Project 18, Get More Sleep, just seems like a cruel joke to this mama who would like nothing more than to do exactly that.

So, if someone could please convince my daughter to sleep through the night that would be great. Thanks.

My son doesn’t nap anymore, so getting a nap during the day isn’t an option either. I already go to bed after the kids do, and sleep as late as I can, so at this stage I’m not sure that there is much more I can do.

Someday…

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Project 17, Create an Essential Papers File, is one I should have started ages ago.

Both because I should have it, and because it’s going to take more than a week to get it done, so I’m not yet finished with it.

I will be *so* happy to have it done however, because it’s one of those nagging things in my brain that I know I need to do, but just needed a final push.

I’ve started with the simpler stuff – I already had a file which included things like passports and birth certificates, so I’ve used that as a starting point.

I’m working my way through compiling all the financial info into an easily-usable form for Mr. SJ. I do all the bill-paying and taxes and everything else dealing with financial paperwork, so if something were to happen to me he’d have a awful headache trying to figure out what we’ve got where.

And, I’m embarrassed to admit this, considering that we have two small children, but we don’t have wills. It’s one of my goals for the year, to get that done and a guardian officially named. We did do-you-own wills several years ago, but neither of us are entirely sure that they’d be valid, so they’d probably be nothing more than a hint as to our wishes, and wouldn’t be binding.

Being a responsible adult is so not fun sometimes.

Part of our deal with not taking care of it sooner is the whole how do we find an attorney issue. So, if you’re in the central Indiana area and have an attorney recommendation for putting together a will, can you leave a comment or send me an email? We don’t have any sort of complicated situation or anything, but we do want to make sure our kiddos are taken care of if anything were to happen to us.
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Project 16, Schedule Regular Date Nights is one I’m struggling with.

It’s not that I disagree with it, or don’t think it’s worthwhile. It’s 100% because of childcare issues.

And currently two possible solutions aren’t: everyone I know who has children has grandparents nearby to watch them, so there isn’t much motivation to swap child-care when you’ve already got it free and readily available.

Putting the kids to bed early and having a stay-at-home date also is less-than appealing, because it would just mean that the boy would wake up that much earlier in the morning. Ugh.

Honestly? I don’t generally worry about it that much. Mr. SJ’s family visits semi-regularly (2 or 3 times a year) and they always encourage us to leave the boy (and eventually the baby) with them and go off for an evening. I also know that this really is just a season, and doesn’t mean that foreverandever we will never again have a night to ourselves.

If you’ve got kids, do you make a special effort to have date nights? Especially when your kids are very young?

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When I first was considering buying the One Bite at a Time ebook, this week is one that jumped out at me as a “no way am I doing that” project.

I thought “Make Your Kitchen Paperless” was going to ask me to give up paper recipes and cookbooks, and instead use the computer for everything.

So I was relieved that the project is simply talking about paper towels and napkins. Whew!

I’m not entirely sure how to call this one however. My husband is a confirmed paper towel user, though I’ve gotten him to use them less at least. He’s never going to give them up completely. I almost never use them – my mom didn’t, and I think that’s why I never got in the habit of reaching for them. I’ve got plenty of dish cloths and other cleaning rags that work great.

(We are just talking about paper towels in the kitchen, to be clear. I use paper towels sometimes when cleaning the bathroom/wiping down outside and around the toilet. Boys = gross.)

We do still use paper napkins, because we’re using up the never-ending stash of napkins from some family get-together. I do love using cloth napkins however – I’m already doing laundry, so they’re easy to handle.

Honestly, our biggest issue of using paper in the kitchen is when we do have lots of family over. Paper plates and plastic cups and it’s all I can do to keep fishing recyclables out of the trash. None of his family recycles, so they never remember to not toss stuff in the regular trash. I don’t even own enough plates/cups/silverware to get through a meal when everyone is over, and it’s infrequent enough that it doesn’t seem worth it to buy a lot of extras for the rare occasions.

