the wagon" I save money and always have what I need on hand which is a lot less frustrating than those nights that I'm standing in front of the freezer, fridge, or pantry and realizing I could make four or five different meals if I only had one more ingredient.

Lately, I've been using a program called BigOven. It's a website that has an app that syncs all the info onto your phone, iPad, etc. It has many recipes already in the program, but you can add your own as well. It stores the recipes and you just drag them into the calendar.

After that you tell it to generate a list and it will guide you through the ingredients for each recipe and you can uncheck what you already have on hand. The really nice thing about this is that it means I don't forget that I need noodles for a pasta dish (which I have done before even with making a list ahead of time). It automatically send the list to your phone and organizes it by department so it's easy to shop at the store. My husband also has it on his phone, so he can add something to the list for me to pick up at the store. Another thing I appreciate about it is that I don't spend an hour trying to think of another dinner idea. All my ideas are in there already. Now I thought about doing a similar system on paper, but I lose paper. Little lists get lost or sometimes even eaten around here. My computer and phone, I (usually) know where they are and they can survive (a little) drool. 

Homemade Laundry Detergent

So today I got the stuff to make the homemade laundry detergent I've seen on Pinterest. At my local Super Wal-mart, it was all lined up...

I've venture to say that a lot of people must make this same recipe. :) I found a few recipes out there so I sort of combined a few and figured I'd test it out. This is what I used:

1 bar of Fels-Naptha Laundry Soap
1/2 box of borax
1/2 box of Washing Soda
1/2 box of Baking Soda
1/2 box of Dirty Jobs Complete Heavty-Duty Stain Remover (I had a $2 off coupon so I used this instead of Oxiclean, but I figured they were both Oxygen powered laundry additives, so why not)

None of this is very specific, I know but I didn't want to make a huge batch which would have been the whole box of each and two bars of soap. I wanted to try this out a bit first.

I shredded the Fels-Naptha bar with a fine cheese grater and combined the powder ingredients. You should know that when you are pouring Borax, it will create a cloud and leave a fine dust on the nearby surfaces, so be careful that you don't have any food around and that you can easily wipe all the surfaces. I mean it's all natural and I've used it to prevent water spots in a dishwasher for a couple years, but that doesn't mean I want my toddler eating it straight!

Now at first when I was grating the soap and even after I combined everything, I was concerned about the smell. All the posts I had seen so far talked about how mild smelling it was and one poster even added Purex Crystals to make it smell more. I am sensitive to smells and get headaches easily and thought this might be too smelly for me, but once it was in the wash, the laundry had a very mild scent and really just smelled clean.

My toddler graciously decided to throughly soil a few of her outfits for me and this detergent did well against anything she threw at it. I did learn that if you do large loads, you do need to use two TBSPs or even three if you have some stains you need to get. I have no idea how many load this will do, but it's every bit as much as the large boxes of Tide that cost $20 and I use less in each load, so I'm sure it will last longer. The best part is it cost me only $11.53 for all the supplies and I still have enough to make another batch. I'd estimate that this will save me at least $50 in the long haul, if not more.

Best Degreaser Ever

I've had an issue with grease in my kitchen for a while. We have a deep fryer we use fairly often and my daughters love waffles which means my counters get sprayed with cooking spray fairly often when I meant to hit the waffle iron. I've tried  buying Clorox cleanup and other stronger cleaners and even let them soak, etc. I've tried using straight Joy to cut through it and nothing seemed to work that well. 

Today when I was cleaning the kitchen, I thought I would try some baking soda. Now I've been reading about the cleaning benefits of baking soda some because I was thinking of making my own household cleansers, but mostly it just made sense to me, and I have to say that it was the best degreaser I have ever used! I just sprinkled a little on my surfaces and used a wet Dobie sponge, adding water as necessary. With very little scrubbing, the cooking spray and oil from the fryer came right off. I did rinse it with a wet paper towel after, but it cut through anything my kitchen had to offer. I will still have to find something to disinfect, but this was by far the best thing I've ever used to get built up gunk off of my surfaces!

Finding a Cleaning Routine

Well lately I've finally been feeling well enough to get some cleaning done around the house (I had an issue with my hip since I was pregnant with my youngest, but it seems to be better now finally). I've tried the FLYLady method before but it was too much for me in a way. I mean I would start out with the babysteps she recommended, but it would just frustrate me and I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere since she suggests you just start one new thing a day so it forms a habit. I totally get that premise and I don't think she's wrong really, but it just didn't work for me. I'd start out shining my sink and then before long I'd get frustrated because my sink wasn't shining and that was the ONE thing I was allowed to do right now anyway. :) That said, she has some great ideas. If you haven't read up on her system you should. She's got a ton of info for free on her site. She has a lot of encouragement for women like me who are perfectionists, but not so good at the house cleaning stuff. See the issue for me is that if I can't start a project and get it finished and perfect, a lot of times I won't bother at all. With two small children it's near impossible to finish a sentence, much less a major house cleaning project, so I would constantly get frustrated.

