Saturday: Dishpan Hands

I feel like I have done nothing today but dishes. Not true, of course (I also washed the countertop, the microwave -- I don't even want to know what that was -- the sheets, the towels, the kid's hair), but I have done them several times in the course of cleaning up the kitchen/cooking.

The six-year-old and I made carrot cookies today, from the Living on a Dime cookbook formerly known (when I acquired it) as Not Just Beans. We ended up adding another egg to the batter, because it just looked too dry when it was "supposed" to be done, and I knew there was no way it would stick together. The cookies taste OK (kind of like slightly carroty sugar cookies), but they still came out pretty crumbly. I'm not sure if that's in part due to the fact that we thought we had no more baking powder left after the first teaspoon (recipe called for two) and so used the substitution of 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. (Later discovered that we did, indeed, have a new container of baking powder in the cupboard where I told her to look - but it was in a different shaped canister than before. Regardless of the fact that it says "Baking Powder" on it in big letters.)

I also made cornbread to go with the ribs I threw in the crockpot this morning for supper.

Needed to have supper planned, because the day was broken up with dance recital dress rehearsal (and the accompanying doing of the hair, slathering on of makeup so she can be seen from the stage, annual motherly speech about how this is the only time she gets to wear makeup, etc.). Announcement from the backseat of the car: "My favorite part about dance recital and dress rehearsal is being up on stage in front of all those people!"

Also spent part of the day going through the mammoth pile of school papers that have accumulated over the course of the year. I think I have uttered several times recently that next year, we are going to keep up on the sorting and not let it all wait until the end of the year. The parental review of this sorting needs to stay in place, though -- she thinks we should keep way more than I think we should. But, on the other hand, she didn't think we needed to keep her report cards.

February First Goal Post (and Carla's Challenges)

Happy Groundhog's Day! Evidently, Punxsatawney Phil saw his shadow, leading to a prediction of six more weeks of winter. Here in Minnesota, it was so foggy this morning that seeing any shadows was unlikely, and it seems like winter has already ended, we have had so little snow.

The year, however, continues apace, and it's time to look at another month of goal-setting. I'm trying out the challenges from Carla at My 1/2 Dozen Daily this time, and this post is my starting one for that, as well as incorporating my own personal goals for the month.

Carla is running both a Low(No) Spend Challenge and a Declutter Challenge for the month.

While I don't know how Low I'm going to go in the spending this month (there are a couple of purchases I've been putting off), I do have financial goals for the month. (And I think I'm "officially," for me, starting this challenge on Monday, because that works better for me -- and that gives me a couple of days in this week to achieve my unaccomplished January goals :). )

So, here are Carla's rules:

1. Choose a financial goal for the month!

My January goals to finish up:
             1) create a monthly budget

             2) changing direct deposit allocations into checking/savings (need to do because our bank is changing its accounts and we will get hit with fees if we keep our current configuration)

February financial goals:
            1) tally up taxes info (get in order and get totals for charitable contributions, educational expenses, extra income from online surveys, etc.)
            2) set tax appointment
            3) set up automatic deposits into Roth IRA

and, if I get really ambitious in February (although these parts of this year's goals may need to move to March)
            4) reallocate 401K
            5) open a savings account for the kiddo

2. How will you achieve your goal this month?

I have all the records for the tax stuff, but they're all thrown into one big folder and not sorted. I need to sort them logically (and, um, probably start keeping the 2012 ones in better order for next year... ) and just do the calculations. I also keep lists on Remember the Milk, which also helps in the tallies.

I need to complete the monthly budget -- again, I have the information (saved via documenting our spending on Spending Diary, thanks to Sharon at Midlife Mom Musings); I just need to work with it -- in order to figure out the proper allocations for changing our direct deposits. Then, it's just a matter of paperwork and potential phone calls to the bank...oh, joy.

Getting a tax appointment set up is another phone call -- but we're still waiting on a 1099.

Setting up automatic deposits to the Roth IRA is more phone calls/paperwork. Both DH and I are taking less in our dependent care FSA's this year, and there were some slight year-end raises, so I think the small amount of extra money from that can get shifted into IRA funding.

3. How will you allot your spending this month?

I don't know yet, because I haven't done the budget. :)

4. Track your purchases!

This, I already do through Spending Diary, and it is pretty darn helpful.

