Here's what's working for me right now

(Once again, I refuse to lower myself and demean my three remaining readers by offering inane excuses for not posting in... awhile. So how 'bout if we all just assume that I've been very productive, doing tons of blog-worthy things, improving myself, serving others, and honoring God. OK?) 

Not that it's been such a ridiculously-long time since I last posted, but I did find it necessary to read through my last few entries to remind myself what exactly my blog is all about anyway. (Is it really a laundry blog?!)  And I realized I have left quite a few loose ends over the months which I now plan to remedy.

Remember this post where I once again apologized for not blogging told you about a book I had read on productivity? Well for goodness sakes people, aren't you even a little curious about whether the methods in the book transformed my life like the book jacket said it would?!

 (Didn't think so....Do you even remember who I am?!!) 

 Actually, I'm happy to report that there was one suggestion in the book - one seemingly small time management tip - that helped me cut my to-do list to post-it note size.  The author of the book suggests that if a task will take you less than 2 minutes then you should just do it right away vs. writing it down to do later. I've been amazed at how many things I do each day that take less than 2 minutes. And how many very short tasks I had previously put off doing. Maybe not life transforming, but definitely an attitude change. 

(I'm also still doing a regular Mind Sweep, which I told you about here. My Mind Sweep takes a stack of post-it notes but I'll let my therapist deal with that.)

Another idea (one which I would describe as brilliant, except that I came up with this one myself and I do not like to praise myself with such flamboyant adjectives) which has saved me oodles of time this year - and kept me lookin' good (...at least that's what my friends say...) is to focus on refining one part of my wardrobe at a time. 


 Two summers ago was the year of the T-shirt. My mission was to find the perfect T for me.  After some experimenting around at Kohls, Target, and a few nicer stores, I realized a petite fits me best (without fitting me TOO well, if you get my drift) and is the right length for me - even though I'm not petite height. So now I know exactly what brand of T-shirt is 'mine' and I will not even give those others a second glance. So there.

Last year it was denim - I kid you not, I found a pair of jeans that made everyone ask me if I had been seeing a personal trainer. That would've been reward enough, but the bonus is that shopping was uber-easy since when I went to a store or a website, I was only looking for jeans or capris, not shirts (that was last year) or skirts or shoes. No ambling through Marshalls for me. Nope. It was straight to the one row of jeans, then back to the car.
Easy peasy.

 2011 has been fun and low-cost. It's been my Sandal Year. I discovered that shoes really do make the woman, or at least the outfit. I bought these (in brown and in grey) and these , and of course these in black and for 1/2 price (and a few other pairs that I would show you but my sandal financier occasionally reads my blog.) 


Because I'm only shopping for one type of item, I am in and out of stores more quickly and I have a better idea of what is a good deal. I'm not keen on shopping (except for book shopping, I'm real keen on that...and they always fit and never go out of style, and you can buy them even on your fat days. 

One last thing that has worked for me recently is to use the lazy days of summer to teach my children a few skills that will make  my their life easier once school starts. Here's a picture of Daniel and Andrew having a banana bread bake-off. It was a tie :)

Oh, and here's something that didn't work for me. I had another birthday.  I can now get 25% off at Goodwill on Tuesdays, which is such comfort as I look into the mirror and see my mother staring back at me.

My family lavished me with construction paper promises of back rubs, foot rubs, and car washes. And my husband got me an ipod docking station - which means I now need a construction paper promise to teach me how to use my ipod.

Here's my amazing birthday meal; Pioneer Woman's caprese salad, sauteed asparagus, steak, and dear husband's now-famous boston cream pie (which is really a cake, so what's up with that?)

See you in a few months!  (I'm trying to keep my expectations low so I can surprise myself.)

Actually, when I hit 100 followers my son has promised me a blog refurbishing. So....that should be sometime later in this century. I'm excited!

Half a party is all you get around here

My youngest two children are a boy and a girl, born thirteen days apart. We used to get away with telling them they were twins - one of whom had emerged a little sooner than the other (from a very, very...long labor.) This charade was especially helpful around birthdays - one party, one cake, one special dinner. We never felt bad because they seemed to always enjoy it.

Until recently.

Maybe it's the fact that Molly is a good foot taller now than her "twin" brother, or maybe that classical education we're giving them has finally got them to thinking, but this year Molly asked to have a solo birthday party. And Daniel was fine with it. He immediately started planning his own mannish,no-girls-allowed party. (Maybe that Barbie cake last year was the Tipping Point for him......)

In order to give them even more "individualism" (because that's just the kind of amazing mother I am), I suggested Molly have a half-birthday party so their parties would not be a mere 13 days apart (because that's just the kind of cheapskate, tired mother I am).

Once we got started, the ideas just started flowing (because that's just the kind of creative mother I am.) We sent out invitations that had been cut in half before inserting them in the envelopes. See if you can find all the half-brained ideas we came up with in the following pictures.

