Steady Mom

Welcome to My Country Kitchen

Settling into a new house means settling into a new kitchen. They're not exaggerating when they say it's the heart of the home, right?

The place where we prepare, serve, nourish, and so much more.

I've shared here before about the kitchen in our previous home and the transformation we made to it. When completed, we had created a fabulous kitchen that would best serve us in that space. (You can see from the before photos, it had no cabinets--the owners had been too short to reach them, so never built any.)

I loved the snazzy appliances in that renovated kitchen--man, that oven could bake! It was super luxurious to cook with such brand new, shiny tools.

The kitchen we have now at our farmhouse doesn't have fancy appliances, though the ones it has work fine.

But what it lacks in sparkly tools, it more than makes up for in character.

Come on in:

The Biggest Mistakes People Make When Packing for a Move

It's two days before our move, and you may imagine that I would be surrounded by boxes and chaos.

But actually, I'm not.

We've taken a radically different approach to this move than the moves we've made in the past. We may come to regret it on Saturday at 3am, but hopefully, it will work out fine.

We've waited to start packing until five days before our move...with the majority of the packing happening Thursday and Friday. Yep, just two days.

I almost started the packing a couple of months ago, when a move began to look likely. But as I prepared the first box, a thought came to me:

A Morning Routine

Photo by Selena N.B.H.

A note from Jamie: We're still on vacation, so I'm not really following this specific routine at the moment, though it's still generally how we operate when we're at home. This post was originally published on October 5, 2010.

I've always been fascinated by how others run their days, especially since I became a mother. It encourages me to see how other moms make life work, and doing so has often given me ideas that I've been able to implement as well.

If you're curious about how we make mornings work around these parts, today I'm giving a snapshot of my current morning routine.

6:45 am - My alarm goes off and I jump eagerly out of bed! (Translation: My alarm goes off and I force myself out of bed, most days. Some days, to my detriment, I push snooze and suffer the consequences later.)

I try to take my showers at night because it saves me time in the morning. So I get dressed after waking--including clothes, hair, makeup, the works. If I'm on top of things, I'll make the bed and make sure the bedroom is tidy too.

Moving with Children: An Adventure & A Challenge

Photo by bfhoyt

The following post is written by Cortney Teeples of Praiseworthy.

 

We recently decided to move our little family to a new town and a new home. Not because we had to, but just because it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it. Unfortunately, the right time doesn’t always coordinate with the best time. 

Our move-day was the day my husband submitted his final report for an audit and within a week of the time he had to begin traveling to Denver for work, and it was right in the middle of two family weddings! That left me with an overworked husband and an extended family with very limited availability to help.

Along with those circumstances, every-day life continued to race on around us with birthday parties and church responsibilities, doctor appointments and all our normal chores and tasks. Oh how I wished I could have just put life on pause, packed all my boxes, gotten settled in to our new house, and then hit play again!

I did my best to prepare though, and in the end, the planning paid off. There were definitely things I would do differently, but a few things done right made all the difference.

Here is what I learned:

The Case for Once a Month Decluttering

My daughter's room

Back in April I wrote a post about how I deep clean my house once a month. I mentioned that "it’s amazing how a tidy, uncluttered house can fool people into thinking it’s clean."

In a followup post, I actually shared before and after photos of my cleaning days. In the comments Jenni wrote:

"Will you do a post on HOW your house looks so good in the before pictures? Decluttering? Organization? Simplifying? Daily pick ups? Where is all your STUFF? I love it!"

Others mentioned feeling discouraged by my photos (the complete opposite of my intention, by the way)--feeling like they had so far to go or that I secretly clean without calling it cleaning.

In a way, that's true--I don't consider tidying cleaning. No, I don't wash my dishes once a month (ew!) or sweep after meals once a month--putting things away is part of family life, doesn't take a ton of energy or time once you get started, and allows monthly deep cleaning to proceed with ease.

The secret to any success I've had in this area comes from stumbling across an organizational system that has worked well for me--once a month decluttering.