My dear friend suggested a group of us embark on a journey this year to develop new habits.  But not your ordinary run-of-the-mill habits.  Stay tuned for the following months, but this month it is 21 days of self care complete with blogged experiences.  This is a very loose interpretation of what this might look like.

I heard a quote this morning that is summing up what this month looks like for me:

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

What self-care means to me this month is getting the junk out of my head.  The voices say the following statements and I am choosing to look at them and see perhaps if I can become a painter.

1. I am undisciplined enough to stick with a budget

2. I am undisciplined enough to intentionally decide what I put into my mouth

3. I am undisciplined enough to attend to my spiritual life

In addition to typical self-care exercises I will be participating in this month (massage, hair done, date night, etc)  I will be saying to myself: I can stick to a budget for 21 days, I can do a food log for 21 days, & I can do a study for 21 days.  I did an experiment yesterday.  All of the above takes approximately 30 mins a day.  30 minutes a day in exchange for the amount of junk and baggage to be out of my head is astounding.  I will let you know how it goes.  As a side note I have lots of support in all three of these, Jon, Melana, & my neighborhood girls.  I have found that it is rawther dangerous and prone to failure to embark on these adventures without close intentional support.  So thanks all.

I gave up shopping for lent.  This seems funny, until you consider Jon gave up hot sauce.  And our girls gave up cardboard boxes.  The impetus behind giving up shopping came from a couple of different directions.  One is that shopping is a form of therapy for me.  Since I am working on Weight Watchers pretty hard core to drop the remainder of my baby weight from Mercy & Z, I no longer can use food as a source of solace.  And exercise has never been an escape for me, and giving up exercise would be like Lucy giving up bananas (she doesn’t eat them anyway).  Shopping became the sand paper that made my life feel a little smoother.

So shopping it is.  Simplicity, organization, budgeting, sustainability. Unknowingly I am addressing all of this in my life.  It’s funny when one asks for the core issue, how sometimes it is actually revealed.  Shopping for me is shiny, happy, invigorating, a competition, a game.  Target is my drug, deals are my pride.

So I stopped it.  I stopped dreaming “researching” for the next greatest deal.  What I didn’t expect was the big void of space in my head, the massive amount of time I had left over.  I was too busy and overwhelmed, and discovered some of it was from “trying to save money” by finding deals.  I am a very frugal shopper, but like I said before, deals are like liquid ecstasy to me.

So it is done for at least 40 days.  Have I said how much I love the season of lent.  It is by far my favorite time of the year.  Creating voids in my life that can be filled up with Christ and the sacrifice he made for me, and my family, and our world.  My sacrifice, if you can even call it that, feels divinely inspired.

So it has been a week & 1/2 of no shopping, no on-line window shopping, no dreaming about what I want.  I have found myself kind of looking around at various times with nothing to do.  Wait, check that, plenty to do, but nothing that I really want to do.  So it is reading the daily emails from The Journey, thanks Michael, and letting myself be kind of at loose ends.  Sitting in that void and getting familiar with it, letting the echoes be loud and uncomfortable.

I hate packing.  And now I am packing for 4 people. Generally Jon packs for himself.  But phew, when planning 2 plane trips, 3 kids, a week away from home, napping schedules, mealtimes, not to mention Christmas gifts that need transporting there and back, it becomes exhausting.  So here are five tips for packing for the holidays.

1. Ship the Christmas gifts ahead of time. And ship the ones received at your destination back.  Then you don’t have to worry about lugging them around in the airport and hoping they arrive.

2. Make a list. Kind of goes without saying.  But I have a general packing list with additional blank spaces for items specific to the trip saved on my computer and when I start packing I print out 2.  One to use when packing here and the other to use at the end of the trip when packing up to come home, to make sure I didn’t forget anything.  This also allows me to sleep sounder the night before the trip, b/c my mind isn’t spinning trying to remember everything I need to make sure I get in the morning.

