These are not an original design. ;) I have been going through my craft room, purging, and trying to use up half my stuff by the end of next summer. In the process I came across this old kit from Stampin' Up!. I thought it'd make a cute and easy little gifty for my three kids' teachers.
I pretty much did it just like the picture on the kit. The pic had only candy corn. I added in other coordinating candy...because we must have chocolate. Also, I swapped out the Bermuda Bay color for the Island Indigo because that's what I had. The sample pic had a stamp that said 'num num' which isn't the same as this one. But I had this one. ;) I actually used a marker to isolate the 'num num' from an entire phrase. It worked.
There were 8 in the set, but I only made three. That means next year I still have 5 for whoever I want to make them for.
And that is how you make cute treat bags in about 15 minutes.
The end of this week was starting to get easier. I went through the timeline on the Whole 30 website and my pants got tighter for a few days. I'm slimming back down and getting more energy. I have definitely noticed a clarity in thinking and loss of brain fog. Another interesting note, 2 of my kids got sick at the beginning of this week but not me. Normally I get it pretty fast because I take care of them. This time, I had one day of slightly less energy and that was it!
So here's what I ate:
October 7:
turkey in lettuce wraps with paleo mayo
cranberry macadamia balls
apple slices
2 egg muffins
paleo fish tacos in LA (plus chips and salsa ;() We were at a filming and had to eat out. I was pleasantly surprised that the Mexican place we stopped at offered lettuce cups for tacos.
coffee black
October 8:
cranberry macadamia balls
almonds
veggie sticks
egg muffins
pumpkin spice latte :( - bad me
October 9:
bacon
grapes
banana
ham
cauliflower crust pizza (great except for cheese :()
nachos - bad me again
October 10:
coffee with cream
seaweed snacks
leftover cauliflower pizza
cranberry macadamia balls
smoothie (peach, banana, spinach, OJ)
almonds
Chick Fil A grilled nuggets
October 11:
black coffee
chipotle salad - I think it made me sick and I didn't eat much else the rest of the day or next day
egg muffins
apple
October 12:
almonds
banana
turkeytaco salad w/o chips
grapes
October 13:
coffee w/cream
beef and potato casserole
smoothie (spinach, banana, strawberry, peach, OJ)
sausage
green tea
October 14:
coffee w/cream
a cherry muffin (I so should not have done that) That's one of those things I just ate because it was there, I didn't even really care about it.
almonds
lettuce wrap w/ham, mayo & spicy brown mustard
decaf plain iced tea
smoothie (banana, spinach, pear, OJ)
veggies (cauliflower, beets, broccoli, cucumbers)
roasted chicken
And that concludes another week. Not a perfect week, but pretty good. I'm definitely seeing the sugar addiction break, and still feeling awed that cheese is a bigger problem for me than chocolate.
My 1st grader's teacher's birthday is today and she's my favorite teacher ;) She decorated her room with owls this year. Really cute owls with purple and teal and pink and white and grey. I noticed a few things (ok, more than a few) while out and about in stores, but I restrained myself and picked up this a cute mug and stamp on the cheap!
I made this quick tag to put on a bag we already have. Score 1 for a time saver.
Pretty much everything that makes up this tag was scrap. The Birthday Wishes is a branding strip from some paper by Glitz. The rest is scrap that I cut or punched. The colored rhinestones I got on clearance somewhere (probably JoAnn) a while ago.
This is the mug I got at Marshall's for $2.99 and the stamp was half off at Hobby Lobby!
As the past decade has gone by, I find myself more and more wanting to live a simpler life. I find myself less and less trustful of what big companies and government provide. Changes in thinking have me slowly doing more of my own food growing, buying at farmer's markets, planning for taking care of myself, not counting on the government to do it, etc...
This is not my yard. I found this picture online and used it for a vision board and thought I'd share. I think it's beautiful.
Along the way I've become a bit of an urban homesteader. I live in a fairly big city in southern California. While I've recently begun to dream of moving to some place with seasons and more space around me, I know I'm stuck here for at least 3 more years. I might address this in more detail another time, but this post is about what urban homesteading looks like at my place.
Just so you know, homesteading, urban or otherwise, does not have to reflect one hard and fast look. It can be many levels and take on many different looks. I started with a small garden plot, that is now double what it used to be. I'm in the middle of a two year plan to put a mini fruit orchard in my side yard. I can't have chickens in my area but I hope to (some day when we move). ;)
I also do more cooking from scratch. I make more chicken stock, can items, freeze things, etc....And I've found that the things I started canning and freezing and such, are really not as time consuming as I thought they'd be. Cooking and freezing dried beans instead of buying canned is way cheaper, way healthier, and pretty much all inactive time. Sometimes, in the midst of food preservation, I can't believe I thought I didn't have time for these things before.
