Netball - NZ Silver Ferns V's Australian Diamonds - I was there!

I did not think that I would be there but on Tuesday night one of the girls from Salome's netball team sent a text asking if anyone wanted to go on Thursday night.  Jumped at the chance!

We started at Sal's Pizza in Parnell.  I have never been there before and their pizza was really nice!  Then onto the game.  Here is the court from our birds eye view.

  

Australian Diamonds warming up

 

Unfortunately we lost 45-47 but it was a very tense, sit on the edge of your seat game and I was very happy that I had the privilege to go to the game.

 

Thanks Silver Ferns for a great night!

Blogging whilst waiting for children

It is with great pride that I let you know that my 8yo dd is a swimmer like me ( or like what I was in my younger years).

 

She swims 3 days a week for HPK, does a race night once a fortnight and she also went to her first competition last Sunday.

 

The reason I am telling you this is because her Saturday morning 2 hour training session has allowed me to tick off 2 of my goals today:

1. I have been for a half hour walk and used my phone to 'Map My Run'
2. I started writing this blog (took about half an hour to format and complete when I got home)

As you can see from the picture below this is an outside pool BUT it is heated (warmer than the indoor heated pool they normally train in).  They are swimming in the Pakuranga College pool for the next 2 weeks on a Saturday.

 



Dolphins swimming at Pakurange College

 

As you can see by the jackets in the background it was a really cold day, the wind was icy and it kept raining off and on.  I went for my walk and then stood by the pool for about 5 minutes before going back to the car to write the blog.

 

 

All in all a successful start to my Saturday – lets see if I can do my third goal which is to stay at home for at least 1/2 a day and get some stuff done!

It all takes time - take 2

Unbelievable!!!!

I have not blogged for 17 days even though I wanted to set it as a priority.

I also wanted to work part time and spend 1/2 a day on the weekend at home - neither of which I have accomplished.

So what went wrong?

Time again (same excuse I use for not doing exercise as well!)

So do I really not have time to do what I want?  Here is my normal day

6.30 am - listen to the news and then get out of bed and have a shower

7.00 am - in the kitchen having breakfast, feeding children, getting them ready for school.

8.00 am - leave the house to take the children to school, carry onto work

5.00 pm - arrive home from work, catch up with husband & children, help with dinner or fold washing etc.

6.00 pm - sit down for dinner, dishes

7.00 pm - watch Shortland street and cuddles with 8yo dd

7.30 pm - cuddles with 8yo dd and 5yo bb.

8.00 pm - 8yo dd goes to bed

8.30 pm - 5yo bb in bed

Too tired to do anything now.

I see a couple of solutions

1) get up half an hour earlier so I can do 1/2 an hour of exercise

2) don't cuddle for so long with kids

3) don't blob after 8.30

4) make a lists of what i do each night so I can look more closely at things

I will let you know how I get on by hopefully finding 1/2 an hour each day to blog.

PS - I only managed to write this during my lunch break at work but I would not like to make a habit of it!

Gluten Free Chocolate Chip and Banana Muffins

As mentioned earlier I have a child who has behavioural issues and before he was diagnosed with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) the doctor suggested that he had a Gluten Free Diet.

The doctor suggested this at the beginning of February but we did not think much about it until nearer the end of February when there was a rather major issue at school and we went to the doctor and went Gluten Free that night.  Was definately hard to begin with but we are now in the swing of things.

Below is one of the better recipes that I use for my GF Choco Chip & Banana Muffins.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of GF Flour - any type or mixture
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 or 4 large bananas, mashed
3/4 cup of white sugar (not castor)
1 egg
1/3 cup melted butter (about 50g before melting)
1 cup chocolate chips or bits

Method:
Preheat oven to 175c.
Put liners in muffin tray.
Sift the first 4 ingredients together.
In another bowl combine the next 4 ingredients.
Add the Chocolate chips to the sifted mixture and mix together.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and fold until mixed.
Scoop into muffin pans.
Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

 

It all takes time

 

I have been kicking myself lately and saying that I do not have time to do what I want to do so I decided to have a good look at things.  I decided to make a list of the things that I really really really wanted to do and here it is:

1. Blog at least 3 times a week

2. Work part time or school hours or 7-3

3. Spend at least 1/2 a day per weekend at home doing things around the house that I want to do

4. Have a really good look at the blogs and make continual improvements

So yesterday I worked on #1 ... being Monday, I will blog for the first time this week but it will be on what we did on Sunday!

As we were taking the children rock climbing and that was going to take a large chunk of my day I decided it was also time I looked at the blogging software that is on my iPad.  It will mean that I can at least get a draft going whilst in the car and get the photos directly into the blog as it happens.

Below are some of the photos of the kids doing their thing.

 

Once this was done it was Library, Supermarket and home.  Quick lunch for all and then it was onto other things like making Gluten free Chocolate Chip and Banana Muffins but more on that tomorrow ...

Things I want to change throughout the house

I really want to change a large number of things in my house but every weekend I don't seem to have a plan on what to do, SO I have decided to put everything in a single blog so here is a list of all the areas in my house that I want to do something with.

 

Computer desk - this is a dumping ground all the time and I want to clean it up so that there are not computer and video and PS2 and PS3 and PSP etc games on it all the time.

 

Childrens toy area - WOW with so much lego and toy trains and dolls houses and books floating around this is a continual mess and I really want to do something with it so that it can all be seen and all be played with when they want to.  I also want to stop people putting stuff on the chair all the time and they then have to sit on the floor (see the legs in the bottom right of the screen).

