avatar by on March 31, 2009   •   111 Comments Unused

Q&A Tuesday: Why do you use Facebook?

Facebook is such a funny thing.  I love how it keeps me connected with so many people, especially since we live overseas.  And it’s wild to see how paths cross – how your college roommate can comment on “your wall” right alongside your brother’s brother-in-law’s girlfriend.  It’s sort-of like a wedding, in that way – your worlds colliding, right in front of you.

So it’s a great tool for keeping up with the lives you love, and for you to update others about your family through photos and little text snippets.

But Facebook can also be a time-sucker. With it’s bajillion applications, you can easily do a lot of pointless – albiet fun – activities, such as sucker-punching your sister.  And it’s a quandrary how to handle those people who want to “friend” you, and for whatever reason, you’re not sure you want to.

Susan at Real Simple wrote a little article recently about the oddity that is Facebook, questioning its validity in our lives.  So today’s Q&A is this:

Do you use Facebook?  What’s your primary motivation?  How much time do you spend on it weekly?  And – how do you handle those requests for friendship, for accepting virtual plants, or anything else you just don’t want to do?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

avatar by on March 30, 2009   •   81 Comments food & drink recipes

A monthly menu plan for the Spring

woman at the market
Photo by Alyson Hurt

It’s been several months since I wrote about menu planning; mostly, because I haven’t menu planned in awhile. With all our traveling in the States, it’s only been this past week that we’ve had some semblance of a normal life since mid-October.

But we’re all itching for some well-planned meals around here, so with the start of a new month and the start of a new season, I thought it a great time to plan for the entire month.

Our current book club selection, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has me jazzed about eating locally and seasonally, and there have been some great recipe site suggestions on the forums.  And I love food blogs, so I thought I’d pay some of my favorites homage and try out some of their recipes.

With this in mind, I’ve tried to make our month’s menu as seasonal as possible, with every intention to get most of the ingredients from our twice-weekly neighborhood farmer’s market.

I can’t vouch for the seasonality of every recipe here, especially since every locale is different. But for the most part, these recipes work well for us in the spring, and if they do for you, then please use and enjoy.

Here are some other articles I’ve written about menu planning:

You might also remember that I like to have a theme for each day of the week, which helps me narrow down recipe decisions. For the spring, our weekly rotation looks somewhat like this:

M0ndays - pasta
Tuesdays - soup, salad, and/or sandwiches
Wednesdays - stir fry
Thursdays - crock pot
Fridays - pizza
Saturdays - something new
Sundays - something easy

So here it is – our family’s menu.

April Menu Plan

Week One

beef empanadas
Photo from Smitten Kitchen

Week Two


Photo from Under the High Chair

Week Three


Photo from Cooking Light

Week Four


Photo from Joy the Baker

Week Five


Photo from Tomato Casual

What are you eating this week?

avatar by on March 28, 2009   •   3 Comments Unused

Weekend links

blue bistro table and chairs in a garden
Photo by Sue

• Book of Days :: Blue Yonder Ranch

• Dead Simple Guide to Beating Procrastination :: Zen Habits

• “We’re Constantly at War Over Chores” :: Redbook

• Ruthless Simplicity: How to Ward Off Doing More and Burning Out :: Unclutterer

• Make Your Own Organic Baby Wash :: Rookie Moms

• Town Hall for Hope :: Dave Ramsey (do your best to make a local event!)

• Peruse the rest of my finds from the week…

    “It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” -Mark Twain

    avatar by on March 27, 2009   •   29 Comments Money Management You

    A simplified story of our economic crisis

    futuristic foreclosure
    Photo by Mike Licht

    The following is a guest post from The Weakonomist, the anonymous blogger behind Weakonomics.com.

    The media has tried to explain the current economic crisis. But many of them don’t fully understand it themselves, so elements and details are lost in translation. The ultimate failure is trying to explain it in a matter of minutes – and this is impossible. You have to keep it simple, and then add layers of complexity as each level is understood.

    So let me tell you a story.

    Meet Ivan. Ivan is an investor. After a recession in the early 2000s, Ivan pulled his money out of the stock market. He wanted a safe investment, but interest rates were very low and because of this, government bonds offered a low return.

    Ivan approached his friend Barry to see what other options he had. Barry is a banker. It’s his job to help investors find places to put their money – a broker of sorts. Barry suggested that Ivan invest in mortgages because they’re safe – real estate prices have never had a down year, so loan defaults are rare. Ivan thought this was a perfect solution.

    Barry contacted his friend Mort. Mort is a loan officer at a mortgage company. Mort will help someone purchase a home by providing the financing, and then sell the mortgage to Barry. This frees up Mort to go help someone else with a new mortgage.

