Weekly Goals

Updates from a few weeks ago:

Family/Mothering Goals

1) Finish reading Caleb's Story By Patricia MacLachlan to Caleb. We have to do this otherwise the book will be late!
Caleb loved this book. I am going to look into getting the last book in the series as well.
2) Survive a crazy Christmas schedule between my husband's family and mine.
We survived by the skin of our teeth. We were certainly busy and still haven't taken all of our presents out of the boxes!
3) Remember Advent Calendar every day! Caleb really enjoys this but I keep forgetting about it.
We loved this so much we got another one for next year already (On clearance a few days after Christmas!)

Personal Goals


1) Finish reading Animal, vegetable, miracle By Barbara Kingsolver Must do this week!
Ended up re-renting it.
2) Drink 5 glasses of water each day.
I have been drinking a few glasses at work
3) Go to bed by 8:30pm Sunday thru Thursday for new job. Although I did really good with this last week, it was really hard and tempting to go to bed later. So this will stay on my list.
4) Ride my stationary bike every day for 1/2 hour.
I only did this 3 days

Home Management Goals


1) Go through the dressers and take out ANY clothes that aren't just quite right and get rid of them! Stop keeping clothes that I might wear some day.... sometime....
I am so glad I did this and I don't know what took me so long!
2) Fold all laundry.
3) Put food racks back together and get food on them.
Although I did do this, Joel has found it and keeps taking everything off. It's super cute though so I don't mind to much.

Business Goals


1) Continue entering times and meals daily. Doing this made my world so much easier!
2) Do a Fire drill.
3) Do some poking around of my own to remake daily schedule.
Not able to do now for a few weeks

This weeks goals:

Family/Mothering Goals

1) Finish reading Mummies in the morning with Caleb

2) Family game night 1 time this week

3) Read with Caleb 3 times this week

Personal Goals


1) Finish reading Animal, vegetable, miracle By Barbara Kingsolver Almost done. I promise!

2) Drink 5 glasses of water each day.

3) Ride stationary bike 1/2 hour 3 days this week

Home Management Goals


1) Make weekly menu so we don't waste any food this week

2) Get Windows painted at our other house

3) Put 25 items in the good will bucket

Business Goals


1) Continue entering times and meals daily.

2) Do a Fire drill.

3) call Minute menu so I can print off my parents tax forms

I have linked up to moneysavingmom.com. Go check her out to link your weekly goals or to encourage others too!

2012 goal - Read 1 book each month

I would love to do some reading. I have found that I absolutely love to read but if I don't set a time line for myself, it'll just never get done. So I have a goal to read 1 book a month! That gives me 30ish days read a book from start to finish.... Well sort of. This month I am actually still finishing up the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Yes, I know I should have been finished with this ages ago but, um, yeah that's why I made this 1 month thing a 2012 goal! lol So although I don't know all the books a plan to read in 2012, I do have one picked out for January. It's already rented and uploaded to my kindle. It's called Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting 


Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life is about a family who moves from the city to the country and eats only locally grown or raised food for a whole year. There are recipes and tips through out the book as well. I have loved the book thus far. It has been inspiring to my plant and maintain a garden goal! I will post as I go along how the books are and also will post what my next book will be

Recipe : Lasagna

I have in the past tried to make lasagna but they have all been a complete fail. From the noodles not being cooked right to it just plain out not tasting good. So I made up my own and my husband has decided it's the best lasagna he's ever had! Now I will pass on the best lasagna recipe to you.

Ingredients

9 lasagna noodles

30 oz cottage cheese

3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese

1/2 cup Parmesan cheese

4 eggs

1 tsp dried basil

1 tsp dried oregano

2 27oz jars of spaghetti sauce

1 cup of water

1 lb of ground beef

Preheat oven to 400 degrees

Cook and drain ground beef.

Mix together the cottage cheese, 2 cups of the mozzarella cheese, Parmesan cheese, eggs, basil, and oregano.

Mix together ground beef, water, and  spaghetti sauce.

Layer in a 9'' X 13'' pan from bottom to top:

2 cups meat sauce

3 lasagna noodles

1/2 cheese mixture

1/2 of the remaining meat sauce

3 lasagna noodles

the rest of the cheese mixture

1/2 of the remaining meat sauce

3 lasagna noodles

the rest of the meat sauce

sprinkle the remaining mozzarella cheese over top.

Cover tightly with foil and bake for 50 to 60 minutes. Let it cool for 15 min before cutting into it to serve.

This recipe makes 9-12 servings.

2012 goal - Develop 12 new habits

It is said that when you try to make a chore into a habit, it takes 21 days of consistently doing that thing to develop that into a habit. Well, I am going to give myself some grace here and do 30 days worth. I will be trying to develop 1 new habit each month and I have come up with a plan of action as to what I would like to develop. I will be sharing my results on this as well to keep accountable. Here are my plans.

January - Don't waste any food (This is a HUGE problem at our house right now!)
February - Pray with my family every night
March - Drink 8 glasses of water daily
April - Keep sink shined night
May - Weekly meal planning and stick to it
June - 1 new recipe a week
July - Make bed every morning
August - Floss teeth Daily and brush teeth twice a day
September - 10 min daily dash house cleaning
October - Get dressed to shoes right away in the morning
November - Lay out next days clothes for family
December - Read magazines as they come in and pass them on

I already need to get busy on January. I went grocery shopping last week Wednesday and stocked up on some items but then Joel was in the hospital for 3 days so we have got quite a bit of stuff that needs to be chopped, cooked and frozen like today!! You all know what my plans are this afternoon. :)

2012 goal - Cleaning goals

Goal #5 and goal #11 are both cleaning goals that I hope to accomplish in 2012. Cleaning out the down stairs will have to come in stages for sure! It is stuffed full with boxes upon boxes of stuff from my house. Because Jimmy and I both owned a home before we got married, we both had all appliances, dishes, silver ware, towels, pots, pans, nick nacks, ect. So in moving over here, all my stuff got put into boxes.... and has stayed right there. Until now!! Also in the basement is pretty much everything from Jimmy's house. We got the carpets cleaned in November (Yes, you read that right NOVEMBER) and still don't have even half of our stuff put back together. Our dressers, entertainment center, free standing shelves, toys, ect are still down stairs. So you can see why this is a problem. We just need to get stuff put back upstairs or brought to a local donation center.

