caring for my people, and the unusual reasons i use essential oils.

In the last two weeks, we've had a weird amount of sickness in the house.  This is unusual for us - we usually don't feel 'hit' by cold and flu season until about February, from which point on we are often sick until June.  (That's life in a large family; the germs just keep making the rounds.)  But here it is, September, and it's in the eighties so it still feels like summer, but my mind is suddenly feeling forced into Doomsday Prepper mode - what will I need to have in my arsenal to hopefully fend off The Crud this winter?

An old photo of broth simmering away on the stovetop and in my pressure cooker.  Remember when my kitchen used to be green and brown?  Rough times.

I have stuff on hand to start brewing Fire Cider.  I have elderberry syrup kits.  I want to get some garlic fermenting.  I have ascorbic acid Vitamin C, colloidal silver, and Vitamin D3/K2 drops.  My freezer is typically stocked with plenty of broth.  And I have essential oils.

I use a nail polish organizer to keep them within easy view inside my linen closet.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  I like oils.  They work.  I don't think they're a cure-all for every result of the Fall, but I do think they're a helpful part of a greater wellness arsenal.

I have been musing on home life lately, and looking to author-mentors to guide me along the way, and two things that have continued to come to mind through my readings are atmosphere and memory.  And I realized that essential oils could play a much larger part in a home atmosphere of care and compassion than I first realized.

To use an example, if a child has a headache, and I give them a Tylenol to swallow, it may help the headache, but it has mostly removed me personally from the process.  I have solved the problem, but I have not necessarily entered into the sickness.  However, to use a medium like essential oils is to touch my hurting child.  Some of the oils themselves, like peppermint or eucalyptus, feel immediately soothing, and my hands administer that.

Personally, I need this opportunity.  I'm not particularly patient with illness; it frustrates and exasperates me when the kids are sick.  I know myself too well to think I can be trusted with a cabinet full of easy, impersonal pills as my first line of defense.  I need to be trained to enter into my kids' suffering with compassion, understanding and patience.

(Now, I realize there may come a time for pharmaceuticals.  But I want to make my first attempts mine.  I want to be personally, intimately there with my kiddo as much as I can.)

Additionally, not only do oils utilize healing touch, but they also have distinct smells.  Which, I know, duh.  But the sense of smell is strongly linked to memory, and I want to leverage every tool at my disposal to help my kids form good memories of their life in our home.  Edith Schaeffer says that the only way to keep time is to take it with us into the future as memories.  Our life on earth is fleeting, but we can redeem the passing time by hanging onto as much of it as we can through intentional memory-making.  I want my adult kids to smell peppermint and experience comfort as they remember me rubbing their heads or their bellies when they didn't feel well.  I want them to have triggers for memories of being cared for and loved well when they were at their most vulnerable.

So I have made it a point lately to pull out my oils when there are opportunities to do so, and my kids are noticing.  They are asking for them, and telling me how much they like it when I use them.  I know that in our home, an atmosphere of care and compassion is slowly growing like leaven through a lump of dough, and I'm excited by that.  And time will tell whether they're forming the memories I hope they are, but I can pray they are and I'm doing what I can to help them.

Practically speaking, if you haven't used oils much, I can tell you that you don't need a ton of them to start, and you don't need to buy super pricey ones.  Plant Therapy is an excellent, super high quality brand, and Edens Garden is also good and comes in prettier packaging.  (Priorities, am I right?)  Most of the oils and blends I use are in the $8-$13 range, which helps me feel like I'm balancing the stewardship of both our heath and our finances at the same time.

These are the oils that I personally use the most:

Peppermint: for headaches and tummy aches in kids over six.  Peppermint can irritate airways in younger kids, so we don't use it on them.  Plant Therapy (here and here) and Edens Garden (here and here) both offer oil blends for these ailments that are safe for younger kids.  For the older kids, I buy the kind already diluted in a roller bottle, as it makes it easy to apply, and peppermint is a strong oil so I want to make sure the dilution is correct.

Lavender: for headaches, sleep disturbances, stress, and skin issues (rashes, itchiness).

Tea tree/melaleuca: as an antibacterial in cuts and scrapes.  I also sometimes put it in homemade cleaning solutions for extra germ-fighting.


A couple extras that get more occasional use:

Helichrysum: to stop bleeding.  EXCELLENT for nose bleeds.  It's a pricey oil, though, and while I'm glad I have it, I'd be able to live without it if I needed to, as my kids aren't major bleeders.

Frankincense: for skin issues, especially scarring.  This oil is also a bit more expensive than the first three (though not as expensive as helichrysum), and gets less use.  I just personally have a major beef with scarring, so I like having it on hand, but it's not absolutely necessary.

Healthy Hero: a kid-safe immunity blend.  (Did you know Thieves is not recommended for use around children under the age of 10?  As this is the age range most of my kids are in, I don't even have a normal/non-kid-safe version on hand.  It's important to me to make sure I'm not risking their health when I'm trying to build their health!) I honestly don't use this as much as I could/should, but it does get pulled out occasionally.