 

 

And from another angle

 

 

As you walk in through our front door there is heaps of shoes on the left - 6 people in our family plus all of the childrens friends means that we end up with lots of shoes.  I want to also look at making this area into a place that the children can put their school bags and school books etc, a bit like a mini command centre of some type.

 

Currently the school bags live in this long thing that is in front of you as you walk in the door but the bags are getting too big for it and it just collects rubbish so I would like to get rid of that and have a little shelf of some description instead (that is once hubby has put the wall back up!).

 

 

Kitchen bench is another dumping ground as well, including my hand bag so need to find somewhere for that too.

 

 

In the dining room we have a lovely cabinet that holds our good china but it collects things on top.  We have a lot of ornaments from our various international students that are currently hidden underneath all this junk.  I want to show them off so I will be looking for a nice shelf to go on the wall and that painting of pears has to GO!

 

 

Our bedroom has a huge big wardrobe but it seems to be holding a whole lot of things that are not clothes so we need to clean this out too.

 

 

On that note I am going to go and start doing some looking at solutions to my problems and hopefully in the blogs to come I can tell you all how my low (or no) money solutions help to fix our household problems.

 

Kitchen Pantry

Yet again it has been ages since I have written anything.  We are nearly 1/2 way through the year and I have not got around to blogging for ages.

 

A couple of months ago I decided to sort out our pantry.  My youngest has just had to go on a Gluten Free Diet so I also had to chuck out a lot of stuff that we are no longer eating becuase of this.

 

This is what I started with

 

I removed everything from the pantry and put it all on the kitchen counter.

 

 

Acutally I only removed 4 shelves as I ran out of room to put things and I decided that the top shelf which had been done a month earlier by hubby was still ok and the bottom shelf where all the alcohol sits could wait for another time.

 

This left it looking like :

 

 

After a thorough clean (and the second to bottom shelf emptied as well I started putting things back into place and now it looks much better.  I can actually see things now.

 

 

Stationery Cupboard

I cannot believe that it has been about 6 weeks since I last blogged - I actually did this organisation project about 4 weeks ago but have not had a chance to write it up so here we go.

I have a cupboard under the breakfast bar that holds all of our stationery items. Only problem is that I am forever getting requests for Pens, Pencils, Rulers, Colouring in gear from the children because they can't find anything. This is why:

 

So out it all came onto the kitchen table - and with much rolling of eyes from the Hubby I started to put things into piles with the biggest being the rubbish pile.

It was at this point that my youngest decided that this would be a great time to do some colouring in so here he is doing that.

I labeled chinese containers to hold the crayons and felt pens. The coloured pencils are in a container that has long since lost it's lid and to be honest I have no idea where it came from in the first place. These labels were just done in word, printed off and then cellotaped onto the containers with extra wide tape so they won't fall off.

Now with an empty cupboard to work with I started to put things back.

This is the final product with all the everyday items on the top shelf and the extra stuff on the bottom shelf. I googled 'how to make a box' and found that it is so easy - the pink box in the top right shelf is just made from cardboard and my daughter helped to decorate it.

 

 

Much easier to find things now and the bow in the top shelf has gone as well.

My first organising project

I was very excited yesterday that I only had one child at home and no hubby as he was at work so I decided to start my first project. I have started very small in an area only 63cm x 63 cm that sits beside the store. Now, as this was the general paper collection area and we have a gas stove I was constantly worried that something was going to go up in flames one day so this had to be sorted!

This is what it looked like to begin with:

I did the following to get this sorted:

1. Put batteries in the clock and put that back in my son's room
2. Put the cough medicine in the medicine cabinet
3. Put the fire extinguisher in it's correct place
4. Put the books away in the bookshelf
5. Threw son's faulty iPhone away
6. Put suntan lotion away
7. Ate the lollies in the paper bag
8. Put rubbish in a rubbish bag - I cannot throw this away at this point as hubby may suddenly ask for something that I thought was rubbish.

This left me with papers, pens and a few odds and ends so I sorted the papers into piles. 

The papers got sorted and placed into some lovely manilla folders that I found at Warehouse Stationery for only $4 all up.  The labels are just 'shapes' that I created in Word, coloured, named and printed out on sticky lables.  Cut them out, stuck them on and put it all into the recipe book holder that I have had for ages as a catch all and it looks like this.

This left me with some pen's that needed to be sorted out into ones that worked and ones that didn't and a few odds and ends like the cheque book, envelopes, hubby's lotto scratch-its etc that for now will sit on the side until I can find something that I like to put them in.

The final reveal looks like this and I am proud of my first attempt at organising with very little money and will continue to find little projects to practice on and try not to give my hubby heart failure :-)

AND FOR MY NEXT TRICK .................

The first blog

I love to look at websites and blogs about organising your house, especially on a budget. I get a huge amount of ideas from these sites but they are not specific to NZ so I thought that I would use the ideas from these sites and put an NZ twist on them. I also aim to find good deals for the resources that I use to help us NZ'ers.

I have 3 children, 1 husband and for 42 weeks of the year we have an international college student as part of our family too. My husband does a lot of soccer refereeing and training and during soccer season I become a soccer widow. We both work full time so I believe we need to get more organized so that we don't get completely overwhelmed this year.

I started writing this blog and then got horribly ill so I have not written again for a week but I will start showing you some of my projects shortly.