How do you handle large get-togethers if you don’t have a lot of dishware / glassware / silverware? Concede and buy disposable? Own more than you’ll generally use so that you don’t have to resort to disposable? If that’s your method, what do you do with the “extras” normally? Stash them somewhere out of the way? Or maybe you’ve got plenty of cabinet space and can store enough items to host large gatherings easily?

(For reference, our large family get-togethers can include close to 30 people, if not even more, so those are the numbers I’m trying to accommodate).

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Ok, after the review break last week, it’s back to working through the projects, and project 14 is to Eat Whole Foods.

This is another project that makes me happy because it’s something I’ve been working on already!

What are we doing right?

• We eat a ton of beans and legumes.
• I try and avoid all HFCS (I know there is something that we eat that I can’t find a HFCS-free version yet, but we do the best we can).
• I try and avoid all trans-fat (I think this one we’ve got out of our house 100% but I wouldn’t want to swear to it).
• I buy hormone-free dairy as much as possible (Milk is easy to find hormone-free. It’s all the other dairy products that don’t specify that gives me trouble.)
• We’ve cut back on our meat consumption, and I buy better quality.
• We’ve cut back or eliminated convenience foods that we used to eat all. the. time. (I am embarrassed to say how much of that famous boxed meal helper we ate when first married).

Where I still need to improve?

• I would like to cut back on our chip consumption – Mr. SJ LOVES them and eats them whenever he has sandwiches. It’s almost impossible for me to not eat some when he’s eating them.
• I’d like to make my own granola. It’d be so much cheaper, and it’s supposedly easy. I tried once and it was awful, so I have never tried again, but I want to give it another shot.
• I want to be more careful about buying organic produce for the dirty dozen.
• I’m really really thinking about doing some gardening this year.
• I’d like to start regularly baking my own English muffins. I’ve done it once, and they were good, but they weren’t exactly like what I’m used to. It’d still be much cheaper if I made them all the time, and maybe my taste buds would adjust.
• I’d also like to try making my own bagels and cinnamon raisin bread.
• I also want to start using a produce wash to remove pestacides on any non-organic produce I buy.
• Someday (maybe not this year) I’d like to try canning.

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As astonishing as it is to me, I am one quarter of the way through the book One Bite at a Time, so I’m taking this as an opportunity to review the last 13 weeks of projects.

What have I accomplished?

1. I’ve eaten my frog (but I still need to keep eating it!
2. I’ve celebrated that we already had a debt free plan
3. I’ve adapted my morning routine
4. I’ve revamped my evening routine
5. I’ve (continued) menu planning
6. I’ve (drumroll) created a family purpose statement (woo-hoo! This was a big one!)
7. I’ve (not) downsized my book and magazine collection
8. I’ve streamlined my mail
9. I’ve continued on with my already streamlined receipt system
10. I’ve (not yet) taken an annual vacation
11. I’ve cleaned as I go
12. I’ve cleaned the kitchen as I cooked.
13. I’ve had a weekly planning meeting with my husband (sort of).

My favorite projects have definitely been the ones that really are a check-off complete sort of project Creating a family purpose statement? It’s done. Yes, it might need to be reevaluated as our life changes, but for now it’s done. Menu planning? Has to be done again and again and again. Cleaning as I go and as I cook? Also endless.

I think what I’ve most appreciated about these projects is that it is keeping me moving forward and making some progress. Life with two small children is filled with the same things day in and day out and sometimes it’s hard to see that I’m accomplishing anything.

I’m really happy that I bought the book and have been working through it – it’s giving me some focus and projects that are very doable, even in this stage.

And now I’m looking forward to the next 13 weeks and what I’ll accomplish during them!

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Project 13, Plan weekly meetings with your spouse, is another one that gives me trouble just like the family purpose statement did, because it’s not just up to me – I have to get buy-in from Mr. SJ. And he’s not really big on weekly meetings.

