Smelly Cats

Do you dream about blogging? Apparently I do. Last night I conjured up some really helpful tips for eliminating cat-related odors from your home. I'm leaving out all the parts about trying to find a bathroom with a very full bladder in an empty mall and the parts about living in Downton Abbey, just to save time.

1. Give your cat an eviction notice. If the smells are that bad, maybe it's time that you thought about kicking him out.
2. No more litter box! You can Google cat potty training, I'm sure.
3. Make sure your cat wears a Gatsby cap. Most cat odors escape from a cat's head, so it's best to make sure they are wearing a cap at all times.
4. My personal favorite - get your cat a pleasant smelling scratch 'n sniff tattoo! You could get one that smells like bananas or grapes or whatever you want!

I hope you find these tips helpful and are able to reduce your home's cat-related odors!

What is one of your more eentertaining dreams lately? Do you have any helpful tips (sarcastic or otherwise) tips for eliminating pet odor?

15 Tips to Make Your House Look as Amazing as Mine

Housekeeping, frugal living, cooking; my hobbies. When I say "hobbies" I mean that I am actually really bad at them and want to be way better at them. When I say "hobbies" I mean that I pin a lot of pins on Pinterest about these things. When I say "hobbies" I mean I Google lots of articles about them and think, "I want to do that!" I am able to come up with some legitimate solutions, sometimes. Cooking Once a Month is working out great (so far) and my homemade cleaning supplies are great. I also still try to clean on commercials, and I really am way better of than I used to be. Even so, I still have weeks like this where everything is a disaster and I feel like I'm sinking in it. I'm not gonna lie.

So, without further ado, here are 15 tips to make your house look as amazing as mine!

1. Have your toddler throw dry oatmeal everywhere. If you don't have a toddler, just throw it in an indiscriminate manner in every room. Don't vaccuum for two days.
2. Reuse your towels! By that I mean don't wash your towels and scramble to find one that was hanging over the back of a chair after your kid's bath last night.
3. Spill stuff. Wipe it up, but don't realize it's still sticky till later when you set an important paper on it.
4. Always have at least one thing crammed into the back of your fridge that shouldn't be there.
5. Only get rid of the kid's cave art when the landlord is coming over.
6. Mix your lights, whites and darks. (Husband commentary: "...and the reds.")
7. Stack anything that doesn't have a place on top of the fridge.
8. Clean out your oven infrequently enough that you have to Google how to clean out your oven when you do.
9. Definitely do NOT put your cups/plates/bowls in the same order in the cabinet every time.
10. Wait three months before deciding if old mail should be thrown away.
11. I strongly recommend avoiding putting all your groceries away when you get home. Leave a few on the counter or table.
12. Have a catchall drawer in every room where it's nigh impossible to find anything.
13. If you don't feel like folding laundry, toss it in a bin or basket for later.
14. Only do laundry once a week, or one load as needed. The as needed load goes straight into the basket/bin. (Husband commentary: "I think you're being too generous here.")
15. Have 15 hangers for 45 items that need to be hanged in the closet.

There it is, folks! Now your place can look just as great as mine- you'll be a true work in progress in no time!

Have a great Wednesday!

Bethany

5 Ideas to Reduce Waste

I hate throwing trash away. For one, I feel like I'm just wasting money when I am throwing away so much stuff. I also think we can do better for our planet, so I like to figure out what I can do to throw less stuff into landfills.

1. Recycle! When purchasing things, try to figure out (quickly) how much of it you're going to be able to throw into the recycle bin.
2. Have a bigger recycle bin than a garbage bin. Doing this has helped me be more conscious about what I'm throwing away that could be recycled.
3. Reuse and repurpose. This may sound a little nutty, but I like to reuse things like aluminum foil if it doesn't get messy while I'm cooking. If I'm just covering a casserole, and no food transfers (or very little), I fold that foil up and reuse it. I also like to repurpose old jars and things to store food and homemade cleaning supplies when possible. (If I have nothing to put into it, it gets tossed or recycled to reduce clutter.)
4. Do without. Learn to live with less! This is a hard one for most Americans, but I think it's helpful. If you consume less, you have less to throw away. 
5. Switch to reusable when it's convenient/practical for your family. You can switch to unpaper towels, cloth diapers, cloth wipes, cloth napkins, stop using paper plates/cups/silverware, use reusable snack bags, and even use cloth toilet "paper." 