Ok - again, not my picture. But beautiful!
So how do I "homestead" with a regular city tract home lot? Let's start by listing what I have to contend with:
-small lot- slightly less than 1/5 of an acre. It's around 7,800 square feet if I remember correctly. The house takes up quite a bit of that.
-City codes do not allow chickens on my lot size, or anything other than regular pets like dogs, cats, fish, etc...
So if I don't have room and can't have animals, what do I do?
- Last winter I started a mini fruit orchard using bare root trees. They're not producing for a another 2 years because they're bare root, but that allowed me to put in 5 trees in one month. That was nice on the pocket book. If you're not familiar with mini fruit orchards, I highly encourage you to go to YouTube and watch Dave Wilson Nursery videos. He has a whole series on high density fruit tree planting that will rock everything you think you know about having fruit trees. In the back I planted a peach tree several years ago that I espalier along the back wall to save space.
peach tree
- I also have a garden in the back. I takes up a strip along one side of our patio so there is still room for the kids to play in the grass, swing set, etc...
I know it's ugly right now, but it's still in the late summer die off phase. I'll hopefully get cool enough weather to plant fall stuff soon.
-Besides gardening and growing fruit, I do a lot more 'from scratch' cooking. I like knowing that when I cook and freeze beans, it's just the beans. There's no salt unless I add it, and even then it's good quality salt in the amount I want. There's no BPA from the can or plastic; there are no chemicals that aren't required by the government to be on the label. You get where I'm going? I know exactly what's in it, and that's just hard to know anymore when you buy stuff at the store. The labels are full of stuff that isn't food and not everything is required to be on the label.
I do the same with chicken stock as much as possible. After roasting a chicken, a carcass simmering away for a while with fresh herbs from the garden makes great chicken stock that I can trust. Saved money too.
-I bake a lot of bread, but not all of it. Someday I will. ;) I don't bake the regular wheat sandwich slices very often, but I frequently bake rolls, biscuits, and other loaves like dill bread and french bread. Again, have you looked at the ingredients for bread in the store? Bread shouldn't have an ingredient list more than about 5 items long.
-I make a lot of cleaners, but who doesn't these days. I still buy bleach and laundry soap, and furniture polish. Does anyone have a dusting spray recipe that's good? I haven't liked any of the ones I've tried but I don't want to keep using Pledge. :0 I do make my own rinse aid, fabric softener, room spray, and all purpose spray.
There might be more that I can't think of at the moment, but maybe I'll make a part 2 of the Urban Homesteading blog post. I might go more in depth about the cooking part. We shall see.
Do you homestead? Urban homestead? I'd love to know what 'homesteading' things you do!
So day 1 went pretty well. Not easy, but well. I beat down a craving for a pumpkin spice latte and didn't give in to the smell of the food court at Costco when I went shopping hungry. I didn't intend to go shopping hungry, but my first morning appointment went longer than usual and all my errands after that were displaced, which put me at Costco right at noon. :( But I survived!
Where I fell today was with 1 bite. 1 bite. I made my family steak sandwiches for dinner, thinking I'd just do mine in a lettuce wrap. But that buttery toasted french roll really tempted me. I ended up compromising by eating 1 bite of my son's sandwich on a roll, and then the rest of my meal was in the lettuce wrap like I planned.
I also had an epiphany through a conversation with a friend. I knew ditching the night time eating was something I needed to do, but was worried most about this part. I eat a lot of sweets and carbs at night, and I'm not even hungry. But the craving is sooooo there. My friend was talking about getting herself a cup of green tea and taking care of her body. I thought, I bet I could use that to make a new ritual. So I decided to try having a warm cup of decaf green tea instead of food, replacing instead of eliminating. My thought process here was to make it like a ritual, kind of like morning coffee. I don't really need it to wake up, but the warm mug and strong flavor are a big part of my morning ritual.
-market salad from Chick-Fil-A (brought my own lime dijon dressing and picked out the blue cheese
October 4: - rough day
-forgot breakfast :(
-paleo pistachio bites
-veggie sticks
-nibbles of things I shouldn't have had that probably cumulatively add up to a whole meal- things like nachos, pumpkin corn bread, etc...
