Kitchen switch-a-roo

Today I completely switched around my kitchen, also known as "driving my husband completely banana's". Chris HATES change and complains about it incessantly. However, the next time I change it around he'll complain that he wants it back the way before - which he also complained about.

My kitchen appears to have a bit of cabinet space, but it's an illusion. The cabinets are shaped funky, there are weird dividers that make it difficult to store things effectively, and we just seem to have never enough space. I hate things on my counter, so even the toaster is stored in a cabinet (this habit I picked up from my mother-in-law!). The only thing allowed on my counter is Betsy, my new mixer. Ain't she beautiful!

Anyway, Chris was flying late tonight and most of the times this means an easy going evening. Chris is leaving soonish for 5+ months and so we are now transitioning back into "getting on with life when Daddy is gone" phase. We've been very lucky for the past 3 years Chris has been on a special duty assignment that has kept him from deploying and in the past year hasn't even gone on a TDY because of my surgeries but thats all about to change. He'll be back to being gone 6-9 months out of the year soon and so we are preparing for that.

My plan is to accent my kitchen and dining area with Polka Dots. I love Polka Dots! For now, I'm just cleaning it up and trying to find new space for my new gadgets. Such as this beauty I've been lusting after for a while

Chris jokes that I'm a disgrace. He bought me the iPad2 for our anniversary and I was disappointed because I wanted Betsy. After a few months I decided, with his blessing, to sell the iPad to get what I really wanted. This was also on sale for about $60 less than usual so I had to jump on it. This may deserve a name in the future. I get very sad when food spoils or gets freezer burn.

In my already cramped kitchen I had no room for all my new gadgets.

I decided to start in the dreaded tupperware cabinet. This cabinet is scary. We have so much tupperware, but we can never find anything. I swear there is a land out there where tupperware lids and socks are partying together.

See how scary it is? Also, see that annoying divider that makes it difficult to get anything LARGE into or out of that cabinet? So frustrating! I wanted to separate our tupperware from the cutting boards since we use the cutting boards very frequently and it's very hard to pull them out without a bunch of tupperware raining down with it. We have this drawer that we store the placemats and cloth napkins in

Which is the perfect size for the cutting boards, and it's located right next to the stove so it makes it very convenient. So now I had to relocate the placemats (I'm planning to buy or make some beautiful polka dot placemats!) Back when we bought our couches we also bought a coffee table that was entirely too large. We recently moved it behind the couches as more surface space in the dining room, and it has drawers and a shelf that would work for the napkins and placemats.

And now our four cutting boards are located in a much nicer spot

For our tupperware, there wasn't a single cabinet that would work well, so I was reduced to buying an additional storage unit. I am not pleased by this, and although it works well it is very bulky and ugly. I'm hoping to find a better solution, but for now this is where our tupperware is

I have yet to find "green" tupperware. If anyone knows of any please let me know!

Now I needed to move my pots and pans into my new empty tupperware cabinet. This is my awful pots and pans cabinet. It makes it very hard to pull anything out without something falling on your foot because of the weird half shelf. These poor pots and pans were gifted to Chris and I on Anthony's first Christmas by my parents. They are great pots and pans but they are nearing their life span. We are looking into upgrading to stainless steel, one pot and pan at a time as they are insanely expensive!

And this is my plates, casserole dish, bowls, and the rest of pans cabinet. Annoying.

And this is my new pots and pans cabinet in my old tupperware cabinet (Are you keeping this straight? lol).

And in my old pots and pans cabinet is where my new food saver is stored, as well as Betsy's attachments!

Thats my extra mixing bowl, my ice cream maker attachment and my bin of other attachments. On the top, weird half shelf perfectly fits my food saver and storage bags. The ice cream maker can and should be stored in the freezer, so this is the picture after I realized that

Now I need something to fill that gap!

I forgot to take a picture of my cup cabinet prior to emptying it out, but I thought it would be best to put the cups over where the plates and bowls were now that I took out most of the pans.

We have more plates and bowls than that, they were all in the dishwasher.

I needed to move the cleaners from their lower cabinet because Charlie kept getting into it. So they went into the old cup cabinet.

Here is Anastasia taking the cleaner out and handing it to me to put up top.

This is another weirdly shaped cabinet. It goes way towards the back but it makes it hard to get to the stuff back there without practically climbing into the cabinet.

Cleaners are one of my few non-"green" things, my OCD makes it hard for me to trust that something is clean without harsh cleaners. I'm working on it.

Here they are crammed in the new cabinet. This had three shelves in it, but I had to remove one and change the height of the other one in order to fit anything into it. The shelves, prior, could hardly fit anything that was remotely tall. See my inventory sheet? (My computer just turned off and I thought I lost this post! I was about to throw my hands up and laugh/cry).