    Mort has a few mortgages to sell to Barry, which Barry gladly purchases. Think of these mortgages as the eggs, flour, and icing needed to make a cake. Barry puts these mortgages together to create an investment product called a mortgage-backed security, or MBS. It’s the same thing as putting the ingredients together to make a cake. Barry sells the cake (the MBS) to Ivan.

    three coin stacks
    Photo by Jeff Belmonte

    At each stage in this process, everyone makes a tiny profit. Mort sells the mortgages for a bit more than he paid, and Barry might charge a fee for putting the mortgage-backed security together. Ivan will now receive income in the form of the monthly payments homeowners make on their mortgages.

    Ivan was very happy with these results. So happy, that he came back to Barry with more money, and brought some friends with money too. Barry is happy to oblige their requests for more mortgages, and contacts Mort. Mort tells Barry he doesn’t have enough mortgages to meet everyone’s demand. Because interest rates are so low, everyone who can afford a mortgage already has one.

    Then Mort gets an idea. What if he helped unqualified home buyers become qualified? By “exaggerating” reported income, or using mortgages that make payments cheaper up front and more expensive later, Mort was able to put people in homes that previously couldn’t afford one.

    These mortgages were riskier than traditional mortgages, so eventually the homeowners would have to pay more each month. Barry was happy to buy them, and packaged them with other mortgages to be sold to Ivan. No one was worried about the occasional default because they could just sell that home. Everyone was happy – for a few years.

    Eventually, those people in riskier mortgages started to default because they couldn’t afford the new, expensive payments. At first it was no problem – the house was foreclosed, sold, and everyone moved on. But as more and more homes defaulted, more and more homes were on the market. The abundance of supply, and no increase in demand started make the prices of home fall.

    house in foreclosure
    Photo by Jeff Turner

    Soon enough, Ivan and Barry found they had too many homes for sale, and not enough money coming in from those folks that could make their payments. Ivan stopped buying mortgages from Barry because he didn’t have any more money.

    As a result, Barry stopped buying mortgages from Mort. Without the money coming in from selling the mortgages, Mort couldn’t make new ones. Mort found himself sitting on a bunch of foreclosed homes and was no longer making money, so the mortgage company closed.

    Barry was no better. He couldn’t sell his foreclosures because there were too many on the market, and Ivan wasn’t buying the good mortgages Barry had because Ivan was out of money, too. The system froze.

    There is no happy ending to this story.  No new investors were in sight to bring in new money, and not enough money was coming in from the good mortgages. With no new money, there were no new loans.  This meant that even the most qualified buyers had trouble getting mortgages.

    The lesson behind the story

    So how did that get me laid off? Well it isn’t me per se, so much as it is the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs. The idea here is to show the connection between the frozen industry above, and whatever it is you or I do to make money. Let’s take a closer look at Ivan.

    Ivan is an investor, which is just some generic term. Ivan represents all investors. When Ivan started losing money, he had to retool his operation in order to keep his organization afloat.

    So what kind of business was Ivan in? It could be anything. It could be a hedge fund, it could be an insurance company investing premiums, or it could be simply another bank. So we can see how the financial sector was impacted. All these companies had to lay off people to save money and keep their companies alive.

    job offers tshirt
    Photo by Social is Better

    Financial companies weren’t the only investors. You had universities investing endowments, churches investing surpluses, retirement pensions investing for conservative returns, even local governments investing tax revenue.

    Why? Because everyone thought (and was told) it was a safe investment. They all lost money, and as a result, they had to cut back. Eventually, the banks themselves lost so much money they couldn’t stay in business anymore. The government stepped in to assist and… you know the rest. Since 2007, we’ve watched a domino effect toppling every industry.

    Does this story help explain the crisis?  What other questions do you have about our economic situation?

    ___
    The Weakonomist is an anonymous blogger responsible for everything at Weakonomics.com. With a financial background and a passion for learning, he brings others into the light of economics and personal finance. As a banking insider he’s witnessed this economic crisis from the inside-out. You can usually find him at the corner of Wall Street and Main Street throwing rocks at traffic.

    avatar by on March 23, 2009   •   78 Comments Productivity You

    20 tips for finding your routine with kids

    two girls wearing pink dresses and crocs
    Photo by D. Sharon Pruitt

    Reader Marilyn asks, “I am struggling to set some kind of schedule for my family. I’m new to the SAHM thing (I went back to work after my son was 5 months) and have a 5-month-old and a 3-year-old who is now at home with me.  I’ve been kind of going with the flow, but that is losing its effectiveness, and I have to take a bit more of a proactive approach. I’d love any tips on balancing the bedtimes, eating, naps and various activities of two different-aged kids.”