-veggie sticks
On October 5:
-homemade paleo pumpkin spice latte
-no nitrate sausage
-1 coffee - I ended up putting cream in the second half
-water
-tostada without the shell and beans (on a date with my hubby)
-paleo pistachio balls
-chili on baked potato
October 6:
-coffee with cream :(
-macadamias
-cherries
-green smoothie with spinach, strawberries, banana, apple, and OJ
-apples and sunbutter
-In and Out cheeseburger with no bun- totally forgot about the cheese issue
-iced decaf herbal tea
-garlic butter chicken
-veggie sticks
Reflections so far:
I've eaten out this week more than I had planned. The hubby and I are taking advantage of a break in a crazy schedule to have a few lunch dates. Despite that, I've stuck pretty well with the Whole 30 when out and about.
My weakness is cheese. If I could have cheese it would be a lot less hard. But I've wanted to have a dairy free month for a while now due to other health things I think might be tied in. I really need to know. I've been back and forth on the coffee creamer. It was my one caveat when I began. I try to do without each morning, and some mornings are fine, others are impossible. :)
Sweets are not as hard as I thought they'd be. That's probably in part because it's not my first Whole 30 and I do try to stay away from sugar so it wasn't as hard this go round as my first Whole 30 was.
I'd be a lot better at ditching bread if I could just have tortillas. I might think about that for after the Whole 30 as a way to have less, but still live in the real world. Tortillas are yummy...salivating too much to remember how I was going to finish that thought.
I only had the green tea one night. It worked well and I will use that strategy again if needed, but I have been pleasantly surprised at how not hard it had been to not eat at night.
Last reflection - I eat more mindlessly than I thought I did. I seem to always be looking for a snack if I'm sitting down. And since there aren't a whole lot of Whole 30 snacks readily available, it catches my attention that I'm looking for a snack and I'm not hungry.
When I started the Whole 30 this month, I decided to take a different approach to snacking. In the past, when trying to eat healthy, I always thought that if I had carrot sticks ready and cucumbers cut, etc...I'd eat those for a snack. I thought I only snacked on bad stuff because it was faster and more available.
The reality is that when I'm hungry I don't want that good stuff. I want something a little heartier. So I decided this time to change my approach. I picked at least one snack that was a little more substantial. I chose to try one of those energy bites/Paleo balls/lots of other names for it snacks. Then I couldn't find one that I really wanted to make that also fit the Whole 30 criteria. No problem, I thought, I'll just make my own recipe. All the recipes really do have a lot in common so I had a good idea of where to start.
I must say, they came out even better than I thought they would. These are sweet but not overpowering, with just an edge of saltiness and touch of crunch to balance the softness. And they taste like fall.
Spiced Paleo Pistachio Bites
1/2C pistachio meats
3/4 C almonds (I've made them with both raw and roasted, both fine)
1 C dates, pitted and rough chopped
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 Tablespoon raw honey
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
Blitz it all together in a food processor until it's all in small bits and starts to clump when pressed together.
Roll into balls about 1" in diameter.
Store in fridge for about a week in an airtight container.
Make 9 bites
My kids are in love with these too. I've made 3 batches over the last 5 days.
So this little baby is turning 7 this December. It's about the status-quo around here for me to just now be scrapping her siblings meeting her for the first time. ;)
This is mostly a combination of Stampin' Up! and My Mind's Eye. The 'Meet' I just hand wrote with my white Signo Gel Pen because I couldn't find what I wanted. The '{' and 'Olivia' were some thicker I got at Tuesday Morning.
I think the Love ticket was part of an artisan kit I got from Stampin' Up! a long time ago. The balloons I'm pretty sure are My Mind's Eye, as is the blue half doily sticker with the Love ticket and the little flower near the title. The vellum half doily is something I punched with my Stampin' Up! triple flower punch.
There are a few enamel dots here and there that I'm pretty sure are also My Mind's Eye. There's a red one on the balloon bouquet a blue one on the vellum doily flower thingy.
I'm really hoping to one day have a dedicated time and day to scrap so I can do more. Sigh.
I would have done more with my Silhouette on this but I can't find the cord to my dead laptop! This is serious business.
What crafty projects are you working on these days?
Ok, so I don't have a homestead. But I aspire to one day so, for now, I'm sorta urban homesteading. ;)
This is not my house, just my dream future.
But homestead goals are just what I want to do at home each month. I don't usually share them, but I thought I would this month. Maybe I'll continue it in the future.