I forgot to take a picture of the after cleaner cabinet. It now stores the huge pots I couldn't get past the weird divider, and the kids cups. It drives me crazy to hear 20 times a day times 3 kids "Can I have a cup!" so I thought it would be the most logical thing to put the kids cups where the kids can reach them. I now fear I will be washing every kids cup every single day, but at least they can reach them.

Around this time we had a mini-family crisis and the rest of the kitchen switch-a-roo had to be put on hold. Hopefully I'll find time soon to finish it. I only have a few more cabinets to go through.

So far I've made muffins, tortillas, and pancakes with Betsy. The pancakes were for dinner tonight, and they were super simple to make and much less messy than usual.

These are some pictures of the Bear eating pancakes. We've had such a hard time getting him to eat that I was so happy he ate some pancake! He is nursing about 18 hours a day at the moment, and it's driving me bananas. Hopefully he'll be able to eat more food soon!

I got my Mixer!

For years I have been lusting after a KitchenAid Mixer. I tried, for a long time, to be as self sufficient as possible. Then I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and I had to stop doing a lot of self reliant activities - such as bread making. I loved making bread, and I was really darn good at it too! I loved making something from scratch, kneading life into it, and feeding it to my family. My arms are useless for kneading dough now, but I refused to buy a bread maker. It felt like cheating to me.

My friend Elaine brought over her KitchenAid a while back and made pizza dough in it. It was so similar to hand making it except the KitchenAid kneaded for her. I lusted after it even harder than before. With a family as large as mine, though, a 4.5 qt Mixer was not going to suffice. I needed at least a 6 qt, and a 7 qt would be even nicer. The 7 qts are so hard to come by so I settled for a 6 qt and today my lovely husband went out with the two younger kids and returned with this:

Ain't she beautiful? I've named her Betsy. All the best tools in my house have names. He bought me a few extra attachments too, and right now if you buy a mixer you can get the Ice Cream maker attachment for free! So that should be coming to me in a few weeks time!

I am so excited to make bread again and am already planning on making me tortillas tomorrow. I shall update with pictures, recipes, and results! I'm so excited!

And since he left with the two younger ones I managed to have a few hours to clean uninterrupted. My room is well on it's way to being complete!

Spoons

I was planning to post this last night, but Blogger was down so it's worth posting tonight.

This is an article that my friend showed me a few years ago after I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. "The Spoon Theory" has resonated deeply with me ever since. I don't blame people for not understanding what it's like to be me. How can someone who is healthy, and normal, and has loads of energy, who doesn't wake up to dislocated limbs, or complete loss of joints understand what someone who DOES have all those things feels like? It took my own husband reading my MRI scans to actually grasp that I wasn't "putting on" or exaggerating how bad it was. It took some of my doctors over a year to take me seriously about the pain. So I don't get offended that someone doesn't understand. I have no idea what it's like to live with Cancer or a terminal illness, they have no idea what its like to live with EDS. Even though the spoon theory was written for Lupus it still applies for EDS and most other chronic conditions.

I have a finite amount of spoons. Some days I have more, some days I have less. Some days I barely have any at all, and other days I have nearly as much as a normal person. Some times I borrow spoons and then I'm short the rest of the week as I recover, sometimes my pain meds gives me a few spoons and sometimes it takes away a few.

Yesterday was one of my lowest spoon days. The whole house has been sick with a cold/tummy bug. It has completely wiped me out. Especially because Charlie has been hit hard and only wants me and my nursies all day, and all night. And I mean all night. Sleeping in 10 min. increments when you are sick yourself is a recipe for disaster. I am not a TV watcher. I watch maybe one show a day, unless Chris and I watch a bit at night while we unwind, but yesterday I couldn't find the strength to even get up off the couch. Having OCD on top of this drains my spoons even faster. My OCD causes my anxiety and stress to go way up when my house is cluttered, dirty, or chaotic. So I sat on the couch and thought of the laundry piling up, the carpets that needed to be vacuumed, the kids that should be interacted with, and it drained me further and further.

As soon as Chris got home I had to leave. I couldn't stand to be in the house for another second. I had no energy, and I actually sat in the car and cried for a few minutes because I wasn't sure I could even leave! I figured I'd go to Target, and then to dinner, and hopefully relax and recoup. I love Target. I was in Target for less than 10 minutes because I could hardly walk. I knew it was time to leave when a sales associate came over and took my basket from me saying it looked as if I was going to keel over. Times like that are quite embarrassing for me. How do you explain to stranger that you have an "invisible illness" and it's not that you are weak, or whatever may be running through your head? Sometimes I feel I need a sign, "Yes, I'm young. Yes, I LOOK fine. Looks can be deceiving. I am sick."