These are five things you can do to waste a little less, and even doing some of them in small amounts can make a difference. 

Once a Month Cooking - Grocery List

Here is the final part of my short series on Once a Month Cooking. We are loving the meals. So easy, and we've been loving how tasty all the meals are. I want to wrap this thing up by sharing my grocery list and giving you an idea of what supplies you might want to have on hand. Then I'll update in a month and let you know how it worked!

Below is the grocery list. Unfortunately, I lost the completed copy and this is one from when I just started putting the list together. It will, however, give you an idea of what I brought to the store with me.

Finally, I just want to mention a few supplies that I used to get this done:

• Freezer bags (quart and gallon)
• Labels 
• Permanent marker
• Saran wrap
• Tape
• Measuring cups/spoons

That's it! I thought of the labels as an after though, and the only labels I could find quickly were name tags. Now all our meals are awfully cordial before they go in the oven!

Happy cooking!

Once a Month Cooking - The Recipes

Disclaimer: Sorry this is a novel's length! I tried to label the different sections so you can skip around as you'd like.

With this entry I wanted to talk about what I actually prepared. I wanted to do something really, really easy to prepare so I could get the whole project done in a day. BTW - I went shopping Monday and today is Thursday...it took me that long to recover from the insanity of shopping for a month and cooking for a month in one day. I hope to do follow ups in the upcoming months about what we're changing, so hopefully I don't have that lengthy of a recovery period next time. (I feel like a wimp typing that out, but I kid you not- that was a LOT of work!!)

What I Chose to Cook

I decided the easiest way for me to do this freezing for now was to go ahead and do the majority of my meals with a method I found online called "dump chicken." The idea is that you stick the amount of chicken (I used boneless/skinless) you need in a bag, add the ingredients for a marinade, shake it up, flatten and freeze. It really made the majority of this process so easy, and the only thing I cooked was enough lean ground beef for a couple of those meals at the end.


Modifications

We're trying to be much more health conscious, so I did modify some of these recipes slightly as I went along. The recipes listed are the original recipes. I cut down on the oils and the butter in a lot of the recipes. Some of the recipes called for jelly so I used a little less of that just to watch the sugar. The possibilities are endless- modify as you see fit.

How I Prepared the Meals

First I labeled all the freezer bags and cut any of the fresh ingredients (such as garlic) I needed so it was all ready.  Then I did the meals as such:

Chicken

1. Cut the chicken breasts into the appropriate portion sizes. We each get about 4 oz- about the size of a deck of playing cards, and Hat Boy gets half of that. So, about 1 1/2 of the chicken breasts I bought.
2. Wash hands. Carefully place chicken in labeled bags. (I say carefully because I get worried about chicken residue getting everywhere.)
3. For the love of Norman, clean up your counter space and disinfect so you don't cross contaminate with the raw chicken.
4. Gather all the ingredients, and just start divvying them up according to your recipe list. I taped mine on the cabinet above me as a prep list.
5. Wash hands, seal bags (double check- I learned the hard way! ;) ) and shake them up so the ingredients are mixed. Flatten and stack 'em up in your freezer!
6. For good measure, I wiped down the counter with vinegar and water again to avoid spreading the chicken germs.

Ground Beef

1. While divvying up the ingredients, I put all the lean ground beef on the stove and browned it.
2. When it was done, I let it cool enough to handle (I had to double check food safety rules on this one- can you tell I'm worried about food poisoning?) and then I separated into the freezer bags for my meals.
3. Same thing here with the ingredients: add the spices, shake 'em up, flatten and freeze.
4. The only hamburger meal that was different was the enchiladas. I mixed the enchilada mix in a bowl (ingredients listed on the recipe sheet - I honestly just kind of eyeball the mix since I've made it a hundred times) then separated that into two bags. That's also the only meal that uses creamy condensed soup. I've seen healthier substitutes floating around Pinterest, if you're interested.