3. Limit the amount of crap you bring. This was hard at the beginning of having kids, but now, I have it down to a science.  If I can borrow a pack-n-play, car seat, stroller, or some kind of booster I will.  Beg, borrow, and steal is my motto. Not really, but kind of.  Don’t bring all of their toys, just a few favorite things.  If you child has a favorite pillow, just bring the pillow case and put it on another pillow.

4. Buy necessities at your destination. I buy the following things at my destination:  diapers, food, wipes, disposable bibs.  It cuts down on using valuable packing space.

5. Give yourself plenty of time to pack. Don’t pack the morning of, the kids are going to be nutty, you will be nutty, plus you still have to travel that day, and really you should start packing a few days ahead of time to make sure you are clear headed when making decisions about what to bring.

And always remember, generally you can buy whatever you need wherever you are going if you forget something.  Breathe and have a fabulous adventure.

Jon and I are avid travelers.  Roughly 2 weeks after the birth of each of our children we either took a long road trip, or to top them all, after Ezra was born we traveled to Grand Cayman Island with my family.  His passport picture is of him about 4 days old.  Very fun.  We also traveled to the Dominican Republic with the two girls when I was pregnant with Ezra and had a blast.  That trip entailed stitches on Lucia’s chin and traveling through a Jurassic-like DR interior with 8 of us loaded into a little Rav-4 type SUV.  Such good times!!!   Read the rest of this entry »

With my birthday and all three of my kids birthdays in the last part of November/Early December, around September I start getting hives thinking about birthdays & holidays looming on the horizon.  So I take a deep breath, remind myself of 2 things.  One, this time with the kids is going to be gone in a flash, so enjoy the chaos while they still live with us (granted they are 7, 5, 1), and two keep breathing.

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I alerted everyone I was hand-making most of my Christmas gifts this year. Then I went off in search of fun, reasonable projects that wouldn’t break the bank or my time.  I found a plethora of ideas, and the following are some of my favorites.

1.  Pipe Cleaner Garland, inspired by tord boontje’s until dawn curtain.  Absolutely beautiful, and I would actually hang this in my home.  And done very reasonably!!  Thank you Design Sponge for this gorgeous idea.  NOTE:  I found a bag of 350 white pipe cleaners at hobby lobby.

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November is a month of beginnings for us this year. Which is weird, usually November is the beginning of the end.

My resolutions this month.

1. Start budgeting
2. Cook once this month for the rest of the month
3. Shop once this month for the rest of the month

So I started this journey, and am bound and determined to make this work. But a bit of planning error happened with this as I attempted it after traveling for 10 days. And Halloween.

So this is how I recommend not doing this, although the individual parts of the plan were sound, the overall execution was in fact, not.

Initially I intended on shopping on Saturday, prepping in the evening and cooking on Sunday. B/c of halloween, just getting back from traveling and Jon’s unusually fully client load on Saturday, shopping and prep didn’t happen on Saturday. So I took full advantage of daylight savings time, got up early and went shopping on Sunday morning, then went to church, then took my girls over to get their pictures in their costumes and pick up our freezer, sent Jon out to finish up some of the shopping, got the 11 month old down for a nap, and then proceeded to start prep and cooking. SO NOT A GOOD PLAN!!!!

And all would have worked out wonderfully if my stupid back wouldn’t have started killing me around 7pm.

Anyway, Jon completely picked up the slack and knocked out quite a few meals for us.

All in all, the meals look delish, the girls were drooling over the pumpkin pie, I was drooling over the pumpkin coffee cake, and I would like to say thank you to Once a Month Mom for the fab, no thinking cooking for once a month.

The nice thing about this menu, is that she thought ahead for the holidays.  My pies are done, I have a couple of cheese balls, side dishes to bring to dinners, brunch type stuff for Thanksgiving morning, and all for about $150 per family.  It was a little more this month as I got started up.  The other COMPLETELY fabulous note about this system is that she puts everything together for me.  Shopping list, podcast, instructions for day of, recipes.  I literally didn’t think about it.

And the other note is that on the recipes she mentions medium size apples or onions or potatoes.  I didn’t realize that everything in the grocery store is super sized, so I ended up with quite a bit extra of certain things.  But I would say success overall.  Having the first meal tonight.  Meat pie…  yum.