Welcome to the last day of the 5-Day Clean Your House for Christmas Challenge. Otherwise known as: Crystal really needs to deep clean her house and she needs the public accountability to get it done. Ahem.
{Thank you for humoring me. If your house is in great shape, please just skip over these posts. I may be the only one who has kind of let my housework and decluttering slide a bit the past few months.}
It’s been SUCH a great week — you all are such great accountability for me! Thank you for tagging along with me in this challenge.
Today I was planning to focus on the main living areas of the house, but those are really clean and clutter-free, so I’m going to finish the rest of the bathroom drawers/cupboards/underneath the sink today.
Here’s my plan for this morning (feel free to follow it somewhat, if you find it helpful… or you can get a laugh out of how detailed I am!):
This Morning’s Plan
1. Read my Bible, eat breakfast, and start laundry.
2. Exercise, shower, get dressed to my shoes. (Thanks, Flylady!)
3. Morning chores with the kids.
4. Get the kids started on their schoolwork. Kindergarten with Silas.
6. Switch the laundry.
7. Finish cleaning the bathrooms:
Surface clean.
Go through the rest of the cupboards, drawers, and closet.
8. Read aloud with the kids.
9. Celebrate a productive morning, er day… because it probably won’t all get done by noon!
So, that’s my morning plan. I’m hopeful to have it all done before dinner time today. I’ll take pictures and will post an update later today to let you know how it goes.
Want To Join Me?
Are you joining me? If so, what room(s) are you planning to tackle today and what’s your morning plan? Let us know in the comments. If you are blogging about it, I’ll have a link-up that you can link your post to in my post later today.
I got up later than I’d planned this morning and felt like I was sort of chasing my tail all day long. However, because of the good routine we’re getting into and because of the hard work we’ve done to deep clean the house this week, the whole day didn’t feel derailed and I ended up getting most of the things done that I’d hoped to accomplish.
I’ve been doing a really good job of doing one load of laundry from start to finish every day this week. I’m amazed at how much this is helping our days go smoother — and how happy it makes me to know that all the laundry is done when I go to bed.
One thing that has made this to actually happen is that the kids have been folding and putting away the load of laundry every afternoon. So all I’ve had to do was start and switch the load — and then remind them to fold and put it away in the afternoon.
I may have solved my years-long battle of the laundry pile! And that is HUGE!
Kaitlynn made me breakfast this morning. She loves to serve me and is always looking for little ways to do so. Today, she presented me with a bowl of oatmeal that had chopped bananas on it. Yum!
Yesterday, she brought me a fresh cup of coffee almost first thing in the morning. It was totally her idea and it blessed me so much.
Moms of littles, I just want to encourage you: your hard work will pay off. Keep loving, teaching, and nurturing those babies of yours and someday soon, they’ll be making you breakfast, helping with laundry, and encouraging you throughout the day.
Silas practiced writing out numbers today, as well as working on learning basic clock-reading skills. He also did some Do-a-Dot letter printables.
While I was helping Silas with Kindergarten, Jesse made dinner and popped it in the crock pot. Yes, folks, I am so very blessed. Truly, I am blown away by this man that I married. And I fall more in love with him every day.
Life isn’t always all roses and rainbows and we have our struggles and arguments, but for the most part, we are just loving this lifestyle of us both working together and sharing homeschooling responsibilities, and all working together to keep our home running. I’m beyond grateful for this blog (and you all who read here) and how you help make this possible for our family.
All those years of hard work, sacrifices, and living on little have borne much more fruit than we could have dreamed. We have no idea whether this is just a season or a forever thing, but we’re seeking to embrace the here and now and loving where we’re at and how it allows us to get to spend so much time together.
After Jesse made dinner and we’d finished breakfast and morning chores, he left for a meeting and to run some errands. The rest of our morning was spent cleaning, doing morning chores, homeschooling, and reading aloud together.
When Jesse got home, I finished reading the last two chapters of our current read aloud book while he made lunch — it was bacon and eggs today. Yum!
And then he took over homeschooling and I headed out to finally run on the treadmill, take a shower, and do some blogging and business work.
Later in the afternoon, the kids came outside to help me shoot the pictures for my Apple Pie post. They LOVE to help me set up and take photos for my blog posts.
