Back to School

Back to School is coming! Time for backpacks, lunchboxes, routines, and getting those kids up early and ready for the school day!

Over the last few years I have worked hard to make the mornings as easy as possible for myself and the kids. Here are some great tips I have picked up along the way:

1. Prepare the night before (or week before):

- My kids have this in their closets:

Every Sunday, they pick out clothes for each day of the week (Mon-Fri). This makes getting dressed on school mornings so much easier.

- All my kids shoes are downstairs in a basket by the front door/stairs. Easy access right before we walk out the door.

- We have a small shelf with hooks right next to our door that leads to the garage. Backpacks are hung here everyday after they return home from school. 

- Lunches are prepared the night before for easy grab out the fridge in the mornings.

- I bought several individually wrapped snacks and put them in a gallon bucket we recycled from the farmers market. Currently, the bucket holds granola bars, cheese/pb crackers, cheese and pretzels, and mini ritz cheese crackers. I keep this hidden on a high shelf in the cabinet so the snacks don't get eaten any other time. Pull it out on school mornings and the kids grab one for their backpack before we leave the house.

2. I wake the kids an hour before we need to leave for school. This might seem like an excessive amount of time. Hey they could get more sleep right?! But I have found that this gives us plenty of "margin" and we don't to have to rush rush rush!

3. Bedtimes are set early so that they get at minimum 10 hours of sleep on school nights. So if we need to be up by 6am, the oldest (age 9) is in bed by 8pm. 

4. TV stays OFF until everyone is completely ready for school. ONLY then if we have extra time, can they turn on the TV for cartoons or something. NO electronics until you are ready to walk out the door for school (for my son who has a DS).

5. Keep breakfast simple. We do frozen waffles or french toast sticks, cereal, biscuits (premade the night before), and boiled eggs. We always have fruit - bananas, apples, etc. We save big breakfasts like homemade pancakes, eggs, bacon, etc. for the weekends.

6. The kids have a checklist (pictures) of their morning to do's posted on the wall in their rooms. This is a good reminder of what needs to happen every morning. It goes like this:

Good Morning!

Potty

Clothes

Brush Hair

Brush Teeth

Breakfast

Backpack

Bonus!! EXTRA TIPS FOR THE AFTERNOONS:

1. After returning from school, backpacks are hung up immediately. Mom looks through for any important papers.

2. Kids have snack. But NO electronics.

3. Homework is started at table in kitchen.

4. Chores are done following homework. All chores take only 5-10 minutes to complete.

5. Then kids have FREE time to play until dinnertime.

6. My kids work better with a good routine. So during schooltime, we go to bed at the same time each night, get up at the same time each morning, follow the same morning routine (see checklist above) each day, and the same afternoon routine (hang backpacks up, snack, homework, chore, play, dinner, bath, play/family time, and bedtime).

Keeping Your Diet Simple

I am a minimalist at heart and that touches every part of my life. Recently, I have been looking at my foods, my meals, and my groceries in a different light and trying to determine how to make this whole area more simple than it has ever been.

I have put in place several ideas to make foods more simple:
1. Meal planning
2. Eating more whole foods
3. Only cooking recipes with few ingredients
4. Shopping from a specific list (broken down by my specific grocery aisles!)

Other ideas I have tried:
1. Diets such as Whole30, Beachbody, Paleo, NSNG, etc.
2. Eliminating processed foods
3. Eliminating dairy

We all want to eat healthy, easy, fast, and probably cheap. The problem with this is the easy, fast, cheap foods are not always healthy. And the healthy foods are not usually easy or fast or cheap.

Finally, I have stumbled upon an idea that I feel may work for me. It is disguised as "meal prepping" but I think it is easier than that and "more". I tried it for the first time this week and it was amazing! It provided the following benefits for me:

a) I always ate healthy for breakfasts and lunches (these are the meals I used this idea for)
b) once "prepped", the meals were quickly ready to eat
c) I always felt prepared this week when thinking of what I would eat!

Minimalist Diet

Meal prep on Sunday or Monday for the whole week.
I meal prepped Breakfast and Lunch for each day.
Eat the SAME meal for breakfast. And the SAME meal for lunch.
Next week, REPEAT.

So what did I eat for breakfast this week? What did I eat for lunch? Was I completely bored?

My breakfast was 2 hardboiled eggs (prepped a dozen), nuts (raw cashews, almonds, or pistachios) - 2 handfuls, and a side of fruit (watermelon, berries, or apple).

My lunch was shredded chicken (3/4 cup), salad greens, raw spinach leaves, chopped tomato, sliced cucumber, blueberries, and Green Goddess dressing. The chicken was shredded from a precooked rotisserie chicken from the grocer (so easy and affordable!) and provided 5 servings - plenty for all lunches. The salad was prepped in individual containers. Dressing added during actual consumption. I love Tessemae dressings. No sugar and made out of whole ingredients.

Soooo...was I bored? NOPE. In fact, I felt less stress and happy knowing my meals were ready to go whenever I got hungry and there was no worry over what to eat and how long it would take to prepare it.

Another benefit was the portability of the lunches! One day the kids and I had lunch at the pool and I just grabbed my salad and poured dressing into a small TBS container and DONE. Took a fork and my water bottle and ate my salad poolside. It was great!

I will be continuing this minimalist diet, varying the meals for different weeks, but always prepping the same 5 breakfasts and the same 5 lunches during a week. Healthy eating has never been so simple!

