Kitchen Renovations - (Mostly) Complete

For the long saga describing our drawn out kitchen renovation timeline, check here.

And, for the fun part.  Here are the before and after pictures:

February, 2010

January, 2013

There are still a few things to be done, but the vast majority of the work is complete.  I am so happy with the way it turned out! 

HelloMornings

As I alluded to in this post, I've recently started getting up before the kids - well before!  I know the common wisdom is to make small changes over a long period of time.  I've tried that with both my eating and wake time in the past and always fail miserably.  I'm not great at moderation or small changes.  I actually seem to do better with large changes.  Of course, many of these large changes don't stick, but the few that do make a huge difference in my life.

One of the major changes I made a few years ago was to start budgeting using YNAB.  We had tried and failed at budgeting many times in the past, and the idea of setting up a budget each month and tracking every single penny manually in the software would seem daunting to most people.  For some reason I got really excited about it, read the forums for weeks, and bought the software within a few days of downloading it.  We have been faithfully budgeting and tracking for over 30 months now (and I even got a job with YNAB - best job ever!!), and it has made a huge change in our financial picture. 

I feel the same kind of excitement over this new habit I've been forming.  As I mentioned before, I made my way to this blog for a meal planning boot camp last week.  While on her site, I saw that she had free downloadable ebooks.  One is called 'Maximize your Mornings.'  While I've bemoaned early rising in the past , it's still something I have in my heart that I want to do.  So I chose it as my first project for the year ... and failed miserably.   I tried to use the procedure set out in the One Bite At a Time ebook and just set my alarm 5 minutes earlier each day.  I see two problems with that:

1) When I get up 5 minutes earlier, so do my kids.
2) Getting up 5 minutes earlier doesn't allow me to see any benefit from the earlier rising, since I only get an extra 5 minutes.

Now, I am an introvert by nature and I've always said I'm not a morning person.  I think one of the reasons I don't like mornings is I don't like interacting with other people - especially demanding little people who all want something from me at the same time - first thing in the morning. 

A day or so after I read the 'Maximize your Mornings' ebook, I decided to give it a shot.  But, this time, I skipped the small changes bit.  I set my alarm for 5:30, a good 2 hours earlier than I usually get up.  Of course, I had to adjust my bedtime accordingly, so I set out what I would need for the next day and headed to bed by 10:30.  I am fairly confident I need around 7 hours of sleep (that's what I was getting before - I just went to bed after midnight).

Based on the book, with a few modifications, here is what I aim to do each morning before the kids get up around 7:30:

- breakfast
- time with God
- exercise
- shower / dressed

The book also suggests planning your day, but I do that before I go to bed the night before.  That first morning I got out of bed without too much difficulty and went through my routine.   And ... I loved it!!  It took a few days for my body to get used to the different schedule, but the rewards far outweigh any drawbacks I've found so far.  It takes care of the two problems I mentioned above with the incremental changes (I have enough time to accomplish major parts of my day, and the kids are still fast asleep when I get up and seem to sleep through my morning times).

That said, I know myself and that I have trouble sticking with anything long term, so when I found the HelloMornings challenge I knew it was a good idea.  From what I can figure out, it's basically a way to join an accountability group with other women in the same time zone, and encourage each other to rise early for the next 13 weeks.  This was the first morning of the challenge and I followed my regular schedule.  I can't overstate what a difference this has made to the way I greet my children when they get up, which sets the tone for the day.  I love getting up early (even this hardcore night owl!) and think it's one of those 'big' changes that's going to stick.

Come to think of it, what's gotten in to me lately?  First I started drinking coffee and now I'm getting up early ... soon I won't recognize myself!

What we've been up to ...

This is the first winter where we've all been able to go out and do things as a family.  Last winter Abigail was just over a year old and still couldn't really do much outside.  Plus, she wasn't walking.  What a difference a year makes!  This year we've been sliding a few times.  The first couple of times were quite chilly and Abigail didn't enjoy it, but today was beautiful and we took advantage and headed for a hill nearby (yes, there are hills big enough to slide on in the fields ;) ) with some friends.  We didn't get any pictures today, but here are a few from our previous visit:

Yes, Hannah was laughing after this one :)

The kids are also pretty excited the NHL boys could settle their differences so they can get back to one of our beloved family traditions - Hockey Night in Canada and pizza for supper!  The first Saturday night of the shortened season, they had some friends over.  During the pre-game show they all started dancing to the music in the living room.  It was too cute!  Here's a (very dark) video I took on my phone:

One Bite At a Time - Start Menu Planning

Menu planning is, not surprisingly, something I've done before but I'm hit or miss.  I'll do it consistently for a while and then stop.  I do find I'm much less stressed about cooking when I menu plan, but I also find I spend more time cooking when I plan, since I plan more complicated meals.  Since I enjoy cooking, that's not usually a problem.

Somehow last week I stumbled back upon Plan to Eat, a web-based menu planning service.  Unlike many online options, it doesn't provide you with menus, but instead offers an interface whereby you enter your own recipes and then plan your own menu for the week.  There are a few things I *love* about this site. 

One is that you start out with a blank slate.  I have a couple hundred recipes in my current recipe software and I'm not interested in being helpfully provided with hundreds more that I'm not sure I'll like. 

Second is how easy it is to add recipes from websites.  Almost every recipe I've tried to import using their one-click system has worked almost perfectly.  Manually entering is (of course) a bit more tedious, but not terrible.

