The Happy Heavy Homemaker

Since this new year has started, I've been on an organizing spree. I've been sprucing up closets, de-cluttering and re-purposing everything I can get my hands on. Almost every room in my house has been subject to change, and it makes me smile to walk into a nicely organized, tidy, room. I feel like the whole house has gotten a face lift!
(Look for a post soon on Penny's new, out of the way, bed, and Miss L's newly organized room.)

While my financial diet is going (pretty) well and the house has never looked better, I feel like I'm working on everything but myself. I'm deliberately ignoring my diet and haven't made it to the gym AT ALL THIS YEAR.
I don't know why I'm sticking my head in the sand about this. Perhaps I'm sick of dieting. Since August of last year, I've only lost 10 pounds. (and if I'm being honest, I've gained back half.)
I'm tired of counting calories, I'm tired of going to the gym and Miss L causing me to leave after only 15 minutes. I make excuses for not going after D gets home, or before he leaves - which is admittedly very early in the morning.
It's like someone has told me I have to lose weight and now it's the only thing I don't want to do. (Like when you're pregnant and suddenly want to eat sushi and drink beer - even if you typically hate those things.)
Stubborn.

I truly do want to lose weight, so maybe it's time for my head to come out of the sand.


I'm looking forward to the glass on the left being empty.

Driving him crazy

If I don't stop making my husband help me with all the little projects I'm working on from Pinterest, he's going to beg me to get a paying job. I'm driving him half insane.
Yesterday, I emailed him tons of times, asking him questions about the wood we have, the saw & if he would teach me to use it, what materials I needed for a current project and my MS Paint, crudely drawn, plans for my idea.  I haven't gotten much farther than a pile of boards with measurements drawn on them, and a husband who wants to pull his hair out from my incessant bugging.

I think all the projects I've been throwing myself into are good for me, though. It may be driving him nuts, but it keeps my mind busy and cuts down on my anxiety. It's keeping me from spending money on things I don't need and my financial diet is going quite well, even though I think our house is looking better than ever. It's amazing how you can move around and re-purpose things for a new look.
It keeps me from eating from boredom and it gives my brain something to actually THINK about instead of going through the motions with mindless dish washing, laundry folding, & chauffeur duty.

Although, come to think of it, he never complains about the new, delicious recipes I crank out from there...

Laundry Room - before/after

We've spent part of the weekend upgrading our laundry room a little bit. We spent about $35 dollars on new shelves and mounting hardware and that's IT!
Before: 

Our pantry, which is in the laundry room. The door you see is a half bath.

junk... cat scratching post, bowls, etc. This is the other side of the bathroom door.

space between the freezer and the garage wall. The door out to the garage is to the left.

Freezer, washer, dryer and random other stuff.

After:

Pantry shelf after. Organized and now hiding the litter box. I made the curtain with fabric I already had so it was free and no-sew! Now, the kitty litter is hidden and out of the way.

front view

New shelves! Lots of room for more food. Why, yes the kids do eat a lot of macaroni.

Space between freezer and garage door.

Space between freezer and garage door, view 2.

D mounted that basket for me for the soap and laundry essentials.

The bucket is for dirty laundry.

clothes pins

I printed the art myself (thank you Pinterest!) and put it in a frame I had stowed away somewhere. I just thought the clothes pins looked cute.

Coping

As you know from this post, I am taking an anxiety medication. Most days, it works just fine and I don't feel the anxiety or the physical symptoms I was having. However, if there is a rumble of thunder, or a chance for severe weather, or - gawd forbid!- a tornado warning; I come completely unglued.
I picked d up early from school yesterday because there was a chance of severe weather at pick up time. Last week, the little boys were an hour late to preschool because it was hailing. (It's hard for me to tell which actions are appropriate and which are fear driven and unreasonable.)
If there is a chance of rain I spend inordinate amounts of time on weather.com watching the weather maps. It's supposed to rain Friday night or Saturday and it's only Wednesday and I'm already nervous about it.
I thought having a storm shelter would help.
I thought being on medication would help.
I've tried deep breathing, rationalizing, being extra prepared, ignoring the situation... and while some of those work better than others, it doesn't feel like enough.


I can't function like this. I don't want to live in fear of the weather. This can't be normal! Spring is coming and spring is full -  full - of thunderstorms.
Moving to a desert is actually starting to sound like a good idea and that certainly can't be a rational solution. Right?
I don't know what to do! I need some kind of coping strategies to keep me functioning on bad weather days instead of quivering like a spineless jelly fish!

Good Week

The weather has sucked this week. It went something like this: rain, rain, rain, rain, hail, rain, rain/wind, snow. However, the sun finally came out, so that's something. And, to be honest, I prefer the snow over the constant gray days and drizzle and hail and thunderstorms. Although, it's not very much snow.
(AT ALL. Barely a dusting.)

I was watching a news story about Alaska and their 18 FEET of snow and oh boy... that would really super suck. 

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Miss L has had no accidents for 5 days! She is officially potty trained and yesterday we even went to a friend's house and Target and all the school drop offs and pick ups and she even fell asleep in the car with no accidents! I can hardly believe it!

It's both weird and awesome to think about never using or buying diapers again, although I still have 3 children in pull ups at night so that's not the greatest, but still. No more diapers!

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Thanks to Aldi's and smart shopping at Target with sales and coupons, I managed to keep our grocery budget UNDER $200 this week! This is huge because I struggle with it a lot.
Also, I managed to not buy anything frivolous this week, even when I went to Target. If you know and love Target like I do, you know that's a big deal.
OK, actually I did buy myself a treat at the dollar spot so I guess that's not a total win but at least it was just a dollar.

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d got his report card and got all 99's and 100's and today is Friday which means I didn't have to make any lunches (he buys school lunch on Fridays) and he has Monday off (MLK Day) so yay!