And, not related to curing illness, but for creating atmosphere and smell-linked memories in our home, I've fallen in love with diffusing this lately:

It is called Lemongrass Ylang Ylang from Edens Garden, and it has magnolia in it, so it's definitely floral.  But it's balanced with citrus, which smells really clean.  It might not be for everyone, but we love it!  I have become super sensitive over the last few years to synthetic fragrances, and 'stuff' in the air.  Sometimes I even get physically ill.  But oils haven't done that to me, so I like having an intentional scent in our home that doesn't make me feel crappy, or put toxins in the air around the kids.


So while those aren't earth-shattering reasons to use oils, I do feel like they're the most compelling ones in our house, and ones I don't see mentioned often in the discussion.  Soon, I'll fill you in on another surprising tool that Scripture instructs us to have in our wellness arsenal...

how we store toothbrushes to avoid sharing germs.

This seems like a dumb topic to post about, but I will tell you that I have mentally labored over the toothbrush problem for months, so I have zero issues believing that maybe one of you can get some use out of this little tip.

We don't have any vertical storage in our bathroom.  Our mirror doesn't have a cabinet behind it, and other than cavernous cabinet space under the sink, all we have to work with is drawers.  All the kids would toss their toothbrushes into the same drawer, where they'd mingle together, all wet and spitty, until the next toothbrushing session.  This is gross enough.

But add to that the fact that we brush with bar soap at our house, and they were all sharing the same bar of soap.  Last winter, when we could just NOT kick the stomach bug for four straight months, it did occur to me that the bar soap situation wasn't doing us any favors.

View this post on Instagram

A while ago, I mentioned on the blog that I brush my teeth with soap and baking soda. No morning breath, fewer coffee stains, no weird chemicals in my mouth - win/win/win! This is my new favorite kind to use.

A post shared by Paige Van Voorst (@theminivanvoorsts) on Feb 5, 2018 at 9:53am PST

So this fall, I decided we needed to make some proactive changes to prevent so much intimate contact with one another's germs, just for overall hygiene reasons, and to hopefully prevent illness from running completely unchecked for another winter.

I started by buying each of them a color-coded travel set for their toothbrush and soap.  (I've told you before that my kids all have their own assigned colors for everything, right?  Atticus is blue, Penelope is pink, Finneas is green, Laurelai is purple, Rocco is red, and Callista doesn't yet have an assigned color.  It makes it SO easy to keep everyone's stuff organized to be able to figure out the owner of something at a quick glance.)

Then, I cut a couple of bars of soap down, since the soap we use isn't super cheap so I didn't want to buy five whole bars, and because a single bar of soap lasts FOREVER when only being used for toothpaste.

Then I just put everything in an easily-bleached plastic tub under the sink.

All my fingers and toes are crossed that this will do some massive prevention of cross-contamination this winter!

avoiding the Plague like it's, well... the Plague.

We used to be healthy.

When we lived in Iowa, flu season would roll around and we'd be all, "Oh, pshaw.  Oh, shrug, shrug.  Oh, whatever."  We'd get the occasional cold, but the barfs were very rare for us, hitting us only once every few years.

The last couple of winters, though... man.  I don't know if it's the climate down here, or if our house is some kind of disease-ridden hotbed, or if our new Missouri friends are secretly and slowly trying to poison us, but, dang.  We have been hit hard and often, with our stomach bug cycles seeming to just repeat over and over and over from February until June.  Multiply the barfs by eight people across four months, and it is truly apocalyptic.  I'm genuinely surprised I'm still alive to tell the tale.

But this year, you guys.  This year is going to be different.  It has to be different.  I just can't do it anymore.  So I'm girding my loins, stocking my arsenal and setting my face to rout the enemy.  I will not be mocked; I will not be conquered; I will not be weak.

I'm busting out the big guns: a daily concoction of elderberry syrup and grape juice.

 I keep a silly-looking Dixie cup dispenser on hand in the kitchen for this daily purpose; the flip-top mason jar lid has made it MUCH more likely that I'll stay regular with this, since it requires so little effort or clean-up to bartend this cocktail.

Why elderberry syrup?  Because this stuff is a Christmas-flavored Immune System in a Jar.  I get kits from my friend Paige (YES! I KNOW!) at Elder N Honey Co. and make it with honey I buy locally.  (Eh.  "Local" is relative; I buy mine by the gallon through a friend in Iowa, so it's not exactly in my backyard, and figuring out how to get it from her place to mine involves a series of complicated hand-offs compiled to form what we've dubbed "Operation Honey Wagon.")  If you can boil pasta, you are a more advanced chef than is required for making your own elderberry syrup with one of these kits.

I ordered two kits this year, which is enough to make about six pints, but we're already through two pints so far, so I may need to order a couple more when they come back in stock.  (These seriously fly off the shelves; they're that good.)

The results of one kit.

Also - why do I add grape juice?  I'm both proud and ashamed to admit that it's mostly because of an unquestioning belief in everything I read on the internet.  I saw a random Facebook post about the stomach flu being unable to survive in a stomach regularly doused in grape juice.  Why?  Who knows.  There is no supporting science that I'm aware of.  HOWEVER.  I figure it can't hurt, and I'm a desperate woman.  So, grape juice shots for everybody!!!! (Except Laurelai, who is the only preschooler in the history of the world who doesn't like juice of any kind, so she takes her elderberry syrup straight and neat.)

