goals that make me not want to die in february.

February is the woooooooooooooooooorst.  As it is now February, I'm having to put some incentives in place to help me want to make it through the month and not just give up and die right now.

While goal setting is something that is becoming more natural for me, goal follow-through is the really groundbreaking work happening in my life at the moment.  I noticed that when I posted my goals last month, it really helped me get on it so I could hold my head high around here instead of having to schlump around in the shadows of failure.  I think I need that again, especially now that it's February.  I am anticipating desperately needing a tangible win or two at the end of this month.

So, without further ado, my February goals.

Personal

*Get back on track with my Bible reading plan.  I have fallen off the wagon these last few months with Christmas and then a couple rounds of illness.

*Read four books.  This is backing off my recent hardcore ambitions for getting huge stacks of books read each month, but I'm slowing down lately, and I have a lot to get done around the house, so I'm going to give myself the grace to be a bit more realistic.  I'm not even going to pick what they're going to be in advance.

*Get down to goal weight.  I am soveryclose.  I haven't seen my 'target' weight since my postpartum days with Atticus, other than when I get really skinny during morning sickness seasons.  I want to get there this time!  I'll plan on sticking more closely to the Trim Healthy Mama plan than I have been.

*Get through exercises Two and Three in Ab Rehab.  I have a small gap that I need to close again, and I've been seriously delinquent about dealing with it.

*Paint Callista's ceiling.  This doesn't really get me headed in the direction of being a better or more disciplined person, but it does force me to face something I don't really want to do.

Look, I made some new bling for the Facebook page!

Blog/Online

*Post at least three vlogs.  I don't know why I feel so weird and self-conscious about these, but I just need to jump in.  (If you've got any topics you'd like me to cover, make sure to let me know!)

*Host another Facebook Live event.  Not sure what the topic will be, but I'd love to have another super casual, conversational night with you guys.  I loved the talk on homeschooling a couple of weeks ago!

*Blog each weekday in February.  I really had fun sticking to this last month.  Forcing myself to write that regularly really got me out of a creativity funk, and got the juices flowing again.  While I don't know if I can keep up that pace every month, I'd like to at least try again for February.

*Get a little closer to moving this blog over to my permanent domain.  I don't know what all this will involve, other than a lot of prayer and probably a lot of cussing, but I'd like to finally get it figured out.



So.  There are my goals for the next four weeks!  Seeing it all written out like that makes me feel a little trepidation, but that's good.  Goals aren't really goals unless they make you feel like you actually have to work to meet them.  Otherwise, they're just likelihoods or wishlists.

So now it's time to muster my inner Teddy and charge up San Juan Hill*!

*Obviously I mean February, but "Charge up February" is less catchy, so I figured, why alter a classic?

three things.

Thing One:

I was planning on bringing back the old video vednesday tradition by posting another FAQ vlog today.  But as I've been sprawled out on the welcome mat of death's door lately, I didn't have it in me to do it, since that would require such things as taking a shower and getting dressed.  So I suppose it will have to wait until next week.


Thing Two: 

I am actually feeling much better - thank you for your prayers!  It has made it so much easier to care for the poor strung-out saps who still haunt my couches.  Penelope and Rocco seem to have made a full recovery, but Atticus has fallen, Lolo is dealing with a comparably mild case of things, and Finneas is still all-out sick as a dog.  Callista has remained above the fray, other than a couple questionable diapers (knock on wood).

Which all brings me to my actual Thing: now that I'm up and around, I am a woman on a mission.  The bathroom and kitchen have been sanitized, and bedding of all fully-healed individuals has been bleached within an inch of its life.  I have been working on catching up on laundry, which is why I spent two hours last night folding this noise:

Blehhhhhhhhhhh.


Thing Three:

Today is January 31, and I have successfully met my goal of posting every weekday in January!  Through Whole30, and sickness, and busyness, and truly audacious piles of laundry, I have done it!  It kind of makes up for not having completed Whole30, right?  Right?


Well, those are The Things.  I'm off to fold more laundry.  (Oh, you thought I got all of that finished in two hours?  You have way too much faith in my abilities and my circumstances.)

finally, my knight in shining armor has ridden in!

This flu bug isn't leaving on its own accord, so we thought we'd call in the big guns to scare it off.

Flu, meet your worst enemy: Fire-Bat-CampingHat-Boy.

May your bones melt to water under his piercing gaze.

show's over. we're all dead.

