On Saturday Steven and the girls started our first vegetable garden! We still have to clean out the garden area so we started with little planters.
Watering
Planting the seeds. The radishes sprouted the next day!
You can see here what a beautiful weekend it was, perfect for a bike ride (Yes, she did have a helmet on when she left the driveway)! Mid-70s and sunny for the most part. Today we're back to dreary weather with the temperature dropping by the minute!
Saturday night was a fun FAMILIA Family Dance at church!
My two cute dates in their plaid shirts :)
And my chub-man this afternoon!
We went to a furniture auction on Sunday, still on the lookout for a nice brown leather sofa set for our living room at a price we can afford. No sets to be found at the auction, but it was fun watching! I'm hoping March will be the magic month for a good furniture find. This week is First Friday, so I've got to start working on a lesson plan for the homeschool preschool group. We'll be talking about St. Joseph the worker!
The organization around here was a bit lost over the long weekend (since we had a family day on Friday), so I'm trying to get back on track today. I've got my new cool Catholic Women's Planner and need to start using it. The best thing about the past week though is the improvement on the laundry, my hardest chore! Doing one un-sorted load of everything each morning REALLY helps me stay on top of it. No more huge sorted piles of dirty clothes, and baskets with mountains of clean clothes messing up our bedroom. Thanks for this idea, Veronica! Now I really need to do some clothes-sorting. I'm really wishing I could cut down and be like Kristen in her minimalist lifestyle. Then this household organization thing would really be easy! Baby steps...
Hope you all have a wonderful week!!!
10 comments:
Okay, what's up with this unsorted thing? Do you mean you put lights and darks in together??!! If so, how does that work? Doesn't everything come out all weird? I'm totally interested. Laundry isn't one of my good points.
Yes, I just put them all in there together. If I had a new dark item, I'd probably wash it separate the first few times. But I've been doing it for a week and don't see any effect on the whites. And I guess mostly all our whites are underwear, socks, etc so it doesn't really matter w/ them anyway.
Huh. Okay, and why is this helpful? Because you don't ever have laundry sitting around waiting to finish out a load? Sorry to ask so many questions.... I am confused!!! Maybe this wouldn't help me since we are going on #5... maybe we have so much laundry that this isn't going to be the magic fix that I hope it will be. But you have 5 people in your household including one of those messy baby sorts :)and it is helping you? Maybe I should stop hounding you with questions and just try it. I honestly don't know why I am making such a big deal about this... it isn't like our whites are really white anyway. I have my own post about laundry brewing and it is very anti-front loader. Our old front loading washing machine just did not get things clean.... so all our whites look dingy brown/gray anyway. I guess I have nothing to lose.
Hey, thanks for letting me sort out all my laundry thoughts in your comments section!!!!
No problem, Emily! It helps me b/c I normally have a white, dark and color pile sitting on the floor of my bedroom "waiting" to get big enough to be washed. But then it's always too big and I still have leftovers. This just gets rid of the 3 messy piles and makes for just one load a day. I'm sure I'll still have clean baskets and piles around, but those dirty piles by my bedroom door will be gone. Hopefully. IF I follow through. This also helps if we want to wear a certain item 2 days later...I can find it!
I'm glad the laundry thing is working for you!..It is nice to not have that dirty laundry just sitting around...and I think you will find when you do that, a minimalist lifestyle will naturally follow..when you are washing every day you realize you just don't need that much clothes! It's quite nice actually...and when you have less clothes, they are much easier to organize (not all crammed in a drawer!) Good luck, and keep up the hard work :D
One more thing...for all of those on a mission to get organized..a wonderful book I would recommend is called "Confessions of an Organized Housewife" by Deniece Schofield. This book was actually recommended by Kimberly Hahn in some talk she gave...the lady may be a bit over the edge for some people, but man is she organized! She has many wonderful ideas and the book can be found at amazon for a penny (plus shipping of course)..it's worth the buy if you ladies are looking for some more nifty organization ideas
Lillian had that book, lost it, bought another, found the first book... and let me borrow it. Am I hopeless if I read the book and lost it too?
Oh, and by the way, I second having few clothes. In the last 4 months I have cut the kids and myself down to 3-4 outfits each and 4 pairs of socks. My life is SOOOOOOOooooooo much easier for it. I do have to do frequent laundry, but wow... our clothes all fit together in one 2 foot wide closet. So much better. I also have stopped passing down clothes, unless they can be passed down directly (like from Mary T. to Lucy). Sitting in a rubbermaid tub for 5 years (gap between Nathan and Ben) makes for nasty smelling clothes (especially now since we have a damp basement). Since I can get clothes off Ebay for about $4 an outfit including shipping it really isn't too terrible to just buy everyone new clothes every season (especially since I am not buying very many outfits per child). Anyway, I have found immense stress relief just in letting go of all of our hoarded clothes (and all the $4 boxes I bought to hoard the clothes in). I love a good bargain, but I began to realize that I was hoarding and that all my good deals on clothes were actually causing stress because closets were crammed and our basement was overflowing with tubs of clothing to pass down. Anyway, we have so much to learn from eachother. Where would I be without my fellow bloggers?!!!!!
Oh, and Veronica, since you have been doing this for a lot longer... do you really not have weird-looking whites? (why am I having so much trouble with this???.... perhaps because of a few too many lectures from my MIL... who hates how I do laundry. She sorts into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, whites, towels, work pants, work shirts (also by color) and sheets. I am totally not kidding. Of course, she only had one kid, and she DOES have laundry ALL over the place. When we visit her she always throws a fit about our clothes and insists on washing all of them again while chewing me out. We literally don't have clothes when we visit her because it will take her 4-5 days to wash a suitcase full of clothing. Anyway, as you can see, my hangups with mixing laundry are not my fault. Totally my MIL's! Ha ha! Counsel me, Veronica!
Thanks Emily for letting out my secret!! LOL! Yes, that book is great and I did lose my first copy.
I LOVE her book and also like her other one, Confessions of a Happily Organized Family. I rely on her more than on Flylady or any other resource.
Now to purge some clothing. I admit to hoarding. I'm embarrassed to admit how many outfits my kids have ...... so I won't. But I plan to work on that this summer.
Emily, I don't always sort my clothes either. And the whites are white. And I have a front loader too. I would complain about her but she's been good to us, for the most part.
Okay, you know what?! I've totally gotten my hopes up that this is going to be the end of my laundry problems. The light at the end of the tunnel first appeared when I cut down on the clothes. I had to do laundry, or we would have to walk around naked... but when I HAD to do laundry I only had 3 (maybe 4 with diapers) instead of 12 to 14. How embarassing. There! See, Lillian, I can out hoard you any old day. Hallie had a post on her blog about doing a soak load once a day... I couldn't figure out how she accomplished it without having more than one washer and I couldn't see how we could even get down to 1 load a day... but I bet we can if I put them together. Duh. Okay, I'm going to try it. Thanks ladies!!!!!!!
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