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I got to spend time with my friend T, and hold her sweet little baby girl. Always a pick me up!

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I caught up on all my episodes of Big Bang Theory, which frankly brightens up just about any day. Seriously, that show? IS AWESOME.

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I won a contest a few weeks ago over at Little Etsy Love, and I got my prize in the mail yesterday. It was good timing because a certain big boy had an accident that meant a lot of clean up for me and I was just about *this close* to snapping from annoyance at a million other little things and the doorbell rang!
I should have taken a picture but the box was FULL of awesome samples from the company Out of the Box. 

There was bath salt, cake balls (OMG YUM!), cookies, homemade soaps (some of my favorite things ever!), soy tarts, yummy smelling candles, handmade cards, some jewelry, including some particularly lovely earrings, and just a whole bunch of cheering stuff! The pictures below don't even begin to show all the awesomeness that was in that box! 

soy tarts

red earrings

handmade soaps! (minus the one that already made it's way into my shower)

Before and After / Organization and Craftiness

I've been in one of those "I need change!" moods lately so I've been working on little things that I can change at the  moment. I cleaned off the tops of our dressers, the nightstands, and my desk, but forgot to take any before pictures. My dresser was the worst! It gets so cluttered with papers that I'm saving for this or that, and toys and clothes, etc. Here's the after:

My room is currently making me smile instead of sigh, and that's definitely nice for a change.

I also organized our linen closet in the master bathroom and one of our 2 tiny hall closets that we use for other linens. The other closet is just games and winter gear and it's pretty tidy. The hall closet was the worst! Before:

After:

Our master bathroom has a linen closet too, and I also keep my sewing stuff in there. It wasn't terrible, but needed a little tidying. I read a tip about putting the sheets together in sets, inside one of the pillowcases from the set. Genius!

before

after

Next, I decided to rearrange a little furniture and recover some pillows. I spent about $9 on fabric and it covered 4 pillows with some left over, so that's less than $2.25 a pillow for a brand new look!
A couple befores of pillows from this and that:

After, in the living room:

close up of the fabric

Speaking of change, we had 3 solid days of being home and we decided to try potty training with Miss L. She's doing great, although we're not totally there yet, and to celebrate I cleaned out her room as well and got rid of the changing pad, and packed up all her cloth diapers and wipes.  Lots more storage room for clothes and toys!
After almost 7 years of having someone in diapers... it's a big change!

On the other hand...

Yesterday was kind of a shitty day. I had plans with a friend I haven't seen in too long, and C woke up with a nasty case of pink eye.

A mess.

So, those plans were canceled and instead I spent the morning in the doctor's office (co-pay) and then at the pharmacy (2 prescriptions). When I came home and started making the kids' lunch, I realized the big chest freezer seemed... warm... which is obviously not good for a freezer.
At dinner C ran into the other room and gave us all a heart attack when he started screaming and ran back in with a HUGE goose egg on his head. We thought he might need to go to the emergency room, but after awhile we convinced ourselves that he's OK.
Shortly after we realized something was also wrong with the refrigerator since the water dispenser was spraying water all over the place. I gave up after that and put the kids to bed early.
I had a cup of hot chocolate and a handful of chocolate chips and talked myself into seeing the silver lining.

We're lucky to have good insurance, a good doctor and the money to afford the prescriptions and generally healthy kids. We got that huge chest freezer (which HAD to be 30 years old!) from D's parents, for free, so while it was a financial blow, it could have been worse. We had the money to buy a new (smaller and more energy efficient) one, which is some kind of miracle so soon after Christmas and several road trips. In fact, the cost of the new freezer was almost exactly the same amount of money we received for Christmas.
Even better, the store had it in stock and we were able to get it immediately, and because we were home and noticed it in time we didn't lose ANY food in the freezer. I'm thanking my lucky stars it didn't happen just a few days sooner, when we were out of town and would have lost everything. This morning, D was able to fix the fridge and I had a moment of inspiration and took the old metal baskets out of the dead freezer and used them for storage!

this bathroom has NO storage whatsoever so this seems like a good use of the baskets

I put the dead freezer on a "curb alert" on craigslist and it was gone before lunch.

In the end, it didn't turn out so bad after all.

so not doing that end of year thing this year

I haven't posted in 2 weeks and I can hardly believe it. Yikes! Between traveling and Christmas and New Year's, it's been insane around here. I just cleared up my google reader and yikes. Sorry if I didn't comment on your blog posts, I did skim/read most of them but there were just SO MANY.

I'm not going to do that end of year thing this year. I just don't have it in me. In short: about as happy, and slightly thinner and possibly, very marginally richer. (as in, we make a small amount more money, but our expenses seem to raise as well, so it's basically a wash I think?)

It's depressing to think about going back and looking up last year's resolutions, because I know for a fact that I'm not at my goal weight although I did lose 10 pounds this year. (although I haven't weighed in since right after Thanksgiving...)
I know D & I haven't worked out any church issues and I can't even remember what my other resolutions were.
This year I'm still planning on losing weight. We're going to the beach in June (I think) and I'd like to have lost at least 20 lbs by then.
My main goal is to ONLY buy things that are absolutely necessary. We're saving up for a new car and a trip to Disney in 2013, so that's my biggest goal.

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Our trip to the inlaws was actually pretty good this year. There was some ridiculous family drama but it wasn't centered around me, so that's always a plus. There were a few comments that got under my skin, and the food was as bad as it always is when we're there, but mostly things went as well as they can go!
Best of all, I got to see my sister, my 3 beautiful nieces, and my pregnant sister in law and next time I see her my nephew will be here! Squee!!!
The drive was as long as always, but we did it, it's over and we don't have to do it again until after next Christmas.