Four out of the five of us spent the weekend sick, so I am in recovery mode today.  Combine that with needing to stock my freezer for summer meals and I decided to make this week a out-of-the-freezer week.  Then I can defrost the freezer and work on filling it up with some summer meals!

Check out Menu Plan Monday @ orgjunkie.com for more meal ideas!

I don’t know what happened to my earlier post.  If you stopped by earlier to a ‘page not found’, I apologize.

Last week my menu got turned upside down.  I can’t pinpoint everything that went wrong but I did learn one lesson.  While I’m solo-parenting, my meals have to be nearly ready to go or I will opt for something requiring less work like frozen popcorn chicken or picking up fast-food on our way home from a day out.  So I spent this weekend doing some prep work–cooking & dicing a couple chicken breasts, making & rolling meatballs (which I froze), making barbecue sauce for the kids’ favorite barbecue chicken.

Monday
Popcorn chicken, salad, applesauce
Friend’s house for dinner

Tuesday
Leftovers or sandwiches
Chick-Fil-A Kids’ Night

Wednesday
Packed lunch (sandwiches, carrots, pretzels)
Crockpot marinara & meatballs (new recipe from Cook’s Country)

Thursday
Grilled pizzas
BBQ chicken sliders

Friday
BBQ chicken ranch spaghetti (from leftovers)
Hamburgers on the grill, potato packet, fruit & veggie tray

Saturday
Lime chicken burritos
Steaks on the grill, baked potatoes, salad

Sunday
Garlic chicken pasta salad
Margarita grilled chicken, plantains, salad

Soon enough, summer will be along.   A couple days breaking into the 90s has brought back memories of our early days in El Paso.  The heat.  Oh, the heat! When we moved here, I was often asked how the weather compared to Georgia (or Indiana, or Hawai’i).  The difference?  When you went outside in Georgia, you walked into a sauna.  In El Paso?  You just walked into one of those big standing ovens you see at the grocery store bakeries.

For a couple months now, I’ve shooed the kids outside in the morning to wear them before we started school.  As hints of long, hot summer days appear, I’m shooing the kids outside for longer mornings.  Our afternoons usually consist of just an hour or two of schoolwork and then outside playtime.  As the days get hotter, we will do longer afternoons of school and outside morning time.  Park days will come after breakfast rather than after naptime.  Breakfast will replace lunch and dinner as our outside meals.

Filling the rest of the long, hot days will have to come with trips to the library, indoor playdates, puzzles, books and lots of imagination, I suppose.  School will start back after a short summer break so, come fall and early spring, we can shorten the school days and be outside.

My meal of bacon tenderloin, green beans, corn yeast rolls has now made an appearance on the menu five times.  How many times have I made it?  O.  I was determined to make it this week when, Saturday morning, SoldierBoy asked me if I wanted to take the kids to Cattleman’s Steakhouse for dinner.  It has been on our to-do list since we moved to El Paso, so we decided to go for it.  We had so much fun!  The food was good, nothing amazing.  But its very much an experience.  After dinner, we headed outside where we looked around the animals, a movie set, saw some longhorn cows and llamas and then played an awesome playground that, by no means, would ever meet today’s safety standards (which is why it was so much fun!).  SoldierBoy & I couldn’t resist and headed onto it to play with the kids.  It was getting late, so we didn’t explore the rest of the ranch.  SoldierBoy’s parents are coming in June and we plan to take them and explore more then.

This week begins nearly two months of SoldierBoy gone for the weekdays playing, what else, soldier.  I planned out a two-week menu that I plan to rotate.  I have a tendency to get bored with such menus, so we will see how this goes.

The only breakfast I made last week were the orange smoothies.  A couple of tweaks and they were a hit.  I’ll try to take pictures this week so I can blog the recipe.

Breakfasts
Pancakes
Fresh orange smoothies
Maple oat scones (double to freeze)
Peanut butter baked oatmeal, apples
Berry smoothies

Lunches
Sunday–Wendy’s
Monday–Popcorn chicken, pineapple, pretzels
Tuesday–Salad, leftovers
Wednesday–Picnic after Bible study (peanut butter sandwiches, pretzels, apple wedges)
Thursday–Make-your-own-pizzas on the grill
Friday– Hamburgers on the grill, carrot & celery sticks
Saturday–Chicken teriyaki & rice (triple the sauce to freeze)

Dinners
Sunday–Cajun chicken, rice pilaf, green beans, pineapple
Monday–Taco “pizzas”, salad, pineapple
Tuesday–Chick-Fil-A kids’ night
Wednesday–Chicken satay
Thursday–Pancakes & bacon
Friday–Margarita grilled chicken burritos, chips & salsa
Saturday –Bacon-wrapped pork medallions, corn yeast rolls, green beans (I’m not giving up!)