So here goes:
-Have a family over for dinner.
-Work my scheduled hours on curriculum for my TPT store.
-Fit the clothes in my corner. At the beginning of September I put all my small clothes in the corner of my room. I gave myself the ultimatum to fit them or ditch them by the end of October. I really want to keep some of those items! I hurt my hip running in September so I've been doing less exercise. That means I now have to concentrate on food in the mean time. Hence, the Whole 30.
-Get a hair cut
-Catch up (or get close) on my Project Life 2015 (I haven't started yet, but I've taken really good notes.)
-10 scrap pages
-30 deep clean items (I have a whole house list divided into 15-30 min chunks)
-Finish reorganizing my teaching stuff in the garage
-Get a new saute pan
-Place my fall and winter stamping/scrapping order- which means whittling it down.
-Prep Teacher Fairy Thanksgiving notes (more on that later)
-Stay on track with my TPT marketing goals
-Whole 30
-Keep detailed track of all our money. We budget, but I want to start subdividing categories, like how much we spend on shampoo, not just toiletries. That will take a lot of extra time so I'm not sure I'm going to do it.
-Take a day to prep a bunch of blog posts for my Elementary Professor blog. I want to try this idea I had to hopefully help me keep up with my education blog.
-Thrive! My one little word this year. I need to thrive this month by being disciplined about my schedule. It's a busy month.
Let's start with the Whole 30. I mentioned in my last post that I was going Whole 30 this month. I decided the best way to stay on top of it all month would be to streamline breakfast, lunch, and snacks.
So for the next few days my breakfast will be no nitrate breakfast sausage and applesauce. My lunch will be hard boiled eggs with veggies. My snacks will be the spiced pistachio balls I made (recipe to come soon) and apples with sunflower seed butter.
For dinners I'll be altering what I make my family to suit my needs. I plan on reporting on a weekly basis about this instead of daily, so you'll be able to see what I've eaten.
On to the great purge! The mood still strikes me frequently to get rid of stuff. I'm a little embarrassed at the amount of stuff I've gotten rid of, yet still don't feel like there's a visually large difference that before. Mentally I feel it though. Every time I get overwhelmed, I start getting rid of stuff. ;)
I can't find my pictures! I did take them though. Every pile I purged from the end of May through now.
Here's the breakdown:
May: I purged only 29 items, but I'm ok with that. Remember that I said I wasn't going to kill myself over it. It was a busy month.
I got rid of: 4 pajamas, 1 sweater, 3 sweatshirts, 3 blouses, 5 cookbooks, and 13 articles of children's clothing.
June: I was going through the garage in June and got rid of a random array of items.
3 dice
15 random toiletries/food to give away
11 kids clothing items
6 liters of soda
10 Easter decorations
2 packages of zoopal paper plates
4 bubble containers
box of 10 granola bars
5 expired medicines and toiletries (trash)
29 expired food items (trash)
1 microwave steaming basket
7 pairs of mom's socks
1 set of wiki sticks
18 sewing patterns
1 big wheel
foot spa
6 wood stakes
3 boxes
a bunch of plastic broken tubs
39 craft pots
2 Halloween pumpkins
3 vases
1 album (scrapbook)
100 patterned papers
other crafty items I did not count (wood letters, etc...)
3 empty binders and a notebook
15 books
Some of that was donated to thrift stores or food banks, some sold on Etsy, some children's clothes given to friends and some put in a box for a consignment sale.
I didn't count that list, but I'm pretty sure it starts to make up for May. :)
July: I'm really sad I can't find my pic from this one because it was huge! I didn't count. Literally hundred of items. I cleared out my craft room. ;) Lots of fabric, organizers, stamps, inks, pots, ribbons, papers, embellishments, etc...
August:This was a tad bit slower as we were getting ready for a vacation and the new school year.
2 old thermoses
2 more pots (garden)
10 articles of kids clothes
17 articles on mommy clothes
3 article of daddy clothes
2 pots (kitchen)
1 kiddie pool
September:
3 more crafty items
two broken plastic pots
1 basket
5 pieces of daddy clothes
103 pieces of kid clothes and shoes (selling at consignment)
3 broken toys
5 little toys that I snuck into my kids' rooms and took while they were at school. You know the kind, little fast food type toys that clutter spaces but the kids refuse to get rid of. Guess what, they never notice the missing if they don't see you take them. ;)
So October is here and a new list is starting. What are your plans for this month?