Happy Ostara!

Hope you are having a lovely day! If you want some inspiration feel free to pursue my Ostara pin board.

And if you have not already signed up for Poppy’s Seeds Academy Newsletter follow this link and get special love from me every Tuesday!

Preschool projects

Little and I worked on this project the other day. First she separated and sorted all of the bands by color. Then we used Youtube to find out how to make the bracelet and then we went out to the laundry line to find a clothes pin.

We were about half way done here, and it occurred to me that this would be a great little protection trinket.

“keep me safe, keep me sound
while my wrist you are wrapped around.
I will be out of harms way
all through the night and day”

Mad mission for me

So here I am reeling from our 3rd life interrupting sickness in as many months. I knew coming into 2014 that this year would be the year of self-care. I know I have neglected me. Its gotten to the point where feeling stressed out and in crisis is my normal feeling. That’s not good. It’s not right and it’s not helpful. Of course guess what it makes me sick. There is a shocker right. So time to take a step back and evaluate.

so now I’m on a mad mission to take care of me and I am starting with the food. It seems when I get buys that my ability to eat good food disintegrates. Take today. We (Little and I) were morning people today. Which means she has school in the morning and I have work in the morning. So I woke up helped her get dressed feed her, took the dog out, feed the dog etc etc. You know the life of a mom. What ended up happening is that I walked out the door without having eaten. fast forward its 1pm I still have not eaten and I am leaving the office to go pick up Little. Who announces that she is hungry and thirsty. I do have some snacks in the car and so I get a few handfuls of trail mix. We rush home. I take the dog out. Get little situated with a snack and some water and then off we go again on more errands. During said errands I make a bad food choice in the form of a lot of sugar and even though I feel better at the moment I know I will pay for it later. I guess it convinced me and I got to thinking of what I was reading last night. A very inspiring post on eating clean and doing a sunday prep. It got me thinking of doing a food prep day or days. I got to thinking of the different foods that would work for me and my family and the first two are what I’m sharing with you in this post.

I am slightly embarrassed by the first one. I joined in the salad in jar craze. I don’t know. I hope it works. It does seem like something I can grab and be able to have lunch at work. It also seems like a nice pre made lunch I can have at home when I am in the middle of life.

I also made 12 smoothie packs. I was inspired by this blog and modified the recipe based on the fruit I already had in the freezer. I plan to make some with her recipe because they sound good. It didn’t take that much time to put them all together which is nice and I am sure doing them all in a big batch like that actually would save time as opposed to doing them individually each morning. Whats more the work is done which frankly is needed in my crazy mornings. One last benefit is that no more greens melting before I get to them! I do hate to waste food. Win win win!

now I’m working on list of foods that I might make every week during food prep day. Do you have any foods you make every week? do you have foods you wish you made every week?

Full moon

Tomorrow is our full moon circle and the ritual still needs some work!

Imbolc is in two short weeks and that event needs a lot of sprucing up.
Meanwhile I share this.

Domestic Goddess Guide Book aka your witchy Home Management Binder

well another year has come and gone and so as I like to do during this quite time between years, I am assessing and analyzing how my systems are working for me and figuring out what changes need to be made. There are A LOT of changes that have to be made! We have moved to different house and Little has started preschool. So I have modified my original Homemakers Binder so that it will better fit my needs and my family needs. There are a lot of pictures and a lot of links. I have taken a week or so to put this together and I am still working on it.

What you will need:
A binder I have a one inch binder with clear covers so you can slip papers in for the cover
tabs
post it type flags
paper
a printer (if you want to print out the links)
and a hole punch
and tape I always need tape.

I wanted a homemakers binder or home management binder that fit me better. Yes I clean my house but I also cleanse my house. Lots of magic things happen here and so just like my BOS this book starts with a few little tie bits of magic.  A prayer for patience and a picture of Cerridwen to bless my home hearth and endeavors.

I then have two sets of tabs one is the typical down the side type and I have used the set of 8 from Martha Stweart avery line.
They are:
1. Launch pad (don’t worry I will explain it)
2. Cleaning
3. Menu Planning
4. Food storage
5. Projects
6. Financial
7. Garden
8. Cleaning Recipes.

1. Launch Pad Section

I have those extra post it tabs across the top in just my Launch pad section.  So lets walk through what I have in there. First up is this daily rhythm which I made based on this one.

next up our weekly Rhythm. This one is still in flux but since Little and I have had our schedules changed this needed to be changed as well. As you can see I’m still literally penciling it in until I find a rhythm that really works for us but its still a good example. 

Next up is our Yearly Themes now if you have followed me on here or in my life you realize I am sure that I am crazy and like to plan things out. So much so that my wonderful fellow admins at The Pagan Mama have started calling organizing Poppy-fing. So you might know, or might not be surprised to see that I have monthly themes for Little and I. We try to plan activities with them in mind and check out books from the library within the theme.  These themes have been the same since she was 10 months old or so. Each year it feels new though as each year what is age appropriate is changed.

