Works for Me - Free Rice

From 1pm-3pm every day is 'Sabrina Time' here in the Mad House. The girls are in nap time, Luke is in nap/rest time and Caleb is in quiet time. This has been the case for almost 6 years now and will be the case for many to come. I adore my children, but need some time during the day to relax, rejuvenate and refresh...oh yeah and do housework, clean, scrapbook, fold laundry, watch my DVR shows, talk on the phone, blog, surf the net...the list goes on. And now I have a new source of entertainment to add that already-out-of-control list.

A friend of mine recently told me about this website called Free Rice. It's this cool website where for every vocabulary question you answer right, 20 grains of rice is donated and then distributed by the United Nations World Food Program. It's a pretty cool site!

My friend is a homeschool mom and uses it as a vocab tool for her kids and says that they love vocab now! They, apparently, get very excited to watch their bowl of rice accumulate. I must agree, it is fun and I'm addicted!

Ending poverty Works for Me. For more ideas head over to Shannon's.

Three Words...

FREEZER MEALS BABY!!! When I was first introduced to this idea 4 or 5 years ago, the thought of eating casseroles out of the freezer was totally unappealing. First of all, I'm not really a casserole girl and secondly, I always do Weight Watchers after I have a baby (and in the last 5 years it seems like all I've done is have babies, but that my friends is another story!) and I didn't think that freezer meals would be conducive to WW. Thirdly, the whole concept seemed too time consuming and possibly not worth the effort.



Oh, but how I was wrong on all accounts. Now that I have done some freezer cooking, I'm not sure I could ever go back. I'm addicted. And how it has changed my afternoons!

For those of you that have never done it before, I have a few pieces of advice. There are a couple of ways to freezer cook; you can cook with a friend (or friends) or you can cook by yourself. There are pros and cons to both.

1. Cooking with a friend. PROS: It's a fun way to spend the morning/day/afternoon. Time goes by faster. You are able to cook larger quantities, faster. Cheaper up front. Someone to divide and conquer with. CONS: You have to work around each other's schedules. If you both have kids at home, you have to figure out what to do with the kids. You also have to get together a lot to get a variety.
2. Cooking on your own. PROS: You can cook at your own pace. You can make whatever you want. CONS: It's more expensive and not as fun.

I have done both. Cooking with a friend has been documented here and here. I have been cooking on my own and find it to be pretty easy. Here's what I have been doing: I buy a ton of chicken (since, aside from fish, that is really the only meat we eat) and then when I get home divide it into meals that require uncooked chicken breasts and meals that require cooked chicken. Over the next couple of days I make the chicken breast meals. And then over the next 2 weeks I make 2 meals from my freezer cookbooks and quadruple the recipe, then freeze it. Easy-peasy and lots of variety.

Two books that I have been using and LOVE! are Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer and Holly Klegg's Trim and Tasty Freezer meals. They both have ton of variety and I don't know that I have made a casserole yet! And Holly Klegg's book has all the nutritional facts, so that I can figure out the points.

Works for me!! For more Works for Me ideas check out Rocks in my Dryer.

Works for Me: Preschool Playroom Organization

We are blessed to have a playroom in our house, so the kids can keep all their toys contained to one room and not all over the house. We are also blessed because our playroom has french doors that I can close when it is a disaster and pretend that my house is clean. Unfortunately we are not blessed with children who jump up and down with excitement when I tell them it is time to clean up. Nor am I blessed with a personality that likes to pretend things are clean when they are not. So, when things like trash & junk toys, were just getting thrown into bins and then dumped on the floor the next day it was drives me crazy. The playroom was really becoming a mess.

One day I spent a couple of hours cleaning it out and organizing the toys. I gathered like toys and then made piles of toys that I wanted to keep, toys that we were going to donate and toys that were going to be trashed. The keep pile was significantly smaller than the other 2 piles! I really only kept toys that we collections or that we could add on to.

Then I took pictures of the different toys, had them printed and taped them onto the bins with clear tape. And here is what they look like:



Cleaning up is such a breeze for both my 3 year old and my 5 year old. Okay, I still have to
bribe make them clean, but at least they are more capable of putting things back where they belong. And it is nice when we have friends over because they can help clean up as well.
Works for me! Click here for other great ideas!

Works For Me - Backwards Style

I don't usually participate in these, but Shannon over at Rocks in My Dryer does this thingy called Works for Me Wednesday. Today is backwards edition, so instead of me giving you my oh-so-brilliant advice, I'm begging for yours.

Here is the problem...over the past 5 1/2 years I have taken thousands of pictures of my kiddos. Thousands. And our desktop has reached it's limits. Actually it reached it's limits a couple of months ago, but I thought that it would change it's mind. It hasn't. So I have a couple of hundred pictures on my camera that I need to download, with no place to do so.

I have gone through and deleted some pictures off the hard drive and that freed up some space, but not enough to even download what is on my camera. Almost all of my pictures have been uploaded to Snapfish, some have been copied to an external hard drive and some have been copied to CD. But I am still not feeling confident about the organization or storage of my most precious possessions (after my kids, family, friends, bible...you get the drift). And the BIG question is after I have them backed up somewhere else, do I delete them off my hard drive?!? The thought makes me SO nervous!

Puleeze help a girl out and give me some ideas of how you store and organize all the photo's on your computer. I would be ever so grateful. Then after you have helped this not-so-tech-savy girl. Go on over here to see if there are any other questions you can help a sista' out with!

Thanks (super big air kiss!)...