The only thing I did at the end of all of this was to check on the meals in an hour or two. I have a small freezer and they were all stacked in pretty tightly, so I just shifted them around a bit to make sure they froze quickly and thoroughly.

How I Prepare the Meals at Night

This is the best part. Right before bed, I pull out the next day's meal and put it in the fridge. By dinner time, it's thawed and goes in a small baking dish. All meals bake at 350 F for 20-30 minutes. I take 5 minutes and start one of the starch options, and then chop up a salad. That's it. Dinner takes me 10 minutes tops. I know we're only a few nights in, but I am loving it.

Other Things on the Recipe List

Some meals I made two of for the month, and those are marked with "X 2" next to the name. This mostly covers all the meals, except leftover nights (I'm second guessing this because I already portioned the meals appropriately so it's going to be tricky) and nights we eat with family members. The carb/veggie/pregnant snack options are really what I used as a guide to plan the shopping list, since we need those too. I tried to appease the other two people in the house a little more by planning less produce for them in the morning/lunch, and more throughout the day for me so I can stick with the Brewer's Diet for pregnancy.

Again, sorry this is sooo long! When I was searching for information on once a month cooking, I wanted to know all of these things so I knew my own blog posts about the project would be really long.

Tomorrow I'll be wrapping everything up by showing you my grocery list and talking about the supplies needed to do this thing! :)

Have a great day!

Once a Month Cooking - Shopping Successes and Failures

I want to do a short series about Once a Month Cooking (OAMC). I just decided to start it this month, because cooking every night is something that really wears me out so we eat convenient food a lot. This is really only "sorta cooking" because the meals do need to be pulled out of the freezer and baked nightly ;) Here are my guidelines for shopping:

• Budget: $400 a month (over two paychecks) - $350 for the big trip, $50 for milk and produce the next pay period.
• Enough meals for both pay periods. No eating out, and all meals need to be balanced with a starch and lots of veggies. This pay period is 33 days so I prepared that many main dishes.
• Budget includes every possible household need and Pull-Ups for our little potty trainer. (NOTE: I hate how unfrugal Pull-Ups are and I'm definitely going to blog about that another day!)

I felt like there were some things in the trip that went successfully. 

• I made a really insanely thorough list. This thing took me a week and a half. Every item on the list was categorized by type of grocery so I could have a general idea of which aisle, and had an already filled out target price. I also put a blank space next to the items for actual price to track my savings.
• I bought as much as possible at our local discount store, Aldi's. Other places I know of that aren't in this area but might be in yours are Grocery Outlet, Winco and Giant Eagle.
• I made sure to check the price per unit on every single item. 
• I ate before I left, so I didn't have a single impulse buy because I was hungry. 
• I followed the chart at the link below (click the picture) and it helped me pinpoint ways to save that I hadn't ever thought of. I did  save money this way.
• I was $20 under budget!! 

 Now, for the not so successful parts:

• I didn't think about myself being pregnant before I left, and consequently, my bladder almost died because the first store had no bathroom.
• When I got to the store, I thought I'd remember certain things I thought of that morning as I left. I'm not doing this again! When I think of it, I'm writing it down.
• I didn't organize the categories of the list very well. I had aisles that should be together but weren't, so I was constantly flipping pages. This slowed me down significantly. 
• I decided it would be a fabulous idea to shop/cook on the same day. Never. Again.

 So that's the start of it! Upcoming in the next few days are menus, storage, recipes, and a copy of my shopping list.

Have you ever tried shopping for a month, or for a longer period of time than usual? How did it go?