I went to my favorite Mongolian BBQ restaurant after that and for the next few hours I had great girl time with my Best Friend, Sandra. I didn't have to walk, I didn't have to put on, I didn't have to make excuses. It was absolutely exactly what I needed. The best part was returning home to see my husband had done all the things around the house that I couldn't!

Today I'm still wiped out, but I have more spoons than I did yesterday. I'm hoping that as the days go on this week I'll have more spoons, and on the days where I don't I know I've got an amazing support system to help me out.

Day 18!

I've slowed my productivity waaaay down. I have been feeling so run down since my sunburn happened. It's actually taken a lot out of me. I've also decreased my meds quite a bit and that is making my EDS feel much worse, which doesn't inspire me to get up and clean and purge. But - I am still trucking along. One project a day. I don't think I'll stay within my "300" part of my challenge, but will definitely complete this in 60 days. Even though we are leaving in three weeks for a week long vacation!

My friend Kim suggested labeling my diaper bins with luggage tags. What an amazingly simple idea! I had never thought of using luggage tags! I will definitely keep that in mind for future label ideas. I didn't have any luggage tags, however, so I had to pull out one of my favorite home items - Meet "Lenny" my Laminator. Yes, he is so amazing he deserves a name.

Chris bought me Lenny when we were homeschooling. He has helped me create Christmas presents, games for the kids, and LABELS!

I simply used Word and their "insert a shape" option and made myself 10 labels. I even "Chrisified" them.

Chris claims he can't remember that the smallest prefolds we have are Preemie sized (they are blue), and that the smalls are green, and that the largest we own are medium prefolds and they don't have a colored stitching. So, on the labels I put the color of the stitching on them. I called my Preemie prefolds "Newborn" but its the same thing. "Blue" is for the color of stitching. These were printed on colored cardstock, printed, laminated, cut out, and I used a hole punch and tied them on with yard.

Originally I was going to have some system for shapes/colors but sometimes I really need to let things just be so the placement was pretty random. I'm quite proud of myself because of that.

Day - Get back on track!

My house was destroyed this weekend as 13 little, adorable, children ran through it for two days. I have only half-heartedly tried to get it back in shape, but today I did a good portion of it. I figured we would clean for 45 minutes and thats what we did. Amazing what a little family can accomplish in 45 minutes.

This was what my garage sale money went to

This is the new bin for my diapers. All of my diapers, minus the pile I'm giving away to friends, fit in here! I was surprised! Chris doesn't like the set up as much because he can't easily see what he wants - but I was tired of seeing the diapers spilling out all of the time. The little basket on top was given to me at Anastasia's baby shower! It holds the diaper accessories, such as snappi's, pins, diaper cream, and baby powder. I have to have everything in order. It took me a long time to figure out a way to make the colors work. There is a pattern there.

Here's Chris helping me set up for the yard sale

And my sunburned face. It got much worse after this picture was taken. My whole face blistered up. After a full day with neosporin on my face it is beginning to heal and most of the blisters popped.

MAJOR raccoon eyes! See how messy this room is? It needs a good cleaning. This room is the scariest of them all.

And this is the man who makes it all work in our house. We've been married 7 years now!

And just to show the rest of them off....

The Bear

Anastasia

Anthony

David

And.... Jovi!

Day 1 with no pop

Today was my first day starting my new pop challenge. I attempting to change my pop habit and only consume it on the weekend. This morning I woke up super early to get my workout in. Charlie woke up twice so my workout wasn't as strong as I would have liked, but I still got one in. Waking up early makes me quite tired but at the same time I feel very accomplished. I can workout, and clean the house before the kids wake up.

Lunchtime kind of sucked. I really wanted a pop, but had water instead. I haven't had dinner yet, but that will be tough as well. I'll probably make up my daily glass of lemon water (used to cleanse my body and hopefully increase my fertility/chance of conceiving a girl). I had a minor caffeine headache earlier but I had 4 chocolate covered coffee beans and felt better. I also noticed that I was a lot hungrier mid afternoon and had to have a snack. I'm normally nursing my lunch pop all afternoon which curbs hunger.

I must also shamelessly plug my husbands blog. He is still doing the Primal Diet (I had to quit as it caused me massive depression) and blogs about his diet and workout routine. You can find his blog here http://occasionaljark.blogspot.com/. He blogs with his best buddy, David, who is also a good friend of mine and the namesake of our son David.