Kathrynne, especially, has really gotten into giving me ideas and suggestions for how to set things up and angles to take pictures from. When I was finished with taking pictures, she took the camera and snapped some more for me.
When I was finished with the Apple Pie photos, I quickly put on a little make up and headed out the door for a meeting in town with a few of my team members. We had our end-of-year meetings last week and are in the process of making some changes for 2015, so a few of us had to meet to put things in place to move forward with one of the action items.
I so LOVE the team of people I get to work with. Not only are each of them amazing and skilled, but more importantly, they are my friends. We share so much more than business stuff with each other and that’s what makes working together so much fun.
While I was at my manager’s office, I also got to pop in and see all of the boxes and boxes of orders being packaged up and shipped out. There have been a team of people working hard to get all orders out in a timely manner for Christmas. This is our first year to offer products, so it’s been a learning experience and we so appreciate your patience and input as we’re learning the ropes and growing in this way.
By the way, can you believe that we’re now completely SOLD OUT of all the Gratitude Journals? We have enough to send out all the orders that came in through this afternoon, but we had to pull it from our site this evening as we are almost completely out of stock and we just discovered that our publisher doesn’t have any more in stock, either!
The publisher is getting another big order printed and shipped in right now, but that’s going to take at least 6 weeks or so. In the mean time, getting your hands on a Gratitude Journal is going to be bit hard to do. We think a few Christian stores may still have some in stock, as well as possibly a few places online.
Basically, you all BLEW US AWAY with your excitement and orders. And we ended up selling 10 TIMES MORE than I expected we’d be able to sell by Christmas. I don’t know what to say other than thank you for believing in this idea of mine and being excited about it! I’m truly speechless and humbly grateful. You all mean the world to me!
I finally got around to cleaning the bathrooms tonight. Well, let me take that back: I started to clean the bathrooms and then realized that there was no way I could get to every single part of the bathrooms I wanted to and still go to bed by 11:30 p.m. tonight.
So instead, I decided to just focus most of my efforts on the bathroom drawers in the Master Bathroom drawers. Because clearly, these needed some serious help.
Yikes! I cannot believe I’m posting these publicly.
And yet another, really awful drawer.
I pulled everything out — and it was a little overwhelming!
I used a rag to wipe down the insides and then tossed some things, put some items in the shelves in the bathroom cupboard, and re-organized the rest.
I think I need to find some drawer organizers for all the little things. Still thinking on what would be best there — I welcome suggestions of drawer organizers or how you keep your bathroom drawers from looking like a Stuff Bomb exploded inside of them!
Leave a Comment & You Could Win This Stack of Books!
In my cleaning today, I found some more books that I’d love to pass on to a good home, most all that are ones I’ve loved and just want to share with someone who could be encouraged by them! Plus, I threw in a copy of both my audiobook, Say Goodbye to Survival Mode, and a copy of my new Choose Gratitude Blessings Journal that’s now out of stock in our store (I have a few copies left!), and a copy of my first book, The Money Saving Mom’s Budget.
Who wants to win them? To win, just leave a comment on this post and I'll choose one winner tomorrow evening and will mail them to you so you'll have them in time for Christmas. Some of these books are great condition and might even work as gifts for people on your Christmas list!
Did you work on cleaning your house today? If you blogged about participating in this Clean Your House For Christmas Challenge, leave the direct link to your post below that is specifically about this challenge. Or, leave a comment telling us how your cleaning went today.
The winner of yesterday’s stack of books is Sara (sara.perrera@) — I sent you an email tonight to ask for your address.
This Apple Pie recipe has been one of our family favorites for years. And it’s usually always part of our holiday celebrations. In fact, Thanksgiving or Christmas just wouldn’t seem right without this recipe!
It’s not too hard to make and it always gets rave reviews. If you want to dress it up even more, add a scoop of ice cream (we love Breyers) plus some caramel sauce. It’s ooey-gooey, the perfect combination of sweet and crunchy, and oh-so-delicious!
We’d never tried the Breyers caramel sauce before, so when they asked me if I’d be interested in making an apple pie and they’d send us a gift card to buy the ingredients plus some Breyers ice cream and caramel sauce to top it with, my family happily signed up for that taste test opportunity.
