What would you do with. . . Zucchini!

It's the second Wednesday of the month so it's time for Aubrey and I to tell you what we would do with. . . zucchini!!

Growing up with a garden I feel like we always had more zucchini than we knew what to do with.  One year you plant two plants, and the next year you don't plant any but some how you have 20 plants.  My parents used to fry it up with butter and salt, but once I ate it too many times in a row and it kind of ruined it for me.  I avoided it for a looong time until my grandma steamed some zucchini for dinner when I was visiting her in Jordan (the country in the middle east, yep, I've been there) and I was hooked again.  Still can't fry it in butter though.

So, what did I do with my zucchini??  First I made Preethi's Panzanella.  It is amazing food.  If you love olives and feta and garlic bread. . . make this stuff.

Then I googled "clean zucchini bread" (Can I get an aside here?  I've heard nutritionists don't like the word "clean" when referring to food, because it brings up that comparison of good foods vs. bad foods, but it's SO convenient to know that I can google any recipe with the word "clean" in front and find a recipe that doesn't use any sugar, white flour or processed ingredients.  Anyway, just my two cents.)  This recipe was really good!  Since I avoid dairy, I used almond milk and vinegar instead of greek yogurt (just a T of vinegar per cup of milk I think. . .) and it still turned out great!  Oh and I added chocolate chips instead of nuts.  Maybe cut down a little on the honey if you do that, it was kinda sweet.  Don't use your good honey for baking if you can help it.  Buy some cheaper stuff.  No need to use raw honey if it's just going to get cooked during the baking process, am I right?

Can you see the tiny flecks of zucchini?  No?  That's because this is banana bread, but I assure you it looked almost identical.  I forgot to take a picture, so sue me.

So there you have it!!!  Let me tell you, I am so FREAKING excited for fall, and so next month we're spending $20 on school/office supplies.  I don't know what I'm going to buy yet. . . maybe a bouquet of sharpened pencils. 

An InLinkz Link-up

Six Jobs

 I went to a Relief Society activity (the LDS women's organization monthly event) and I was really inspired.  The topic was about finding balance in our lives and the woman speaking is an expert.  She said that most of us can do 4 jobs.  If you're good at time management you can do 5.  If you're really really good at time management you'll max out at 6.  That's it.  That's all you can expect to handle.  6 jobs.  (So of course I'm sticking with 6, because I'm stubborn like that)

I came home and listed out my jobs.  I chose the same top three jobs as the speaker:

1. Daughter of God
2. Wife
3. Mother

And then I listed out the remaining jobs in no particular order:

-Housekeeper
-Blogger
-Chef
-Interior Designer
-Olive the Things CEO

That adds up to 8.  Two jobs too many.  Obviously I have to keep housekeeper and chef.  I would love to hire out my cleaning, but I'm not making enough money with my other jobs to do that yet. . . maybe one day! (hey, a girl can dream!!)  That left only one space left.  And I can't drop my new etsy shop.  So we have. . .

1. Daughter of God
2. Wife
3. Mother
4. Chef
5. Housekeeper (since I work from home, I have to clean before I can sew)
6. Olive the Things CEO

I'm not going to stop blogging or trying to make my home a more beautiful place, but those will have to be relegated to hobby status.  Something I do for fun in my free time, if I have free time :)

I don't value being busy, I love my down time.  But I do have a lot of things I'm passionate about and so it's easy to fill my time up so much that I don't have any fun and I'm nothing but stress.  I still stress about this blog, about what will happen if I don't try and post somewhat regularly.  I have got to get over that!  It was a great hobby with a newborn and I'm sure it will be there for me with my next kid too.

And I love decorating, but I'm going slowly as our budget permits.  Sometimes we have to pay for boring things like new blinds, but I know it will get there eventually.  (I do have a really cheap fun project I just completed for my living room I CANNOT wait to share!) 

I'm excited to put more energy into those six jobs as I learn to let go of other things in life.  It's hard to say no, but I'm getting better and better all the time. 

What would be your 4, 5 or 6 jobs?

Five Little Confessions: Hoarding

 

Once a month Aubrey, Carrie, Jacquelyn and I team up to bring you the 5 Little Confessions link up!  You can confess anything your little heart desires.  And link up!