    I had a five-month-old and a three-year-old at this time a year ago, but no matter the ages, I think it’s always a struggle to juggle multiple kids throughout the day.

    The key is to just plan something.  As the COO of your home, it makes complete sense to have a work schedule to your day.  Just as zero-based budgets require a name to every dollar coming and going, I think the best routines put a name to every hour (even if that name is “nothing time”).  Kids thrive on a routine as well – t’s comforting for them to know what’s next in their day, even those things they don’t like.

    Now, I’m not talking about planning every single minute of your day, nor am I talking about the weekends.  We all know that moms work 24 hours a day, but I suggest allocating tasks to total a roughly 40-hour work week.  This will help you direct your energy appropriately throughout the day.

    Here’s what my days have (more or less) looked like the past few weeks:

    6:00 – wake up, work out, read my Bible, and pray
    7:00 - write
    8:00 - breakfast with the family, chores with the kids, and get ready for the day
    10:00 - preschool time with my daughter (I’m teaching her how to read) while the baby naps
    11:00 - play time, chores, and/or reply to emails
    12:00 - lunch and clean up
    1:00 - outside or art time
    2:00 - quiet time, nap time, and mom time – I work on the finances, our home, my writing, or I help with my husband’s job
    4:00 - kids are up, and we read books together
    4:30-6:00 - kids play while I do more cleaning, cooking dinner, and replying to emails
    6:00 - dinner time
    7:00 - everyone helps clean up from dinner, and then kids get baths and/or play
    8:00 - story time and bed for the kids
    8:30 - my husband and I finish tidying up the home, then we either spend time together, or we work independently (but next to each other)
    10:30 - bed

    There’s nothing magical about this schedule – it just works for me right now.  It’ll probably change in a month, as my routine often does with a baby in the house.  But simply having some sort of written-out plan helps me know what’s next, how to stay focused, and not feel like I’m running in a hamster wheel.

    Here are a few observations from my routine:

    color-coded calendar and pen
    Photo by Erich Ferdinand

    1.  Write a set-in-stone schedule, but keep it soft as clay. The planner in me likes creating a weekly schedule of my work, and if you were to see my color-coded spreadsheet, you would think I was a schedule nazi.  Not so.  I write it with specific times in mind, but rarely does it work exactly.  I say we do story time at 4:00.  Many times it’s at 4:30, or sometimes at 3:00, or even at 5:30, while dinner’s in the oven.  Dinner is really the only thing to which we try to stick a hard-and-fast time.  Everything else is subject to change.

    2.  Re-visit it weekly. Just because your schedule worked well last week, it doesn’t mean it will this week.  You may have a play date when you’d normally pay the bills, or your son has a dentist appointment right during your younger one’s nap time.  There’s no rule that there has to be a “master schedule” – just make a new one each week.

    3.  Sit down with your spouse for 30 minutes on the weekend to discuss the upcoming week. It helps me so much when my husband and I touch base with each other about our upcoming work weeks.  I ask him if there’s anything I can do for him, and he’ll find out if I need anything from him.

    4.  Do what you can to have your little ones help you. Marilyn, you specifically asked me about handling little ones.  Most preschoolers think chores are great fun, so have your older one help.  He or she can put away silverware, fold towels, pick up toys, and even wash dishes (just put a bit of watery soap in the sink with some safe dishes and a sponge).

    5.  Teach them the value of waiting. Along with the suggestion above – it’s okay for kids to learn that Mom has a job, and she can’t play all the time.  The world doesn’t revolve around them, and this is a good truth to learn as early as possible.

    6.  Clean as you go. Completely clean from each mealtime before moving on to the next task.  Loosely straighten up a room before heading to another.  Set a timer for three minutes, and have a fun pick-up blitz with your child.  It may sound stressful to clean so often during your day, but I’ve found it to be much less stressful than tackling the entire house at one set time of day.  It’s usually much more chaotic if I wait, and it feels overwhelming before I begin.

    7.  Find your three MITs. Out of a ten-item to-do list, identify your three Most Important Tasks, and focus your energy on those.  Don’t try to get your to-do list completely scratched off, because it’ll very rarely happen – accept the fact that in this stage of life with littles at home, the to-do list doesn’t end.  But you can probably accomplish three things each day.  Pick the three things that, if finished, would make you feel like you had a productive day. Work on those when your energy is at your highest, and if you accomplish anything else – well, those are just gravy.

    mind map
    Photo by Jason Rogers

    8.  Write things down. Have a brain dump at least once during the day – transfer everything swimming around in your head on to paper.  I usually do this during or right after breakfast, and I immediately feel so much better.  Don’t bother trying to do this neatly – just jot it all down as it comes to you, and then you can organize your ideas.

