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Where to Find Eco Advice for Normal People

Tsh — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:00:20 +0000

Green is the new jeans-and-flip-flops these days. As in, it’s the norm to be a mom who’s environmentally-conscious, yet not wear corn rolls and insist on not showering until global warming ends. You’re no longer in the minority when you care about toxins in plastic or reducing waste. It’s just common sense.

Photo by *sean

I personally have a lot to learn. All the talk going around about carbon footprints and household product chemicals can be really confusing. For me, anyway.

I recently found Ideal Bite. It’s a site dedicated to providing easy-to-understand advice about everyday things people can do to positively impact the environment. Their motto is “a sassier shade of green.” Isn’t that cute?

I just subscribed to Ideal Bite‘s Daily Tip. They’re short, they’re witty, and they’re useful. And they’re free! Woo-hoo for that.

I seriously didn’t need one more thing added to my in-box, but I like that I can peruse their daily tip, archive it if it’s helpful (thank you, Gmail!), or delete it and move on if it’s not. They tend to be about frugality and health while focusing on eco-savvyness (yes, I just made up that word). They obviously have advertisers around their content, but if you can get past that, there really is some good content.

Here are a few examples:

• If you think you’re all out, cut the toothpaste tube in half – you’ll be surprised how much is left.

• Add a little water to your almost-empty shampoo or conditioner bottles, and you can use them a few more times.

• Did you know that staples are recyclable? That means you don’t need to remove them before you throw your paper in the recycling bin.

• Turn off your car if you’re going to be idling longer than a minute (like when you’re waiting to pick up your kids from school). It uses less gas to turn on and off your car than it does to idle. It’s estimated that Americans use 2 billion gallons of fuel while idling each year – that’s $100 in gas per driver per year.

I love this little snippet from their “about” page:

Ideal Bite offers bite-sized ideas for light green living – ideas for real people who lead busy lives and want to make small changes that add up to big results. … The secret sauce? A spoonful of “incremental environmentalism” combined with a keeping-it-real attitude.

I think I’m going to use that phraseology about myself now, kinda like calling myself “chewy granola.” I’m light green.

So I recommend signing up for Ideal Bite’s Daily Tip. It works for me!

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Where to Find Eco Advice for Normal People is a post from Simple Mom

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The 2 Key Questions to Ask While Decluttering

Tsh — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:57:35 +0000

In the poll I had in my sidebar last week (I’ve got a new one there, by the way), I was somewhat surprised to learn that most of you find organizing to be the hardest part of your home management. I wasn’t surprised because I think it’s easy, but because you said it was harder than money management, menu planning, cleaning, or juggling parenting in the mix of housekeeping. None of those tasks are easy.

Photo by Molly

“Stuffitis” can clog our clarity, productivity, and peace to the point of exhaustion. It makes organizing our homes so much harder. When we have so much stuff that those items are no longer useful or provide enjoyment because the mere having it causes added stress – it’s time to rethink its purpose in your home.

One of our unexpected benefits of moving to the other side of the world last year was forced downsizing. Because we were limited in how much stuff to bring, we literally questioned every single item we owned. It either went with us, it moved into a very small storage unit (for those items we wanted to keep but not risk a major overseas move – like family keepsakes), or it left our home and went to another (via garage sale or donation).

And when we inventoried our belongings, the two main questions we asked – sometimes unconsciously – were:

1. Is this item useful to us?, and
2. Is this item beautiful to us?

The answers could be quite subjective, but it pointed us to an overall theme in our life and in our home that I hope we now keep lifelong. It’s this simple quote that is now my homekeeping mantra:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris

Sounds extreme, and in a way, it is. But I like it because it validates the things you do have in your home, and it gives you the freedom to truly enjoy having them pass your threshold. Rather than making that collection of candles on top of your TV cabinet feel pointless, you can enjoy having them there because you’ve made a conscious decision that they were worth being there. They passed the test, in other words.

