Sunday, October 13, 2013

Back in the Blogging Saddle




The last few months have been spent focusing more on earning money for my family, getting out of debt, and holding our own in the homeschool realm.  It's been tough.  Nobody has had a whole lot of fun around here. The house has been a wreck, and I have felt like a horrible mother.  I love the Four Princesses with all of my heart.  I can't think of much, if anything, that I do that is not done with some benefit for them in mind.  That's not a complaint.  It's a fact.

One of the things that I enjoy doing, that has suffered, is my writing and blogging.  I haven't updated my personal journals in at least two months.  I haven't updated The Four Princesses in several months.  In fact, I didn't even want to get out of bed this morning, which is not normal for me.

Abbey came into my room this morning.  I was wide awake.  My eyes were fixed on the ceiling.  I could see that there was dirt on my ceiling and ceiling fan.  I was envisioning how I might possibly get a new floor into our kitchen.  Thinking about moving things like the china cabinet out of there didn't sound like much fun.  Could me, Melody and Abbey handle it?  Should I ask somebody for help?  Abbey sat down next to me and informed me that it was nearly 11a.m.  I thought about it for a minute and said that I was so hungry and uncomfortable, that I didn't feel like I could get up.  See....even a mom can be a drama queen.  She smiled and pointed out that maybe I was so hungry because I had slept through breakfast.  Hmmm......maybe.  Even a diabetic mama ought to be able to miss breakfast once in awhile. She kept looking at me, as though she were a little amused by my childish behavior.  Then, she asked, "Whatever happened to The Four Princesses?"  I said, "Oh, that's just the name of my blog."  She said, "I KNOW.  You need to start doing that again."  "Yeah, I guess I should do that," I said.  By now, I am thinking of all of the things that I should be getting done around the house, that I was not doing while I was laying in my bed, thinking of things that didn't really matter.  For example, we have no drinking water in the house.  Why did I not fill our water jugs last night?  While I got dressed, I thought about a million and one things that I could have been blogging about while I was AWOL, so if I have not bored you to death by now, here is one of the many things that I have cooking up now that I am back to working from home:

Use it UP!

I have been working hard on decluttering my house, and then something dawned on me.  I have mentioned this to other friends in the past, but now I'm going to share it here, because I have extended this idea to the Four Princesses.  When you look at things like your beauty supplies or your kitchen cabinets, do you see a trend?  Do you see where we have shoved things that we have purchased or received to the back of the cabinets or to the bottom of the drawers, forgotten that we had those things and then went out and bought more?  Is this not a problem?????  I perused an entire area of my home that is full of things like moisturizers and lotions.  Is my skin any less dry than it was when I bought those things?  Do I not still love the perfumes?  Why am I not using them?  In the kitchen, there are food items that I stopped using due to dietary reasons or because I just didn't like them.  I used to cook and bake all the time.  Now I don't.  Are there other ways to use those items?  Could I make something with them just for the princesses?  Can I use some things in craft projects?  Should some things just go in the trash?  So, that's the challenge.  This is what I've come up with so far.

Beauty products:  I am making more of a focused effort to keep my skin, especially my face, moisturized.  During a bath time for Tarja and Ivana, I let them play while I decluttered the bathroom.  If we stopped using an item because it was too old or that we were allergic to it or something, it went in the trash.  This made more room for things that need to be used up and made better use of the cute little organizers that I made last year out of baby wipe containers, because now there is no overflow.  It all fits neatly in the shelves.  It almost feels like I have a remodeled bathroom.  I can spray my sheets with body spray when I make the bed.  Slather myself with perfumed lotions all day long, and keep my face soft and wrinkle free with all of those moisturizers that I bought and forgot about.  I have a pretty grand stockpile of body wash and baby wash.  Maybe we should bathe more often. Just kidding!  I also discovered that within this mess, was something like FOUR open tubes of toothpaste.  They are now out in plain sight, so that we can use them up.  I have, actually, done a pretty good job of using make up as we get it.  When looking through my makeup box, I found that empty containers needed to be thrown away and that I really did need to buy some more eye liner and foundation.  Before the night was over, I contacted my new Avon rep and ordered enough from her "on sale" items to last us a few months.  Keep in mind that I only ordered extra of what I knew would be used daily.

Kitchen:  I threw away an entire bag of paper trash that was truly just trash.  This made room for all of the receipts that I've been saving for tax time.  I got the receipts put away in a more reasonable fashion, got old bills thrown away so that I can view only those bills that need to be paid this month, and made great use of the household command central file box that I bought last year and then got lazy about using.  It's back in action again, and I can see what all I need to use up in that area.  In the food department, I have things like corn starch and corn syrup, that I will probably never cook with again, because diabetes changed the face of cooking for me.  That means that we can make BIG BUBBLES to play with outside.  I actually mixed this up this morning, so that we can play with it after Tarja and Ivana wake up from their naps.  Pair that with the bubble wands that had been saved from used up bubble making kits that Tarja had and that some how ended up in the kitchen, in one of my many "catch all" containers.  Also, in an effort to turn this into a tradition, I took note of what I could make for lunch out of items that I already had on hand.  I still had to run out and buy a couple of things, but I made sure to use them up.  I made enchiladas, and only had a few corn tortillas left over from the small package that I bought today.  There were not enough left to make another meal, so I cut them up and fried them into home made corn chips.  That makes an addition to our already great meal and there will be one less item to throw away when it goes bad later. 

The next thing that I need to attack is the book shelf that is making an eyesore out of the living room.  There are quite a few books that I can see sticking out already, that I was planning on reading for myself.  Why have I not read them?  Are they any less interesting to me now, than they were when I set them out so that I would remember to read them?  No!  I still want to and need to read them.  As soon as I'm finished, I need to pass them on to someone else, or put them in storage.  The best idea would be to share the knowledge with someone else.  Board games should probably be relocated, now that the baby has figured out how to open them.  For the games that might not be complete any longer, I might either find a craft project for them or get online and order the missing pieces.  It will be like having all new games.  

Anyway, thank you for being a returning reader or a new reader.  If you think that somebody can be blessed by keeping up with us, please share.  I planning on spicing things up with giveaways and games very soon.

Love Always, 
Laurel and The Four Princesses

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