The Ties That Bind Us...

If you've never asked any of your relatives about family history before, now is the time to do it. Seriously. Put down whatever you are doing and go ask questions.

You'll never know unless you ask.

I've discovered awesome stuff about Bimmer Man's relatives - his grandfather used to deliver groceries to Al Capone's mom in Chicago. His grandfather also did mapping in northern Africa during WWII (where he threw a gun out of a train window because he wasn't supposed to have it). These things I never would have known had I not asked.

I have interesting family stories too (my niece worked in an ER in Botswana, my dad worked on a Gemini series rocket ship). It's strange the things you learn about your family members but it's also so interesting to know and to be able to tell your children - not everything has to be about what people do for a job. There are recipes to be passed down (as in Minnesota sloppy joes that only mothers seem to know...), family secrets that you don't want anyone to know, and weird facts that you know other people would find interesting.

Family history is so important to know. It's important to know your heritage and to whom you are connected. I feel it makes you more connected to the Earth and to your family. It also makes you realize that there are millions of people here on Earth before us, it doesn't stop spinning just because one person died. The sun will come up tomorrow, with or without you and the only things that are left of each us are memories that people have. A bit morbid to think about, right? 

What I love about family history is also finding something that a family member created or made. I've known for awhile that a great-aunt was a children's book author but I hadn't really done much about it - I wanted to buy her books but I've never really had a good reason to, I guess. I mean, before having a child the book would have just sat in the bookcase, unread and unloved. Now, The Monkey gets to read a piece of her family history. 

I think it's pretty awesome, so I just had to share!

Toddler Activity: Grocery Shopping List

I'm an advocate of making my child work and learn how to do things herself, which has its strong points, frustrating points, but also, she makes me incredibly proud that she knows where apples are at the Co-op and surprisingly she can find the milk and snack aisle with no problem. And she's only two and a half. Holy buckets.

But let me share how she knows these things and how I taught her. 

I made her a super simple book ring full of food pictures. I found all clip art - we have the super basic Microsoft Word, not even the full version so I'm sure if you have the full (i.e. PAID) version of Word you'll probably find better photos than what I found. 

I laminated all the photos and trimmed the plastic down.

Simple tip - I made sure to find actual photos of the food instead of cartoon photos of food. I think it's really important that kids can identify food because if they know what it is and can pick it out at the grocery they are more likely to WANT to help you in the kitchen and to WANT to eat food.

Then I punched holes in the top left corner (you can do the right or make it more book-ish and do two rings on the left sides if you want, I just needed it easy for the Monkey).

I put all the food into categories - fruit, vegetables, dairy, meat, bread. Then I put them onto the ring in the order they are at the Co-op - which is the same as listed in the previous sentence.

And voila! Now you can hand your child the "grocery list" and have them find the different foods you need and either hand them to you to put in the cart or have them put the food into the cart/basket/whatever.

The Co-op has child-size carts so I walk around with our "list" and point out the photo of the food we need, The Monkey picks out the food and then puts it into her cart. Dairy and eggs are still a little bit dicey at times and make me a little nervous but so far the Co-op staff have been fantastic at going along with The Monkey doing the grocery shopping. She even unloads the cart and puts it all onto the conveyor belt. I don't do anything but pay for it. I need to put her to work more often. Ha!

Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday

Super Easy Cashew Butter

 Seriously, so easy! 

I've been eyeing the shelf of nut butters at the co-op lately but I can't seem to swallow the $8+ per container cost. I just cringe a little when I've seen so many pins on Pinterest for homemade nut butters. I decided to give it a go and see what would happen.

I LOVE cashews. They taste amazing and some people even say that cashews have a fantastic mood lifting ability (and watching a toddler all day, I will take whatever I can get to lift my mood!). 

The ingredients. Cashews and grapeseed oil.

Easy Homemade Cashew Butter

 2 cups cashews

1-2 tbsp Grapeseed oil

Process cashews in food processor or blender until finely chopped, add in oil 1/4 - 1/2 tbsp 

at a time, continue processing or blending until as smooth as you want it. 

Notes: 

I only used 1 1/4 tbsp of oil. 

If using ROASTED cashews you probably won't need oil.

You may sub the Grapeseed oil with olive oil, sunflower oil, or any other mild flavor oil.

Weekly Instagram Recap

How was this past week? Great!