The other big challenge right now is just logistically. Two small children and no babysitter makes it hard to have a weekly planning meeting. The baby is still sleeping so erratically that I’m having to go to bed at the same time as the kiddos to have any shot at being functional the next day, so evenings after the kids are in bed isn’t currently an option.

Fortunately there are no One Bite at a Time police around to see how exactly I’m implementing the projects, so I feel free to make it my own. And for us right now, that means a lot gets done electronically. Mr. SJ practically lives on the computer so it’s easy to get him to look at something I email him (much easier than getting him to spend some of his non-computer time discussing weekly plans).

Back before we had children, I was very good about sharing monthly budget and financial updates with Mr. SJ, but it’s been ages since I did that, so that’s where I’m going to start.

And once baby girl starts letting me get better sleep, I’ll try and convince Mr. SJ that it’ll be beneficial for us to add in a weekly planning meeting to our schedule.

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Apparently I should have read ahead because I kind of morphed this week’s project, clean the kitchen as you cook, with last week’s project, clean as you go.

One the plus side, that gives me an extra week to continue putting it all into practice before moving on to anything else!

Cleaning my kitchen as I cook is actually something I’ve tried to do for quite awhile. I’ve just gotten away from it in the last year or so, since G has gotten old enough to want to “help” me. It’s hard to strike a balance between letting him help as I teach him and work with him so that he’ll learn how to do things, and actually getting things done and avoiding risking injury or breaking all of our dishes.

What I do know is that when I haven’t kept the kitchen clean, it is so much more difficult to motivate myself to cook dinner if I have to clean up before even starting to cook. I also know that cleaning right away is so much easier than letting things sit.

I’m not so good about sweeping the floor when I drop things, so that’s what I’m trying to focus on, especially as baby girl gets ready to start crawling for real (as opposed to just the army crawling & rolling she’s doing now). I don’t especially want her to end up cleaning the floor for me as she scoots around.

Please tell me I’m not the only one who has to fight a tendency to let the same chores slide? Maybe it’s not the floors for you, but is there something you avoid until it just becomes impossible to ignore any longer?

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I love this week’s project because it’s such an obvious one: clean as you go. And I love this week’s project because I need it so much.

I am not a naturally neat & tidy person (huge understatement alert). I would love to be someone who enjoyed cleaning or easily kept things from dissolving into chaos, but I’m not. It’s hard for me to even believe those people exist, despite knowing some personally.

So as much as I know to do this, I still need the reminder to actually, you know, do this.

My self-imposed goals for the week:

• Clean the kitchen (counters/dishes) after every meal instead of letting it pile up all day.
• Dirty clothes into the basket at the end of the day. (This one is because of my son who tends to leave his clothes scattered everywhere and even pull ours out and add them to the chaos.)
• Clear off the kitchen table & island after every meal.
• Daily toy tidy-up

Not much, but it does make a difference in how the house looks, and that makes a difference in how I feel.

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I’m not entirely sure how to handle project ten, take an annual vacation/staycation. It’s not a project I can just decide on my own to do this week after all. And we’ve got no plans for any sort of vacation or staycation until this Spring at the earliest.

It’s not that I don’t think they’re important. This has been the first year of our married lives that we haven’t had a vacation of any length. Instead we moved. And had a baby. And went to a family reunion (in-state). And Mr. SJ has traveled back home twice, once in January for his parent’s 40th wedding anniversary (I was way too sick still from pregnancy to travel so I stayed home with the boy). Then again in September for his brother’s wedding (too soon post-delivery for me to be up for traveling that far so I stayed home with both kiddos).

All in all, a strange year for us travel-wise. We can’t really even do much of a staycation because Mr. SJ can’t take any more time off from work because he’s used so much this year already with his travel, two weeks of paternity leave, and additional time off when his family was in town throughout the year.

We do have hopes of traveling south in the Spring to see my family and some baseball games. We’d also like to get back out west to see his family, and we’d love to get there for Thanksgiving next year. Exact plans are still up in the air waiting to see what’s going on with work and our old house.

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