As for Goal #11 making cleaning the house more of a priority, I have printed out a few cleaning schedules and I am going to give those a try. I am also getting daily fly lady e-mails however these e-mails go directly into my fly lady e-mail folder and I have a few hundred in there that I still haven't looked at. So I am hoping that I can get into the groove of using those. Laundry and Dishes are my biggest struggle. I am great at really doing them both but putting them away is another story. And then if I don't put the dishes away, I can't put another load in and that's how they pile up. Our clean laundry ends up getting thrown at the end of our bed and we dig through each morning. I am hoping to get into the habit of cleaning more and get this house in shape!

2012 goal - See family in Pennsylvania

Goal #3, Seeing family in Pennsylvania. PA for short. Jimmy was raised in PA til 9th grade when his mom moved him and his siblings here to Michigan and where met me *Grins Really Big* But in coming here he left behind some very important people. His dad, grandparents, and some great friends.

I am happy to tell you that in Jan or Feb of 2010 Jimmy, Caleb, and I were able to travel over to PA for 5 days to see and meet everyone. And what a grand time we had! Caleb and I met as many of Jimmy's friends and family members as we could in our short 5 day trip and we were welcomed with loving arms into their homes and their lives.

Another happy story to tell of is when we had several people fly from PA to Michigan for our wedding! Jimmy's dad and his wife came and brought along grandma and auntie. Along with that, we had a very special long time friend and his parents drive all the way over. What a joyous time we had seeing them during our crazy some times stressful week before our wedding.

Because Christmas and New Years Day both landed on Sundays this year, and Jimmy would typically have a paid holiday those days, Jimmy's work granted him an extra 2 days paid vacation that he can take anytime before April. What a blessing those two days are! So now it's our turn to go to PA again and boy, are we ready or what!

Here's what we need to do to get going to see everyone:

-We still need to find a date but have to consider a few things when doing so. Joel's 1st Birthday party, and Caleb's school and field trip schedule. We would like also like to go either either late Feb or early Mar in a sort of Birthday Celebration! Jimmy, his dad, Joel, and I all have birthdays within a few weeks of each other and what better way to celebrate than to see family.

- Jimmy needs to request the time off from work and I need to let my day care parents know what days I will be gone.

- We also need to get the A-OK from Joel's Doctors to travel that far with him. He sees some specialists and we need to make sure that he is healthy enough to travel.

2012 goal - Pay off and savings goals

My #2 (Pay off Lowe's credit card), #4 (Pay off Jimmy's student loan), and #6 (Save $2,000 emergency fund) goals are all financial goals that I would like to accomplish in 2012.

As I mentioned in goal #1, we need to finish my house and get it rented out. Well... we don't have any money because we are paying for the mortgage on the house right now and we can't fix it up with no money! That's how we got the Lowe's credit card. Part of fixing up the house meant buying and having new windows installed. With the old windows, we were not able to legally rent out the house. They were in such bad shape. We didn't have $4,000 dollars hanging around and we needed the windows in order to get it rented out so we got a Lowe's credit card. If you know anything about me, you would know that I HATE credit cards. I am very Dave Ramsey in that respect. Jimmy had 7 credit cards when we started dating and we had them all paid off a year and a half later! I swore we would never have one again but here we are with one. I am super bummed about it but we did get a no interest for the first 18 months card. Since we got the card in October, we should have til April 2013 to pay it off with out interest. That is why my goal is to pay it off in 2012. Then we will be no where close to April 2013 and no where close to all that CRAZY interest!

When Jimmy went to college, he didn't get any financial aid. I mean NONE. Not a penny. But Sallie Mae helped him out. Over $20,000 worth too. Since Jimmy was a young college kid with no credit, he was only aloud a few grand so his mom had to step in a put a loan under her name. Right now between the two we owe roughly $17,000. Our goal this year is to pay off the student loans that are under Jimmy's name. Which is the lesser of the two. We are hoping to get some forward momentum with paying these things off and get our debt snowball rolling! We have roughly $3,700 left to go on this one.

By this point you all should know that we have 2 houses :) With that, we need two emergency funds. That is why we are going to build up to a $2,000 emergency fund. $1,000 for my house, $1,000 for Jimmy's house. God forbid the water heater goes out at the same time in both houses, or something happens with ours (Jimmy's) and we don't have time to build it back up before something happens to the rental (mine). We are hoping to get it rented out and put the difference between what the renters pay and what we pay for the mortgage into this emergency fund along with other stuff.

For these three goals, getting the finances is our obvious first problem. And budgeting is our second. I have started a new job at McDonalds that we are hoping will help out a little, I am also trying to get in contact with DHS to get payments for my child care kids going (I still haven't gotten paid for most of my kids and DHS is roughly $1,000 behind!) As for the rest of the year, we will have to see what God has in store for us. My husbands bonuses will also go towards these goals along with any money made on craigslist from cleaning out the basement. I am hoping that goal #20 (make and keep budget) will assist with this also.