I'm just popping in to tell you we've all died.  It was a long, slow, painful death.  At least, that's what I'm looking forward to saying when all of this is finally over.  For now, we're still in the writhing, gnashing throes of dying.  Get ready for the gory details.

Today marks Day Eleven of the stomach bug at our house.  A week and a half ago, Rocco sounded the starting gun with a diarrhea incident all over the kitchen floor.  (Thanks to the Shark steam mop my mom got me for Christmas, it was actually as non-eventful as such an event could possibly be.)  It seemed like it went away over the weekend, but then it came back full force on Monday.  I was changing around ten diapers per day for him, and his poor little bottom was so burned.  Luckily, other than one afternoon/evening of running a fever and being really clingy, he acted pretty normal.  At the end of it all, his mouth weirdly broke out in canker sores before he was finally deemed 'in good health.'

Unfortunately, right toward the end of his ordeal, I started to feel queasy, and then Penelope started getting the gurgle guts.  At midnight last Wednesday, Finneas came nonchalantly upstairs to tell Todd, 'Dad, I think there's something you need to see.'  It turns out, he'd thrown up in his bed - and on the wall.  So there was that.

Since Wednesday, the three of us have been miserable.  Fevers, headaches, pyrotechnics.  There was a moment a few days ago when a migraine hit me so suddenly and intensely that I honestly thought I was having an aneurysm.  For a split second, I was like, Is this really how it ends for me?

Callista is clearly feeling the sympathy pains.

Luckily (ish) I lived to see another miserable day, and another, and another.  I am still battling fevers and raging headaches, and have zero appetite, although the GI stuff seems to have settled down for me.  (The kids are still dealing with it.)  And my mouth and throat feel like I've swallowed scalding hot tea.

Unfortunately, Laurelai now seems to have caught the bug... and last night after dinner, Atticus started complaining of a bellyache.  So we're nowhere near being out of the woods yet.

I have served nothing but saltines, Wonderbread, and Sprite for the last twenty million meals.  (I'm not proud of it, but I'm not not proud of it.)  I am so far behind on laundry that it would take less time and effort to just burn the place down, file an insurance claim, and buy all new stuff than it will to get caught up.  Thank our gracious heavenly Father above for my absolute gem of a husband, who has managed to juggle all of our needs with amazing patience, all while prepping for not one but two sermons this week.

We clearly have a ways to go before we can put this all behind us and move on to catching the next horrible illness waiting for us this winter.  Will you please pray that Todd stays healthy, that we can get through the rest of this quickly and with a little bit of dignity, and that my milk supply would stay strong through my dehydration and exhaustion?  I would hate to have to give up nursing because of this, but my body's finicky as it is, and seven months is usually when it starts giving up the milk ghost, so we're treading on dangerous ground.  (Callista turned seven months a few days ago.)

Anyway.  As you can see, it's been no fun, but at least we've gotten to gaze at lots of sleeping kids, which always does the soul good.  Also, as Atticus was the last kid to fall ill (besides Callista), he got lots of time to play outside by himself, which does his soul good.  On Saturday, while everyone was resting inside the bowels of hell the house, he was outside, happily digging foxholes for five hours.

At least something good came out of all of this!

'what's up weekly' is postponed!

I have the fluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.  Pray for me, y'all.  This could be it for me.  I'm seeing an irresistable bright light at the end of a long tunnel... 

Do they still let you into heaven if you barf all over the tunnel floor on your way there?

Deep thoughts.

as promised: my baked oatmeal recipe.

I will start out by saying I don't remember exactly where I got this recipe.  It was somewhere on the Internet, years and years ago.  If it was your own personal blog, I apologize for the plagiarism, but know that I am forever indebted to you for bringing this blessing into our lives.

I will follow up by saying this is our breakfast about eight days a week at this point.  We go through spurts; for a while, we were eating eggs most mornings, since they're really super duper cheap and easy (cheaper and easier than baked oatmeal, for sure), but then the kids got sick of that and started rebelling.  One of them started getting diarrhea from too many eggs.  That level of commitment to the cause was astounding, really, so I was forced to back off the eggs, and we circled back around to that perennial favorite, Oatmeal.

Lastly, I will tell you that if you're not a fan of oatmeal, I hear you.  I hear you.  I hate oatmeal with smoldering, red hot, eternal coals of hatred.  I call down curses on the aging parents of Oatmeal for procreating and bringing that mess into the world.  But this... this is enough Not Oatmeal that it flies under my radar.  It's more like a cookie-granola bar hybrid.  (Granookie?  Grookie?  Canola bar?  No, those are all terrible.  Let's just stick with calling it baked oatmeal.)

