Mutiny Against Excess Week 9- Baby Food Edition

For week 9 I tackled a different area other than clothes and possessions. Baby food making isn't something new for me. I have actually done it to some extent with all three kids so far. It's something that I really enjoy doing and doesn't cost me a dime. 

I think this falls more in the categories of waste and food when touching on the amount of excess in my life. 

It is so nice that I don't have my cabinets full of glass baby food jars. When we moved into our current house I lost my pantry. There is no way I would be able to cram all of my stuff into my cabinets with jars in the way. It's also nice that I know exactly what is in the baby food that I'm making--veggies and water!

I'll start the post in one of my favorite places

my Dad's garden

This is where the free part of this comes in. I know it would cost a lot more if I actually had to buy the veggies, but my parents are pretty awesome and grow all this stuff so that my siblings and I can enjoy it.

For this post I made green beans and squash

 

Everything had to picked, but due to our unseasonably cool temps for July, it made picking a breeze

I brought the beans and squash home and washed them in the sink

Dad does his best to keep from spraying the veggies with any chemicals, so I know these are going to be pretty healthy and pesticide free

Next, I cut the squash up and snapped the green beans and steamed them in my steamer pot

After that I added them to my small blender along with some of the water from the steamer

Once they were pureed I put them into ice cube trays to freeze

Each serving is about 1 oz.

Once they freeze, I pop them out into ziplock bags and throw them in the freezer. 

They usually last about 6 months in the freezer, so I should have all I need until she starts eating more table food.

Mutiny Against Excess Weeks 6, 7 and 8ish

I'm very behind on my blogging through the book Seven by Jen Hatmaker. I have been steadily decluttering things in my house though. There is so much more to her book besides decluttering, but I wanted to start in that area first. 

Mostly I have just been going through drawers, cabinets and small closets. The small roll top desk (ie place for all the junk that didn't have a home) got cleaned out as well as the coat closet. I also organized the kids bookshelves and school area.

One thing I'm considering doing is putting away some of Jackson's toys until this winter. He tends to go through cycles where he only plays with certain toys. Right now, he is mostly playing with legos. He loves to sit and build cars, plains and spaceships with the tiny legos. His imagination amazes me. He has several playsets of imaginext things. Between the batcave, castle and ship it takes up a lot of space. I am considering putting these in the attic until it gets cooler and we are playing inside more. I'm hoping he will get excited to play with them again since he hasn't seen them in awhile.

Do you put some of your kids toys away for certain periods of time? 

Mutiny Against Excess- Weeks 4 and 5

Week 4

Wow! The last few weeks have been busy. So busy in fact, that I didn't have time to post. Between doing VBS, working and having fun in the pool with the kids, we haven't had a moment to think. I did, however, get my 'Mutiny Against Excess' done for the last few weeks. 

The first place I had to go was our closet. I have gone through my clothes and shoes in the past getting rid of a few things, but mostly hanging on to things I "might" wear in the future. This time I had a different mindset. I wanted to get rid of the clutter, but also get rid of things I might wear, but don't really need. I was pretty proud of myself in getting rid of several things that I actually like, but weren't necessary for my every day. Y'all, I even got rid of a pair of Toms. That's kind of a big step for me. I also went through our t'shirts and my bedside table. One can only have so many Beth Moore books :-)

I am happy to have my closet down to a manageable size and be able to see everything that's in there. 

Week 5

The girls' closet
My big focus in here wasn't the clothing so much. I feel like we have that down to pretty much only the things that they wear. The biggest issue was the school papers cluttering the top of the closet. I had saved every single thing that Jackson did at Mother's Day Out since he was two. I realized that I was quickly running out of room and that there was no way to save everything.

Jackson isn't really into drawing or coloring, so I knew that most of the coloring sheets could go. These weren't works of art that he was proud of, or even cared about. I decided to get rid of almost everything that wasn't a hand print or foot print.work of art. For most major holidays they make hand/foot print crafts. I couldn't handle getting rid of those types of things.

I ended up with a small walmart sack of things saved from Jackson and Ava. I plan on getting a small plastic tote to keep these things in. I think it will be fun to look back on them in the future and compare sizes.

I also finished up their room by purging a few toys and baby blankets that were no longer needed. I finally feel like their room is down to the basics of things we use every day.


I've still got weeks 6 and 7 to post about, so stay tuned for that.

Mutiny Against Excess Week 3

I am on my third week of our mutiny against excess. I thought that I was going to be moving out of the kitchen an into our closets, but I decided to hang around the kitchen one more week and clean out the cabinets. This is something that I really don't like doing at the time, but it is so worth it in the end.

My cabinets were getting to the point of overloaded very fast. Since I don't have a pantry, all of our food is kept in one section of our cabinets. I had boxes with one packet of oatmeal in them, cereal boxes with only a little cereal left in the bottom, and baby bottles we will never use. I really wish I had taken a picture of the pile of empty boxes and condiment packages that I cleared out of my cabinets and drawers. Here are a few before and afters though

I got rid of a few baking dishes and storage containers that  we never use. I also used some bins to organize water bottles and other things that were falling out on us. It felt good to have my cabinets organized, clutter free and vacuumed out.

