The Sensible Mom

Tackle It Tuesday: The Pantry (again)

October 26, 2010 by Sandra 4 Comments

I organized the pantry again! I know I’ve done the pantry before as a Tackle It Tuesday post, but I thought since it had to be done, it might be more motivational for me to do if I were to take pictures and share them with you.

We have a small pantry so it gets unorganized pretty quickly. This time, though, it was to the point where I could barely see what all I had on the second shelf. Things were just kind of piled onto one another, but the real need to organize the pantry asap came this time because of all the great catalina deals Jewel was having earlier this month. I was able to stock up on bread flour, ketchup, oil, syrup, popcorn, cake mixes and frosting, and now that I’m WELL stocked on these items, I needed somewhere to put them! And I wanted to at least try to fit some of them into the pantry. So, I got to rearranging.

Here are my BEFORE’s:

Pantry Before

Here’s the reason I had to organize so quickly:

And the AFTER’s:

Pantry After

Pantry After

Did you tackle anything this week? I’d love to hear about it! 🙂

To see what everyone else is tackling this week, please visit 5 Minutes for Mom!

A New Look!

October 26, 2010 by Sandra Leave a Comment

Hi everyone! The Sensible Mom has a new look. I know I said it was going to happen last week, but it didn’t. Better late than never, right? But thank you for your patience.

The new design is pretty much finished with the exception of the sidebars. Those sidebars! What to put in them? I’ll have to keep on working on them little by little and hopefully find out what I want to do with them. In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think.

Oh, and I have revamped our scheduled for the 859th time so that I can get back into a routine of going to bed before midnight and waking up early so that among other things, I can have some blog time. Since we’ve been in school, I have adopted the night-owl life. And the late nights generally consist of homework and talking to my husband about homework, websites, web design, and all things related. Boring, huh?

But, seriously, I am so ready to get back into the routine of waking up early. And on that note….I’m headed off to get ready for bed.

Updates

October 18, 2010 by Sandra Leave a Comment

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would do an update post since I wasn’t really around here much last week. As you can expect, life has been busy, but mainly it’s been full of homework. Ruben and I both have important web projects to get done on top of all of our other work. What this means for you is that you can expect some changes here at The Sensible Mom starting tomorrow! I hope you like them. While the kids and I grocery shopped yesterday (THAT was an adventure), Ruben was able to put together a mock up in Photoshop of some of the changes he’d like to make. I checked it out when I got home, and it looks good!

My computer programming class has taken up a lot of my time as well. Too much! And it has been the cause of sin too, unfortunately. I tend to get rather emotional when I’m doing my programming homework and can’t get the program to “run” after waaaayyyyy too much time spent on it. Ugh. It’s bad. When I do get it to finally work, I feel relief, submit my assignment, and wonder what next week’s homework is going to be like. 🙁 I will never be a computer programmer. My brother, on the other hand, will be. He is all about programming and currently pursuing a degree in computer programming. I saw his this weekend and told him how much I hate it. He gets it, though, and I think I’ll probably ask him for help with this week’s homework if I can’t get it. Especially since the teacher let us know that the next thing we are learning, something called “Arrays” is going to be hard. I’m scared. If she thinks arrays are going to be hard and everything else was easy, I need to be very afraid. How many frustrating hours will be spent on this week’s homework? Feel free to pray for me if you feel lead.

And if you are wondering why I press on with this class eventhough I’m NOT going to be a computer programmer, it’s because of WordPress (and because I don’t want to quit). WordPress runs off of PHP, a programming language. And eventhough we aren’t learning PHP in my computer programming class (we are learning Qbasic), once I learn Qbasic, it will be MUCH easier to learn PHP. I’ve already started trying to learn PHP on my own, and I could see right away how the programming class I’m in right now has benefited me. Soooo, I’m going to try to make it to the end, especially because of all the time I’ve already put into this class. If it becomes more than I can take, though, I can always drop before the end of next month…..I’ll press on for now. Oh, and my teacher is great. She knows programming. It’s just REALLY hard to learn.

On the homefront, the kids are great. Nathan and Breanna are doing great with school. Isaac is enjoying a “Count with Me” class for preschoolers that Ruben takes him to on Saturday mornings, and David–he’s into pinching, biting, and scratching right now, but we’re working on that! I clipped his nails yesterday which has helped.

On the deal front, because of Jewel’s fabulous catalina deals lately, we won’t need any vegetable oil, syrup, or popcorn for the next year or so! Plus I have some to give away. Isaac LOVES pancakes (and it’s hard for me to resist his sweet little voice when he asks me to make him some whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner) so I’m sure we’ll have no problem going through a lot of the syrup.

There are new catalina deals at Jewel for this week which I took three kids with me to get yesterday afternoon. I took the three older kids while David was napping in an effort to give Ruben some time to work on websites. It was an adventure! I did five transactions at self-checkout and on my very first order, I forgot to swipe my “Preferred Card” to get the sale price! I wondered why my total was higher than it should be and when I looked at my reciept, I knew why. The good thing was that all I had to do was take my reciept to customer service to get credited, and they didn’t have to re-ring my order. What made it more adventurous, though, was Isaac. He likes to help you “ring” things up at self-checkout. Fun! 🙂

That wraps up the past week! Happy Monday!

Reading to your Children

October 11, 2010 by Sandra 1 Comment

Lately, I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of reading to my children before bedtime. Life has just been so busy the last few months that I put this on the back burner and opted instead to clean or do homework at our usual reading time. I’m picking this wonderful habit up again, though. I’m making it a priority. There is simply nothing like sitting with your children and enjoying a good story. My favorite is when we read books that *I* read as a child. The memories come flooding back, and it’s hard to believe that I’m reading a book to my kids that I read as a little girl.

I’m also aware that if I make reading to my children a priority now, they will someday by God’s grace make reading to their children a priority in the future. I hope so. I want them to have a love of reading and of learning in general. I want their imaginations and their vocabulary to be stretched as far as it can go.

However, making time to read doesn’t always come naturally for me and maybe not for you, either. So I’ve put together a few tips that might help us out:

1. This is easy, but simply needs to be put in place. Schedule a time to read to your children everyday. Write it down somewhere you will see it and be reminded. On your computer? On your fridge?

2. Let your kids know what time you will be reading to them each day. This may be actually better than writing it on your schedule if your kids are anything like mine! They WILL NOT forgot. 🙂 They will remind you.

3. If you don’t have a big library of books at home, that’s okay. Many times, kids enjoy reading the same books over and over (just hopefully it’s a story you enjoy, too!). And there is always the library! The public library is an wonderful resource. We have checked out countless books from the library. And they run great programs usually during the summer and winter months to get kids excited about reading too.

4. If you haven’t been in the habit of reading to your children, start tonight and just do it. I predict you will fall in love with the this special time with your kids.

Happy Monday!

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