Since I talked about my hoarding "problem" on Monday I decided to make that the theme of today's post.  I have to laugh because my living room is perfectly clean, Adam just took two car loads to the dump and thrift stores respectively and I've been dejunking for the past few weeks, so I'm making a LOT of progress.  I still have some things to confess though :)

1.  When my cousin was helping me move from my aunt's basement to my new apartment, he dropped a box with a glass item in it (sorry to be vague, I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings).  I was bummed that it didn't break because I didn't want to keep it, but I felt too bad to give it away.  I have since given it away :)

2. Most people that move a lot are good at going through things and getting rid stuff.  Not me!  Every time we move it's like "We're just going to move again soon so I'll deal with this crap then"  I'm finally dealing with it now. (Four moves since we got married five years ago.  Two moves for me while we were dating but not married, so six in six years)

3. I've been working on using it all up, but I had three different containers of dish washer detergent in my cupboard.  I would try one, it would make my dishes cloudy so I'd try something else.  But I kept them all.  Now we have soft water so they're all pretty good and I can use them up and clear out space!

4. Also with lotions.  I never wanted to completely use a lotion that I really loved the smell of so I would try not to use a lot.  At our last apartment I put all of my lotions in one basket and systematically tried to use up as many partial bottles as possible.  I'm getting there.

5. There are somethings I don't have a problem throwing/giving away.  Things that are not a full set.  Olivia and Axel lost one of their blocks and I wanted to chuck the whole thing.  It doesn't even matter!  You don't need all 50 to have fun with it!  Also, I'm missing the green bowl in my nesting bowl set and it makes me sad EVERY DAY.  #OCDProblems

An InLinkz Link-up

When you realize you're a hoarder, and what to do about it.

One of my goals is to keep this credenza clean from clutter EVERY DAY.  After a few days it got so much easier!  Making things pretty definitely helps.

My name is Kimberly, and I am a hoarder.  No, I'll never be on the show Hoarders, my house is still liveable. But I'm terrible at getting rid of stuff.  When I moved into our tiny apartment two weeks before Axel was born, I had SIX large boxes of Olivia's baby clothes.  I didn't want to part with any of it.  But thinking that other baby girls weren't going to get any new clothes of their own was just silly!  Me, my mom and my mother-in-law will all be buying that girl clothes, so I didn't need to keep every little piece.  I've gone through her clothes twice and a year later, I have two boxes of her clothes 0-3 months up to 3T. 

Still there are Axel's clothes, baby blankets, CD's, DVDs, CRAFT SUPPLIES!, and weird miscelaneous crap that I'm worried I'll suddenly need very badly if I throw it out. 

Soon after moving into our house, and realizing that having SO MUCH MORE SPACE wasn't as much as I thought, I finally faced the fact that I needed to get serious about throwing away my stuff.  When you start dreaming about someone robbing your garage just so you don't have to deal with it, you know there is a problem. 

The solution (still in progress!)
-A place for everything and everything in it's place.  When I'm cleaning I do what ever I can to make a place for any items I come across, AT THAT MOMENT.  It's worth taking ten minutes to hang a hook or nail so there's a place to hang my camera knowing that next time I go to put my camera away, I wont have to think about where it should go (and I will have an easier time finding it!) 

-Take a picture!  Take a picture of special items I really have no need for.  And then give them to someone who needs it. 

-Be honest with myself.  I had about five half finished blankets.  I had to be honest with myself that I would never find the time to finish them.  I didn't want to throw them away either.  So I put it out on facebook.  My aunt offered to take them, finish them and donate them.  DONE.  Because I didn't need anymore blankets hanging around my house :)

-Trust in the internet.  I had to throw away EIGHT college notebooks.  I was keeping them for reference in my teaching.  I think I used them once in my five years of teaching.  If I need information that isn't in my brain, that's what google and wikipedia are for.  I know enough to know what is good content, but I don't need to memorize the information or hoard it in plastic bins. 

-If I haven't used it, touched it or thought about it in five years (or heck, five months!) I'm probably not going to miss it.  So give it away!

-Try not to be so sentimental.  People don't want to bog you down.  I have gifts from my childhood that don't fit my style now, I don't have space for and no one will know if I give them away.  I have to stop thinking "BUT!  It's from so-and-so!"  Again, take a picture and move on. 

I still have a LONG way to go, but my goal is to have it under control before I have another baby.  The more stuff I get rid of, the easier my house has been to keep clean, and a clean house just gives me peace and makes me happy.

