THE STORY OF MY ONGOING WEIGHTLOSS JOURNEY

About 8 years ago, I lost 40 pounds - I guess it was "baby" weight but I was well passed that stage! I worked really hard, walked daily, used Weight Watchers to help me keep track of every little thing I ate, and felt amazing. 

About 4 or 5 years ago, I began gaining back that weight. I hadn't changed my eating habits much and I was still working out. I was puzzled as to why I began gaining back my weight and started realizing my addiction to sugar and breads and thought that I needed to figure out a way to get that under control. Meanwhile, in the last 5 or 6 years, I have discovered all things natural, clean, organic, and wholesome! Our family now does as much clean living as possible. 

It's a Back to School Printable "Organizing" Bundle Sale!!

 

It's unbelievable to me that school is starting in just a couple of weeks for us! This summer flew by so quickly! However, I want to be sure to help all my faithful readers be prepared and organized for the school season and have joined with some amazing organizing bloggers who have come up with printables that are fantastic and original for you!

Amazing Printable "Love" Bundle Deal!

The LOVE BUNDLE SALE IS OVER - and all links have been disabled!

Organizing is just something I think is fun. Having a schedule and filling it in is also one of those fun things for me, too! But, printables that combine those two - WOW, what fun this is going to be! I am not particularly skilled at making printables, as much as I wish I was. But, I have some blogging friends who ARE and they have put together this AMAZING package of printable - seriously, 300 pages worth - for an amazing price of $20 for just ONE short week! I'm telling you, these printables are AWESOME -- I have started printing up mine to help me keep track of things and organize my blog and much, much more! Read on for more information...

Do you love printables and customizing your personal planner?  It's one of my absolute favorite things to do. If you are anything like me, the Printable Love Bundle (created by several of the most popular lifestyle bloggers) is the perfect kit for you! Whether you use a Filofax planner or a 3 ring Home Management Binder, the Printable Love Bundle has something for everyone.  It's the only printable bundle devoted entirely to the love of planning.  We also threw in some extra fun printables for Valentines Day, the pantry, and your budgeting.   For one week only,  you have the opportunity to stock up on hundreds of printables for your finances, blog, home, pantry, chores, menu planning, and much more.  They contain everything you need to create a home management binder or personal planner. The best part about it, these printables can be printed over and over for many years to come.

Giving Thanks - Bloghop and a printable

One of my favorite things about November is that it's Thanksgiving time and it's a great reminder to be thankful. It's a great time to start counting blessings - and we have a lot of them! Check out my project FREE Thankful printable and then visit my friends to see what they created with the "Gratitude" theme. There are recipes, printables, and family traditions included in this blog hop.

Christmas is coming! Are you prepared?

Christmas is coming!! Have you even started thinking about it? Are you prepared for what is coming? Well, Thanksgiving is next week and BAM! Black Friday starts and we're supposed to be ready for that! 

For the last two years, I have given you a whole bunch of ideas for organizing your Christmas! Have you seen them? Here they are, should you want to see them again:

How to make a simple {and cute} printable with PicMonkey

Have you seen all the cute printables floating around and wondered how you could make something like that but just for YOU? I have...I'm a problem solver and ambitious girl so I wanted to figure it out. I use PicMonkey for all my photo editing and I love it. It's easy to use, user friendly, and FREE! That's my kind of website!

So, here is a step by step of how I made this printable schedule.

First, go to PicMonkey.com and click on "Create a Collage". 

Next, you simply save the blank collage. You can name it whatever you want! I creatively called it "blank collage" - mostly because I can use it over and over again.

I realize this seems simple, but once you save it you'll need to click the "x" in the right hand corner. Then, at the front page click on "edit a photo".

Simply open the "blank collage" that you made.

Once you get it open, you want to click on the symbol at the top {see where the arrow is pointing below} and "resize" the picture to 500 x 750. I use that size because it copies over to a document much easier. If you want a landscape size, just do the opposite of 750 x 500.

This is all real easy - I'm trying to give you every single step for those who aren't sure - so this will take you all of two minutes to do these first few steps.

Then comes the fun part! Pick a frame you'd like to use. I use the Museum Matte for mine.