    9.  Be happy with partial solutions. Meredith wrote about “good enough” on Friday, and I’m certainly learning this in my own life at the moment.  I call these things partial solutions – it’s not exactly how you’d have things if life were perfect, but it’ll work for now.  So you wanted to scrub the bathroom, but you only got around to tidying it up.  Or you planned to roast a chicken for dinner, but you didn’t get a chance to thaw it, so now it’s taco night.  That’s okay.  Don’t aim for perfection.

    10.  Identify daily chores, weekly chores, monthly chores. You probably have a general rhythm of doing repeated things each day, week, and month, and you might not notice it.  Jot down those things you find necessary to do each day, and when you create your week’s routine, make sure you’ve allocated daily time for those tasks.  Make a master list of weekly chores, and fill in your week’s routine with them – check them off as you go.  And make sure you put those sporatic-yet-important jobs you do only monthly (paying bills or menu planning, for example) on the calendar.

    11.  Create a calendar-type system. Speaking of – find a good system for maintaining your schedule, whether it’s using a manual Home Management Notebook or a digital calendar like Google Calendar (I happen to use both).  There’s no right or wrong way to do this.  It just needs to fit your lifestyle.

    12.  Don’t try to do everything. I’ve read some rumors on the internet that I can do everything.  This is allegedly based on this blog, but I can promise you that it isn’t true.  I suppose there are a few things that I can do pretty well, but the flip side to that coin are things I freely admit to not doing well.  No one can do everything. There are probably lots of things you’re good at, and with other things you’re… not so good.  Welcome to membership in the human race.  We still need to do certain essential tasks, even if we don’t feel up to par, but play up your strengths, and don’t sweat over your weaknesses.

    13.  Don’t watch much TV. I’m still amazed at how much more I got done once I stopped watching most TV.  Cut back to only those few shows you really love.  You won’t miss the rest.

    little girl reading
    Photo by Greg Lawler

    14.  Make naps and quiet times essential. Don’t blow these off – little kids need lots of sleep, slightly older kids need to learn the value of alone time, and mama needs a break to do grown-up work.

    15.  Have everyone eat, sleep, and play at the same time. This isn’t always seamless, depending on your kids’ ages, but you can tweak ideal situations a little to have everyone down at the same time, eating at the same time, and playing together as often as possible.  If your baby needs his nap at 1:00, and your daughter really needs some rest time at 2:00, have nap and quiet time start at 1:30.

    16.  Accept the messes. Okay, I’m telling myself this as much as you, because it really is hard to accept the fact that most kids don’t care about the messes as much as you’d like.  They need to learn the value of work, and we home managers need to model that hard work by keeping our home neat.  But that doesn’t mean our homes are never messy.  I have a friend who has this quote hung on her fridge – “Cleaning house while kids are growing is like shoveling snow while it’s still snowing.” It’s true.

    17.  Know your energy levels. Are you a morning, afternoon, or evening person?  When do you hit your slump?  I’m a morning person, so I make every effort to rise before my kids and get my much-needed quiet time in then.  I hit a wall at around 3 p.m., so I know I’ll be spinning my wheels trying to get anything significant done then.  In the morning, I focus on tasks that require full brain engagement.  In the afternoon, I fold laundry and wrestle with the kids on the floor.  Make the most of your energy.

    18.  Think of your job as a job. Don’t apologize for keeping a thorough work routine.  Don’t feel guilty for turning down a friend for coffee because you have work to do.  Just as you’d have those limits with a paycheck-earning job, so you need to create boundaries with your job at home.  It’s a job.  Make it a priority, and do what you can to excel in your vocation.

    resting at a picnic table
    Photo by Zara

    19.  Have intentional down time. Right along with that, schedule in down time, and make it really good down time.  Don’t answer phone calls while you’re taking a walk with your family.  Only check your email during certain times of the day, and certainly don’t use down time for your inbox.  Treat relaxation as a vital part of your schedule, just as you would cleaning or cooking.

    20.  Get enough sleep, water, and exercise. Finally, don’t forget to take care of yourself.  How silly that we all often forget to take care of ourselves while we take care of others under our roof.  Get rest.  Stay hydrated.  Make your health a priority.

    You’ve all learned your own tips and tricks for getting things done around the home with little ones underfoot.  What else can you add to the list?