September and October Project Life

OK - I forgot to post the September Project Life pictures - so I decided to do them along with the October Project Life pages, which I have only just completed this morning.

September Project Life

The start of Spring - thus the flowers on the bottom of this page. Eliza loves Spring - she thinks she is lucky to have her Birthday in Spring as well.

Week 36 

Eliza's birthday week - what more can I say. I surprised her on her birthday with a punch of balloons, including a My Little Pony Balloon. As you can imagine, there were lots of My Little Pony themed presents including a new quilt cover and wall decals! Evan and Jane also came up for a visit, as Annie and Oscar couldn't make it to her Dinosaur Museum Party.

Still Week 36 - needed a couple of pages for Eliza's birthday. Here she is at the Dinosaur Museum with her school friends. I made a Pinata cake for her - it worked out really well (lucky Julie had popped in that morning to give Eliza her birthday present, as she saved me from a huge failure)!

Week 37

LOL - the birthday celebrations continued. This week was Cameron's birthday, so I volunteered to make him a cake (reference the Batman Cake in the photos - the girls helped me with some of the decorations). I also made another cake for Eliza, so that she could celebrate again with a My Little Pony Cake (I made the rainbow using icing).

Week 38

We had some lovely spring weather this week, so there was lots of opportunity for jumping on the trampoline, and we also decided to go to Floriade with Mel and Kate. This week we also caught up with some friends - Jo and Andrew, whom we hadn't seen for over a year.

I created two additional layouts for Week 38 of our Floriade visit. This page includes pictures taken by me - I used some lovely spring themed papers.

This second layout of Floriade, includes the pictures that Jasmin took. She loves to get hold of the camera sometimes, and take pictures, which is lovely. I love the picture of her in the beanie she bought herself at Floriade as well - can you tell she's right into owls?

October Project Life

The second month of Spring - and the month of Jasmin's birthday, this month also featured the school holidays.

Week 39

Some more lovely spring weather this week, so opportunities to once again bounce on the trampoline after school, and go out for Cold Rock ice cream. Eliza also went to a friend's birthday party on the weekend.

Week 40

This week featured my sister-in-law Gen's Hens day. We had a heap of fun playing sports games, and then went out to an Indian dinner at the Southern Star restaurant. It was also the first week of the school holidays. So the girls spent some time in Goulburn with family, and then I had them on the Thursday and Friday - so of course we had to go and watch the latest "Step Up" movie!

I did this extra layout to include int he album as well, so that I had a couple more pictures from Gen's Hens Day.

 Week 41

The second week of the school holidays - so Nan came up for a visit, and the girls were most pleased, she also brought up her dog Bo as well. We went out to Sirens while she was here to try out the Tapas menu as well, it was a very nice meal.  At the end of the week, when I looked after the girls for a couple of days, we managed to fit in a trip to Tulip Top with Jeff, Fiona, Daniel, Nan and Pop, and Hellie. We also went rollerskating with Jasmin's friends from school (and yes, I rollerskated as well and didn't break any bones), we also went to Flip Out with Mel and Kate. The weekend also featured several BBQs. On the Saturday we had a BBQ with Mel and Kate, Mark and Ness as well as the Holloway clan, then on Sunday we had our friends Shane and Leanne for a BBQ. The weather was just perfect for BBQs.

This week I also included an additional layout featuring photographs taken by Jasmin at Tulip Top. She did such a great job, that I'll have to give her the camera more often!

Week 42

This week, Dom and Gen came up for a visit and stayed the Saturday night. We had a heap of fun playing board games (namely Camel Up and Kings of Tokyo), as well as eating Thai food. Eliza also went to another birthday party this week for a school friend - a Dr Who themed party.

 Week 43

This week was Jasmin's 12th birthday - as you can imagine I also needed a couple of pages this week. She wanted to change her room again to an Owl theme, as well as the colours purple and turquoise. Her main present was SIMS4, she has been hanging out to get this game - and she wasn't disappointed as her Dad got her the special edition which has a diamond which connects to the computer via USB and changes colour depending on the mode of your sims.

These are the pictures from her actual birthday party with her friends. I made her an owl cake - which she designed for me, so I knew how I should make it look! Her party was at Flip Out - the trampolining arena in Hume. She had a heap of fun. As this is her last year in Primary school, the birthday parties are scaling down starting next year. We will revert to having a BBQ or something at home with family members and she can invite a couple of friends.