Not pictured: The half and half ice cream that topped those amazing black and white cookies, which we ate after a half-hearted attempt at singing Happy Birthday. For dinner we had half a bowl of taco soup, topped with fritos and colby jack cheese. (Get it? Colby jack cheese? Half colby and half monterey jack. I must admit, some of my half-baked ideas were lost on these 11 year old girls. But I didn't care. I knew. And it made me whole-ly happy :)

We told the girls to come half-dressed, but fortunately no one took us up on it. However, the girls were very clever in the way they dressed for the party. Here's big Sis Mary-Faith, who chose to half-way match.

Most of the girls were a little less bold. They wore their hair half-up/half-down, or one big earring and one smaller. One girl cut off one leg of her jeans so she had half-shorts/half pants. Several of them wore two different shoes. This girl wore 50% of her shoes.

For activities, we decided to set up game stations. The girls played for 15 minutes then stopped (half-way through!) and moved to another station to pick up where the previous players left off. They played partial games of Sorry, Apples to Apples, Phase 10, and Monopoly.



The girls were good sports when we interrupted their games in the middle, but when we tried to stop the American Girl movie half-way through, they were only partially accepting!

A good time was had by ALL. And Molly was 100%, fully pleased.

Marriage - the story

(Here's Daniel setting the table for our romantic anniversary dinner for 8.)


And we don't look very happy in this photo (my husband looks much more like Sean Connery in real life, and I'm actually about 30 lbs lighter than this photo makes me look - stupid camera), but at least the cake looks good. And it was.

Yesterday was my 28th wedding anniversary.

Unreal.

Not in the fairy tale unreal way, where time has magically flown by amid sparkly, scrapbook-worthy moments. Although there have been many scrapbook-worthy moments (very few of which have actually made it into the scrapbooks.)

Marriage, for my husband and me, has been a journey in sanctification.

We're happy we've been on this journey together; We do not want to be on it with anyone else, but it's been long and uncomfortable and if truth be told (and that's what the blog world is for, isn't it?) it is taking us much longer to get to our destination than we ever dreamed it would.

I'm about to finish a book that has impacted my thinking, about my marriage in particular, in a way that surprised me. It's called A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, by Donald Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz). The basic premise of the book is that we are all characters in a "story". Some of us have safe, boring stories. And some of us are so busy living the story that we don't know the plot.

Marriage and having lots of kids has made our story un-safe, and un-boring......and Hard.

The book has hundreds of quotable passages; I love the way the guy writes, talking to you out of his own experience, so you don't feel "preached at", but you end up hearing a sermon just the same. Here's one such passage:

"I realized how much of our lives are spent trying to avoid conflict. Half the commercials on television are selling us something that will make life easier. Part of me wonders if our stories aren't being stolen by the easy life."

Well, if all it takes is an un-easy life to keep your story from being stolen, then mine is very, very secure.

I have several friends in the midst of divorces right now. Friends with marriages similar to mine.
No previous role models. Erratic, sometimes unbiblical teaching on the roles of a husband and wife. Dysfunctional backgrounds. High hopes. Unrealistic expectations. Hard, long, overfull days.

Miller spends a good deal of the book talking about how joy rarely changes a person, unless it's the joy you feel when a conflict is over. And he speaks of how conflict is what really changes people. I bet Job would agree with that. In speaking of Job, reportedly the oldest book in the Bible, Miller says "It is a book about suffering and it reads as though God is saying to the world. Before we get started, there's this one thing I have to tell you. Things are going to get bad."

Marriage, and it's accouterments (children, home upkeep, giving up any personal space/rights), has changed my husband and me. Or maybe revealed more of what we really are.....Which is people that needed lots of changing. And at times things have gotten bad, mostly when we resisted the change.

The mistake would be in thinking that when things look bad, God is taking a break from writing the story.

We are indeed characters in a story, but the story is not primarily about us. That lesson was learned slowly in our case. I think my husband and I both came into marriage expecting that we would each be the "main character" - and we supposed we were being benevolent by letting our spouse "co-star" with us. And the more we demanded "star" treatment, the more the story stalled. If we were a reality show, we would've been cancelled :)

Turns out the story God is writing is way bigger than the characters. It's a story where He stars and gets all the glory, and the so-called stars go through all kinds of conflict and hardship and suffering - - - and in the end.......Well, I hate to spoil the ending.....But I'm pretty sure it has a sappy- happy ending. But the characters look Way Different than when they started.

And we try to remember that "the reward you get from a story is always less than you thought it would be, and the work is harder than you imagined. The point of the story is about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle."


After all these years, we've realized that as our marriage is focused on the ending (the final ending, which will not take place in this life) vs. a comfortable story, we are more content characters. And we persevere by faith in the writer of the story.

And unlike our friends that are getting divorced, We stop wishing for an easier story.

Happy Anniversay, dear husband. Even though it's not the story I thought I was auditioning for, I plan on being there till the finale' (and don't tell the National Enquirer, but I have a huge crush on my co-star!)

too tired to title

I "wasted" my blog time tonight by holding Elijah for several hours while his parents were out. I definitely made the right choice :) You'll have to add your own witty text to the pictures below since I don't have time.