Next week I'm camping out in the girls' closet. I'm a little bit afraid to venture into that, but I'm know I'll feel a lot better when it's done.

Mutiny Against Excess Week 2

This is my 2nd week blogging about our mutiny against excess in our home. I am still on the food portion of the book and wow is it hard! I am ok with getting rid of clutter and cleaning out closets, but when you start messing with my food it's a different story.

Last week I decided to give up eating out. This was a habit we were into doing very often. I feel like we sort of broke that and were able to get used to eating at home more often. This week we really only ate out one time. 

Also, for this week I decided to cut out snacking. I also cut out drinking anything but water and decided not to have anything to eat in between meals. I definitely feel like I needed a detox from sugar. I was surprised at how easy this was for me. I did really good Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Tuesday we were actually on our way out of town and I had a Pepsi with my Taco Bell and a cinnabon dessert from there also. In my defense my sister bought it to share, and I couldn't turn her down :-)

I really felt like I had so much more energy and had much better days. It's amazing what going without all the snacks and sugary drinks will do. I really feel like they were weighing me down. One other benefit was that I actually had times where I wanted something and denied myself. This gave me the opportunity to pray and be thankful for all the things I have. I know there are people all over the world that don't have any food to eat and go hungry every day. Poor, spoiled me had to go without her coke and afternoon snack. It really made me think about how rich we are.

Next week I am starting on the clothing portion of the book. I am really excited to go through and get rid of some of our closets.

Mutiny Against Excess Week 1

If you missed last week, I am doing a blog series over this book

I am blogging for the next seven months about how we are simplifying our lives in order to get closer as a family and closer to Christ. 

This was the first week of our mutiny against excess in our lives. The first section in the book was on food. I wasn't really happy when I saw the title of the chapter. I was expecting to have a big closet clean out, or maybe purging of some kitchen cabinet items...what I was not expecting was having to look at the food we eat.

I was a little curious about what she mean by "decluttering" food. I quickly found out she was very serious about this project. The theme of the book is "7". For the first month she picked seven foods and only ate those for an entire month. She picked a variety of things that would keep her nutrition up, but wouldn't be excess. She chose chicken, eggs, avocados, water and a few other items. I was pretty amazed at her resolve in doing this for entire month.

Instead of picking items to only eat for a month, I decided to tackle one of our biggest issues, eating out. I have to say that one of my most favorite things is eating out, and especially doing it with people. I love to have good food that I didn't have to cook. I really enjoy cooking, but with 3 kids under 5 it gets to be more difficult that it's worth sometimes.

I decided for this first week we would not eat out at all. I had to be the voice of reason for us a few times when it was suggested, but we did it. I think if we can take it week by week it will be an easier thing to accomplish. One of the reasons I wanted to stop doing this so much is because it takes away a lot of the money that we could be putting towards something better. We have recently been talking about giving more or our money away. This is one area where we felt like we could cut something out to have more to give.

It's nice to look back at the week and realize that we have so much more money that we would have normally spent on eating out. I'm definitely going to continue on with this, but making a few changes like eating out only once a week. We can still go out and enjoy ourselves with friends, but we can do it in moderation.

Next week I will be choosing 7 foods to give up for the week. Most of what is on my list will be junk foods and processed things. One of the obvious reasons for doing this will be to lose some of the remaining baby weight. I eat far too much chocolate for that to happen with my current diet. I also want to do this to feel some sacrifice in my eating. This is sort of like a fast if you want to call it that. One of the reasons to fast is so you will pray more often and spend time with God. Every time I think about wanting to eat one of my seven forbidden foods I will pray. I have two specific things on my heart; that God will give our family a direction and that He will give us more of a heart for people. 

 I feel like I am totally addicted to sugar, so I am going to cut out things with added sugar.  I will still have fruits and things with natural sugar, but this means no sweet tea, snacks or chocolate. I'm excited and a little nervous to get started. I can't wait to post next week and tell you how it goes.

Mutiny Against Excess

I'm really excited to announce a new blog series. Lately we have been dealing with decluttering our excess. We went to Florida early in May and I came back wanting to organize and get rid of "stuff". I get so tired of being stressed out because I have too much laundry or too much stuff to clean up. I hate putting my son's clothes away because I'm having to stuff more shorts down into his drawer. Truth be told, he only wears the same 4-5 pairs of shorts all the time. It seems to be like this every time I walk into a room, and it's time to do something about it.

I just started to read this book by Jen Hatmaker

For the next 7 months I am going to be examining different areas of our life and home that are cluttered with too much stuff. I am going to do a weekly blog about an area that I have been working on.

Look for new posts every Friday on our Mutiny Against Excess.