Julie and Leslie also came up for a visit on the weekend with her cousin's Bai and Darien, so they could give her a birthday present. She got lots of owl stuff from Aunty Julie, and Bai and Tux gave her a new purple bean bag to match her new room decor. The kids all had a great time together, and we even managed to squeeze in a late lunch BBQ.

Week 43

The week of Halloween. Unfortunately we had to go back to Goulburn to do the ordering, but fortunately for the girls Arlene takes her kids trick-or-treating so the girls went with Dave and Arlene and the kids this year in Goulburn. Eliza was most upset earlier in the week, when she thought she may miss out!  This weekend Dave also went to his future brother-in-laws Bucks party in Sydney, so while he was there I took the opportunity to help Hellie out with a slide show for her 40th birthday, as well as popping in to see Nan and Pop - the girls had a bit of fun playing with the playdoh - as did I, I made the roses in the bottom left corner of the page! They had a new puppy dog as well - which Jasmin just loved.

So that's it for another two months....
Di :-)
xxx

Super Simple Challenges

Started a class on Big Picture Classes - Super Simple Challenges, just to get back into doing some scrapping and catching up on 2013 and 2014 pages mainly for the girls albums.

The idea is that the pages only take 15 minutes to do, so I can do one in the morning before I get ready for work.

Here are my first four layouts from the challenges:

Challenge 1 - was to create a layout using two 4x6 portraits and one 6x4 landscape, with the idea being to fill in the gap at the left bottom corner with some embellishments. Since I wanted to do a Halloween Disco layout, I found this great skull paper, so I decided to print smaller 3x4 photographs instead, so you could still see the background paper. This layout is going into my Project Life Album - so appears in the November section as the Halloween disco was a week after Halloween.



Challenge 2 - The challenge was to line up four pictures in a row and add a pocket for the journalling on the right. As you can see I used more than four photos - I added an extra row, so that I had enough photographs to remember and represent the event - my sister's 40th birthday party. This layout also goes into my Project Life album in the November section.



Challenge 3 - The challenge was to use 4x6 photographs in the below configuration, but cropped to 4x4. I decided instead to use 3x4 photographs, as I could save even more time, by not having to crop them, as well as giving me a little more white space on the page. I also omitted one photograph and replaced it with a journalling block. These photographs are from Eliza's birthday last year at Let's Play, with her friends from school, and her younger cousins. This layout is for Eliza's album.

Challenge 4 - The challenge was to use cropped photographs, presented in staggered columns - which is exactly what I did. The photographs are of Eliza opening her presents on the morning of her 8th birthday last year. This layout is also for Eliza's album.

Off to make breakfast for the girls and to contemplate the next challenge - journalling using a number.

Di :-)

Kitchen Kapers versus Kitchen Wasters

I've spent the first six months of this year, documenting the food that I have cooked (and Jasmin has learnt to cook), and the food that we have eaten in my Kitchen Kapers blog posts. In June I went back to work after having five months off to do most of a Certificate IV in Bookkeeping (these 5 months passed in a blur!). You may of noticed that the food blog posts dried up, apart from Jasmin's Hunger Diary escapades of course!

Kitchen Kapers kind of disappeared because:

1 - I think six months of documenting the food we eat is quite enough for now ( I do love the six months worth of Project Life pages I have created in the process). I'll do it again in another few years to see how things have changed. Perhaps Jasmin will be regularly cooking meals, perhaps Eliza will be learning to cook more dishes, perhaps Dave will learn how to cook (LOL), or perhaps food replicators will be invented by then (probably more likely than the previous comment)!
2 - I started to forget to take pictures of the food we ate. Dave remembered more often than me!
3 - My meal planning kind of "fell off the wagon" a bit, OK, maybe a lot!

So, I am now back to planning the meals, but I find myself rethinking my methodologies for meal planning and purchasing as things have changed around here a bit.

Many of you know that I used to plan up to 5 weeks in advance - this meant that I could shop once every five weeks - NICE!!!! Means that you can also buy things in bulk and doing shopping once every five weeks is better than doing it every week, right? There are a couple of disadvantages to this approach though:

1 - We don't really have enough "Spare" space to store five weeks of groceries
2 - Things get put all over the place (eg. the garage, the back of the cupboard or freezer) - and sometimes you just can't find that thing you thought you bought!
3 - We really just don't have enough freezer space (a nice big Chest freezer would be great - but I have nowhere to put one anyway!)
4 - You still have to go and get the fresh food - fruit, veggies, bread, milk and so forth (this we solved by doing it through Aussie Farmers).