5. Are there any “exemptions” for the month?

The aforementioned "stuff I've been putting off," which includes a haircut, some stuff for the house that will help in the ongoing organization--file folders, for instance, and possibly some clothes for me, plus a family trip to a children's theater. I would also like to make a couple of book purchases. These are all things that fall under my other goals, for which the broad categories are "Family and Friends" and "Health and Beauty" along with "Crafting/Creativity and Faith/Spirituality." My fourth category is "Finances and Organization" -- and I think Carla has that covered. :)

Now, for Carla's Declutter Challenge:

The "Week One" is a Personal Space Challenge, for which I'm taking on: my bedroom. It will involve a closet purge, and a "top of the dresser"/"stacks on top of the cabinets" purge and organization. Photos forthcoming.

And, my own February goals. (This month's theme goal for me, since it holds Valentine's Day, is "Family and Friends.")

Family and Friends

Parenting

• Work on building N's cooking skills, let her choose recipes
            1) Make at least one batch of cookies and one batch of muffins
• Read-aloud books using lists as suggested in Read-Aloud Handbook, Honey for a Child's Heart, Ambleside Online
            2) Read at least two books from "book lists"
                 - start read-alouds of Laura Ingalls Wilder books?
            3) Reward successful completion of school read-a-thon mid-month. Might let her pick out a new book at a bookstore. (I have a coupon that would make this free.)
• Encourage Bible reading/devotions

             1) Figure out something age-appropriate for Lent, beginning February 22

Family Fun

• Attend children's theater production
• Kid's church choir performance
• Plan family Valentine's Day meal and/or activities
• Plan family Mardi Gras meal and/or activities

Extended Family

• Re-extend dinner invitation to husband's cousin and actually get a date settled on the calendar
• Order Girl Scout cookies 

Friends (and also Extended Family)

• Read Facebook updates at least three times a week; post at least once a week
• Attend at least two women's group/friends events

Personal

• Read through Bible chronologically
         1) Follow reading plan here
• Read at least one book "off the shelves"(a book that I already own and that is on my shelves, thereby accomplishing potential decluttering and achieving a "should do")
       1) I'm thinking The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts
may be a good candidate for this
• Update and improve style
       1) Purge wardrobe; any replacements or updates should follow style guidelines for body type and coloring
       2) Admit that I can probably only squeeze one more application of skin-treatment facial cleanser out of that bottle, if I squeeze really hard and hold my tongue the right way, and actually buy a new one (see "exemptions" to spending challenge above)
      3) Get haircut
      4) I might have to buy socks and underwear.

It's a short month, with a lot of goals -- which is why I'll probably be doubling up some of them to accomplish in a "two-fer."

   

Week in Review: Online Organizing, Kindergarten Open House

I'm doing last week's week in review in the middle of this week in part because, this week, I have managed to acquire a spring cold that is making me not very happy. I was hoping it would get better, but so far, it's just getting worse. Also, I'm not getting much sleep, even though that would probably help with the cold, partly because it's a head cold that's making it difficult to sleep...ah, the irony.

I also haven't been getting much sleep because I finally, finally have managed to (I think almost) complete a project that's been on my "to-do" list for a long time -- organizing lists of all of my online passwords and log-ins so that I can remember all of them and/or know what I've signed up for, as well as unsubscribing to email lists/setting up e-mail filters. My email had been taking me ridiculously long to go through, and I have really needed to get a handle on this for a long time. It seems that, when one plunges into the frugal circles on the web, one ends up signing up for a gigantically huge list of special store programs and such for the deals and coupons. I think this project is mostly complete except for a few straggling issues like the fact that some companies' "switch your email programs" have an up to 10-day delay in making the switch -- which I think is patently ridiculous in this age of instantaenousness. Dear people: I changed my email address (I switched most things to a gmail address with excellent filtering capabilities) because I wanted you to quit sending me all this junk! Stop sending me even more junk the very next day after I changed my email address on your account! It's annoying me and prompting even more unsubscribes.

Of course, I have also discovered that some websites/programs do not have the option to unsubscribe/delete your account -- unless you go through some giant hidden hassle that has so far been impossible for me to find. I'm not impressed with that. Once all the stragglers are taken care of, though, my email should be spring cleaned and a lot easier to deal with on a daily time management basis. (And yes, I have deleted a ton of old emails - at least over 900, possibly up to 1,000. And then, yes, there was one or two that I needed but appear to have deleted. Oh, well, such is life.)

This has literally been days' worth of hours of work, and I think it's one of those things that I need to provide myself with a reward for for having accomplished it. I'm thinking a Hershey's bar with almonds.