So.  Here are the key players you'll need to assemble:

Hilariously enough, the container that says "Yogurt" is actually full of raw butter, and the yogurt I made for this purpose isn't pictured.

3.5 cups old fashioned rolled oats
2 cups yogurt (the stuff you made the other day when I told you to, remember?)
4 eggs
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar or honey (we started with more and I gradually used less)
1/2 cup oil or melted butter
1 Tbsp cinnamon (or more!)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 to 2 cups fruit of your choice (we love frozen berries)


The night before:
Mix yogurt and oats together, and leave out to soak.  If that weirds you out, you can put it in the fridge, but the room-temp soaking actually helps the oats digest better.

The morning of:
1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Add a little water to the oats mixture to make it 'stir-able.'

3. Add eggs, sugar, oil, cinnamon, salt and baking powder and mix well.  Then add fruit.

4. Spray a 9x13 pan with nonstick spray and pour mixture in.

Uncooked.  Why I decided to take photos of it uncooked rather than cooked is beyond me.  I realize it doesn't look appetizing at all, and you'll have to trust me.

5. Bake for 35-45 minutes, until it's bubbly on top and brown around the edges.  I like to bake it for closer to 45 minutes because I like it more firm, but for softer oatmeal, bake for less time.

6. Divide into 8 or 10 pieces, and serve with milk or cream poured over the top!

You really cannot screw this up.  I forgot the eggs once.  Another time, I forgot the baking powder.  I usually just eyeball everything instead of measuring.  And once, I mixed up my spice bottles and added a bunch of cumin instead of cinnamon.  (Okay, so that did mess it up and I thought it was disgusting.  I still served it to the kids, though - I called it Raspberry Fiesta Surprise, and they gobbled it up.)


I usually either double or even quadruple this recipe.  I only have two 9x13 pans, so if I have extra batter, I just leave it in the fridge until the next time I need to bake some up.  My kids will eat an entire pan in a single breakfast, so I'll bake two at a time and they'll eat one hot that morning, and the next morning they'll eat it cold from the second pan.  They like it fine either way.  I LOVE making these on Saturday morning, because then Sunday's breakfast is already made and I don't have to waste time cooking while I'm trying to get everyone out the door for church.

So if you're trying to eat like a Van Voorst, this would be a great place to start.  You'll already be an honorary member of the family just by making it, if that's incentive at all.  I'll even send you a certificate of authenticity if you'd like.

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!

want to make a bunch of yogurt?

We eat a lot of yogurt.  The kids will gobble up two quarts in a single sitting, and I make a lot of baked oatmeal, which uses quite a bit as well.  (I'll be posting the recipe for that soon, so keep your eyes peeled!)  So, in order to save money, I make it by the gallon.

That is a LOT of yogurt.

Luckily, it's probably the easiest thing I do in my life, so I don't sweat it.

If you, too, would like to make a disgusting amount of yogurt, you'll need the following items:

1 gallon of milk*
2 cups plain, store bought yogurt**
Crock Pot
Whisk

Put the milk in the Crock Pot on low for three hours.  After three hours, turn off the Crock Pot and let the milk just sit there like a chump for another three hours.  Then whisk in the yogurt - I just eyeball it, and shoot to use around a third of a quart - and let all sit at room temperature for at least 12 hours.  (I've been known to leave it out upwards of 24 hours before, and it doesn't hurt it at all.)

That's it.  Yogurt: accomplished.  You end up with a gallon of yogurt for about three bucks and two minutes of hands-on time, which is better than buying it for $3 per quart at the store.  You win at life!

*We use whole milk, but any homogenized milk works.  This yogurt ends up runnier than store bought, so I like the thickness the fat adds.  If it's too runny for your liking, you can always run it through some cheesecloth or a coffee filter, but I feel like that's bordering on coddling the yogurt, and no one has time for that when there are REAL babies to be coddled.

**Any plain yogurt works for these purposes, though I'd steer clear of lowfat kinds that have a bunch of stabilizers in them.  This time, I only had fat free Greek on hand, so I used that.  My favorite is whole, though - again, the fat makes it a little thicker.

And there you go.  You just made enough yogurt to last a lifetime.  (Or, about a week and a half if you're a Van Voorst.)

january and new churches.

Four years ago, we had just moved into our house in Cedar Falls.  Laurelai was about five months old, we were neck-deep in new ministry, and I was in the throes of a serious health crash and likely some postpartum depression.  (It's hard to know: church planting and postpartum depression feel kind of the same a lot of the time.)  And it was January.