If you'd like to get some details on the Staycation goings-on, check out my daughter's blog (who has text, but no pictures and is sending people over here. We're all about passing the buck in our family!)



In Winston's behalf I do have to add a couple of words here - He came to the beach with us even though he has a herniated disc in his back and can only sit and watch us play. In this picture his boredom is starting to show. But I think he would like me to point out that the sippy cup is not his.



Alright-y, I guess blogger is also otherwise engaged since it is refusing to upload any more of my wonderful pictures. I'm eager to show them to you, but it is now 12:22 a.m. and my drowsiness is overwhelming my eagerness.

good night.

Recession Love ...and Laundry Cure: The Sequel

(It's hard to choose when you have two titles you really like. So I didn't even try.)

As previously noted, my husband is frugal (for lack of a more truthful, yet respectful term).

But boy do I have a love/hate relationship with that particular character quality.

I love it when he's being frugal with things I don't care about or want, But the rest of the time (which is quite a bit), it's a nuisance.


Not getting something because it costs too much seems a little too much like self-denial, which is another one of my least favorite terms. I mean....there's already so much negativity in the world, don't you think? Must we add to it with our incessant penny-pinching?

Do we really need to be all that concerned about a little thing like how much something costs vs. how much we have in our bank accounts?

Seems so temporal. Seems so mundane. Seems so biblical (!)

Yes, I know all about Dave Ramsey, Crown Ministries, Consumer Credit Counseling, and the over 600 Scriptures that address money. Stop confusing me with the facts.


Forunately, there are times when frugality and getting what I want mix beautifully. And this Valentines Day was one of those times. My husband finally learned to speak my Love Language.


He even took a half day off from work on Valentine's Eve - It being such a special holiday to him, and all (cough:cough). I casually mentioned to him, with absolutely no ulterior motives (this time) that when blogging about our laundry system last week, I realized it would be nice to have a shelf in the laundry room.

A shelf would allow me to keep those personalized laundry tubs spread out vs. nested inside each other. That way the clothes could be folded straight from the dryer into the tubs. It would alleviate the need for a laundry delivery person since everyone could come get their own laundry whenever they wanted.


He acted semi-interested in my idea - and even allowed me to show him exactly where I would want the shelf. He was also sweet enough not to mention that there are already three shelves in the tiny room.

Soon after I heard the most romantic sound coming from the back yard. A sort of buzzing, productive sound - loud and manly. And within an hour I had this:

The upper shelf was already there, but the lower shelf is my Valentine's present. And it cost NOTHING. He already had the wood and the tools so his only investment was time - a precious gift in a large family - and energy (a precious gift at any time!)

The secret's out: Shelves and Book Cases turn me on. Nothing says, "I'll love you forever" like new storage options.

It was all the more sweet because he did it spontaneously - and quickly. (Not that he doesn't always jump right up and grant my every wish and whim....)

I told ya'll last time that my house is very big- No brag, just fact -But somehow the laundry room was an oversight when they built this monstrosity of a house. I'm thinking the previous owner must not have washed much.

Or maybe she had a maid. Or perhaps disposable clothing. The house was built in the 40's. Maybe they didn't have washing machines back then (?).

Because the laundry room is just a big closet.

The house has a living room you could hold a sock hop in.

A kitchen that could easily house our big farm table and still have room to cook and converse.

Four nice-sized bathrooms;Five large bedrooms, including one that used to be a 3-car garage (now turned boys' dorm); a basement/gameroom; even a library, for heaven's sake!;

And yet, The laundry room. Is. A. Closet.

Here's the view from the Foy-A (with the infamous wallpaper).

And here's how utterly discreet it looks from the front door. You'd never know that behind that door ,tucked in between the library and our ballroom/living room, is a smallish laundry room wreaking of sweaty shin guards and on rare occasions (yet not as rare as I'd like...) wet sheets.

I hope I don't sound like I'm ungrateful. I have come to love my cutesy, impish laundry room. I painted it a cheery color and put in wire shelves for storage as well as hanging clothes.

Having one wall with this peg-board type material allows me to keep mops, brooms, buckets, and other Very Vital, Necessary, Tools of My Trade in the laundry room, too.




Oh yeah, there's also a washer and dryer in there. That comes in handy at times.
Did you know almost any front-loading washer and dryer can become 'stackable' with a $50 kit?




And lastly, (can you believe someone could take up two, very long posts about something as trivial as laundry? Admit it, girls! I'm not your ordinary blogger),

I like to put pictures on the shelves to remind me why I'm in the diminutive, windowless (yet, cheery!) room to begin with.






"Now they show you how detergents take out bloodstains, a pretty violent image there. I think if you've got a T-shirt with a bloodstain all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem.Maybe you should get rid of the body before you do the wash.”
Jerry Seinfeld