I also picked my colors, because black and gray were boring to me!

I advise you pick a main font, for titles and such, and one for your normal or subheading content.

When I made my subheading, to save myself time, I right click on the text box and I highlight "duplicate overlay" and then it duplicates the text. Then, I just adjusted the text and tweaked it how I wanted it to look.

Voila! You are done! Adjusting and tweaking are all part of the process until you get it to look nice! Then, save this...

You'll open up Word and insert this as a picture. You may need to adjust the margins a little bit to get it to fit the page correctly. Then, print it up! My secret is out! You can now make your very own printable schedule or chart for yourself! 

 

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Positively Splendid
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Home Stories from A to Z
A Bowl Full of Lemons
Organize and Decorate Everything
The Better Mom

I found my haven in Atlanta

I went away for about five days last week and headed to Atlanta, Georgia for a bloggers’ conference called Haven. It was a conference specifically for home décor/DIY bloggers and it was just like its name – a haven! It’s hard to describe the camaraderie of bloggers. It’s something that most of us bloggers can’t really share or talk about much with even our close friends or family because they don’t understand the lingo, the online relationships, and the hours and hours and hours it takes to run a blog, and usually get bored hearing us talk about HTML, stats, and SEO. So staying up until 1 AM to talk and chat at the conference was pretty normal for all of us and worth the lack of sleep we all got.

Top Left: my new polka dot bag. Bottom Left: reading material on the plane. Right: My love note I found in my suitcase from my sweet Rachel.

What did I learn about? Well, there were lots of classes you could take. I specifically wanted to learn about SEO, running a blog better, PR, advertising, making money, photography, photo styling, blog design, and furniture painting. There were so many more classes I didn’t even get to like: thrifting, decorating 101, furniture building, and many more.

I have a HUGE to-do list now for this blog and that is going to take a lot of extra time to get through that list to make OMF better. To help you better understand what it takes to run a blog, each post that you see {three days each week} takes me an average of 5+ hours to put together. Surprised?  Well, it does. I have to DO the project. I have to take photos WHILE I’m doing the project. I have to write the post. I have to edit the photos. I have to edit the post.  Plus, there’s all the social media and link parties to get my blog known so you can find my organizing ideas!  There’s emailing with companies for advertising and giveaways, answering emails and comments from my lovely readers. You can see, it’s nearly become a full time job for me – remember I’m also a piano teacher with 15 students! Oh, and did I mention I have a family and home to run, too? Well, I know what it’s like to work because I’m about up to full time work hours, as you can see. But, I LOVE it – I absolutely LOVE to blog. I work every spare minute I can – just ask my husband and friends!

Top Left: Allison Hepworth. Top right: Beckie Farrant. Bottom Left: Andrea. Bottom Right: Anna, my roommate at Haven.

Now…enough about all that blog stuff and why I love it. Let me tell you about some amazing ladies I met and whom you might like to get to know. My roommate was Anna, of Ask Anna. She and I are both Christians and we both love organizing and decorating. We were a great fit as roommates. She is more of the “cleaner” than me – I just like to organize everything, I’m not so much the germ-a-phobe, which she’ll readily admit to. She and I are both from California and have been to each other’s houses, too! We had lots of late night talks and never seemed to run out of things to talk about.

I also got to see my friend {whom I roomed with at Blissdom}, Allison from House of Hepworths along with some of her Texan friends that she roomed with, Beth {of Freestylin.com} and Jamie {of C.R.A.F.T}. They were just sweet ladies and I got to talk a lot with them. FYI - I didn't take nearly enough pictures because I'm terrible at taking "people pictures" and usually just take pictures of stuff! So this is what I have...

I made fast friends with sisters Vanessa and Heather from AtThe Picket Fence. I had never been to their blog before and I can’t understand why. They have some great stuff and are amazingly good at what they do. We laughed and talked for hours about so much stuff!

Brittany, the Pretty Handy Girl, and I became friends at Blissdom in Nashville, and I had the privilege of joining her {on the day after our conference was over} at a Habitat for Humanity Restore in Atlanta. She spoke about recycling and restoring old items. She’s amazing and everyone loves to be around her – she’s definitely a people person. She can fix just about anything and has amazing tutorials on her blog about how to fix, make, and do so many things. I would recommend her as a great resource for all her great tutorials on DIY {especially geared for women}.