We thought it was delicious… really sweet, but really good.
Breyers Apple Pie A La Mode
1 pie crust (uncooked) 6 cups thinly sliced, peeled cooking apples (about 2 1/2 pounds — or 8-10 apples) 3/4 cup sugar 2 Tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg butter
Crumb Topping: 1/2 cup flour 1/2 cup packed brown sugar 3 Tablespoons butter
Prepare and roll out pie crust. Line pie pan with it and flute edges.
In a large bowl, stir together sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Add in apples and gently toss until coated. Transfer apple mixture to the pie crust. Dot apples with butter. Set aside.
Prepare crumb topping ingredients by stirring together 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Using a pastry blender, cut in 3 Tablespoons butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
Sprinkle crumb topping evenly over apples in pie pan. Cover edges of pie with foil and bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes.
Remove foil and bake 20 minutes more or until fruit is tender and filling is bubbly. Cool on a wire rack.
Top with Breyers® Natural Vanilla Ice Cream. Drizzle Breyers™ Caramel Flavored Ice Cream Sauce on top and serve.
Win a $100 Target Gift Card!
For a limited time, Breyers Gelato Indulgences are 2 for $8 at Target. These creamy desserts come in a number of irresistible flavors like Vanilla Caramel, Triple Chocolate, Tiramisu, and Raspberry Cheesecake. These would make a great treat for yourself or a dessert for the whole family and they would be a great way to sweeten up the holidays!
What Breyers Gelato Indulgences flavor would you love to try? Post a tweet on Twitter tagging me @moneysavingmom and using #MySweetHolidays and you’ll be entered to win a $100 Target gift card.
*See in-store for details. Offer valid 12/7/14-12/20/14. The Bullseye Design, Target and Target GiftCards are registered trademarks of Target Brands, Inc. Terms and conditions are applied to gift cards. Target is not a participating partner in or sponsor of this offer.
{This post was underwritten by Lunchbox and Breyers. All opinions are my own. Read my disclosure policy here.}
My husband and I honeymooned in France and assumed we would return every year. Then life happened. Graduate school, unemployment, a baby, a house, miscarriages, more babies, more debt, more stuff got in the way of our newlywed dreams of travel.
After we paid off all our debts, we started dreaming big dreams again — a trip to France for a month with our six children to commemorate our 20th wedding anniversary was one of them.
Folks looked at us like we were crazy!
Not only had we dared to do something big like to travel with kids, we notched up the crazy by saving up the money to do it. It took two years, but we pulled it off.
Here's what we did to make it happen:
1. We said it out loud.
Part of the success of a goal is to be brave enough to put it out there publicly. We talked about it enough that we would have been really embarrassed if we didn't pull it off. Sometimes, pride is a good thing.
2. We envisioned our kids.
Just like when we did the really hard work of getting out of debt years earlier, we explained our plans to our children so that they would understand why we were making cuts to our spending or doing extra things to increase our income.
3. We created a budget.
I planned a hypothetical trip and calculated all the price quotes. The total was staggering, particularly when I added extra to allow for inflation and a weak dollar.
4. My husband worked overtime.
Getting up at 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday wasn’t his favorite thing to do, but my husband did it.
5. We opened a separate bank account.
I opened a dedicated account in a different bank from where we do our regular banking. I also chose not to get an ATM card. I wanted that money liquid but as inaccessible as possible.
6. We put all other vacations on hold.
We put off other travel plans, instead banking the money for France. Staycations and family visits were a great way to do family travel while we worked toward a bigger goal.
7. We socked away all extra income.
Even though we have two incomes, we choose to live on one. Any income that came in over our regular expenses went toward the France fund.
8. We deferred lots of "extras".
There is a lot of excess in our lives, lots of things that are fun, but that we can certainly live without. We cut back so we could divert that money toward our vacation instead.
Now that we’re home and finally unpacked, it's been so encouraging to look back at what we pulled off and the great memories we created as a family. It was an amazing trip, one we plan to do again in 2016!
Jessica Fisher is a happy wife and a homeschooling mom of six kids under 18. She loves French cheeses, sandy beaches, good books, and Jesus. Not in that order, of course. Catch up with her on her blogs, Life as MOM and Good Cheap Eats.