To clarify, it wasn't just January.  It was January in Cedar Falls, where ice goes to cool down.  It was a record-breaking January in Cedar Falls.  The temperature gauge literally did not budge above zero degrees the. entire. month.  That's not an exaggeration.  It was so miserable.  I was so miserable.

Fast forward to last January.  It was our first January in Columbia, and it was gorgeous.  There was one day I got in the van to run to the store, and I was like, "Dang, it's cold out!"  So I looked at the temperature gauge and it was forty-two degrees.  Apparently it didn't take me long to get acclimated to the weather down here.

But even though it was warmer than Iowa, it was still the first winter of a church plant, and it was dark.  I so desperately just wanted to go home.  I wanted to throw in the towel and turn around and be done.

If I'm being honest, there are still a lot of days where I struggle.  If I'm being honest, life down here has been hard in a lot of ways.  Good, but hard.

But yesterday, I found myself in another January, with another new baby, in another somewhat new season of ministry, and in another new postpartum season... and I was outside in a Tshirt, grilling burgers for dinner.  And it hit me how 'the same' and yet how different our life is here, and how every place has its hardships... and every place sees its moments of just reveling in being where you are.

So I got to revel a little yesterday, and it felt good.

what's up weekly.

Blargity blarg blarg blarg.  It's Friday.  We've been on break from school this week, and while I was planning on hunkering down, grading papers, and getting a pretty good week of 'nothing' set in the books, this week got weird and I feel like it was kind of wasted.

We didn't really do anything particular that made it feel like a waste.  In fact, I got quite a few really good conversations and meetups in throughout the week!  But I feel like most of them felt spontaneous, and that is really hard for me to deal with mentally.  I'm an INTJ (or an ISTJ, depending on who you ask, and what day it is, and where the moon is at in its orbit, and what side of the bed I rolled out on that morning.  But usually an INTJ).  So either the "I" part of my personality takes over and literallycan'tevendeal with unexpected social interactions (even just getting text alerts sometimes stresses me out), or the "J" part of my personality kicks in and starts freaking out that THIS WAS NOT ON THE SCHEDULE.  Luckily I have the "T" part that seems to be the boss of all the other ones, because he usually steps in and is like, "Cool it, y'all."  And then they all fall in line.

Anyway, that whole weird paragraph to say, busy weeks are one kind of stressful.  Spontaneously social weeks are another kind of stressful, even if they're not technically busy in their own right.  This week was the second kind of week.

Oh, you know.  Just drawing a soldier with a machine gun and drinkin' some coffee.  What's your five year old up to?

It was icy through the beginning of the week, so it kind of messed up my Amish morning - we had to move it back a day.  But I did have a grocery pickup scheduled at Walmart Wednesday morning, so we had to get out of the house anyway.  I'd already been struggling with Whole30, but when I got home and realized that they'd mistakenly substituted four huge bags of honey roasted sunflower seeds for the four big bags of plantain chips I'd ordered, I lost it.  That's the moment I quit Whole30.  It wasn't a shining moment, but it was definite.

Laurelai has started doing this thing where she lays out her clothes for the next day in such a way that it looks like she had been wearing them and just kind of evaporated out of them.  Here lies the Ghost of Laurelai Future.

When we moved Callista into the nursery, we moved Rocco into Laurelai's old crib, and Laurelai moved to a toddler mattress that 'trundles' under Penelope's bed.  Here they're reading bedtime books in their nextdoor beds. They're wearing socks on their hands because Penelope's hands are cracked and bleeding from the dry air, so we put heavy duty lotion on them (and socks over that) to keep them moisturized.  Laurelai's sock hands are pure reverential mimicry.

Todd and I got to go on a date last night, and hit up an amaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing barbecue place.  It looked like a dirty old bar, was attached to a gas station, and apparently didn't have a working furnace.  I was the only female customer in the place.  And it was seriously sooooo. gooooood.  (It deserves all the vowels I'm giving it.  There is no hyperbolic vowel usage in this paragraph.)  Then on our way home, we stopped at Schnucks so I could exchange some mayonnaise.  That's a thing people do on date nights.

Brothers who draw construction vehicles together... stay brothers either way.  Because that's how genetics work.

Um, what else happened this week...?  I went grocery shopping.  My sister closed on her house, which really has nothing to do with me other than it has to do with houses, and my sister, and my sister's opportunity to now decorate a house, which are all things that make the world a better place to live.

And that was our super random week.  Now I'm off to hurriedly grade papers.