Check out Menu Plan Monday @ orgjunkie.com for more meal ideas!

Good enough IS good enough.

Housework done incorrectly still blesses your family.

These two mantras, courtesy of FlyLady, are two that I often repeat to myself, especially the second one.

I found FlyLady back when she was still a “baby” on the internet, 2001.  I never thought of myself as a perfectionist.  If you looked around my room as a teenager, my house as a new wife you’d see clutter, a mess.  I often spent too much time looking for a lost item or trying to organize clutter.  While I rarely ran late to appointments, school work was often done at the last minute.  Not because I had forgotten about it (usually) but I work well under pressure.  Any of that is hardly what I would have ever called a perfectionist.

Enter FlyLady.  I quickly realized I was…a FAILED perfectionist.  Because I knew I couldn’t achieve perfection, I just didn’t try.  Now, that doesn’t explain away everything about the way I function.  It did, though, give me some insight into my own behaviors.

Training myself that it IS okay if I wipe just the parts of the counters you can see and not move everything first or sweeping only part of the kitchen.  Its been hard.  But, oh what a blessing!  To myself (freedom) and to my family.

So what does that have to do with the Spring Cleaning Challenge?  My list.  Go read it.  I also added several things that aren’t on there.  It started out as four typed pages.  FOUR.  To accomplish in two weeks.  While I’m homeschooling, solo parenting for almost a week plus all those other life commitments that come up.   Perfectionism, anyone?

I had a mini-panic attack this morning wondering how I would get it all done.  Know what? Christine isn’t going to come check to make sure my list is completed by Saturday.  And no one is going to go around inspecting my house to ensure each item is perfect.  If I decide to take a few items off the list, no one is going to reprimand me.  Whatever I do and however I do it STILL blesses my family.  I don’t have to finish my list and I don’t have to do each item perfectly.  Good enough is good enough.

If your dishes aren’t rinsed before putting them in the dishwasher or all your kids’ clothes aren’t perfectly ironed (or ironed at all!) or if you didn’t move the couch when you were vacuuming, its okay.  Good enough is good enough.  You are still blessing your family.  Really.

I’m joining iDreamofClean and 9 other bloggers in the Spring Cleaning Challenge for a chance to win some incredible prizes!

I don’t know about you but I am the type that stays really motivated with chores that can be completed easily (even if time-consuming) or chores that show big payoff (even if it took a long time to complete or was hard).  But when its chores like dusting a bookshelf or cleaning off a dresser top you know will be cluttered again within the week or a chore like unpacking the junk drawer box with things you need but don’t have a good home?  I’m terrible at that.  And that’s where I am with my Spring Cleaning List.  So much that is left are just…boring.  Or irritating! LOL

Still, I’m chugging along.  The list below is what is still left to do.  I’m going to italicize the items I’m committing to finishing by bedtime Wednesday.  My vacuum isn’t sucking up well, so SoldierBoy is going to work on it after he gets back this weekend.  So if I finish the italicized items, the remaining list is pretty manageable, minus the vacuuming.

Kids’ Bathroom
Wash shower curtains.
Straighten towel cabinet.
Towel hooks—paint, decorate, install.

Downstairs Half-Bathroom
Clean underneath sink.
Find a cup for toothbrushes & toothpastes.

Living Room
Find curtains and hang?
Install cord-hiders.

Kitchen
Go through plastic-wares cabinet (toss out items without mates, straighten).
Clean oven.

Dining Room
Hang picture.

Office/school area
Clean desk off entirely.  Replace only important items.
Wipe down desk, chair, monitor and computer stuff.
Clean off school shelves.
Move table and mop.
Move computer and mop.
Move entryway drawers and mop.
Clean out school tote.
Pull unwanted curriculum out to sell.
Clean off side table; decorate.

Master bedroom
Take books off bookshelf & dust.
Take remaining donation items out; donate.
Clean off dresser top.
Vacuum WELL.
Clean windows.

Boys’ bedroom
Vacuum WELL.
Put away miscellaneous items.
Sort out too-small baby clothes for donations. (In process)
Pack up winter clothes.

E’s bedroom
Rid closet of at least one box.
Vacuum WELL.
Go through toy storage and help her sort out unwanted items.
Clean under bed.
Wash bedding.

Master bedroom closet
Straighten my shelves.
Sort through clothes for donations.

