Happy St. Patty's Day

I just wanted to share these gorgeous cookies and very wonderful tutorial for St. Patricks Day!

Have a green one!

See more of The Sweet Adventures of Sugar Belle.

Menu Plan Monday (March 14th)

Menu planning is an amazing tool.  It saves time, money, and reduces waste.  These are all things everyone can use more of, but often times we don’t invest the little bit of time and effort it takes to get started. 

My fiancé and I have been attempting to plan menus out ahead of time for the last few months and it just hasn’t worked.  To be honest we haven’t really tried that hard.  On Sundays we would clip coupons, do a partial inventory of what we had, and make a list of what we wanted to eat the next week off the top of our heads.  After making the list of what we needed I would go to the store, get the groceries, put them away, and there they would sit.  By Tuesday we had already forgotten what we wanted to eat on what day, or even what we had planned on doing with that chicken in the first place.  Usually the ‘menu’ we made was written on the back of the grocery list and would be tossed in the trash while putting everything away.


Presently several people have inspired me, actually.  First was Laura from ‘I’m an Organizing Junkie’.  She almost makes it fun!  Menu Plan Monday, it becomes a group effort to share ideas, recipes, and saving tips.  Pretty amazing.  The best part is she doesn’t just throw it out there and leave you to it.  Nope, she gives advice and encouragement for every step of the way.  The trickiest part is there isn’t just one way to do it, so you have to search around and try new things until you find a method that makes fits into your routine that you can easily stick with.  


Obviously throwing away the menu on the grocery list didn’t work for us.  The other problem is that we have very, very busy schedules and things change quite a bit.  Or we just don’t have the right thing thawed in time and we end up having to scramble at the last minute to figure something, which usually means eating out.  Feeding a family of four several times a week gets very expensive and blows our budget out of the water.  So here we are.


Rather than making a menu off the top of your head, which makes it really difficult to come up with something interesting and new, Laura suggests using delicious to store recipes.  Another good site I found is Food.com.  Both are easy to sign up and start building cookbooks.  If storing recipes isn’t for you then it’s just as easy to make your own recipe cards.  Many places actually format their recipes into standard card sizes so all you have to do is print them.  If not, it just takes a few minutes to write it down by hand.  Once you have your card, one nifty idea I ran across is laminating them and attaching magnets so that they can easily be attached to the stove or refrigerator for referencing while cooking.  Here is a great tutorial for Magnetic Recipe Cards from LDS Craft Project.


For us a bulletin board/white board does the trick with the help of some pretty magnets and pushpins.  Days of the week magnets help divide up the white board to write our menu down on, but the dry erase allows us to easily and quickly make changes as needed.  The bulletin board is great for posting the finished grocery list and new recipe cards or handouts.  I love the little recipe cards from the grocery store.

Anna, from Ask Anna, does hers by hand and offers a great tutorial describing her method.

I got the magnetic shopping list at Target, I can't find it online but there is a similar one here.  The days of the week magnets are from Bealls while visiting my best friend in Florida, the "E" was from Hobby Lobby during their Christmas clearance last year, and the squares are from Wal-Mart.  And that beautifully crazy cat you see right there… that’s Simon’s Cat.  He’s just the cutest thing I’ve ever seen and my best friend on a bad day.  


This will be the first time we've actually followed through with a menu if this works.  We did it up last night and I bought what few groceries we needed for the rest of the week today.  It was so nice to go to the grocery store with a plan and not wander from isle to isle trying to figure out what to fix then realizing I need something else half way across the store.  I think through out the week I'm going to have him look up a couple recipes online that he thinks will be good and I'll find a few, then BOOM! Next week's menu is done.  


