I once told my dad that when he died we were going to have a huge dumpster outside his house.I recommend against saying things like that to your family. Even for me, it didn’t take long to realize how mean that sounded but it seems I still haven’t quite learned my lesson. My wife constantly reminds me that I need to bite my tongue instead of telling the kids I can’t wait to get rid of their toys. Sometimes I’m a slow learner.I know that if your family members are resistant to letting go of things, then the best way to convince them is usually to show them. You have to first purge your own excess stuff and hope they see the benefits of owning less. Then they will want to follow suit. Easier said than done. We can look at someone else and wonder why on earth they’re keeping something as useless as a spoon collection. Yet, it never occurs to us to get rid of the dozens of shot glasses we accumulated in college collecting dust on a shelf. In the back of our mind we know we should get rid of those shot glasses, but it’s a lot easier to point out someone else’s junk than to get rid of our own. Matthew 7:1-5 Here’s a suggestion and I’ll try to follow my own advice.The next time you’re looking at someone else’s stuff you think they could easily live without, instead of pointing it out to them, take a look around at your own things and find something you can purge. Keep doing that until you can’t get rid of anything else. Chances are, you’re still not done. Hopefully, those around you will see you spending less time taking care of all that extra stuff. They will notice the extra space and free time you have that comes from owning less and will want that too. They might even ask for your help. One thing I’m proud of is that even though we are a busy family always on the go, we almost never eat fast food for dinner. In fact, most evenings we still manage to eat dinner all together at the table. Of course, having a teenage son who seems to never leave the table except to find more food gives us more time to gather everyone else around. Last month, I discussed some of the things we do to keep our sanity through all of the running around but today I’d like to talk about some of the quick and easy things we keep on hand to eat. We love almondsand they are great for you but they can be expensive and the roasted/salted/flavored variety you find in the store are not exactly the healthiest thing for you. My solution? I buy 10 pounds of raw almonds at a time from D & S Ranches in California. I dry-roast about a pound at a time in the oven and keep them in a sealed glass container for everyone to eat. The extra is stored in the fridge to keep them fresh. It’s not easy to shell out that much money for almonds, but the bulk purchase brings the cost to about $7.50 per pound. To roast them, I put them on a baking sheet in a 350 degree oven for about 6 - 7 minutes. Then I stir them up a bit and put them back in for another 6 - 7 minutes. You have to pay attention to because they can quickly go from perfectly roasted to having a burned flavor. When they are done, they should have darkened a little and you should hear a crackling sound. I just leave them on the baking sheet to cool. Keep in mind they will continue to cook a little more after you remove them from the oven. I eat them in my Greek yogurt every day. If you buy raw almonds, you should know that the FDA requires raw almonds to be pasteurized. There are two methods to doing this and one involves a pretty nasty chemical that is banned in many other countries but allowed by the FDA. That’s why I order from D & S Ranches because they do not use chemicals for pasteurization. We also keep a bag of baby carrots on hand.We realized a long time ago that regular carrots by the bunch are cheaper, but we just are too lazy to wash, peel, and cut them. Now we just buy the baby carrots and I eat them every day. If we put them on the table at dinner time the kids will dig in too. There is always a bunch of bananas on our counter.They make a great snack or breakfast. If they get too ripe, my wife makes banana bread with them. If we can’t keep up on banana bread for some reason, we peel them and put them in a bag in the freezer to use for smoothies. We also keep frozen blueberries in the freezer for the same purpose. The fridge is also stocked with apples, pears, and oranges. For breakfast, my kids seem to alternate between cereal and pancakes.I’m not a fan of the cereal even though I ate bushels of it as a kid and usually added sugar to it. I have to admit though, it’s an easy breakfast that the kids can handle themselves. Our tradition is to make pancakes from scratch on Saturday morning. We cook a huge batch so that there are always some left over. Those go in the fridge and the kids warm them up in the toaster during the week. The recipe we use is on AllRecipes.com but we double it (except for the sugar) and also use a mixture of white and whole wheat flour. We also thaw out some of those frozen blueberries and add them for blueberry pancakes. Occasionally, we mix it up a little and make waffles instead but the kids seem to prefer pancakes. I remember calling waffles “bumpy pancakes” when our oldest was young so he would eat them! We also have a few go-to meals we seem to make frequently that I’ll save for some other time. We aren’t always the healthiest eaters, but I think we do OK. I think it’s important to teach kids early what is a good snack and what isn’t. I always have part of that song from the 1980’s stuck in my head: “The best foods come in wrappers of their own”. Enjoy. We’re all desperately trying to find more time in our day. We find it in different ways but usually something gets sacrificed in the process - whether its sleep, a healthy meal, time spent with family, time spent doing our jobs, or time for ourselves. Maybe all of the above? My family is far from perfect at managing our time and I never seem to get enough sleep, but we do have a few tricks that help us keep our sanity and still get to piano lessons more or less on time.