I will soon be adding these Vitamin D drops and some sodium ascorbate to the cocktail to add to the immune boosting powers, but for now, this is at least a good start.

For Callista, who is old enough to take remedies with honey, but is also still young enough that I'm solely responsible for her care and therefore constantly looking for shortcuts, I use these Vitamin C drops, also from Elder N Honey Co.  They come with their own little dropper, so I don't have to deal with using my own medicine syringe, which is just more work than it's worth somehow.  I ordered 6 oz. to cover us for the upcoming season.

In addition, I also have been brewing my own fire cider - a truly terrifying infusion of apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, horseradish, turmeric, garlic, jalapenos, etc. etc. etc.  It sits for a month, at the end of which time I am supposed to strain out all the solids and refrigerate the infused liquid.  At the onset of any nasties, any of the Potentially Infirm are instructed to mix a shot of this fire cider with some honey, and cross their fingers that they don't poison themselves.  It all sounds very thrilling, and promisingly effective.  My half-gallon batch was ready to strain on Halloween... but I've been too chicken (ahem, I mean, too early pregnant and too concussed... and also too chicken) to approach it.  But I will pep-talk myself into it one day soon.

After sitting for a month, the ingredients seem to have leached most of their color - and presumably, their essence - into the liquid.  Which I am very afraid but resolved to drink.

I am also about to embark upon a journey of fermenting garlic cloves in raw honey, which I'm actually quite excited about, and seems simple enough.  (Peel garlic; cover in honey; leave in breathable jar for a month, turning occasionally; beat All the Germs; call yourself a home remedy wizard; win awards.)  

And that, friends, is what my kitchen is currently churning out in preparation for creating an anti-Plague bubble around the Van Voorst family this winter.  What other tips do you have for me?


*Yes, yes.  I realize this post was a total plug for Elder N Honey Co.  I'm not being compensated by them or anything; I just love this company that much.  The Amazon links, on the other hand, are purely affiliate links.  Cha-ching, suckers. JK JK I am always grateful for the small amount of commission that comes my way when you order - at no extra cost -through the links I post!)

my recipe for homemade toothpaste.

I've mentioned before that we don't use store-bought toothpaste at our house.  Long story short, toothpaste can coat your teeth with glycerin and weird chemicals, preventing the teeth from remineralizing.  And if it can seal out minerals, I'm presuming it can actually seal in cavities.  (But I'm no tooth scientist; just a common-sense mom, if that hasn't been clear.)  Plus, with as much as our kids swallow it, I didn't love reading the ingredient lists on even the natural toothpastes and wondering what the crap I was even looking at.

A while ago, I mentioned on the blog that I brush my teeth with soap and baking soda. No morning breath, fewer coffee stains, no weird chemicals in my mouth - win/win/win! This is my new favorite kind to use.

A post shared by Paige Van Voorst (@theminivanvoorsts) on Feb 5, 2018 at 9:53am PST

So we've been using bar soap to brush our teeth and I've really been liking it.  It has kept our teeth really clean.  But with only one bar of soap between us, we were running into the problem of extensive germ-sharing.  We would each run our toothbrushes along the surface of the soap before brushing, and I strongly suspect it was cycling sickness amongst us.  I was trying to figure out a way to give everyone a separate bar of soap, and to keep them all separate and organized, but a noncomplicated solution was proving elusive. 

My best idea involved a couple baskets hung on the inside of the cupboard doors, with a color-coded water cup holding a color-coded soap dish and toothbrush for each kid.  It's still not out of the realm of possibility that a system like this might someday be unveiled at Chez V.V., but for the time being, I didn't want to spend the time and money hunting around for all the supplies I'd need.  Luckily, a better solution presented itself in the meantime.

I follow The Clementine Bee on Instagram because of the adorable eco-friendly products they offer, and a couple weeks ago, Melissa (the owner) posted the ingredients she was gathering together to make some remineralizing toothpaste for her family.  As it turned out, I had every ingredient in my possession - ironically, from the time four years ago that I had purchased all the supplies to make remineralizing toothpaste... and then promptly forgot about them.  (I have issues with follow-through.)

So the other day, I pulled out everything I'd be using.

Coconut oil
Bentonite clay
Baking soda (OPTIONAL: see note)
Essential oils (I used peppermint and tea tree)
Stevia (liquid or powder)
Trace mineral drops (optional)

I mixed together about 1 part coconut oil, 1/2 part clay, and 1/2 part baking soda.  There is really very little science to this - you really can't mess it up.  Just going by consistency, and keeping in mind that the upcoming summer months would make the coconut oil extra runny, I opted for a bit more clay to keep things stiff.  (In the winter, when coconut oil tends to stay hard in the cooler temperatures, I'll use less clay.)  Note on baking soda: you may be worried about it being too abrasive on your enamel to brush with baking soda, and that's fine!  Just leave it out and increase the clay.