I’m joining iDreamofClean and 9 other bloggers in the Spring Cleaning Challenge for a chance to win some incredible prizes! 

We stopped at the commissary this weekend on an unplanned trip.  They had bags of the clementine oranges for $1.99 v. the usual price of $4-5 a bag!  I picked up three.  Now, what to do with them??  I found a smoothie recipe that uses fresh oranges (one of the few that did), so I will make that.  I will peel and freeze some of the segments for other smoothies.  The kids have eaten half a bag already (the little oranges are a rare treat).  Maybe some muffins?

Last week, SoldierBoy got a promotion at work.  We weren’t able to celebrate Thursday because he had a work commitment, Saturday we had date night and he’s gone all this week.  So we are looking forward to celebrating on Saturday bacon-wrapped pork medallions.  I can’t wait to try this recipe!

Breakfasts
Pancakes
Fresh orange smoothies
Peanut butter chocolate chip oatmeal bread, apples
Maple oat scones (double to freeze)
Peanut butter baked oatmeal, apples
Berry smoothies

Lunches
Garlic chicken pasta
Popcorn chicken, oranges, salad
Burritos
Ham sandwiches, pretzels, carrots
Salad
Barbecue grilled chicken (double to freeze)

Dinners
Grilled chicken, French bread, salad
Pork Souvlaki, roasted red potatoes, salad
Pizza Joes
Chick-Fil-A
Crockpot marinara & meatballs (new recipe from Cook’s Country)
Grilled hamburgers, potato packets, carrots, grapes
Bacon-wrapped pork medallions, corn yeast rolls, green beans

Check out Menu Plan Monday @ orgjunkie.com for more meal ideas!

Tale of the Moldy Tampon

Have you heard about the case of the moldy tampon?  Danielle from Parr For the Course posted this morning on a parenting board I visit about a tampon that she opened.  She accidentally popped part of it out of the applicator and found MOLD!   She was encouraged to contact Kotex.  Know what they said?

In instances where it has been found, we conducted tests on the product involved and have found the mold to be a common environmental species that carries no health risk.  The vegetative mold is similar in nature to mold on vegetables or in baked goods.

Check out the bolded parts.  First, this isn’t the first time it has occurred nor the first time they have heard about it.  I’m not sure I would have bothered to contact Kotex, honestly.  And there are others like me, you can be sure.  Secondly, when I find mold on my food?  I toss it!  I don’t put it into my body which, apparently, Kotex thinks would be fine to do!

Her blog post has gone viral!  Over 100,000 hits today!  Its all over Facebook, discussion forums and creeping through Twitter.

So what is a woman to do?

1) Switch to tampons without applicators, like o.b.  Switching to a brand, such as Tampax, that has cardboard applicators and paper wrapper would be more breathable so, in theory, less chance for mold to develop.

2) Stick with menstrual pads.

3) Switch to Instead softcups.  I first used them about 15 years ago and I love them.  They have a learning curve to them but it was quick for me to master.

4) I’m going green.  I first purchased cloth liners from Tree Hugger Cloth Pads, a.k.a. mama cloth, a year or so ago as backups to tampons or for lighter-flow days.  I was instantly in love. They feel so nice, work great and are easy to care for.  Really!

5) Still, I didn’t want to go full-time with mama cloth because I just don’t like pads.  I’ve had a Diva Cup on my Vitacost.com shopping list for well over a year.  I kept putting it off because, well…I’m not sure why.   Tonight I ordered one.   Moldy tampons pushed it up my priority list!!

Have you ever shopped at Vitacost.com?  They have amazing customer service, great prices and just about every vitamin, supplement, green cleaner, natural baby product, organic packaged foods, personal care and other natural living item you can imagine.  Shipping is free over $49 and they often run free shipping sales for all orders.  Sign up at Vitacost.com through this link and you’ll receive a $10 credit towards your first order!

And to make it an even better deal, if you enter Vitacost.com through ShopAtHome, you’ll earn an additional 8% back on your order!  Or shop Vitacost.com through Ebates to earn 4% on your order.

Have you heard about the case of the moldy tampon?  Danielle from Parr For the Course posted this morning on a parenting board I visit about a tampon that she opened.  She accidentally popped part of it out of the applicator and found MOLD!   She was encouraged to contact Kotex.  Know what they said?

In instances where it has been found, we conducted tests on the product involved and have found the mold to be a common environmental species that carries no health risk.  The vegetative mold is similar in nature to mold on vegetables or in baked goods.