How do you get rid of things???  Also, anyone know the correct protocol for disposing of seminary scriptures?

What would you do. . . with spray paint?

Every second Wednesday Aubrey and I get together for a little craft/recipe/fashion challenge.  We pick a theme and then have a month to come up with a fun project using that theme.  This month we chose spray paint, which was funny because I used gold spray paint last month in my GOLD project!

I had a really cool idea, and I wont talk your ear off about it, but it was a pretty big fail yesterday.  Luckily, I spray painted a few other projects when I was working on the gold project last month so I had a back up plan.

My sister-in-law has been responsible for the last three "What would you do" posts.  She gave me some of the trinkets I used in my hexagon shelves (from What would you do with flowers) and she gave me the frames I painted gold.  This month I'm showing some art that she gave me and I spray painted.

I didn't take any before pictures (the only problem with a back up plan).  But the silver art used to be a hemp rope and I just sprayed it silver and hoped for the best!  I think it turned out great.  It's funny because when these pieces were in my SIL's house I used to think of ways I could DIY something similar.  I had no idea she had made them herself!  The hemp things are like placemats I'm guessing and then she just wrapped some canvases in felt and used the placemats like velcro, they just kind of stick.

And then there's the large mirror.  It was a light wood, but a little more yellow than I liked, especially up against the blue.  So I sprayed it white!

When I get all my new things, new dining room set and new light fixture, I'm going to have Aubrey come take pictures because the wall color is so much prettier in real life and I'm just not capturing it!!!

It's one thing to have a cluttery fridge, but I'm a little unsure about my decision to frame it here :) 

*QUESTION* I'm going to be getting a new dining room set soon (new to me anyway)  I'm going to do the chairs in white, but I'm unsure what color to do the table.  Would a white table be too much???  Maybe I just need to keep the natural wood color of the table I haven't found yet but hope to find a the thrift store or yard sale in the next month.  I guess no point worrying until I have more info, right?  (Even though my dining room set it cute, it's seriously SO un-kid-friendly.  Glass table top, fabric covered seats, a little jungle gym under there that the kids can't stay away from. . . so annoying)

Now link up any of your blog posts that feature a spray paint project!  We want to see!!  Next month we'll be doing zucchini!  Doesn't zucchini just scream August?  I'm SO feeling it. 

An InLinkz Link-up

Why I'm a NO Mom

It's super popular to be a "yes mom" right now.  When I was looking at nanny positions several years ago, a few of the jobs I found said that they didn't like telling their children "no".  And even some moms who understand that "no" has it's place, still want to say yes to their kids more often than no.  I do too!  But I can't, and let me tell you why.

-Olivia cannot have straight brown sugar in her cereal bowl for breakfast.
-Axel cannot have the large red cement balls outside of Target. 
-Olivia cannot walk to the park alone.
-Axel cannot drink his water out of my glass (because it's actual glass and he can barely lift it)
-Olivia cannot buy two giant Elmo's for her and her brother.
-Axel cannot run into the street.

It seems like other kids are asking their parents for picnics (sure!) or snow cones after lunch (absolutely!) Christmas music in July (Yes!) or making the day special by going to the splash pad (please!)  But my kids ask for, and freak out about, things that would make me kind of a bad mom, so I do the right thing and say no.  Yes, occasionally I try to divert them to something fun but different but that is exhausting. 

Last week I asked Olivia what we could do to make the day special and she said go visit my parents in California.  So. . . that was a no, but I wish! 

Five Little Confessions: Pop Culture

It's that time again, the first Wednesday of the month some of my blogging friends and I get together and "confess" some of our deepest darkest secrets. (if you can call them that!)  We would love to have you link up with us!!

I decided that it was time I told you about my celebrity crush.  The other confessions just kind of fell into place after that. 

1. My celebrity crush is Curtis Stone, The Take Home Chef.  That's how much I like food.

2. My favorite genre of music is rock 'n' roll from the 60s.  The Beatles, Beach Boys, The Who, The Mamas and The Papas, The Rolling Stones. . .

3. I really really love The Lizzie McGuire Movie.  

4.  I'm kind of annoyed with Kim Kardashian because she has my name.

5. I wrote this while watching Saved By The Bell.

An InLinkz Link-up