Then I got to meet Beckie with an “ie” – one of the most creative ladies I know who blogs at Infarrantly Creative {she’s also got two other blogs – Knock Off Décor and Road Kill Rescue}! She is an amazing businesswoman as well as blogger. She has a great handle on how to do this whole thing and had great advice for us on that.

The trip to Atlanta was absolutely worth the lack of sleep, the time change, the lack of not eating enough, and having to be away from my family for a short time. But, I’m still a wife and Mom, first, and it is good to be home with my family. It’s hard to balance working from home as a blogger and being the “COO” {chief operating officer} of your household. I hope that you will begin to see changes on the OMF blog that you like. To start, I re-wrote my “about me” page. I’m hoping to update my home tour page soon, too, but it takes a ton of time to do that so I’ll let you know when that happens.

I’m also going to be helping you with organizing your kids {and making your life a little calmer, hopefully} in a whole different way as I am partnering with Positive Parenting Solutions for a FANTASTIC webinar that she is hosting next month. If you’ve never heard of this site, I’m going to tell you more soon about it and, trust me, when I talk about having a calm and organized home, this is going to help a lot of Mommies with all of her great advice. I look forward to another great year of blogging and motivating all of you to organize!!!

 

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How to make a simple chore chart step by step

One of my most asked questions is "How do you make your chore charts?" So, today I'm going to teach you. It's pretty simple and I want you to be able to do them yourself so you can tailor it to your family's needs.

I'm assuming you have a computer, so this is going to teach you to use your computer! If not, you will have to make these by hand and get as creative as you are able. So, with that, I use a publishing program on my computer. I am now a Mac user, but previously had used a PC for many years. I used Microsoft Publisher for many years - probably 15 years! So, when I switched to Mac and discovered I could't use Microsoft Publisher, I was a bit sad :(


But, good news! I found a similar Mac-based publishing program that works a LOT like Publisher - it's called Swift Publisher. I downloaded it for $29.95 {you get a FREE download for 30 trial to make sure you like it, too} and can now make ALL kinds of things - cards, menus, brochures, programs, posters, etc. But, you can also make your own thing. These two programs {Swift and Publisher} are similar, so you can use this tutorial for either one.

I started first by opening up the program and {step 1} starting with a blank new document.

{Step 2} Create a text box by dragging the shape as large as you want it. I did a larger text box and a smaller one - one for a title and one for the main body, but you can just make a title in one large text box also. 

You'll need to choose what font {step 3} you want and decide what you want to put in there. I always like to choose a main font and a contrasting font - one with pizzaz for titles and important parts and one that is easy to read and more simple.

Next {step 4}, you fill out the whole thing - changing the size of the fonts if they don't fit in. You may have to play with it a bit, but in time you'll begin to know about what size will fit in how much space!

If you'd like {step 5}, you can add a border around the text box. Because I only wanted border around just the kids chores and days of the week, I chose to make a separate text box, like I mentioned {in step 2}.

Adding pictures {step 6} is both fun and easy - and I get lots of you asking where I get all my cute pictures!  In the Swift Publisher {and Microsoft Publisher}, you can pull open your own personal pictures OR you can pull open clip art from a gallery of pictures. There are a lot of categories and you can type in a search word to find something you're looking for. I used to use a bunch of pictures when my kids were little - see my printables HERE for those ideas - but now that they are older, I just put a picture of them on there.

As you can see, above, if you were to look in Microsoft Word {similar to Publisher for clip art}, this is what you would be looking for to find clip art.

In Swift Publisher you can see where to look for photos and clip art, in the example above.

