WFMW - All Cut Up

This is not rocket science, but it sure is helpful - especially on those days that I don't think about dinner until we are already hungry but there is no meat defrosted yet.

Once a month I buy our chicken (I buy it fresh, not frozen) and when I do I take several of the pieces and cut them up into strips or cubes. I put enough strips or cubes into one bag to feed the family for two nights (leftovers are priceless, no?). I label the bags with helpful information and lay the bags flat in the freezer.

Guess what that makes? Chicken that thaws quickly and is easy and ready to throw into the pan for all sorts of dishes (think chicken fajitas, taco soup, and burittos... I bet you have more creative ideas than my mexican rut affords me).

I also like to do this same but freeze them with marinades in there. Our family favorite is terriaki sauce.

p.s. the scissors are in the picture because i thought it would be easier to cut the chicken with the shears instead of a knife. I was wrong. A knife is so much easier.

WFMW-My Favorite!

I have very few new ideas running through my head about what "works for me" and have fallen off the "Works for Me Wednesday" bandwagon. But today I stopped by the clearinghouse site for all sorts of wonderful ideas. I thought I would share my favorite one I found this week.

Check it out! Anybody who homeschools or whose kids love worksheets will benefit from this.

The Private Kleenex

My bestest friend from college has a brilliant idea for controlling a kids urge to wipe their snot on their sleeve. Whereas I gave up long ago and am pleased (generally speaking) when the snot ends up on their clothes, rather than mine, she has come up with a great idea. Go check out her blog!

WFMW - Schedule THIS.

If you have ever wished (to no avail) that you could create a "way we do things" and a "when we do things" with the kids, this post is aimed at you.

To start with, some minds are made for creating systems and order. For example, they love coming up with spreadsheets that detail out every hour of their day. Other brains were created to maintain an existing system or order. Give them that pre-made spreadsheet and they go to town!

However, Ask a systems-creator to actually maintain their brilliant system and you might find that they are all gusto in the first week, and then quickly peeter out, unable to keep up with the demands of their awesome way of doing something. Furthermore, ask a natural-born "maintainer" to come up with a brilliant system for making the day go (albeit theoretically) smooth like silk and you might find her eyes welling up with tears because the task seems insurmountable. The bottom line here is that most of us stink at order, though we all long for it.

So might I suggest a gentler way to "schedule" your day with your preschool kiddos.

• First, find a fixed point in your day that pretty much happens whether the sky falls or not. How about lunchtime.
• Next, decide on something that you would like to see happen every day, like picking up toys before naptime. If your brain works like mine, it gets all excited and goes crazy at this step, so let yourself dream about the wonderful things you could accomplish with your kids if there was a schedule, but then hold back and PACE YOURSELF!
• Talk about it with your kids. Say, "starting Monday, we are going to..."
• Start super slow. Finish the sentence you started above with, "...spend 5 minutes picking up our toys," even if you know it would really take a solid 15-30 minutes.
• Add chunks of time or tasks as the weeks progress. "Starting on Valentines Day we are going to spend 10 minutes picking up the toys." Then, "Starting in March we are going to keep working until the whole place is clean!"
• Continue to build around that fixed point. "Spring Break is coming, kids" (like your preschoolers have any idea, but you get my drift, right?) "and starting then we are going to do one chore each day before lunchtime."
• Stay positive and fun. Make games out of things as they adjust to the demands of the schedule. If one day is a disaster, focus on what did get done and start fresh tomorrow.

Now, I don't care if your house is clean before naptime or if your kids are doing chores, but can you see how I am building around a fixed point (lunch), and doing things in small increments in order to create a routine? You are not overwhelmed at the task of maintaining something impossible, and the kids are not overwhelmed by a sudden major shift in their day. This is also a great way to establish a bedtime routine, get kids ready in the morning, accomplish homeschooling tasks (I might imagine), establishing a quiet time when naps are no longer part of the day, or...

I have been working off of this principle since January 1, 2008. I started super small, like I described, with just '4 minutes of reading the Bible after lunch.' Now it is early February and the kids and I have sucessfully added the following things to our after-lunch-and-when-mommy-gets-home-from-work routine:

• Recycle the under the sink pile
• Feed the cat
• Pick up the baby toys that the (now napping) baby pulled out that morning
• Do one extra chore, for example laundry (I have to think ahead on that one and write in on my kitchen dry-erase board the night before or during breakfast.)
• Read a couple pages in The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes.
• Practice our weekly verse (supplied for us by our Sunday School class)
• 40 minutes of Bible Quiet time (even the baby participates in this: I place him in his crib with lots of toys, binkis, and his favorite CD...we have been slowly working up to this with him!)
• A quick snack
• And then the big reward: 30 minutes of some beloved show we have TiVoed (one of these days I think I will post something on the virtures of digital video recorders).