Next up is the 30 day challenge which I got from here. Go check it out because it is really much prettier. She did it all in color but my printer was acting up and I just can’t wast paper. Anyway If I’m am trying to establish a new habit I like to do one at a time, one month at a time. It helps solidify it for me. So I will be printing out one for each month. 

Next  I have an sheet for important dates. I didn’t show it to you as there are you know personal dates and names on it but you can find one here.

Next up is a to do list. there are lots of pretty ones out there but I just used a sheet of scrap paper (again I hate to waste paper) and scribbled January to do List at the top.

Next up is the 52 Weeks to an Organized Home challenge from Home Storage Solutions. 

Which of course is followed by A donation tracker. Because I am sure as I go through each area I will be purging items and passing them on to a new home. Might as well use it the numbers for our taxes. 

I have a calendar in her too. This one is just for tacking cleaning and house to dos. I am not sure if I will keep it like this or not as I do use a Flylady. Wall calendar and my personal Filofax which has this same calendar in it. I just LOVE this calendar! It is from Lime Tree Fruits and all of her printables are just beautiful!

2. Cleaning

Ok next up a cleaning schedule and hey i’m still working on it.  I also have a smudging prayer taped on the inside of my cleaning divider.  You can find this daily/ weekly  sheet here along with one that is filled in for how she does it.  After that I have a Monthly Zone sheet from here. You might also like this weekly sheet  I am not sure which one I will end up using myself. I say check them both out and see what works best for you.

Because as I said I cleanse my house not just clean it I added this sheet that I originally wrote for my Facebook page. 

3. Menu Planning

We eat. We eat a lot here and I cook a lot here. so here is my menu planning and shopping sheet.  There are lots of good ones out there but I made this one years ago and just keep using it. You can get the PDF here menu plan I also keep a few recipes behind this for things I will be cooking this week. I am also working a few other sheets for this section and I will share them when I finish them. 

 

4. Food storage.

I think a lot about food. I spend a lot of time with food. growing, buying, cooking, reasserting on and on and on. so this section Might not be for everyone but it is for me. I know some people are prepers and this will not meet their needs and some people for religious reasons feel they should have a years worth of food ready. I on the other hand lived through the 1989 San Andres earthquake. My house was 2 miles from the epicenter. My entire neighborhood pitched our tents and camp around our yard. While other people went to stand in lines for food and water for hours and hours I never had to. Mom being the good Girl Scout she was, was prepared and we had enough food for us not to worry and enough to share too. I took from that experience how important it really is to be prepared and so it is something I have been working on. I also have started canning, which means I need to take a better assessment of what kind of food my family eats and at what rate. Just how many pints of strawberry jam will they consume and how many pounds of tomatoes will it take to make 52 jars of sauce? These are questions I am working on answering. The following section has some sheets that help me track and figure it all out.

 

 

 

you can get this sheet here 

Canning Inventory here

I also have a Panty inventory and a freezer inventory which I failed to get a picture of somehow.

5. Projects

We all have them.  We all need to track them and think them through so we can complete them and do a happy Yay me I finished it dance! I found this cute sheet here to help out with that.

 

6. Financial

mostly what I have here is a sheet like this from Organizing Home life.

7. Garden. I found a whole lovely downloadable notebook for the garden section. Again I am trying to answer one of lives questions how many tomatoes do you need to grow to make 52 jars of sauce, have enough for salads and eating and not have too many?  And how many plants do I need to plant to get that many tomatoes. Not to mention all the other yummies that need to be grown and of course the herbs. What herbs can you grow to cook with and make potions with? You might want to make a list.

8. cleaning recipes.

Finally a section to keep all the fabulous diy natural cleaning recipes. Both to clean the house such as uses for lemon below or rosemary salt to bless the house and how to make moon water. All the good Kitchen witch recipes I need to know. 

There are a few more things but that is pretty much it for now. I know it’s a lot so what I think I might do is break it down now that I have given you the whole shebang maybe I will go back over each section and do a step by step for that section. This way I can add in all the extras.

also just for you I made a pin board with most of the links 🙂 http://www.pinterest.com/heleneliz/domestic-goddess-guide-book/

 

After the rite

Decorated my Filofax tabs

This section is for Little

Oh the beauty

a few spots left

I am doing a new experiment I am going to try to teach online. I started a group on Facebook and there are a few more spots open so if anyone would like to join us please let me know 🙂

You can either like my Facebook page, and send me a pm with your email or you can email me at poppyunderhill at gmail.

I am super excited as we have folks of all level of experience and a small group so there can be a lot of interaction.  My class is more of a guided self discovery and I can’t wait to see where it all leads.

as I have in my BOS “Welcome all with open heart and open mind, what you seek you shall find.”

Starting my day