It helps us that our home isn’t too big. We live in a very urban high-rise condo, which provides about 1,300 square feet of living space. We have one closet, which is actually pretty unusual here, since closets are a rather American concept. Our bedrooms have wardrobes which serve as ample space for all our clothes.

Most families won’t have a major international move to force them to downsize. But I highly encourage you to quickly ask yourself an object’s purpose or beauty in your home the next time you declutter. If it merits neither, then maybe it shouldn’t even belong. Perhaps another family would find a better use for it.

And you might be surprised to learn how little you’ll miss the thing once it’s gone.

2nd photo by karly b

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The 2 Key Questions to Ask While Decluttering is a post from Simple Mom

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How Do You Declutter?

Tsh — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:46:21 +0000

There are two schools of thought when it comes to decluttering:

Touch everything only once, and
Declutter in steps, moving piles around until it’s done.

Photo by Camilla Engman

When you touch everything only once, you pick up an item and put it in its rightful place immediately, even if it means going to the other side of the house. Sometimes you can maximize the effectiveness of this method and pick up several items going to the same room, using a basket to take your goods with you. Then you stay in that one room, reshelving everything you brought, and when you’re done, you return to the room you started in and continue on your work.

When you declutter in steps, you essentially make piles. If your dining room table is cleared off, you pile everything together that’s going to your daughter’s room, then the bathroom, and so on and so forth. When all the declutter has been transferred to their appropriate piles, you focus on shrinking the piles until they’re gone. When there are no more piles, your place has been decluttered.

Most home organizing “experts” advocate the Touch Everything Only Once method, but it doesn’t work for me. I get too distracted. If I crate up just a few items for my bedroom, before I know it, I’m perusing the magazine on my nightstand, or I’m organizing the shirts in my wardrobe by sleeve length and color (I’m a bit sick that way – ask my husband or my college roommate). The original room I started in has long been forgotten.

My method is to stay in the messy room and pile its misplaced belongings in one central location, then move on to the next room and add to those original piles. After I’ve gone through the whole house and decluttered, I should have only one big pile for each room. Now all I have to do is empty a pile at a time until it’s gone.

What do you do? Have you even thought about it before? Just wondering if I’m in the minority or the majority here.

I’m off to make some piles.

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Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
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How Do You Declutter? is a post from Simple Mom

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The Rest of My Home Management Notebook

Tsh — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:02:18 +0000

Photo by esotericsean

So far, I’ve discussed my Daily Docket and my Weekly Checklist as the essential components of my Home Management Notebook. I use the Checklist as my reference for my Docket – my general goal is to complete everything on the Checklist every week. Rarely does this happen, but having a master list as a visual reminder really helps.

So what else do I have in my Notebook?

• Calendar – I use Google Calendar for my personal daytimer, and I usually just refer to it online to keep track of my appointments. I especially like that I can have it remind me of events via email or pop up – very handy when you’re writing emails and you’ve lost track of time. But I also print the calendar several months at a time to keep handy when I’m not near my laptop and I want to jot something on the schedule. I also menu plan monthly, and I enter this online when I plan (99% of my recipes come from the internet). When I print the calendar, I have a month’s worth of my dinner plans easily accessible in my Notebook.

• Grocery List – I’ve written up my master grocery list in Excel, and it’s a lifesaver. How often do you forget what you need to stock up on? For me, it’s all the time – so having my usual purchases already written out really helps trigger my memory. I normally have a print-out hanging in the kitchen, so that anybody can mark what we need, but I keep several copies handy in my Notebook. And I make sure I have several blank pages of paper in this section for me to jot down menu and food ideas.

• Budget – I write a monthly budget a la Dave Ramsey, and I also print out a copy of this and keep it handy in my Notebook. I use Pear Budget for now, which has a $3 monthly service fee, but there are lots of good budgeting resources out there. More on that soon. I also write out current financial goals we have and where we stand on reaching them, and any other financial information that might prove relevant that month (bank statements, important receipts, etc.). My husband has a lot of work reimbursements for his job, and I also keep track of this here. I have a little plastic envelope where I keep all the current month’s receipts.