I say - if you have the space - doing a shop once a month is the go! But, it's not working for me now - so therefore I have to change.

I now work 10 minutes from home, which means that if I leave work on time, I have a spare 30 minutes in which I can actually "pop" into the big supermarkets (Aldi, Coles and Woollies) to pick up what I need for the week on the way home. This is a luxury that I have not had before. I have gotten back onto the meal planning wagon again - so I know exactly what I need.

That leads me to my point - last week I cleaned out my fridge and cupboards. Yes, I know, amazing! I threw out all the out-of-date food, I cleaned all the shelves, and I actually organised the fridge and cupboard back into some semblance of order. I must say that I was disgusted with the amount of food that I threw out! What a waste! My parent's never wasted food, probably why we had to sit at the table and eat everything on our plate before we got to leave the table. Now I'm not suggesting that anyone these days should do that - I personally think it leads to over-eating, obesity and an inability for people to stop eating when they are full. I'm all for the girls trying a little of everything on their plate, and not overloading their plates to start with - afterall, they do have smaller stomachs.

So what did I throw out? There were a few offenders -
1.  Unused Fruit, Vegetables and herbs
2. "Special" purchases
3.  Pre-made jars of pastes, conserves, sauces and dressings.
4.  Left overs.
5.  Bread and rolls.

So my new thing is about food wastage and how I can reduce it. We waste a huge amount of food in Australia. Did you know that we waste about $5.2 Billion in food? That 47% of domestic waste is food and green organic waste, and food waste in Australian landfills is the second largest source of methane – a gas 23 times more harmful than CO2 from cars. All these stats come from this document which I found on the Secondbite organisations web-site.

So why the food wastage and how do I fix the problem?

1. Fruit, Veg and Herbs - We purchase a weekly fruit and vegetable box from Aussie Farmers - the quality of the fruit and vegetables are great, it represents value, and I like supporting Aussie Farmers. The problem is that I get food that we don't eat or use - I can't eat a bag of carrots a week, we don't eat a lot of potatoes and onions, the girls don't like mandarins, and I often still need to buy ingredients I need for some meals. I want to continue to support Aussie Farmers, but I am time poor and don't have time to go to the Farmer's markets. So I have decided to stop the delivery of the boxes, but purchase the items that I need from Aussie Farmers instead. It's costing roughly the same amount of money - but I'm getting what I need, and I can feel better that I'm not throwing out a heap of uneaten food.

2. Curb Dave's "Special" purchases - ie. jars of special preserves, lollies and so forth. Instead of buying 5 jars of special stuff, perhaps only buy 2! For example -  jars of special jams from IKEA, he doesn't even eat breakfast - not sure when he was planning to eat them? Anyway, I had to throw most of them out.

3. Jars of pastes and so forth - I will make my own pastes, dressings and sauces. Benefits - they don't have preservatives in them, you can make just the quantity you need, and for the most part they will taste better.  Way too many jars of Indian pastes were found in my fridge, they were still in date, but had furry stuff growing in them. Also - we are only going to have 1 or 2 preserves going at a time, and will only purchase new ones once these are finished. I think I threw out about 6-7 jars. Dave no longer eats breakfast, and Jasmin has them intermittently.

4. Leftovers - some foods just aren't suitable for freezing. As a result you put them in the fridge so that you can eat them later on, except the next night you generate more left-overs, and the cycle continues. My solution to this one is to cook less, try to cook what is required, so there are no leftovers, and if people are still hungry they can have a yoghurt or some fresh fruit to top them up! Also, if there are left overs, use them in another meal. Prime example is Corned Silverside - my girls love it, but we can't eat the whole silverside in one night. The last time I cooked it, I made the left-overs into a soup the next night.

5. Bread and rolls - there's only so much leftover bread you can freeze before you run out of space!  Once again I was getting fresh bread and rolls from Aussie Farmers. I was getting a delivery of bread and rolls every week. Only problem was that the girls go on and off bread and rolls, so sometimes you get left with almost a full loaf. My solution was to just cancel this regular order and just buy whatever is on special at the shop as I need it.

So - every so often now you will see a blog post about things I have put in place to reduce food wastage and food going to landfill. I am also keen to get a compost bin - so perhaps over the Christmas Break I'll go and buy one, and start composting all the food scraps eg. peels etc.

I finish this post with a picture of my newly organised fridge. I am so much happier, now that it is all organised. I spend way less time trying to find things, and therefore my food prep time is reduced :-)

Di :-)