I made fried green tomatoes. Delicious. You need to sweat the tomatoes first so they're not mushy (sprinkle with salt & sugar 15 minutes before you start breading!). The bad part of this week is that I didn't end up with a bumper crop of tomatoes like I had hoped back in May. I had 3 tomatoes for frying, 9 for roasting, and only 4 for chopping and freezing. There's still a few green tomatoes left. We'll see what happens.

Ahhh... I love when utilities get turned off. I was great at homesteading it for 8 hours though. 

Started a new granny square afghan. Oy, it's going to take me forever. 

Want to follow me on Instagram?

http://instagram.com/pattymctatty

New Recycling System

I cleared as much crap from the hooks by the side door as possible.

You might be thinking.... WHAT THE HELL IS THAT TENNIS RACKET THINGY????

That, my friends, is a bug zapper. I actually zapped myself with it once. It's a little, well, shocking... 

In any case, the last two paper bags were used last week, so we're just down to the new re-usable recycling bags. They can be rinsed out (which is fantastic because I'm not great at remembering to rinse beer cans).

I've got the recycling bags, the organic waste bin, the actual garbage bin, the cart, and finally, Rusty's water dish. I just swap the towel out. He drools too much for me to just put the dish on the floor.

So far the bags are working out really well. I've been able to bring my re-usable bags to all the stores with me and not have to worry about asking for paper bags for recycling. They're pretty square so they fit the small boxes from Amazon really well (beer can boxes too!), along with all my other recycling. It's been pretty easy so far, I just hope these stick!

Organizational "Stuff" - Do I Keep it or Toss it?

Since I've de-cluttered a few things I've cleared out storage bins. Now that there's no stuff to go inside them, I have to decide what to do with them.

I don't think I want to keep them but my thought process keeps going back to "I might use these!" I might buy more stuff to fill them! No, that's not what I want to do at all.

I've got 4 smallish bins right now that I don't know what to do with - I need large bins to organize The Monkey's clothes that she no longer fits in (I'm saving those for when we have our next child, and once we find out if it's a boy/girl, then I'll get rid of them or save them. Also, NO, I'M NOT PREGNANT, so don't think anything into this!!). However, I don't really want to buy new bins so I'm trying to get myself motivated to de-clutter the storage room in our basement so I can re-use the larger bins from that room.

And then I also have two CD storage boxes - I don't use CDs anymore thanks to modern technology and iTunes and Amazon so I don't know what to do with those. I think those will go into the next donate box for next week or the week after.

But I guess I can always post things on Craigslist and Freecycle - my only problem is that once I decide I want something gone, I want it gone that moment and I don't want to wait for someone to come and pick it up. When I'm motivated, I'm motivated and when I'm lazy, well, I'm lazy.

Same with the magnet spice tins on our fridge - if I use those as magnets for keeping stuff on the fridge, when it's used then everything under it falls to the floor. Irritating, annoying, blerg. So once I've used up the spices in those, I think I'm going to wash them out and give them to Bimmer Man to store small items in the garage. He can put them on his tool box or wherever to keep little things so they don't get lost.

De-cluttering can be more of a chore and a burden than a fun thing to do, however, once it's done and items are gone it's a fantastic feeling of relief. Or maybe a release? Not sure yet, but I do know that sometimes I need to sing "Let it go!" from Frozen to be able to just say to myself "THINGS AND STUFF DON'T MATTER."

BUT WHAT IF THE APOCALYPSE COMES??? WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT MY STUFF??? Meh, I'll probably wish I had stockpiled guns and ammo instead of craft supplies anyway, right?

I guess I don't need my organizing bins for organizing my stuff after all.

I'll put them all into my donate box.

September Garden Update

 My goodness, my garden is STILL blooming. 

I'm totally shocked to see 3 more roses in bloom, plus my Clematis bloomed for the first time in 3 years. My good friend was telling me this morning that there's a little saying about Clematis - you plant, you wait, it blooms or something like that. And goodness, did I wait for that Clematis. It's the pretty star shaped purple bloom. 

Above: Rose

Above: Clematis

Above: Yarrow

This year my yarrow grew so tall that it basically flopped over and covered two hostas. I cut it back once it seemed to be done blooming (I don't actually know if you're supposed to do that or not...) and suddenly it was bushy and growing again. One stalk is flowering again. The dragonflies seem to love it. I've got two bushes of it and I have to google yarrow to see if I can split it. I'd like to put this down on our little strip of boulevard.

Above: Sedum

I've only planted this in the backyard where The Monster has peed on it and killed it. I decided to try it out in the front and it's doing fantastic!