So Now that I am done raving about the wonders of planning a menu here is mine for this week:

• Monday-  Chicken fajitas, mexican rice, chips with queso dip, and monkey bread
• Tuesday-  Parenting class (they provide dinner)
• Wednesday-  Italian Sausage Penne Bake (recipe and samples handed out at Kroger)
• Thursday- Bbq roast, coleslaw, baked beans, and garlic bread
• Friday-  Chicken Italian salad (one of my fiance's recipes, so it should be interesting)
• Saturday-  Porkchops, mashed potatoes and gravy, and mac&cheese
• Sunday-  Steak stir fry, rice, rolls, salad

Office At Last

So this weekend was an amazing birthday weekend.  I’m spoiled so, so it wasn’t just a birthDAY, it was a birth-weekend.  Friday night we went out to dinner and the girls gave me the presents they picked out.  They’re so thoughtful, and by thoughtful I mean they really thought out what they got me so that they can play with it. LOL  I got a ladybug pillow pet named “Lollipop”, a princess card with stickers, a Hannah Montana card with a button, a jewelry set (which really was for me, so I think Daddy helped with that one), and a pink “golf hat” aka visor.  My fiancé said my youngest had a fit and would not leave the store without getting the visor.  Ironically enough it fits her just right.   But all in all it was very sweet and I had a lot of fun opening my presents.

Saturday we went down to Columbus to Easton Town Center to the Container Store.  That’s pretty close to heaven for me, which is ironic because as much as I obsess over things that organize, I am organizationally challenged.  Majorly.  So after getting all kinds of new ideas there we all went to dinner at the Mongolian Grill.  Great food.  I’ve never been there before, but the fact that they had calamari on the bar made me happy.  After dinner we did some window shopping and into Apple.  They had the part I needed to hook up my HP monitor to my laptop.  So now I have TWO screens!  Makes writing my research papers sooooo much easier.  I’m truly in love with it!

Before the organization bug caught on.

After working all Sunday afternoon.

Now I can't lose my keys!

Sunday morning I got up and went to Lowes and Wal-Mart to buy some shelves, a cheap desk, and some office organizers.  My favorites are the magazine files, desk top files, and a simple box to hold my CD's and disk drives.  The best thing I found at the Container Store was the Gridit.  I really really want one. Especially after my last trip to Florida.  Would have made my computer bag so much easier to navigate.  Once I got everything and we got started it took all day to get everything put together, but it was worth it.  It has made such a difference.  I also got a front entrance organizer to hang keys and mail in, and a bulletin board for the kitchen so that we can keep up with our menu planning better.

A special area just for menus and shopping lists.

Some great magnets that liven up the area to make it fun.

I got the magnetic shopping list at Target, I can't find it online but there is a similar one here.  The days of the week magnets are from Bealls while visiting my best friend in Florida, the "E" was from Hobby Lobby during their Christmas clearance last year, and the squares are from Wal-Mart.  My next post will be this evening, I'm starting Menu Plan Monday after being inspired by Laura from I'm an Organizing Junkie.

Enlightening.

       I love conversations with my three and four year old on the way home (most days).  Today's topic was flowers.  A friend of ours is in the hospital and I picked up some crazy daises from the store to bring on our visit tonight.  Giving flowers is one of the girls' favorite things to do, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to show them how flowers "eat".  I told them I wanted them to help me put the flower in a vase with "food" and water.   Our conversation went something like this...

How do flowers eat food? Can we eat flower food?
No, flower food is yucky.
But bees eat flower food.
They eat food FROM the flower.  It's called pollen.
HOLLAND?!
No baby, P O L L E N.
If you touch bees they will sting you.
Yes, they will.  Don't touch them.
Butterflies eat flower food too!
That's right! It's called nectar.
HECTAR!?
No, N E C T A R.  Like NECKlace. *pointing to my neck.*
Oh. (Like they were very disappointed it was so simple.)
Bee's eat honey!
No, they make honey, but they don't eat honey
Why are the cars all making smoke?
That's steam not smoke.
What is steam?
It's when cold air mixes with hot air and makes a tiny cloud
A tiny cloud that makes big clouds?
Yes.
What's in the tiny clouds?
Little bitty bits of water.
Like big rain clouds with big rain?
Yes, just little bitty.
Can we touch steam?
No, it's hot.  It will burn you.
That's why clouds get mad and storm, when they get burnt by steam.
Something like that, yes.