Once I got a consistency that looked good - soft, but able to hold its shape on a toothbrush - I added  a few drops of trace minerals, a few drops of each essential oil, and a few drops of stevia.  (If you're using powdered stevia, add small amounts at a time and taste as you go.)

Once it was mixed, I was back to navigating the germ dilemma.  Did it really accomplish anything for me to put it all in a communal jar that we'd dip our toothbrushes into?  Or, alternatively, did I really want to have to have eight separate jars of toothpaste floating around the bathroom, potentially getting mixed up with each other anyway?

I wanted something sanitary but simple to store.  Like a tube of toothpaste.  But what could I buy that would function like a tube of toothpaste?  Then I remembered I had one lone refillable squeeze pouch a friend had given me last year.  I hadn't found a use for it, so it had just been languishing in the kitchen drawer, all alone and purposeless.  Bingo bango.

It has worked well.  We did have one incident where the toothpaste kind of hardened in the spout for a little while, but once it resolved itself, we haven't had the same issue since.  I also had to duct tape the bottom closed since it did pop open once when the kids were trying to squeeze it.  So it's not a fail-proof system, but it does seem to be working well enough for me to consider it a win!

Honestly, it tastes like toothpaste.  Sweet and minty.  It does have a bit of saltiness from the baking soda, but I could easily add a bit more stevia to cover that up if I minded it, but I don't.

Unfortunately, Penelope and Finneas seem to hate the stronger taste of mint than they're used to, and we've had to overcome some tears and gagging during the transition.  So I promised Penelope that the next time I make this, we'll try lemon essential oil instead of mint.

Overall, I'm really, really happy with this toothpaste, and I'm really hoping it helps keep the kids' teeth healthy and strong.  It tastes good, and cleans SO well.  The only drawbacks I am noticing are that you need to rinse it out well when you're done brushing (it can kind of overstay its welcome), and unlike normal toothpaste residue that creates a white film in the sink, this stuff (being clay-based) can leave a brown, muddy-looking residue.  But since we wipe down the counters and sink daily, it hasn't been horrible to keep on top of.

There you have it!  Who knew you could concoct toothpaste at home?  If you'd like to give it a go yourself, here are the supplies I used:






Okay, okay. I didn't actually use the animal pouches in the bottom list, but HOW CUTE ARE THEY?!?!?!?! I just had to include them. Maybe at some point, I'll make each kid their own tube of toothpaste to keep track of, each with a different animal pouch. Adorable.

I will mention - these affiliate Amazon links are to the smallest packages of the products I already had on hand. You will likely be able to find many of them cheaper or in smaller quantities at your local health food store, or even Aldi!

our visual family schedule.

Sorry in advance for the terrible photo quality.  We get no natural light from this side of the house, so pictures are hard to take from this direction.

Have you ever read "Managers of Their Homes" by Steve and Teri Maxwell?  If not, you should.  It is full of absolute gold.  It's basically an instruction manual for doing with your time what Dave Ramsey says you should do with your money: make it work for you.  You decide how to spend it.  You decide where it goes and what it does for you.  I don't necessarily believe as strongly as the authors that sticking to a strict daily schedule is a moral issue (I'm more of the 'routines over schedules' type), but I have found many of the principles really helpful and biblical.

Because I'm more of a routine-type, I haven't really felt the need to have a chunked out visual schedule for the family until recently, even though they strongly recommend it (and the book itself actually comes with a kit to accomplish just that).  Lately, however, I've just felt like I'm always dropping a ball somewhere - college girls will show up at my house for meet-ups, for instance, and I'm caught completely off-guard, even though they come at the exact same time every single week.  I just can't keep it all in my brain anymore.

So a few weeks ago, Penelope and I sat down to make a large poster board schedule, with color-coded Post-Its for each activity type.  It took an inordinate amount of time, and I started to worry that I was just wasting my already scattered time on a glorified craft.  (Psychotic scheduling is the crafty-fun-time of the left-brained, Type A, firstborn set.)

I keep it on the inside of the basement door so it doesn't ugly up the rest of the house, and a side benefit of its placement is that I can stare at it from the spot where I eat breakfast and plan my day.

But you know what?  THIS THING HAS SAVED MY LIFE.  That's almost not hyperbole.  Not only can I know, at a glance, what the day will hold, but I've also started using it to move activities around to more efficient time-slots.  I never realized there was a more streamlined way of doing things until I saw it on paper.

Those blue slots are discretionary time for me - helping the kids with their independent school work, running laundry through, taking a shower, reading a book, etc., all happen during the blue slots.

So, for instance, one regular sticking point for us has been Atticus' speech therapy appointments.  I'd scheduled them on Tuesday mornings, which often meant we got no morning school done, throwing the rest of the week totally off as we tried to play catch-up.  But seeing on paper that I was already running a lot of errands on Wednesdays, and very little school is ever scheduled on that day, helped me to realize that scheduling speech then would actually work so much better.  We tried the new arrangement out yesterday, and while it makes for a looooong day of errands, it also meant that it purchased back for us almost an entirely normal half a day on Tuesday.