Check out the bolded parts.  First, this isn’t the first time it has occurred nor the first time they have heard about it.  I’m not sure I would have bothered to contact Kotex, honestly.  And there are others like me, you can be sure.  Secondly, when I find mold on my food?  I toss it!  I don’t put it into my body which, apparently, Kotex thinks would be fine to do!

So what is a girl to do??
1) Switch to tampons without applicators, like o.b.  Switching to a brand, such as Tampax, that has cardboard applicators and paper wrapper would be more breathable so, in theory, less chance for mold to develop.

2) Stick with menstrual pads.

3) Switch to Instead softcups.  I first used them about 15 years ago and I love them.  They have a learning curve to them but it was quick for me to master.

4) I’m going green.  I first purchased cloth liners from Tree Hugger Cloth Pads, a.k.a. mama cloth, a year or so ago as backups to tampons or for lighter-flow days.  I was instantly in love. They feel so nice, work great and are easy to care for.  Really!  If you want to try cloth pads, LunaPads is offering $5 off an order of $30 or more in response to the moldy tampon.

5) Still, I didn’t want to go full-time with mama cloth because I just don’t like pads.  I’ve had a Diva Cup on my Vitacost.com shopping list for well over a year.  I kept putting it off because, well…I’m not sure why.   Tonight I ordered one.   Moldy tampons pushed it up my priority list!!

Have you ever shopped at Vitacost.com?  They have amazing customer service, great prices and just about every vitamin, supplement, green cleaner, natural baby product, organic packaged foods, personal care and other natural living item you can imagine.  Shipping is free over $49 and they often run free shipping sales for all orders.  Sign up at Vitacost.com through this link and you’ll receive a $10 credit towards your first order!

And to make it an even better deal, if you enter Vitacost.com through ShopAtHome, you’ll earn an additional 8% back on your order!  Or shop Vitacost.com through Ebates to earn 4% on your order.

Free shipping if you spend $49 or more (you’re more than halfway there if you get a Diva Cup) plus a $10 credit plus 4-8% back through Ebates or ShopAtHome?  Surely that’s a better deal than moldy tampons!!

Vitacost.com, ShopAtHome.com and Ebates.com links are affiliate links.  All other links are for informational purposes ONLY.

We have a crazy, crazy week awaiting us.  I tried to keep meals simple but I’m not sure I succeeded.  My only exception, barbacoa on Friday, will be a reward for a long week.  Barbacoa burritos, margaritas, quiet evening on the porch as the kids play and the sun sets.  Perfect way to end the week.

Lunches
Hamburgers/hot dogs on grill
Leftover chicken & pasta
Sandwiches at SoldierBoy’s ceremony
Chicken bacon club sandwiches (freezer)

Dinners
Sunday–Homemade pizza
Monday–Tacos
Tuesday–Italian grilled chicken, salad
Wednesday–Baked pasta, garlic bread (freezer)
Thursday–Leftovers or fast-food
Friday–Barbacoa burritos, cilantro lime rice, chips & salsa
Saturday–Date night!  Grilled chicken & rice pilaf for the kiddos.

Share your menu plan and check out others’ plans at orgjunkie.com!

This week is going to be nuts.  EGirl starts soccer (two evening practices plus a game), Girl Scouts, Awanas, SoldierBoy has three evening work commitments, Bible study, SoldierBoy takes command of a new company this week (which includes a ceremony & lunch we have to throw) plus our regular homeschool work and commitments.  I’m tired and its only Sunday evening!

Spring Cleaning is going to be tough, as a result.  My master list isn’t whittling down as quickly as I hoped it would so I need to focus this week.  I’m hoping that by planning and listing out those plans here, that will give me the needed motivation.

Monday
Wipe blinds. (LR)
Wipe ceiling fan & light. (LR)
Clean chairs WELL. (K)

Tuesday
Move table and mop. (O/S)
Move computer and mop. (O/S)
Move table & chairs and mop underneath. (DR)
Move entryway drawers and mop.
Rid closet of at least one box. (BR)
Rid closet of at least one box. (E’s BR)

Wednesday
Condense towel shelves. (UC)
Pull out items that don’t belong; put them away. (UC)
Gather cleaning items and put together. (UC)
Wipe shelves. (UC)

Thursday
Hand mopping job throughout. (MBath)
Clean out trash can. (MBath)
Hand mop throughout. (DBath)
Clean out trash can. (DBath)

Friday
Clean stovetop.
Hand mop throughout. (K)
Catch up.

I’m joining iDreamofClean and 9 other bloggers in the Spring Cleaning Challenge for a chance to win some incredible prizes!