Menu Plan Monday - Jan 5, 2015

We managed to get off to a great start this morning with our family’s “do for yourself” New Year’s resolution! When I got home from the gym at 7:15 am, everyone was dressed and the girls were actually making their lunches!! I made a little sheet and posted it by the wall with the lunchbox requirements and the girls were happily packing their snacks into their bags.

Last night I posted a picture of my “happy place” on Instagram – my happy place being three blank calendars!! I managed to fill in all the kids’ activities in my planner and on the family calendar that we keep on the fridge, but the menu plan calendar didn’t get fully completed. I’m hoping to finish that planning up on my lunch break today.

At least I managed to get the first week all planned out! It’s tough planning sometimes. Mondays we only have 40 minutes in the house to cook and eat dinner between activities and Thursdays the girls eat at my mom’s and I just pick them up and head on to that day’s activity. For me, that means I don’t even get home to cook dinner for the hubs and I until 8pm!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you all have a fantastic week!

On the menu this week:
Monday: Shell pasta with homemade spaghetti sauce and turkey meatloaf
Tuesday: Perogies and farmer sausage
Wednesday: Fish and Chips
Thursday: Butter chicken lasagne
Friday: Sweet and sour chicken, rice and stir fried veggies
Saturday: Pizza & Salad

Sunday: Pasta with prawns in boursin cream sauce
I’ll be linking my menu plan up to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday – check it out!!

Money Saving Challenge

Hello all! I hope you are all having a fantastic new year! I have been loving having the week after Christmas off – getting started on some organizing projects, hanging some artwork I made for the girls’ rooms.

Today I’m here with a bit of a different post. My cousins over in Ireland did a weekly money-saving challenge and managed to save a huge chunk of money over the past year. I found a similar one on Pinterest  and thought it would be fun to see if I could stick to it and save up some cash. I don’t have a plan for what to spend the money on, I’m just excited to save it up!

The challenge that I found said that by saving $1 the first week, $2 the next week, and so on until by the last week of the year, save $52 for a grand total of $1378.00 saved! This sounds like a great plan, but I thought I needed to make a little tweak. Rather than having to save $49, $50, $51 and $52 in the month of December (prime Christmas present buying time), I decided to switch it up and work backwards for the 52 weeks. So this week, I’ll be putting $52 into my savings canister, next week it’ll be $51, and so on.

For me, the trick is going to be NOT dipping in to the piggy bank when I think I “need” to. So, I scoured the house and found a not-in-use container with a lid, grabbed my trusty hot glue gun and some wrapping paper and got to work making it sealing it up and making it pretty.

I think it turned out alright, I’ve got my savings container and my list of deposit amounts in a kitchen cupboard (because that’s where my purse ends up most nights) and I’m ready to start building my little nest egg.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope I’ve inspired you a little today!

Dollar Store Art Hack

Hello my friends and Happy New Year!! Hope you all had a safe and fun evening last night. My evening consisted of a Homeland binge watching session and some sparkling wine with the hubs at midnight. A perfect evening as far as I am concerned!

Today I'm sharing with you a dollar store hack that I used to make Christmas presents for my littles. Miss A has been asking to update her bedroom for a few months now. Originally she asked to paint the lower portion of her room green like grass in a field, and the top part of the room blue like the sky, paint a fence and put pictures of horses all over the walls.

That tall order was not going to happen (not right now anyway) but I wanted to bring some horse themed artwork into her room. Rather than shell out big bucks for artwork at Home Sense or Target, I thought I could find a way to do it for cheap. So, off to my favorite store these days - Dollarama!! I picked up a horse calendar and some photo frames and got to work!All in I spent $13 to make four art pieces for my littles; 4 frames at $3 each and a buckeroo for the calendar.

Once I took the stock photo out of the frames, and the matting out, I was able to "frame" out which calendar pages would work out best for my project. I lucked out and found that more than half of the calendar pages would have worked! I picked out the ones I thought the girls would like best (especially since Miss A asked for a real horse that's brown with white spots for Christmas!) and using scotch tape affixed the calendar pages to the matting.

I also put together one other art piece for Miss A that wasn't horse related. Since she isn't exactly a morning person (like at all) I wanted to find a fun quote about being happy. I scoured Pinterest and found this quote that reads "Today is the perfect day to be happy" - it was an ad for a Color Run, and I just cropped the runners out of the bottom of the picture, resized it to fit on an 8 1/2 x 11 page and printed it on cardstock.

Here are some photos of how the prints look in the girls rooms. Pardon the horrendous lighting, I took the pics at night and the chandeliers in the girls room aren't exactly the best sources of light for photos!

Notice anything in this one? My assistant Miss E snuggled herself into the bed disguised as a stuffy. And yes, she actually sleeps with all of those "babies" on her bed each night!

I decided to put the Happy quote on Miss A's wall right at the end of her bed so that when she wakes up for her compulsory 12 minutes of stretching each morning, it'll be the first thing she sees! Here's hoping it works!!

Thanks so much for stopping by to check out my dollar store artwork - maybe it'll inspire you to put some fun pictures up in your house!

Happy 2015 Everyone!!

Hello my friends!! I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas holiday with your families! I know I have been enjoying every minute with my family, even when they drive me bananas.

Sorry, don't have a photo credit, it was on facebook :)

As I tuck my littles into bed after watching the ball drop for New Year's Eve in New York (which is 9pm our time), and settle in for a relaxing Homeland marathon binge watching session, I'm reflecting on the amazing year that I've had. Now, not much of that year was chronicled on this blog, but that's something I'm hoping to correct in the future.