Third, and what my previous software was missing, is an easy interface to menu plan.  It's drag and drop, and you can even easily 'queue' recipes to use when you're doing up your plan.  Something I didn't think I would use at first was the option to save a menu.  But, when I started thinking about it, I decided to save a weekly menu for breakfasts and snacks, since they tend to be pretty constant. 

When I shared the link on Facebook last week to see if any friends already use it (you can have 'friends' on Plan to Eat just like on Facebook, and you can see their recipes), a friend pointed me to this blog post.  Kat, the person who writes that blog, is having a meal planning boot camp based on Plan to Eat this week. 

All that to say, it only made sense to choose the 'Start Menu Planning' project for this week.  I made my first week's plan and am really enjoying already knowing what we're having for each meal every day.  I hope this is something I can stick with long term!

So, to sum up, so far from the book I've done:
1) Get up early (more on this later - I'm finally getting up before the kids - long before :) )
2) Daily To Do list
3) Create a chore system
4) Menu planning

I'm kind of cheating early on, since these are mostly things I have done in the past or was already planning on doing, but they're also important 'systems' (a word I liked from the Do It Tomorrow book) that will help the household run more smoothly.  Just imagine if I could consistently do all of the systems at once - I would be so much more efficient! :)

SFL update

As time goes on, doing Simply for Life is becoming more a way of life and less a news (or blog)-worthy event.  I think that's a good thing overall.  Of course, I'm not as rigid as I was at the beginning, but that's also more realistic. 

I had my check-in on Saturday morning and it went pretty well.  My eating was decent last week and is on track to be the same this week.  I generally have a day or two that are more 'off,' but 5 out of 7 isn't bad.  Now if I could just start losing some weight!

I'm still hovering around 125.  I did see 124.8 on the scale late last week but I haven't seen it since.  Cory asked me to try and work out every day this week to try and make the scale budge.  I've also moved from cleansing back to nutrition transition, which means one grain a day.  Hopefully with those two changes it will knock things out of equilibrium.  I really do want to reach that goal before my 6 month term is up on February 20th.

Just a short update tonight as getting on the computer is tricky these days.  I really think we need to start budgeting for a second laptop!

One Bite At a Time - Create a chore system that works for the whole family

Since one of my goals for the year is to teach the kids about working, giving, saving, and spending, I chose this project for this week.  We had already planned to start a new chore / payment system based on this blog post and book.

I ended up purchasing the book after reading the blog, but honestly it had a lot of stuff in it that wasn't related to the system, but more a sermon on the particular family's values.  So, in hindsight I think there was enough information in the blog post to get started.

Since Hannah and Nathan are still pretty young, we started off with a pretty simple system.  Each day they can receive up to four points:

1) Morning point - get up and get dressed without complaining or taking forever.  We will add lots of other requirements to this point, but when I went over the whole system at one time their eyes were glazing over.

2) School point (M-F) - this point consists of getting their outdoor clothes on before school, listening to their teachers, and putting their outdoor clothes away when they come home.  Neither of them go to school 5 days a week, so on the days they don't have school this is an automatic point.

3) Chore point - each morning I'll write 1 - 3 chores on little chalkboards on the wall.  There is a separate chalkboard for each kid.  I tell them what the chores are (since neither of them can read yet), and then remind them throughout the day.  They get their point if they complete their chore(s) without complaining.  So far this is the easiest part of the system for them - they really enjoy helping.

4) Round-up point - at the end of the day either Peter or I will supervise them as they are responsible for taking anything that they have left out during the day and putting it away properly.  Lately we've been doing pretty well at having them pick up after themselves so it's usually only a few things.  This takes no more than 5 minutes, but it's so nice to have a tidy house in the evenings!

They can earn 4 points Monday - Friday, 3 on Saturday, and we're not doing any points on Sunday for now.  That's a total of 23 points for the week.  They can also earn extra points by doing chores that aren't on their list, or by being extra helpful.  So far we've given out one extra point.  If the kids get 25 points for the week they get double their money.  We decided to make each point worth $0.10, so if they do their normal points with no extras, they would earn $2.30 per week.  If they get to 25 points, they would get $5.00.  Since I don't anticipate them getting 25 points every week I think this is probably a good amount for their ages.

Borrowing from Dave Ramsey, we're not worrying about what specific percentages they use for give, save, spend, but they will need to put something in each jar when they get paid on Sundays.  One other requirement we have is that their room has to be tidy before they get paid.

We had the kids decorate labels for their money jars before we started the system last week.  My problem with these systems in the past is that 'saving' seemed too broad a term.  For example, this could include saving for a Wii game Nathan wants, or saving for university.  So I decided to have two 'savings' type jars - invest (for long-term savings like a car or university), and save (for shorter term savings like a Wii game or a bike).  I think that will work well.  Eventually I'd like to get them to these percentages:

10% Give
30% Invest
30% Save
30% Spend

We only started the points system officially on Monday, so we're definitely in the 'honeymoon phase.'  I really want to be consistent with this for the long term - I hope it sticks!

Re-motivated

I ended up spending an hour re-reading my blog posts from the start of this weigh-loss journey, and it was really motivating!  I feel ready to get back on track with SFL.  I was so fired up at the beginning and I want to be in that place again.  So, I'm going to make it happen.

Here are some specific things I'm going to do until the end of January as a start:

1. No more than one can of Diet Coke a day
2. Drink at least 5 bottles of water each day (my water bottle holds ~500 mL)
3. "If it's not on my plan, it doesn't go in my mouth."
4. Skip no more than 3 snacks per week.
5. Exercise at least 5 time per week.

I will check back in every couple of days to say how I'm doing.