Minimalist Birthday

My kids' birthdays are very close together so every year we do a joint party. This year, they are 7 & 9 years old. And NO, they don't want separate parties yet. Can you believe that?!

I have been working to minimize every area of my life. So to that end, I go in search of the Minimalist Birthday Party. This year's party was so super easy! Although it was Not inexpensive. Sometimes you have to choose your minimalism.

My kids LOVE having their party at some indoor play place and they had been begging to go to an indoor trampoline park. Considering their birthdays are in July, the 2nd hottest month in the South (the 1st goes to August here), and the weather is either boiling hot outside or thunderstorming, we ALWAYS have an indoor party.

So for venue, it would either be our house OR a play place type party. Yes, our house would be inexpensive. However, it would add stress to my life by inducing a mad house cleaning BEFORE and AFTER the party. I would also have to act as HOST. Which means less time watching my kids have a great time at their birthday party. So for us, it's a no-brainer. We will foot the bill for a play place type party.

Let me highlight the advantages of having a kids birthday party at a play place setting. Our experiences doing this type of party have always been great. But this particular place and year were more awesome than any other year/party before. Here's my number 1 reason why: THE PARTY HOST. Provided by the play place, we had our own "party host" who took care of basically everything! She took care of the table, the food for the kids, and she even had candles (I forgot them!) for the birthday cake.

So what did they provide vs. what did I bring? I brought: 1) the birthday cake 2) treat bags 3) my kids. They provided: 1) decorated table with balloons & birthday sign 2) cute paper plates, napkins, and cutlery 3) pizza + drinks for kids 4) candles for the cake  5) cake knife 6) the FUN! - trampoline park 7) MORE fun - arcade cards for each kid 8) birthday gifts for my kids - a free mechanical BULL ride (LOL) + a gift certificate for a free jumping next time  9) clean up (YES!)

The kids had a BLAST! And there was plenty of play time with friends! We barely got them to sit down long enough to eat pizza and cake. My son deemed it the "best birthday party yet"!

While what I provided already seemed very minimal and easy. It was even easier than that! The cake was homemade by my RIGHT NEXT DOOR neighbor! She made the cake and I walked 25 feet to her house and picked it up. As for treat bags, I hate giving kids a bag of small toys and trinkets only to get played with once and then become junk in someone's house. So this year, I gave a small (think snack size) bag of candy for the ride home. The birthday cake was rainbow and sunshine. So I did a "taste the rainbow" treat bag - Rolos for pot of gold, skittles separated to show rainbow colors, and mini marshmallows. So EASY and the kids loved them! (Even the parents did - I had a parent take a picture for Instagram!) Best thing was the parents had no junk to throw out later as these were long gone before they even made it home!

NOTE on minimalist gifts: While I would love to have more experiences for my kids than Stuff, they did still receive toys. This year, however, I noticed that more people gave them gift cards so they could choose their own toys. This is definitely a step in the right direction. At least they can have the experience of budgeting their birthday money to pick out a toy they will love and enjoy for a long time to come!

Are you Surviving or Living?

I have spent the last 2 days at home with my 8 year old son who was sick. While he lounged on the couch and I gave him medicine or made him something to eat occasionally, I cleaned and scrubbed the house, did laundry, and basically caught up on household chores. We survived. 

Are you just surviving daily life? Are you thinking each day "Man, I can't wait until this day is over!" or "Is it 5 o'clock yet?" Do you wake up each morning dreading the day ahead, already overwhelmed by your long to-do list and never ending emails? Are you "living for the weekend"?

Certainly, we all have our seasons of survival. I have had mine. I will never forget my youngest spending 2 months in the NICU after her early birth and having a 2 year old at home that needed me too. We survived. Even before that, I had seasons of survival. I survived while grieving the loss of my mother from cancer. I survived while spending an exhausting amount of hours working toward completing a Master's thesis. Yes, there will most assuredly be seasons of survival in all of our lives.

But seasons come to an end. They fade into the next season. Sometimes it takes weeks, months, even years. Then one day you look up, and life is a little easier. You can smile again. You begin to plan for things again. Look forward to things again. 

For some, however, they are in a constant state of survival. Getting up every morning in dread, rushing off to work, working all day, coming home, eating dinner, collapsing on the couch to watch Netflix  and going to bed - only to get up the next day and do it all over again. Maybe on the weekend, they get a reprieve and are able to relax, breathe, live a little. Maybe even then, they just sleep, eat, repeat. When did life become a series of days, weeks, months, or years of just surviving?

I look around and I notice those that are just surviving, and I notice those that are living. Those that are living may have similar daily struggles as those that are surviving but they make time for parts of life that often get pushed to the "back burner". Health, self-care, family time, reading, learning, nature, spirituality, community. Just to name a few. People that are living life make time to smile, laugh, relax, and do something fun. 

People who are surviving life will say "there's not enough time. I'm too tired to do..." There IS time. We all have the same amount. You get to decide what is a priority for you. You always have a choice. Put down the remote. Turn off the Netflix. Decide. Right now. What is important to you? What would "living" look like for you? And then GO AFTER IT.

Even if it's just for 10 minutes a day. Do it anyway. 10 minutes of self-care is better than 0 minutes. 10 minutes of taking a walk outdoors is better than never spending time in nature. 10 minutes of playing with your kids is better than just kissing them goodnight. 

You will never regret "living" life when you come to the end of yours. The opposite of life is not death. The opposite of life is "surviving". Stop surviving. Start living your life. You deserve it.