The weeks are color-coded, too: Oranges are 'out of the house' activities, Pinks and blues are school, bright green/yellow are meet-ups/ministry, light purples are family activities.

It's also helping me brainstorm where to fit things I was frequently dropping the ball on.  I figured out how to fit family quiet time in before breakfast (I'll post more about this soon), and it has been working out really well.  I also noticed that I don't have a regular weekly cleaning time, so I'm trying to puzzle out where that should fit in.

This has been so insanely helpful to me lately; I really have no idea why I was so resistant to doing it sooner.

my house cleaning routine (and, simultaneously, my first vlog).

Well, I did it.  I mastered the webcam long enough to do a quick vlog!  Well, sort of mastered the webcam.  There's definitely a spot in there where the video cuts out for a second, and the sound quality is weird.  I clearly still have no idea what I'm doing.  But whatever!  I made a vlog!

So, without further ado, here's the first video in the FAQ series.  If you have any topics you'd like me to cover, make sure to let me know in the comments, on the Facebook page, or via email!

this is apparently what i do with my free time.

In a weird turn of events, I am finding myself with a normal week on my hands.  I seriously have no idea when the last time was that we had multiple days in a row in which we had nothing too far out of the ordinary on the agenda.  The students are on break, so while I'll still get together with a couple of them, it won't be during times that take my attention away from homeschool.  Also, we're waiting on our insurance to approve more speech therapy for Atticus, so no appointments whatsoever this week.

I am embarrassingly excited by this.  I have no idea what to do with my time, so I'm doing idiotic stuff with it.

I may or may not have found myself on Monday with saw in hand, hacking away at some scrap wood so I could stabilize this janky old bookshelf we have.  Once it was stabilized, I was like, "Hmm.  This would look good in the girls' room."  So it moved.  But now I have to find a place for the dresser that resultantly got bumped from its spot, so I'll be moving it into the closet.  But there's already a dresser in there, so I'll be moving that to our room... and on and on and on.

Plus, the weather is supposed to be unseasonably nice today, so I thought it would be a good day to clean out the garage so I could get the Christmas stuff put away out there.  But in order to organize the garage, I need a new shelf unit.  No problem, since I got some Lowe's cards for Christmas, but that means I need to actually stop at Lowe's to get it.  And if I'm stopping at Lowe's anyway, I'll just grab the brackets I need to secure the closet shelves, and maybe some paint samples for Callista's room...

I am clearly in denial about the fact that I have only three days left of this wide open week, so even though I have more time than usual, I don't have an eternity.  Plus, knowing me, I'll get all the supplies I need and then end up spending the afternoon reading instead of doing anything more productive.

Ahh well.  By the end of the week, I'll at least have a torn up house and a bunch of half-finished projects to show for myself, and no time or ambition left to complete any of it, so I have that to look forward to.

Onward and upward, friends!

just one more way in which God is providing.

When we lived in Story City, we had a huuuuge house - five bedrooms, three bathrooms, basement family room, finished attic, 3600 square feet.  Everything we would ever need in a 'forever' house for a large family, plus it was beautiful to boot.  It was built in 1913 and had all the original woodwork, chandeliers, leaded glass, pocket doors.  Dang.  I still tear up when I think about that house, so I'm not going to keep dwelling on it, and I'll just move on to the real point of this post.

We had purchased a double bed for one of the (then-empty) bedrooms, for guests to use.  But when we moved to Cedar Falls, we didn't have official room for it. (Our house at that point was three bedrooms, one bathroom, and 1100 square feet.)  So we laid down a big piece of scrap carpeting in our unfinished basement, and put the bed down there for guests.  Not ideal, but at least it was something.

Once we got to this current house, and all of the four bedrooms were allocated to permanent residents, we still had nowhere for our guest bed, so it's been weirdly sitting out in the relative middle of our basement family room.  It's somewhere for guests to stay, which is nice, since out-of-state church planting just kind of comes with lots of potential for overnight guests, so we've had a lot of need for it.  But the setup hasn't been ideal - there's no privacy for friends who are staying, and when the boys wake up and come out of their room, they just kind of... stare at our sleeping guests until the guests feel a heavy gaze upon them and wake up totally freaked out.

See how weird the set-up currently is?

Suuuuuuuuuuuper weird.

So I've been praying God would somehow provide a better bed setup for us that would accommodate the double mattress.  Essentially, I was wanting a twin-over-full bunk bed set for the boys' room, where guests could stay when they come, but the boys could use the rest of the time.

The other day, I got a rando text from a friend saying she was getting rid of a twin-over-full bunk set if I wanted it - for free.  It's solid wood, and super sturdy and everything.  (We have twin bunks, but they are SO RICKETY we can't bunk them anymore, but these are really secure.)  I told her I had been praying specifically for that very item, and she said she doesn't even remember me ever mentioning it, and honestly, I don't think that I had, either.  It just kind of came to her mind that she thought I was looking for one.  God is so funny and awesome.