Above: Cosmos

Cosmos grow like crazy in our front yard. They're annuals so I plant them every year. All I do is open 2 - 3 seed packs and toss the seeds out into the garden bed. They come in fun colors too, but I prefer the pink!

De-Cluttering The Linen Closet

I have this dream that I buy a serger and I will magically have 2 extra hours every day to serge cleaning cloths, napkins, hem old jeans, and somehow, obtain the know-how to do those things by reverse osmosis. If I could just put my phone to my forehead and BAM! Knowledge and time! I would be in Heaven.

But no. That's life. 

I pulled two sets of sheets from the linen closet - one was a jersey cotton, the other a flannel. I cut up the flat sheets to make cleaning cloths (I was trying to channel my mother while doing this, I remember her slicing up towels for dusting cloths when I was little). I got 16 cloths from each flat sheet, since I don't have a serger for sides, I don't want them to fray but they don't need to be hemmed, so I'm going to use a few different stitches on a few cloths to see what works best - I'm just going to run a line of stitches around the outside and trim the excess fabric and the frays. I'm not a particularly great seamstress, however, I can sew in a straight line and I make pretty nice curves when I set my mind to it.

There are still a few sheet sets in my linen area of the closet upstairs. What we really need is just 2-3 sets of sheets - one flannel for the winter, one regular cotton for the summer and an extra set of cotton sheets for when I'm washing the dirty sheets.

I don't care if we have a dust ruffle so that went out into the donate box (it only picks up dog fur anyway). I only need one shower curtain so the dark, heavy blue one went into the donate box (it's not the right fabric for cleaning cloths so I don't want to attempt to cut that up). I'm currently sorting through our mismatched pillow cases and since we use a ton of pillows I can't really get rid of those right now. I will at some point organize them and determine which ones will be used and which ones are the favorites and get to stay. Small steps, people, small steps.

My quest continues on even as more stuff is accumulating on our property.

Bimmer Man's race shop's lease has ended so we have a TON of racing stuff, car parts, engines, you name it and we have it in our basement, garage, driveway, parked in the street, etc... That stuff will need to be sorted, fixed, put away and/or sold or stored somewhere else (I don't know which yet).

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Up this week:

• Swap toys (put away the potato heads, music instruments, string toys, dolls, stacking boxes)
• Trip to Goodwill
• Possible sell items on Facebook groups for online garage sales (but do I want the hassle???)
• Get all dirty laundry cleaned so I can vacuum laundry room
• Rake up grass in boulevard and go to Sunnyside Gardens for bulbs/sale perennials

So Long Irritating Rugs...

I love my bathroom rugs. They are approximately 2ft x 3ft, are more than an inch thick and ridiculously soft.

And I'm getting rid of them today.

Why?

BECAUSE I HATE WASHING THEM.

From reading lots of "simple living" blogs, and minimalist blogs, and the book "Clutterfree With Kids," I've come to the conclusion that I just need to rid myself of the things that irritate me in my house. I hate cleaning. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that before. No? Yes, I'm sure that I have.

I tossed the dirty, disgusting dog bone rug that I hated vacuuming a few weeks ago. I've never been happier just to run the Dyson around the perimeter of the kitchen and then use the Bona mop with water/vinegar/essential oils. Now it takes me much less time to clean the kitchen.

I keep reading over and over again: less stuff = less stress

I'm thinking that I really like that idea. A lot.

And those damn bathroom rugs. I just can't sacrifice my sanity anymore for the luxury of my feet. I'm done. I bought a super small, more towel-like rug for the first floor bathroom which means that I can toss it into the washer with a load of towels instead of saving up rugs to do at once and shake my fist at the washing machine every.single.time I wash rugs. I'm done with one less stress and irritation.

I know that I bought something new, but I'm donating 3 rugs in place of one. I think it evens itself out. And why on earth did I have 3 rugs? Blerg. Consumerism, right? You see something that you think you have to have and buy it only to realize that it really just sucks the fun out of you.

So now as I wait listening closely for those damn rugs to unbalance the washer, I'm getting more and more excited to toss those rugs into my donate box.

My road to a de-cluttered house is turning into more fun by the week as I shed items that bring me more stress than I thought.

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Do you need a de-cluttering challenge today? If so, do you have an item that causes you stress and irritation when you clean it or take care of it? How does it make your life better? In what ways do you justify to keep it? What would happen if you didn't have it? Could you live without it? Is there something else that you have that does the job better?

Are you going to sell it or donate it?

Feel free to comment with your "irritating item" and what you decided to do with it...