Un-pin-worthy Chore Charts

Working on my tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good enough.

Yes, Lucy did get a hold of my dry ease marker

Organizing the Pantry

The pantry had gotten pretty disorganized and I was avoiding more pressing housework, so the kids and I emptied it out, wiped down the shelves, took an inventory and put it back in better order.

I had Zero Waste Home out from the library, and I am looking forward to implementing a brilliant idea from it once we eat down our reserves: rotating pantry staples. Bea Johnson keeps one canister each for legumes, grains, pasta, etc, and then changes up what she fills it with. I hate winding up with bags of three colors of lentils, four types of dried beans, and five different dried fruits, but we also like variety. Why has this solution never occurred to me?

To keep track of what we have, I created checklists in Springpad. My goal is to only purchase food at the butcher shop and farmers' market for the rest of the summer and have as few pantry items as possible left when it comes time to move in the fall.

Preschool Lessons: Morning Basket

With the school year winding done, I'm thinking about what has worked that I want to build on and what I've learned is not for us right now.

Our morning basket has taken a little tweaking, but this is definitely working for us. I've simplified the readings we had been doing (at this stage of the game, for us, it seems better to make sure we are spending time outside every day rather than doing some "nature reading"), but down the line I see us adding nature readings back in along with history and catechism. I've also worked out a planning/record keeping system for this that I'm pretty excited about, but that's for another post.

So, at the moment, our morning basket includes morning prayers, reading about the saint of the day or the liturgical season, a story from our children's Bible, a hymn, poetry reading, and what I'm calling our "1000 good books" reading. Sometimes we have a Lucy Micklethwait book from the library that we look at (Lucy loves these!), and we often also have Lucy pick out a picture book or two since our chapter book doesn't hold her attention yet.

This year, we read through the Milo Winter edition of Aesop's fables, Mother Goose, A Bear Called Paddington, and memorized "The Whole Duty of Children" (Lucy has been surprisingly enthusiastic about our poetry reading). I finally got serious about hymns, and we spent the Easter season learning "Jesus Christ is Risen Today" (Joseph loves singing together). Considering I was pregnant or had a newborn this whole year, I'm pretty pleased with what we got done.