In other news from last week, we took the four-year-old to the open house for next year's kindergarteners at what will be her school. She was slightly ill (guess from whom I caught this cold?), and hence cranky and shy when we looked around the classrooms, but the "practice" school bus ride was a hit with her -- and with most of the other kids there, I believe. (There was at least one family there we knew, but their four-year-old was not visible as he was hidden behind his mother's legs. Such are the hazards of future kindergarteners - who also have difficulty seeing out the bus window. :) )

We had a very pleasant family Sunday dinner at a new-to-us restaurant DH wanted to try, and took a late Sunday afternoon sledding trip to the park to get in a last hurrah of the season before the snow began to melt as the temperatures rose this week.

Week in Review: Dentists and the Usual Drill

Last week was dentist week, part 1 for our family -- appointments for me and for the four-year-old. Husband's dentist appointment is coming up in a couple of days. For some reason, I found myself spitting for at least an hour after my appointment ended -- rather curtailed my planned trip to the grocery store after that errand (the howling wind and sub-zero temperatures were not encouraging, either, but I also don't think it's particularly appreciated to be expectorating in the produce aisle). The four-year-old picked out a purple plastic race car as her prize at the pediatric dentist, and spent a lot of time last week constructing ramps for her toy cars and driving them around.

My playtime last week consisted of a game night with women's group friends, playing Apples to Apples, Word on the Street and the card game 99 -- none of which I'd ever played before. It was a fun time, even if I did end up having to play on someone else's honor after I lost too many rounds of 99 -- at least adding up those numbers stretched my brain into some math skills directions after I spend most of my days thinking about words. :)  I made some Buckeye Bars from this Gooseberry Patch recipe as my contribution to the snacks.

Our family watched the Puppy Bowl together this weekend, but not much of the Super Bowl -- we let that be mostly DH's province, while the four-year-old and I (finally) finished up thank-you notes for late Christmas gifts, and got some practice in on doing dishes.

It was actually rather an aquatic weekend for her, as we also did a "what will sink and what will float" experiment at bath time (it's amazing how fast that kid will pick up toys if she's been promised an experiment in the bathtub) and then her Sunday school class made "aquariums" (plastic water bottles full of what I assume is water with blue food coloring in it, with plastic "sea creatures" they picked out to float in it) when they studied the story of Jonah.

We've also continued the ongoing obsession with horses -- this past week, I had to read descriptions of several horse breeds while she worked on putting the stickers on the correctly matching shape in the horse sticker book,  she got for Christmas.

Unintentionally, except for church, we ended up not going out of the house all weekend -- which was probably a mistake, since the weather was in the 20s on Saturday and is supposed to be back to its frigidly cold temperatures this week. Instead, I finally got over the unproductive blahs I seem to have been suffering from all week and got our family paperwork, which I had been "filing" in a plastic accordion file -- a process which was not making stuff any easier to find -- moved into a different filing system. Still need to sort through some things, but now at least things are not all mixed up with each other because it was too hard to file them. Plus, I've been tracking cash spending throughout January, and started a new Quicken file for 2011, moved all of our bank transactions into it, and got everything categorized. (This is supposed to help with a snapshot of the family finances, and could/may eventually lead to a formal budget.)

Organizing, Bit by Bit

As part of the whole "new year, get organized, save money" thing, I've been going through bits of paper with various online accounts and passwords, organizing them in a much more findable manner, unsubscribing to those that are no longer relevant, and taking note of various offers that are still useful.

This is a process I'm doing a bit at a time -- a few per day -- so I'm not sure how long it's going to take overall -- but it's been something on my goals/to-do list for a couple of years now, so it's good that I'm actually getting it accomplished. (I just tacked this year's goals onto my list from last year, since much of it was the same.)

A few things I've discovered this week are:

• A Delta SkyMiles account, which I had assumed was inactive (the last time I flew was in at least 2005, pre-kid) wasn't. Evidently, my points from the transfer of my Northwest miles into Delta miles are still good -- at least until Oct. 31 of this year. It was annoying difficult to find out how much my accumulation was worth in terms of actual flying-type stuff (tickets, etc.), but I'm guessing not much. Still, unless I fly somewhere this year (which, based on the pattern of the past few years, seems unlikely), I do have enough points to redeem for some nice merchandise.

• Evidently, I can get a free set of address labels every six months through my university alumni association. Since we just used a bunch on Christmas cards, I ordered some.
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• And, I have noted that, if I ever get caught up enough on the bit by bit organizing to need new photos (right now, I am so far behind that I just back them up, and rarely order prints for myself), my hooray.com account offers 20 free prints per month.

Check out lots more people's organizing projects at OrgJunkie's 52 Weeks of Organizing!