The Last Minute Scramble

We've got our game group coming over today, and every time they do it's the same thing as it is with all company: last minute scramble. Even if the apartment is mostly clean, there is always something to scramble over. Horribly messy? Obviously stuff to scramble over. Mostly immaculate? "AGGGH, I need to mop everything in the apartment before they get here!!!!"

Always a scramble.

Do you do the "big scramble" when you know people are coming over, even if your place if mostly clean?

My Nachos Caught on Fire

See that handsome fella? That's my husband on the first day of our honeymoon. He's so happy to have a wife, but little does he know that she's going to be setting a few meals on fire. Oops.

When I first got married I was a minister's wife. I had a few recipes in my arsenal so I wasn't totally lost in the cooking department. I was determined to know all of his church members by name (I literally flipped through the membership book and memorized names), be warm and gracious, and mostly host people over for delicious meals!

I did memorize all the member's names, and I think I was fairly warm for a young preacher's wife. 20 years old and married to the minister. I put a lot of pressure on myself to get this right! I invited someone over for our first night of hosting. I made some delicious spaghetti, and was preparing to make a cake. I opened up the cake mix that exploded everywhere- and moments after that powder settled on the stove top, it caught fire! The whole apartment filled with smoke right as our guest arrived.

A few weeks later, I hosted some of the youth group over for a game day. I thought Nachos would be perfect and very easy, since I had caught the last meal on fire. Nope - I did it again! The youth minister had to put that one out.

Then pork chops and rice. I set the rice on fire.

Then pizza. No fire, but it was black.

The church threw us a wedding shower, and our most memorable gift was a fire extinguisher. Which we were actually quite thankful for since we didn't want our apartment to burn down.

I still occasionally REALLY burn some good food. I feel like the Steve Urkel of cooking..."Did I do that??"

Declutter Game: Official Rule(s)

One of the biggest housekeeping challenges I face is keeping everything straightened. There are always toys EVERYWHERE (toys multiply on their own, just fyi). Between socks and books and kid stuff and jackets, etc., I've been playing a new game to keep it straightened. Here's how it works:

The Great Decluttering Game

Official Rules:

1. Whenever you see a potential break in a fun task, take it and pick up 50 things. If you're catching up on Project Runway, for example, pause it on commercials and pick up 50. If you're playing a super rad round of Legos with your son, pick up 50 things as soon as he moves on to the next toy. If you're drinking a cup of coffee and reading Pride and Prejudice, STOP and pick up 50 things when you're done with that chapter.

That's it. Just do it! Now here are some notes about possible rule modifications you might want to think about:

1. Maybe you don't need to pick up 50 things. That's a lot over the course of the day. Some days things are just less clutter-y, so only 10 things are necessary. Or maybe you want to do 100 things on five breaks and then be done for the day. Number this thing however you want/need to! One thing I occasionally do to switch things up is start at 100 things, then on the next break I do 90, then 80, then 70, all the way down to 10. I may or may not start over.

2. Involve your little ones. One thing we're really working on with Hat Boy is getting him to help out with little chores. I'll post more about that later, but in the context of the Declutter Game, I have him pick up 5-10 things on my breaks. We count it out too so it's a little educational. Multitasking!

3. What counts as a thing? I count big things and small things alike toward the number of things. If I'm cleaning the kitchen, for example, a fork is one thing. However, so is mopping the floor. It all evens out. You can make as many crazy rules as you want, just so long as you're decluttering. 

That's the whole game! I really enjoy how much I get done during the day when I do this, and I still get to do all of the enjoyable things I want to do.

Housecleaning - 6 Steps to Get Started

For better or worse, I am a very free spirited person. It has taken me well into three years of wedded bliss and living in the role of homemaker to begin to get a grasp of how to do this thing. Now it's such a big hobby of mine, and now that I've found other moms out there share my issue of having a mega homemaking learning curve, I decided I need a blog to share the good word about how I do this stuff.