So once the carpet is installed next week, we'll get to assemble our brand new bunk beds and get the bed out of our family room.  I feel like living this house is starting to make more sense for us, and I'm so grateful.  It's these small (and not-so-small) things that God is faithfully providing lately that make me feel better about this being our house, and feel more and more 'at home.'  It hasn't been fast progress in that direction, but it's progress, and I'm really grateful.

Now, maybe with the new carpet and new bed arrangement, I'll finally get motivated to want to paint the basement - 1000 square feet of ceiling, walls, and trim, so it's no small deal, but it will be totally worth it.  IF I can get motivated to just do it.  And also figure out when I'm going to do it, since there's the tiny, insignificant issue of impending labor, birth and newborn... you know.  Shenanigans like that.

we're getting new carpet, and here's the 'how.'

So, I've already told you what happened with the carpet on the basement stairs - long story short, Todd was carrying a cooler full of milk in glass bottles down the steps, and the handle of the cooler broke off.  Shards of glass sprayed everywhere, and two-and-a-half gallons of milk saturated the stairs.  We had a company come to clean it up, but the guy was like, "I can make it look better, but I can't make it smell better.  You won't be able to get the milk out of the carpet and pad unless you totally rip it out and start over."

Because it started smelling so badly, Todd ripped up the carpet on the stairs, and some of the carpet in the family room downstairs, and we've been living with exposed wood stairs and exposed concrete on the floors since then.  We weren't totally sure what we were going to do, since insurance wasn't going to cover it, and we had definitely not budgeted anything like this into the finances for the year. 

We thought we'd go ahead and just recarpet the stairs, since sound from the basement is SO LOUD without the carpet up the stairs, and the boys keep stepping on exposed staples and stubbing their toes on the wood.  It felt necessary to get some carpet back down for functional reasons.  (Plus, obviously, it was dang ugly.)  Just doing the stairs would be cheaper than recarpeting everything, even though aesthetically it was less than ideal - the stairs would be one kind of carpet, the family room would be another (really, really terrible, dirty carpet tiles destroyed by the previous owners' dog), and the boys' bedroom would be another (the carpet from even BEFORE Dirty Dog Carpet got installed).  It was going to look janky, but it would do the job and fit the budget.  And at least it would look better than this:

But then I got a text from a sweet friend, saying she had overnighted me a package I'd have to be around to sign for.  I got the box the next day, opened it, and was pleased but slightly confused to find a pair of Old Navy boots she had sent to Laurelai after they didn't work for her daughter.  It was such a nice gift, but I wasn't sure why they needed to be overnighted and signed for.  But there was something else at the bottom of the box...

I pulled it out, and it was a check for the new carpet.  Not just enough for the stairs, but the whole basement.  I started sobbing at how big and faithful God was in that moment to provide for us.  (The kids were super confused, like, "Why are you crying if you're happy?")

Todd first tithed from the amount, since he's always so grateful that God consistently provides for us that he wants to respond with generosity and trust by holding even gifts with open hands.  (I love this about him.)  Then I got the name of a wholesale carpet guy, he came over and measured the basement, and guess what - the estimate came in at TEN DOLLARS UNDER what was left.  Ten dollars, you guys.  Ten dollars.  And this is fixed - this is the final amount he will be charging me for carpet, pad, and labor.  There won't be any hidden costs.  God provided exactly what we needed.

So the guys are coming next Tuesday to install our new (beautiful! clean! padded!) carpet, and I couldn't be more excited.  And instead of just getting new carpet, we have an amazing story how God, once again, came through for us in surprising ways.

I'm so excited to show you pictures once it's all installed!  Now, I just need to spend the remainder of the week getting all the furniture moved out of there, and the deep freeze and fridge cleaned out so they can be moved out of there... No small job, but totally worth it.  Pictures to come!

plans for a family closet.

So, I'm starting to hit that late stage of pregnancy where everything feels very imminent, and I get that 'thing' (nesting?) in me that tells me I need to do All the Projects and paint All the Things.  Last night, we were all sitting around watching a movie for family movie night, and I just kept staring at the basement ceiling, wondering how many weeks it would take me to paint the ceiling, trim, and walls of all 1000 square feet down there... and if it was realistic to hope to accomplish it before the baby comes.

I realize it's not.  I also realize it's in no way necessary at this point in life.  But I just get so itchy.  Like, I'm also currently dying to just cut a big hole in the dining room wall and put in a sliding door.  Also not realistic or necessary, even though I WANT TO SO BADLY.

So I'm turning my attention to an actual problem that needs an actual solution sooner rather than later: clothing storage.  Right now, the kids are sharing three dressers between the five of them, and there is no room for another kid's clothes.  We also don't have room for another dresser in the house.  (In fact, Todd's dresser is currently housed in the garage because we can't fit it in here.)  Conundrum. 

But you know what I do have room for?  A family closet in the laundry room.  WHAT?! Wouldn't that just be the best?  A single place to keep all the kids' clothes - one area, one piece of furniture, right next to the washer and dryer?  Angels, people.  I hear angels.