I was strolling over on Pinterest and found a lady who uses notecards in a box and has certain things she does each day of the week. You can find her post here. This seemed simple enough and possibly like something I could actually accomplish, but I didn't really want to do the whole card thing so much as I thought it was a good list.

 The HomeRoutines Mainpage on my iPhone

I then found an awesome app through another Pinterest post called HomeRoutines. I have an iPhone, so I'm not sure if it's on Android, or not, but if you have an iPhone, I highly suggest it. It does cost some money (I think it was $3), but it really helps keep me straight and it has the FlyLady's Zones concept preprogrammed into it. The zones concept is the best part of the FlyLady system I think. Basically she divides your home into zones and then each week or month you concentrate of a specific zone and do the deep cleaning things that need done in that area. The FlyLady will send you daily e-mails for how and what to do each day if you want to follow her system, which is nice, but again I sort of found like it was too much for me and then I would give up. Anyway, I like that concept and the HomeRoutines app will let you personalize the zones and change how often the zones appear in your checklist, etc.

 My Zones and when they will be displayed. 

So using the HomeRoutines app, I created a daily checklist and a checklist for each day of the week and then I have the zone work to do each week whenever I can fit it in. My house isn't where I want it to be yet, but this system is actually working for me. The specific breakdown I'm using is as follows:

Daily: (this list resets in the app every night at 3 am)
Get Everyone Dressed
Make Beds
Empty Dishwasher in the morning
Do a load of laundry
Put away clean laundry
Wipe down bathrooms
Run dishwasher at night
Straighten toys after bedtime

Monday:
Strip and remake beds
Clean downstairs bath
Empty trash upstairs
Change out towels

Tuesday:
Vacuum upstairs
Clean Master bath
Clean Girls' bath

Wednesday:
Clean out fridge
Make menu and grocery list
Vacuum Downstairs

Thursday:
Grocery shop (this may not seem like much but with two little ones to get to the store and get it all put away is quite a feat)

Friday:
Wipe Down Kitchen
Clean Kitchen Floor

I don't have lists for Saturday or Sunday because those days tend to be a little more busy sometimes and they are good days to get caught up on things I missed earlier in the week or to do more of my zone work. I don't get everything done on that day necessarily, but it sort of gives me a goal to work toward. I have the lists for these set so they don't refresh until Monday morning at 3 am, so if I don't get something done on Monday, I can always get it done on Tuesday.

Dried Strawberries and Frozen Yogurt Drops

I tried two recipes off of Pinterest, and I have mixed reviews of both. Well, that's not true. The dried strawberries idea didn't work at all. The post claimed that if you cut strawberries into halves or quarters that they would dry out in three hours in an oven set at 200 degrees. Not only did it take a lot of longer for the strawberries to get anywhere close to dry, they pretty much just cooked a bit and got squishy. Nothing resembling dried fruit. Maybe there is more to it, but don't bother to try it.

The frozen yogurt drop recipe was very simple. Basically, you just took yogurt and squeezed small dots onto a cookie sheet and then but it in the freezer. My toddler loved them, but they melted pretty quick and by the time she was getting them to her mouth, her hands were already pretty messy. I sort of thought the advantage of this might be that she could eat the yogurt herself since she insists on touching all of her food right now, even if it means spitting out something I spooned in just to touch it. This sort of worked, and I guess was better than the alternative, but I'm sort of wondering if it's worth the trouble of squeezing all the dots onto the cookie sheet.

http://pinterest.com/sbarnard03/ehhh/

Fingerpainting Activity

This was a paint project I made with the girls. I used the following recipe to make edible finger paint for the girls, since I knew Kaitlyn would eat it.

Homemade Edible Finger Paint Recipe:
1/2 cup cornstarch
2 3/4 cup cold water

Mix together cornstarch and water in a saucepan until there’s no lumps. 

1 envelope of unflavored gelatin (I used Knox)

1/4 cup cold water

Mix together gelatin and water and set aside.

Cook cornstarch mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it boils. It’ll become thick as you’re stirring.

Remove from heat and stir in the gelatin mixture.

Cool and pour into smaller containers. Add food coloring for desired colors.

I think I should have either not let the corn starch cook so long or not added the gelatin, because my fingerpaint was almost solid when it set. 

And Kaitlyn did eat it...

I bought $5 frames from Wal-mart that are 10x13. Since I couldn't find paper that size. I bought a sheet of posterboard and then cut it to size. I used painter's tape to make their first initials on each sheet and then let them go nuts. 

After they dried, I peeled off the painter's tape and framed them and voila!

Again, I think they might have turned out better if my paint wasn't so thick, or maybe I needed to add more food coloring to the paint to get more vibrant colors. Real paint would work best probably, but Kaitlyn definitely would have eaten it!