September 21, 2015

Traveling with kids (making it easy)

Traveling with kids can be exhausting and it takes a lot of work. We travel a lot with our kids mostly to see family so I kind of have it down to a science so packing up my family of 10 really isn’t super time consuming. I showed you on each of the pictures what I do but my biggest tip would be find something that works for you and then do it every time you travel so it’s easy and your kids know what to expect and how to pack. You don’t have to have bags with their names on them like we do, that was a gift from one of our grandma’s, we do love those but before we had those we just had a back pack for each kid. I keep a bin just for toiletries and have toothbrushes for each kid and toothpaste already in there so we don’t have to gather toothbrushes and toothpaste every time we go somewhere. I have a bin I put all our diapers and wipes in along with extra shoes. I keep swim suits in a bag in our hall closet so they are in that bag ready to go whenever we travel during the summer or if we just go to the pool. I didn’t take a picture of the basket that I put all our Sunday clothes in. It’s basically just a flexible laundry basket and I put all our Sunday clothes in one bin along with the Sunday shoes so that every thing is in one place when we need to get ready for church. We use re-usable shopping bags for for all our water bottles and some of our snacks and then I have a small plastic bin that I put medicine in (we always take children’s Tylenol and Ibuprofen with us where ever we go) along with snacks and I always bring lots of sandwich size plastic sacks to divide up treats/snacks when we are driving in the car. Hopefully this is helpful and next time you travel you can come up with a system that works so you can save yourself lots of time and headache when traveling with your kids.

*When we aren’t traveling I store almost everything except the kids bags (obviously because they are too big) in the container I use for the diapers, after we get home from a trip and I clean it out I just store everything we take on trips in that so it’s ready to go for the next time we travel.

September 2, 2015

Large baking sheet (bigger than your average cookie sheet)

debsfaves faves for the kitchen 0 Comments

My sister gave me this pan for Christmas and I love it! It is a cookie sheet that is not your standard size cookie sheet, the standard size cookie sheet is 12X17 (called a half sheet), this pan is 16X22 so it’s quite a bit larger but still fits in your standard oven no problem. It is amazing for large pans of rolls, potatoes, cookies, cinnamon rolls, veggies, you name it, it will cook more of it. It’s so nice to cook a larger quantity while using the same pan. It’s great for large crowds or just when you need to cook a lot of something, something we do a lot in this house. Here is a link where you can buy it on Amazon, I think Cash and Carry also carries them as well.

August 31, 2015

Goal Setting (to kick the school year off)

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I know you can’t read the little papers but these are our goals for the school year. Each Monday night our family comes together for a Family Night where we spend time together. I had a good friend tell me about her family setting goals and I thought that was such a great idea, thank you Heather. So for Family night a couple weeks ago I gave all the kids a slip of paper and had them write down three goals for the school year. My husband and I participated too. It’s important to me that my kids see me do the same things I ask them to do. Here’s what we wrote down…

An educational goal (something they wanted to accomplish learning wise this year ex. master times tables)
A spiritual goal (something spiritual they wanted to learn or read or focus on during the school year ex. read from the scriptures 10 minutes a day)
A physical goal (some way they wanted to physically push their body ex. healthier eating, more exercise etc.)

They all wrote down their goals twice and one piece of paper went in an envelope that we will open at the end of the year and one piece of paper was for them to keep so they could work on those goals throughout the year and refer back to it.

This was a great activity to do with my kids. Goal setting is so important and teaches kids so many great things. Setting a goal, working hard at it, being persistent and then eventually accomplishing it is an awesome lesson for kids (and adults) to learn. I am excited to open that envelope up at the end of the year and see who reached their goal. This may just become a new tradition at this house we’ll see how it goes this year.