But the thing is... here is the side of the laundry room that I've set my sights on:

It's already full of bins.  So, the simple solution is to move the bins.  But this is my only storage area, so I can only move them to the garage.  Even once I've reconciled myself to the possibility of mold and mice getting into them if they're stored out there, I run into the problem of not having a ton of space there either.  But I could make space... if I take the old loveseat to Goodwill, and sell the jogging stroller and single stroller, and give our old coffee table away, and buy some shelves to get the rest of the boxes off the floor.  Simple enough, right?  Realistic to accomplish in the next few weeks?

And then I could actually set up the closet system.  I almost never hang any of the kids' clothes, so I only need to worry about getting drawers or tubs for everything.  (Their church clothes are hanging in an upstairs closet, which would probably just stay the same.)  I'm thinking I'll set up this:

via

And for drawers, I'll label these with each owner's initial and the intended contents:

via

Clothes for Rocco and the new baby would still be stored in the nursery, so I'd currently only need to use four rows of the five available.  I'd give Atticus the highest row, and down the line, and use the uppermost row for storage of right size/wrong season clothes for each of them.

You guys, I'm basically foaming at the mouth thinking about this.  I need to make this happen.  And I have basically no time in the next couple of months in which to clean out the garage, move bins, make a trip to Ikea, set it all up, move the kids' clothes into it, and set up a streamlined system before the baby comes, but I am praying hard that it can somehow miraculously happen.  I need this, people, or I'm a-scary-amount tempted to take a sledgehammer to the dining room wall.


*For some more family closet inspiration, I do have quite a few related things (and some unrelated things) pinned on this board, if you're curious.

spring cleaning.

Years (lifetimes?) ago, I was a Spring Cleaner.  Like, hardcore.  I liked spring cleaning so much I did it twice a year, because only doing it in spring just wasn't enough for me.  I'd pull everything out of everywhere - closets, cupboards, shelves - sort things, scrub things, organize things.  I had lists for every room that started up at the top with the light fixtures and ended with the floors, baseboards and air vents.  And then I'd put everything all back in order and feel so good about the state of my life.  Like, if the depths of my house were clean, the depths of my soul felt clean.

That is so far removed from the current state of my life, it's laughable.  I mean, I still 'spring clean,' but the meaning has drastically changed.  Because it's spring, the kids are playing outside more.  Because the kids are playing outside more, they are getting dirtier.  And because they're getting dirtier, my house is a constant pit.

On the bright side, items do stay picked up longer, since the kids aren't inside creating chaos all day, but dang.  We're at the point where I have to take a magic eraser to the streak of grime running down the hallway walls twice a week.  I am that weird lady who magic erasers her walls twice a week.  I mop at least once a week, I scrub the bottom of the tub a few times a week.  I even have to wash the shower curtain on regular basis because it gets MUDDY.  (Not the liner, the actual outside, decorative one.)  HOW DOES A SHOWER CURTAIN GET MUDDY, I ASK YOU.  I'm surprised there's any dirt still left in the yard for them to bring in - it feels like it's already all been brought.

And to clean any of it up feels like that part of The Cat In The Hat Comes Back where they're trying to clean up the pink ring from inside the tub, and then it just transfers itself to the mom's dress, to the walls, to the rug, to the bed, to the snow.  It doesn't go away, it just dirties up the next thing.  I AM the kid in The Cat In the Hat, all panic-stricken and overwhelmed, like WHY WON'T THIS JUST GO AWAY I DON'T UNDERSTAND HELP ME.

So, all that to say, I do not regularly do the classic 'spring clean' anymore.  I'm too busy keeping my house from looking like a scene from a movie about the Dust Bowl to care about scrubbing the contact paper lining my kitchen shelves.  Priorities.


Now.  Off to scrub the same walls again.

our """"""mudroom""""""" (heavy sarcasm).

Oh, guys.  I'm almost embarrassed to tell you what I'm going to tell you.  Or show you what I'm going to show you.  Can I have just a minute to give some backstory so you don't totally judge me later on in the post?

When we bought this house, what we liked about it was the extra living space it had - it has four bedrooms (one more than our last house), two bathrooms (one more than our last house) and a separate basement family room (again, more space than our last house).  As far as living space goes, this house is stellar.  ...As far as storage space goes, this house is sorely lacking.  Basically the entire house is finished living space.

The only storage spaces we have, besides bedroom closets, are a single car garage and my laundry room.  That's it.  No attic storage, no basement storage, nothing under the eaves.  In those regards, this house is the least functional place we've ever lived.

So, I'm trying to do what I can to make it work.  My clothing bins are currently stored in my laundry room, although I literally don't have space for even one more single bin, so when the big kids move up a size, I'm going to be in a pickle.  Also stored in our laundry room are all of our homeschool curricula, CD's and movies, painting supplies, cleaning supplies, the kids' shoe bins, and my scrapbooking files.  There is barely any room left for laundry.

The right side of our laundry room.

The left side of the laundry room.  I still need to get rid of the old crapped-out washer...  