The kids then play (usually quite happily) until dinner time. Granted, that hour can still be a bewitched one, with tempers on the edge and tears-a-plenty. The only thing I have found that works here every time is an earlier dinner, a spoil-your-dinner healthy snack, or TV (lame!). Got any ideas on that one?

For more great tips and other Works For Me Wednesdays, visit Rocks In My Dryer.

WFMW - Easier Meal Planning

It's another Works for Me Wednesday! This is not rocket science here, but a simple tip to make meal planning a little easier.
First,
grab a piece of paper and write down all the meals you can think of that your family loves to eat. Then write down all the meals you enjoy cooking. Tack the list up on the fridge and add to it throughout the week.
Then,
the day before you grocery shop, pull your list down and use it to create your menu and grocery shopping list for the week. (Tack that menu on your fridge for easy daily reference.) When I am not pregnant or in another sort of season of stress/exhaustion, I try to cook one new recipe per week. As I discover new recipes that are a hit with the family, I add them to my quick reference list on my fridge.

For more great WFMW ideas on all sorts of things, visit rocks in my dryer. And for a cute little essay I wrote on the subject, click here.

WFMW - Laundry

This is yet another ridiculously simple contribution to the "Works For Me Wednesday" file. Simply put, I don't do my kids laundry. (But I do supervise their adept efforts!)

I have been training my boys (AGES 6 and 3) how to do their own laundry from start to finish. One or the other (or both) has learned how to:

• carry or drag laundry baskets downstairs to the laundry room
• sort clothes into darks and lights
• set and start the washing machine and dryer
• add the appropriate amount of soap/dryer sheets
• transfer clothes from one machine to another
• sort laundry into "ownership piles"
• put their own clothes away

Do note that I never mentioned anything about folding laundry. That is because I have decided that you don't really need to fold shirts and jeans. We hang church shirts that ought to be hung, but everything else just fits into appropriate drawers - unfolded. The time saved from not requiring folding is astounding, and honestly, this is my favorite part of my WFMW.

Someday, I imagine, my Type A child will prefer to have his clothes unwrinkled and will eagerly master the steps to a perfectly folded shirt, but my "more creative child" will likely always see wrinkles as a delightful part of a shirt's design. For that child, I will be pleased that the clothes make it off the floor and into a drawer.

It took several months of training each task individually, and it will take several more months before the whole thing will be done unsupervised but what we have going right now WORKS FOR ME!

WFMW - Winco Shopping List

Well, I have a tool that I have been using for a couple of years. It is a blank shopping list for the devoted Winco shopper like myself. Each section is for a different aisle of the store, and it goes top to bottom, left to right in the order that I shop, starting with produce, through meats & cheeses, to dairy, then back and forth through the non-perishable goods aisles. It sure makes shopping quicker and I rarely need to backtrack through the store because I forgot something.

I wanted to attach the file in a pdf but I can't figure out how to do it yet. So, if you want it, email me at jenne @ armworks . net and I will send it to you.

Happy Wednesday, ladies!

UPDATE: Thanks to Brenda, my list is posted on her site. you can get to it by clicking here.

WFMW - Sibling Arguments

My kids were arguing about ridiculous things (ridiculous to an adult, anyway), like who would sit closest to the baby at the breakfast counter, who got to choose today's TiVo program, who got to sit in the preferred van seat, and so on. You know, there are some disagreements that require character development and training and other that just need a quick solution. I was worn down of being the referee on this one, and so I came up with this:
The popsicle sticks have each boy's name on it and are stuck to the wall with that gummy sticky stuff (is it called Sticky-Tac?). When there is one of those arguments, the kid with the stick on top gets to choose. Then I (or one of the kids) switches the sticks to that the other kid's stick is on top.

It works like a charm. Actually, it works better than a charm because now my older son "saves up" his turn for what really matters to him that day (usually being in control of the TV... he's going to be a great man someday) and defers to Jackson's wishes on van seat preference and which color of bowl he wants. Jackson has not QUITE put together Davis' logic. One day he will and I have a feeling that the stick system will outlive its usefulness. But today I have worked myself out of referee employment, and that works for me!

WFMW - Diaper Doublers

Can a Safeway product be a Work For Me Wednesday? (Who makes these rules, anyway?)

These days, even when I put a bigger diaper on my guy he still wakes up soaking wet - all the way through to the crib sheets and blankets. I went to buy a box of super-duper, extra absorbent, extra-EXPENSIVE diapers to alleviate these morning woes and I ran across the magic of diaper doublers. They look like the pads we wore - and hated - twenty years ago, but I promise you will LOVE THEM NOW! And here is the best part: $2.89 for this pack of 30.


And as my wonderful sister helped me realize, he is sleeping longer at night and the 5:00am wake-up has eroded...


...but as I am learning, you have to be careful what you blog. The moment you speak it into the blog-i-fied world, your children will know and they will sabotage you. My kids have been making a liar out of me all week long as they have argued more this week than they did all last month! So please, no one tell Weston about this post. ok? I am really enjoying the extra sleep.