Like many of you I am making some resolutions, but hopefully ones that I can keep! Last year our family had one main resolution, and we stuck to it most of the year!! We made a plan for the girls to try new foods, specifically try a little of whatever the hubs and I were having for dinner. For the most part, the girls were brave and tried, and I'm happy to report that our family dinners are much more peaceful and include many more options and even - gasp! vegetables!!

For 2015, our family is going to try another new plan together. Where up until now, this mama packed the lunches, packed the bags, put most things away, made all the plans, picked all the outfits, did the hair and generally organized all our lives. This year, our hope is to instill a sense of pride and responsibility in my girls and get their help to have our home run smoothly.

Here are the littles, after completing one of their Christmas Lego presents!

I found a list of age-appropriate tasks and we are going to put them into place this week, so hopefully we'll have some things under control by the time school starts on the 5th. Wish me luck!!!

I'm hoping to get a few blogs posts put together this week before I go back to work.  I have some organizing projects on the go, another household purge in the works and a couple of recipes to share with you all.  Please check in again soon!

Wishing you and your family a happy new year!

 

Christmas Morning Sanity Saver!

Hello once again my friends!! Can you believe it?? Two posts, two days in a row, and right before Christmas!! It’s a Christmas miracle! Truthfully, I have about ten posts that I could have done this month, but life is crazy, so I’m happy that I managed to get two done!!

One of my biggest pet peeves on Christmas morning…. Scratch that…. One of my biggest pet peeves when I scrapbook/post to Facebook our Christmas morning photos is the big black garbage bag sitting right in the middle of the room, to corral the gift wrap that has been quickly ripped from our Christmas morning presents.

My solution? One of my ugly blue recycling bins and a roll of wrapping paper! Rather than a big old ugly black garbage bag cluttering up my photos, I’ve wrapped a blue recycling bin with my holiday gift wrap, and then, when the girls (and the hubs and I) unwrap all of our treasures, the paper can go straight into the recycling bin! Bonus, the bin being covered in gift wrap makes it pretty. And that makes me happy.

Another few pet peeves? Presents that are impossible to get into, and gifts that need a little something extra.

To keep my sanity (and mild OCD) in check, I found a basket and put some Christmas morning necessities in there!

• Scissors for opening crazy-wrapped gifts
• Pliers to open the toys out of the boxes with the insane amount of zap straps manufacturers use to make sure dolls don’t slouch in their boxes
• My favorite pic-quic screwdriver – you never know what needs to be put together, or to take off battery pack covers
• Batteries for those gifts that require them, but that are not included in the box
• My spare camera battery (because knowing my luck, the Christmas eve photos would drain the battery and I’d be using an Iphone to capture my girls’ joy)
• Scotch tape (in case we accidentally unwrap a gift that we need to re-wrap!!
  

All of these Christmas morning necessities fit nicely into this little white container from the dollar store, and can be tucked away until we need what's inside.

I hope this post has inspired you to help keep your Christmas morning organized! This season is total chaos, so a few bits of calm and preparedness are like gold!

Christmas Eve Gift Box

I know we’re cutting it close to Christmas, only a few days left, but I’m back with a quick post with one of our Christmas traditions.

Ever since I was little, Christmas Eve always meant new pajamas for my sister, brother and I. When my girls came along, I always made sure that we had new jammies all wrapped up and ready to go for Christmas Eve.

This year, I decided to go one better and put together a Christmas Eve box filled with fun things for my girls and their little cousins to do after Christmas Eve mass. 

I found a box in the house and wrapped it in Christmas wrapping paper and then got to work filling it up! 

I hit up my new favorite place – the Dollar Spot at Target!! There, I found some adorable little craft fun packs and some new pencils for the girls.

Also into the box went some packets of hot chocolate and a bag of marshmallows (we use marshmallows as a hot chocolate topper and as a bribery tool for good behavior!!),

and a few Christmas mandarin oranges. I'm sure the girls are going to love having an extra present to unwrap at Baba's this Christmas Eve!!

Thanks for stopping by my little corner of the internet today!! Merry Christmas!!

Menu Plan Monday - Sept 8, 2014

Hello all my lovely internet friends! Long time no chat! This has been a crazy year so far, and I have to admit that this little blog definitely fell by the wayside. But, it’s the time of year that I get all excited – I got a new mommy planner (yippee!), a schedule full of activities for the girls, and once the strike is settled, back to school! My older gingerbaby is going into grade three and my little one is going into kindergarten (sniff sniff, not sure I’m ready for that!).

We spent our summer mapping out all of the parks and water parks in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Our goal was a new park each week, sometimes two! We also spent a lot of time at our cabin at Black Mountain Ranch. The girls rode horses all summer long and swam, and played and played and played!

The kids lessons all start this week, so I know that if I don’t menu plan, I’ll be heading straight to the drive thru! We have two nights during the week that we have only an hour between activities, so we are going to try some new make-ahead and freeze recipes and some crock pot cooking too! I’ll be sharing my crock pot recipes along the way. Thanks for stopping by, I hope you all have a fantastic week!

 

Recipe for this cheesy concoction

On the menu this week:

Monday: Chicken strips, fries and salad

Tuesday: Crockpot Kung Pao Chicken and chow mein noodles

Wednesday: Tex Mex Lasagne

Thursday: Beef tacos and cheese quesadillas

Friday: Heading down to the cabin – pasta and hot dogs for dinner!

Saturday: Perogies, steak and corn on the cob

Sunday: Miss A’s request – Chicken wings, french fries and salad

I’ll be linking my menu plan up to OrgJunkie’s Menu Plan Monday – check it out!!