• Master Project List – My brain is flooded with little ideas throughout the day, and if I don’t write them down within a few minutes, they leave and don’t return. I have a few sheets of paper to jot down anything that comes to mind that I want to work on – make slipcovers for the pillows, fix the bathroom towel bar, order such-and-such book on Amazon. Having this blank space adds a nice combination of order and stream-of-consciousness to my thought process. I can doodle or outline, and this really helps me.

• Blogging Ideas – Similar to above, I keep paper handy for jotting down blog post ideas. If I don’t, they’re gone, and frustration inevitably ensues! I’ve lately used the process of mind mapping to come up with ideas, and it truly works. Right now I have 79 post ideas for this blog alone!

• Babysitter’s Guide – Our kids are pretty easy, but we want to keep current information handy when someone comes to watch our kids. We list our cell phone numbers, bedtime routines, what’s off limits, and what to do in case of basic emergencies (like where we keep our bandaids). We even have instructions on how to turn on our TV and DVD player!

• Kid Stuff – I jot down ideas or websites that come in handy for anything regarding my children. If I find an article online that’s so helpful, I’ll print it out and keep it here. I’m currently working on creating some basic letter writing curriculum for my three-year-old, and I keep any good resources I find in this section.

• Gift Ideas – When my parents ask me what I want for my birthday, nine times out of ten I can’t think of anything at the moment. In this section, I jot down any gift ideas I have for our family, along with good gift ideas for us to give to others.

• Language Lesson Notes – I keep my current language lesson handy here so that I can easily study when I’m nursing the baby. For those of you who aren’t currently learning a second language – if you have any other work-at-home responsibilities, or if you’re involved in some sort of adult education, you can keep that info handy here as well.

• Personal Stuff – This is where I write down my Scripture memory notes, other Bible study info, motivating quotes I come across, prayer requests, and anything else related to me and my relationships. I also write down my personal goals and habits I want to change – it helps me to see them in writing.

Maybe these ideas will trigger some of your own. What are you constantly looking for throughout your day? Would it help you to have it in a master notebook, so that it’s quickly at your fingertips? I think the trick is to have your notebook complete enough for it to be useful, but not so crammed full or overcomplicated that it’s demotivating to use.

You want this to be a valuable tool for home management. Make it so it works for you! Don’t become enslaved by it. Enjoy having one.

• Next up in Home Management Notebooks: Concluding thoughts, downloadable files, resources for further motivation, and ideas to spark your interest!
Photo by gamookie

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The Rest of My Home Management Notebook is a post from Simple Mom

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Welcome to Simple Mom

Tsh — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 09:53:19 +0000

Alright, so this blog. It’s kinda new. My personal blog isn’t, however, and that’s where you can read our family updates, little cultural stories about life here, and generally whatever comes to my mind that doesn’t fit here.

So what does fit on this blog?

This blog is dedicated to encouraging moms to simplify their high calling. That means freedom from unnecessary complications, and free enough to do our job well.

Photo by Atimoth

And don’t think that by my penning this blog that I have this “simplicity” thing all figured out! By reading, you’ll be following my journey as I learn what works and what doesn’t.

I love exploring the practical sides of simplicity, so I highlight some of the many tools and resources available. Topics that interest me most are:

managing time as we manage the home – how on earth do we do it “all”?

budgeting and managing the family’s finances

cooking and eating well

filling our family’s minds with only quality books, music, and movies

cultivating the dying arts for the benefit of our family – sewing, gardening, and the like

keeping paperwork to a minimum, and organizing well the paperwork that is necessary

incorporating our children in household management – even the little ones can help out

I want to showcase the benefit of simplicity, that keeping things simple can free us to invest in the things that really matter – relationships with family and friends.

Interested? Then please stick around and explore! All suggestions and ideas are welcome. I’ll try my darndest to make even personal finance interesting and fun.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Welcome to Simple Mom is a post from Simple Mom

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