Then, just print up the cute, personalized chore charts - once you spell check and get everything set! Now, get ready to make some fun chore charts for your own kids. We keep them in sheet protectors that are taped in the pantry and behind their doors in their bedrooms - that way when they change, it's easy to slip them in and out, cause they change a couple of times per year. Have you started making your chore charts yet? How about a schedule for yourself? {I'll try to come up with a great tutorial soon on making pretty schedules for yourself!}

 

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Delightful Order
Tidy Mom
Serenity Now
Six Sisters
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Positively Splendid
Iheart Naptime
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A Bowl Full of Lemons
Organize and Decorate Everything

Goodbye School, Hello Summer: Summer chore charts and schedules

Summer in our household is officially here! The kids finished up their last day of school last week and it is so wonderful to be "sleeping in" for an extra 30 minutes a day! Ha, ha - I still get up to walk every morning, but instead of getting up at 5:30 AM, I'm now up at 6 AM.

Anyway, I am determined to be more organized in the area of summer activities, chores, and media time with my kids. I've been pretty organized before, but I've noticed some problems and I wanted to tweak my plans again. That's the beauty of keeping schedules, you learn to be flexible when it's just not quite right. As they grow, so must your flexibility!

Click HERE for FREE printable

My kids have daily chores to do every morning before school. Personally, I have found that they have more energy to do them before school, but if they don't finish them they have to do them after school. They have done pretty well at them and, for the most part, I haven't had to push too hard to get them done.

Click HERE for FREE Printable

So, for summer, I decided that they would have to continue getting their regular morning chores done - minus having to make a school lunch, of course - but added that they have to do TWO more chores each day because this Momma is SO busy now that I need more help around here. I made extra chore cards that they can choose from {above FREE printable}. There are ten cards. They can choose two each day, but then they have to put the cards back into the cup so they don't repeat the same chores that week. It starts all over the next week. {Yes, I know there are two of the cards that are the same, and that's on purpose so they do it twice in one week, but must choose a different area to organize}. They like this part because they can choose their own chore and have some part in deciding what they want that day. 

I've also got to get their time in front of the screen under control. I have always restricted their time in summer to two hours a day of media time, but haven't had a good way to keep track of it. Media, in our household, is defined as: TV, Wii, Ipad, or computer. You could also call it "screen time" or something like that. I don't have a problem with media on a small scale. I DO when they get obsessed with it and act like zombies and it rules their whole day. So, I came up with this idea. I made these "media minutes" sticks {well, laminated cardstock} and they get 8 of them each morning. Each one if is equivalent to 15 minutes. I have their first initial on them and they can decide how they want to use it - use up all their time at once, or a little at time. I also give "bonus" media minutes for various things and for reading. Whatever they don't use up at the end of the day gets put back and start with two hours the next day - they don't get to save up those 2 hours. However, if they got bonus time {I mark these with an asterisk} they can hang on to those and use them. So far, they love it and are doing well with them. 

Let me tell you what this is teaching my kids. It's teaching them that media is fun, but not necessary. It's teaching them how to save - for instance, saver vs. spender. Are they going to use a little throughout the day or all at once? It's a great prep for money useage, too. They are finding lots of other ways to keep busy - alone or with each other. My kids are 13 and 8. Could they have done this many years ago? I believe so. I think these visual sticks are going to help them and we can all keep track of how much time they spend in front of the "tube" watching and doing stuff.

The last kid things I've done are money making chores. I know a few of you don't believe in paying your kids to do things. I also don't pay my kids to do regular household chores - we all have to pitch in and I'm not going to pay you $1 to clean up after yourself. But, those harder chores are great ways to teach them to make some money and learn great life-long skills. I asked my FB readers last week to help me out with this, and they gave me some great ideas:

• Mow the lawn
• Pull weeds for an hour
• Rake leaves for an hour {or a certain area} and clean up
• Sweep for 30 minutes
• Scrub walls in the house 
• Scrub BBQ and outdoor furniture
• Wash windows
• Wash the car
• Vacuum the inside of the car
• Special projects that come up

I have another big list of more chores too that they came up but they are more of just a list of chores that may or may not be paid. The list above is the one I came up with for my own kids to do for some extra money. I have made it a printable, should you want to also make your own $$$ chore cards, but if you don't like these {or want them personalized} I will be posting soon {like next week} about how to make your own chore charts and schedules. Once you learn how to make your own chore charts, you can tailor it to your own family needs...won't you like that? Has your summer officially started?

 

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Join me on Facebook - where we interact and have lots of great fun. You can also see behind the scenes pictures and fun stuff I do on my Instagram!

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Women Living Well