Pertinent Posts

I have a number of blogs that feed into my Google Reader.  Those blogs often link to other blogs and I end up with all kinds of ideas in inspirations.  Some speak to me as a mom, others as a home manager and others are just fun.  Here are a few of the posts that I found pertinent for my world this week.  Maybe there's something here that will help you out too!

:: I Take Joy make me ask myself Do I wake up TO my daughter for FOR my daughter?

:: Lovely Craftey Home gave me inspiration to better a cabinet that's sitting in my bathroom by converting the shelves to pull out shelves.  I may also apply the concept to create a pull out laptop shelf in another cabinet.

:: With Easter right around the corner I love this idea for an Easter Story Countdown.

:: Life As Mom gave a great overview on taking a critical look at you spending and budgets in Audit Yourself to Cut Expenses and Money Saving Mom has some good pointers for saving money on gasoline.

This post is linked up at Simply Staci's Saturday Stumbles.

Clean Kitchen!

Spring cleaning is a sporadic activity in my house.  I'm not one of those folks who enjoys cleaning.  If there's one household task where I cut as many corners as possible, it's cleaning.  So today was HandyMan's day off from work and he had invited some folks over for dinner so I declared it cleaning morning.  I busted out my master cleaning list, added a few more things to it and we got down to work.  The kitchen and down stairs bathroom were targets of our buckets, brooms, and rags.  HandyMan gets full credit for the bathroom.  I was busy cutting corners in cleaning up the living room.

Then we all got to work in the kitchen.  While some believe in "keeping it real", I'm  not going to subject you to "before" shots of my nasty kitchen.  Here are my helpers at work:



We cleaned counters, appliances, cabinet fronts, and even under the fridge and stove.  It's sparkling clean, and has stayed that way for almost 5 hours now.





We'll see if I can maintain it -  at least for a couple days.

Book Review: Judgment Day

I love a good suspense novel. The type with a plot that twists and turns and leaves you lost in a maze.  Characters that are believable are essential to the good suspense novel.  Judgment Day by Wanda L. Dyson is one of those novels.

I was hooked from page one with this story.  Judgment Day reads with screen-type clarity with themes common in many action television shows and movies.  It’s not hard to imagine the tough chic female lead, the less than honorable reporter or the tangled mess of politicians and wealthy power players.

I was immediately board with Alex, Marcus and Razz to find the villain while irked by Suzanne the antagonist.  As the pages flew through my fingers multiple plot-lines unfolded with clarity and a great dose of suspense.  With solid hints at faith, the mentions are unobtrusive to the storyline and plot and come in believable moments in the story.

Judgment Day is a great, quick, read if you are a fan of mysteries or suspense novels.

I received a complementary copy of this book from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for this review as part of the Blogging for Books program.  The opinions and thoughts of this are my own and are not influenced in any way.

Trash Me Clothes

As I've mentioned before, we live rurally.  We have grass, rocks, mud and a creek all within 100 feet of our house.  Not to mention plans for gardening and painting and all sorts of other messy things once the weather turns nice.

G-Girl is usually right in the middle of our projects.  And the mud. And the paint.   I subsidize our clothing budget by consigning her clothes that are still in good shape by the time we're past the season or the time she outgrows them.  To this end I try to keep her stuff in pretty good shape.  But she is a kid and should not be deprived of a muddy, grass-stained, paint-covered childhood.  So I have developed her summer "trash me" wardrobe.

One of the dresser drawers at her level (since she now likes to pick  out her clothes) will contain her every-day Trash Me clothes.  The ones that are for the days where we're not going any farther than the back yard.  This drawer will have Trash Me Pants, and a stash of T-shirts dedicated to messiness.

The central piece of the Trash Me Wardrobe is the Trash Me Pants.  I gathered up a stack of old/extra t-shirts we had around and refreshed my memory RookieMoms directions for re-purposing adult T-shirts into toddler/youth pants.  Then I got to work!  I expanded the concept to use the long-sleeves from a long sleeve T-shirt for the legs of the toddler pants.  Since the stack of T-shirts that I started with were white - some with screen printing and some with stains.  So I picked up a packet of black dye to hide the stains they started with and so the pants wouldn't look totally nasty after a good afternoon in the yard.  Since I put too much fabric in the dye batch they ended up more of a steel-grey, but that's just fine.  I wasn't going for perfection on this project, just completion!



The elastic was about $3 with a coupon at Joanns and the dye was $2.50.  The old T-shirts were re-purposed and I had the thread on hand.  The cost of the project and 8 pair of pants/shorts/crops was under $6.  That works for me!

This post is linked up at We Are That Family: Works For Me Wednesday.