So... what to with all my decor (which is still packed up in moving boxes), my Christmas decorations, our school supplies, our yard gear, our suitcases, my great-grandmother's crystal set, our tools, the coolers, etc etc etc...?  Plus, our bedrooms are so small that Todd's dresser doesn't fit in the house, so we needed to find a spot for that so he still had access to things like socks and underwear.  Not to mention we don't even have an entryway closet or any place near the door to keep coats and shoes...  What on earth were we going to do?  (Other than the option to stop being hoarders, like this list makes us sound.)

Using the attached single-car garage was our only option.  This is all I have.  It has become our mudroom-slash-storage room.  As there is no shelving or available organization, IT IS NOT PRETTY.  IT IS SO NOT PRETTY.  And I am losing my mind.

This is our "mudroom":

There are no hooks that the kids can reach themselves.  There is a small basket for shoes that is clearly inadequate.  It is freezing cold out here, so people (ahem, I) never want to spend much time out here trying to keep things organized.

I can't take it anymore.  All I want for Christmas is a magical shelving elf to come in and tap his wand around and click his little heels, and give me some shelves for my Christmas boxes and decor, a hanging bar for storing out-of-season coats, some lockers/cubbies for coats and shoes, and some rafter hooks for bikes.  Also, if he could haul away the loveseat and coffee table that are out there that I still need to get rid of, I would greatly appreciate it.  (For an elf, he's quite muscular and capable of hauling furniture, so I'm really not being unreasonable.)

I spend a weird, unhealthy amount of time dreaming about what this garage could achieve with just a little bit of vertical storage.  AND SO VERY MANY COAT HOOKS AND SHOE CUBBIES.

only a year in the making.

last december, i was in major nesting mode before finneas came.  as in, i was meltingdown that the color of nearly every.single.wall. in our house was Smoker Teeth Yellow.  (because we all know that babies can't stand that color.)  that everything, as a result, looked brownbrownbrown and i HATE brown.  (except our bathroom, i guess.)  that we didn't even have a crib for finneas to sleep in, since the other two kids were both still sleeping in cribs.  (this is how we solved that.)  that we didn't have a nursery because the kids' cribs were in what was to become the nursery.

in order to support me and also shut me up, todd offered to help me paint one of our front upstairs bedrooms in preparation for the big kids to move in there so finneas could have the nursery.  finally, a year later, it is more than just painted and is basically complete.  considering that only the kitchen and downstairs bathroom are also 'finished' in my mind, that's a big accomplishment.

here's what it looked like last december 21st (so almost a year exactly):

yikes, right?! and here's what it looks like now:

before:

after:

and this dresser...:

...now looks like this:

 

it's hard to see, but i wrapped the knobs in jute.

i was so desperate to get the room finished, i just dug around the house for stuff to put on top of the dresser, and came up with frames full of scrapbook paper and a cut-out children's book illustration.  don't tell the kids that Fish Is Fish is no longer.  so...Fish Isn't Fish, i guess.  but i got the book for twelve cents at a garage sale, so maybe i'll spring for a full-priced copy someday if my conscience gets the better of me.  (who am i kidding?  i'll never personally pay full price for a kids' book.) 

my mother-in-law's uncle made that little ship in the bottle.

 

 

lauren made these prints for the kids for christmas last year, and this bowl is the one made infamous in this post.  clearly, i freaked out over nothing since you can't even tell it's broken.

anyway.  it feels good to have it done, although the timing is ironic (and a little depressing), which i'll tell you about tomorrow.

spring cleaning and pantry challenge

so, if you know me at all, you could probably guess that i'm a firm believer in spring cleaning. at least for me personally, i love the feeling of living in a freshly deep-cleaned house - it makes me feel almost like we're living somewhere new, but without the ridiculous effort of actually having to move.

that being said, it's not the most fun process.

as i've been cleaning and PURGING (more on that later), i've also been preparing to move some of our stuff into storage starting in august. so we're needing some rubbermaid totes and things like that in order to better organize our stuff to go outside, as well as some other odds-and-ends that come with spring cleaning, such as a machine-washable mop (made a big mistake buying a disposable-headed mop), shelves for the hall closet, etc.

but i didn't want to spend the money.

so i decided, with todd's go-ahead, to do a pantry challenge for the next two weeks. the benefit of buying in bulk is not only that stuff is often times cheaper, but you have stuff on hand. so for the next two weeks, i will be cooking from what we already have. granted, i did spend 18 bucks on stuff like milk, eggs, bread and bananas, plus a huge package of toilet paper, but the rest of our food is already here. (9 bucks a week for groceries isn't too bad in my opinion!)

the rest of the money we had budgeted for groceries can go toward things related to spring cleaning and storage.

not to mention, it also aids the cleaning process by forcing me to weed out those cans of soup, various cuts of frozen chicken, frozen homemade applesauce, and myriad betty crocker potatoes that i bought on ridiculous mark-down but haven't used yet. the result? tons of free space, less to store, less to have to pull out of the cupboards to clean under.

i think we'll be doing a pantry challenge every six months or so; it just seems like a good amount of time to go in between.

stay tuned for updates and potentially disgusting recipes cooked up during the pantry challenge. (tomato soup-pumpkin puree-chicken-rice casserole? anyone?)