They sure know how to make me smile.

Conscious Discipline

My fiance and I are currently taking Conscious Discipline classes, hosted by Renee Sutherland.  They are parenting classes based on the books by Becky Bailey.  I am currently reading Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline, which is a book filled with problems every parent can relate to and solutions that really work.  I think what makes these classes different is that they aren't designed to teach you how to change your child's behavior, but how to change your reaction to your child's behavior by understanding why they're behaving in a particular maner.  These classes really have been life changing evening improving.  We're still working on the life changing part.  But there have been so many benefits, I'm going to do a six part series based on each of the classes that are taught.  I hope they can help another parent that is looking for answers.

Art Museum Anyone?

I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was to read this article from The Columbus Dispatch.  I no longer feel secretly horrible as a mom.  Mothers are defined for their nurturing abilities and endless encouragement for their children, so when I throw away more than half of their ‘artwork’ it makes me feel like a schmuck.  Apparently, obviously, I’m not the only one who does it.

Most of their artwork goes straight from the car to the trash.  Anything that is obviously just scribbles, stencils, or black- my youngest who is 3 has a habit of mixing ALL the colors together making a nasty black/brown color that is just hideous.  Then there are the projects they bring home that usually leave me speechless and internally thinking, ”What the…?”  Two of the most obviously shocking were the ‘stress reliever’ and the ‘porcupine’. 

The stress reliever consisted of a plastic baggy filled with hand soap and glitter! GLITTER! I loathe glitter.  Zoey was so excited about it she was gushing when I picked her up and wanted to roll it around all the way home, while all I could do was pray that it didn’t bust or she didn’t open it because that would never come out of my car seats.  In my opinion, that was the dumbest project to do with a child to send home.  So after we all ‘oohed and aahhed’ over it we put it up, out of sight, when she went to bed.  As soon as she was asleep my fiancé snuck in and got it and promptly threw it in the trash.

The porcupine still has me baffled.  It was a painted Styrofoam ball with googley eyes attached and then about 30 toothpicks were stuffed into it.  The stupid thing literally hurt to hold.  Again she was enamored and Lexi wanted to hold it and play with it, all the while the toothpicks kept falling out.  The first thing that came to mind was a time when I was about 5 I stepped on a toothpick and it went into the arch of my foot about half way.  It was so painful I couldn’t walk for days, and watching my mom have to pull it out was rather traumatizing.  So that went on top of their dresser for a few days until it was well forgotten about and then again it was tossed ever so carefully into the trash.

Because of the stacks and stacks they bring home they don’t miss them.  My favorites are usually their favorites and even those pile up fast.   For awhile we were letting them put them on the fridge until the fridge was always completely covered and pages were falling off, and it was just a mess.  So that’s when the piles began to pile.  They piled on bookshelves, they piled on dressers, and they piled in corners.  So then I came up with a genius idea… give it all away!  We just recently moved away from my family, so it was a great surprise to them to receive a huge, HUGE, envelope stuffed full of artwork to divide among my aunts and grandparents.

This has been the reigning for keeping it all under wraps so far and it has worked well.  I keep three or four of the ones I fall in love with and the rest are gone.  My life is a little more sane organized this way.

What do you do to keep your artwork monsters under wraps?

Bed Time

One of the more horrifically funny moments of my life came tonight.  My fiance went to bed early so the girls and I were up in the living room watching cartoons and working online- way past their bed time.  Once I wrangled them into their room to get dressed for bed my oldest one, who just turned four, comes up and asks me, "Mommy can you help me get my pajamas on cause we can't play with these..." as she pokes one of her nipples.  Like I said, horrifically funny.