For those of us who don't rock at keeping house, the great housekeepers of the world are an enigma. Questions such as, "How do they have all that energy?" and "How does their place look so clean all the time?" are guilt-inducing for some of us who don't have the knack. Heck, the knack is so far from me that I can't even tell you if a knack for this kind of thing even exists. So, I want to share how I started tackling this thing with a six step program. That's right, just six steps folks!

1. Acknowledge and accept the problem.

You're a bad housekeeper. It's okay. We all have different gifts and talents, we all have our knacks- this just isn't yours. Some people are more musically inclined, for example, so they can pick up a guitar and learn quickly. That's their thing. Some people, however, need to seriously WORK for the same set of skills. That's what doing the Domestic Thing is like. There's nothing wrong with the person who needs to work harder to have the same skill level as the guitar player who takes to it like a bird to the wind, and there's nothing wrong with you for having to work hard towards Domestic Engineer: Master Level.

2. Know you're going to have to work for it.

You can't just wish you were a better housekeeper. You're going to have to start practicing. Consider the aforementioned musical analogy- you may be really bad at keeping rhythm. Wishing that you could become amazing at keeping rhythm is not going to improve your sense of rhythm. You're going to have to work, put your brain into it, and practice it. Same goes with the housework.

3. Figure out the problem, but don't make excuses for yourself. Ask yourself one "what" a long series of "whys."

What, precisely, is the mess you're having a hard time keeping up with? Why is it that you're having a hard time with it? Yes, some small portion of it is laziness/apathy sometimes. But if you can pinpoint the problem, you'll know how to tackle it. In my case, clutter is the biggest problem.  Why? Because there isn't a place for everything. Why? Twofold problem - I don't have a lot of storage or closet space for the things I need, and I have a lot of things that don't have a place that I don't need at all. Why? Reason A) We just moved and started over from scratch. We've go the stuff now, but not the right places for stuff to go. B) Sometimes I end up with things I don't need, or hold on to things I don't need.

You get the idea. Start thinking about this rationally, but NO excuses! This is not the time for self-validation. It's the time for figuring out the issue. Sometimes you'll have pretty good reasons, and sometimes your reasons are going to be lame. Take them all in stride. You're a work in progress!

4. Get realistic - set attainable goals.

Now that you've had a long pondering session (and hopefully not an existential meltdown), start setting goals. In a few sentences, figure out what your standards are. In my case, my place just isn't going to be as clean as my grandma's house until I don't have a little tornado of child-sized destruction following me around. I'm going to have toys on my floors sometimes, but I know I just don't need papers randomly stacked everywhere. See? I've figured out what's realistic for me in my current life situation. You need to do that too. It may not be realistic for you to have your laundry done all the time, but maybe you can keep your fridge better organized with some upkeep.

The last step in this category is to make some kind of actual list of goals. Maybe you need to do a checklist, maybe you need notecards, maybe you need to type this sucker up- no matter how you do it, you need a guide and a clear picture of how you're going to tackle this problem. 

5. Do the giant clean-up.

Now it's time for work. This is the "just do it" phase, and it's definitely the least pleasant. Later, your best friend is going to just be doing small tasks for upkeep. But for now you're going to have to rid yourself of the stuff you don't need anymore, deep clean that closet you've been dreading, do all of the laundry that's been strewn...do it now, and you're going to be able to putz at it later!

6. Don't worry about what people think and do this for yourself. 

I'll tell you what has never helped me be a better housekeeper: fretting about what people would think if they knew how hard this task is for me. You have to figure out a good place to put the caring about what other people think. While deep breathing in yoga, you're supposed to really clear your mind. When thoughts come in, acknowledge their presence and breathe them out. Shift focus back to your breathing. In less hippie terms (you're going to get the hippie stuff from me a lot), do this when the "intrusive thoughts" start in: take a deep breath. Think, "Oh, hey imaginario-" (imaginary scenario) "about Aunt Ethel judging my lame housekeeping skills. SEE YA!"

Don't let Aunt Ethel hang around long enough to psyche you out. You're doing this for you. So give yourself a pat on the back!