Like I said, we’re far from perfect but we almost never eat fast food and we manage to eat dinner together at the table most evenings while still having our kids involved in a couple activities each. I hope that something here will help you tame your schedule a little so that you can enjoy some family time together too.
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I’m excited to announce that I’m now a member of a new affiliate program for Cozi, the family organizing app and website! I’ve been waiting to join this one for a while because Cozi has helped keep my family on time (or at least as close to on time as my family is capable of) for all of the appointments, games, activities, and more for a few years now. We really would be lost without it. This post is going to sound like a commercial, but I can’t tell you how much we rely on this. Between my wife and I working and three kids all involved in activities, then throw in any appointments for the doctor, dentist, haircuts, birthday parties, church, etc. and Cozi has been a lifesaver for us. Unfortunately, we used to miss appointments on occasion, or suddenly remember them at the last minute so that we had to scramble to get there. At one time, I was pretty sure the lady who cuts my wife and the kids’ hair was going to ban us because we missed so many appointments. That’s where the the scheduling feature of Cozi comes in. Assign everyone a color and you can easily see on the calendar which family member each appointment applies to. Then let Cozi email your calendar to you every week. Cozi also has a shopping list feature, a journal, to-do lists, and recipes. There is an app available for Android and Apple as well as a website where you can manage everything. Here’s how we use the shopping lists. We have lists for Groceries, Target (which we’re using less lately because we try to buy fewer things and because we shop online more), Hardware (because I can never remember things like what size furnace filter I need), and Online (which has turned into more of a wishlist). Did I mention that the shopping lists update immediately? One of my favorite things to do if I know my wife is out shopping, is to start adding random things to the list. She never falls for it though. She’s too smart for me. Then there’s the To-Do lists which I’ll admit we don’t really use for their intended purpose. Mine currently has only one item “Call those bastards at the cable company”. Instead, we have things like a list of local thrift stores and their hours, a list of things we wish we would have brought camping this past summer, and the keyless entry codes for our cars. The best part about Cozi is that it’s free as long as you don’t mind some advertisements. If you don’t like ads or you really need some of the premium features you can pay an annual fee. We’ve gotten by with the free version for quite a while now though. Are you sold yet?One final note and I’ll shut up. Cozi, like any other organizer, is only useful if you take the time to set it up and actually use it. One of the things we did was to hang a simple one-week dry-erase calendar in our kitchen. Every Sunday afternoon, my wife looks at Cozi and updates the entire week using different color markers. This allows everyone to see the calendar so that the kids can help keep us on track too. OK. Thanks for reading. Now go sign up for Cozi and let me know how you like it. Welcome to Part 2 of my decluttering operations order. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here. Below is what I’ve written up for my son’s bedroom. In the Army, we would not only deliver this as a briefing but an operation could involve rehearsals and a demonstration using what’s called a sand-table or terrain model kit. I need to execute this soon because his room is a disaster and seems to just be getting worse. To be fair, he did try to clean it up a little recently and we were able to see more of the floor than we’ve seen in a while. I’m asking for feedback before I do this so feel free to make comments below or send me an email if you have a suggestion for something I missed. Situation: Your bedroom is a complete shambles. It’s impossible to walk from the door to the other side of the room without stepping on something. The floor is covered in Legos, sheet music, Nerf darts and lots of dust. There are clothes on the floor and the desk because there’s no room in the closet. The closet is full because there are clothes that no longer fit and/or you don’t like to wear. Mission: Together we (who) will clean up and remove excess items from (what) your bedroom (where) so that the floor is clear making it easy to clean and it will be a place where you can practice your music without distraction while being safe from tripping on objects (why). Execution: This operation will be executed in several phases: Service & Support: To keep this simple, we’ll just list the items that we’ll have on hand: Command & Signal: As always, mom is in charge of everything. She will have the final say on pretty much everything, especially the disposition of all clothes. I will be the one helping with the room to keep things on track. Safety: Believe it or not, safety is one of the prime reasons to clean up this room. There are multiple reasons for that. First, my son has allergies. With a messy room things get dusty and it’s very difficult to clean. Second, even without being in a rush, it can be a life-risking undertaking to walk through the room. Never mind what could happen if there was an emergency and you had to run out of the room. You could easily trip on something and knock yourself out on the desk. So that’s pretty much it. I’ll try it out and then report back on how it goes. I’ll also refine it based on any feedback received and post the updated version. Thanks for reading. |
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