The Family Bed & Breakfast and St Maarten

Yesterday my sister from The Greedy Minimalist, blogged about her Family Bed & Breakfast.
This rocked a memory in me, as I have been following The Fly Lady more or less for approximately 5 years.
If you have read my sisters blog post, you will know by now that  it isn't an ordinary B&B, but a way of living in your own home with only your own family to take care off.
Here's a quote from her blog: "It's not a real business, but I will treat as if it were just that. I will have working hours and I will pay myself too. My pay probably won't be much more than 10 euro a week, but it will be money that I can use as I please. No strings attached. I'll just have to run my B&B as if it were a real business."
Well, the thought of a B&B, where everything is beautiful & calm and where you can relax and have all comfort at hand is appealing.
So, I will follow my sister on her path, and see what I can do with this concept.
First thing of course, is to get rid of the clutter. To me the kitchen is the heart of the home, so that's where I started working today. The kitchen counter is usually quite empty, as the hubby simply can't stand to see much on it. But, in one of the corners there were 3 empty glas jars, which I had cleaned to use for apple sauce or compote, but I ran out of apples, so instead of something useful, they now started to clutter the kitchen counter. Looking at them I realised that I had read something about the school needing empty glass jars, so I checked my email to make sure this was the case, then went to the shed to get out 4 more jars, and clean them, so they were all ready to go to school at lunchtime.

 And speaking of lunchtime, I had just run out of GF bread this morning, so instead of buying the very expensive factory made bread, I baked my own very yummie and less expensive version, which was just ready at lunchtime:

Now, the kitchencounter itself is usually not cluttered at all, but we do have a cupboard on the opposite side of the kitchen, which tends to attract clutter, so I set myself to work on it, and this is how it looks right now:

 The hubby was really well pleased when he arrived home and saw the change here!

Today it is the 11th of november, and as per custome, in the evening kids will go from door to door and sing a song and get some treats in return. They always love to do this, but DD13 is feeling to big for this.
I had to buy new lanterns this year, as we had ditched the old ones last year.

DD8 & DD11 with their lanterns

So the girls had lots of fun, and got a quite a nice haul.........
Oh, of course, I should add pictures of a part of their loot. (yes, they had already been eating some of it before I even had a chance to take a piccie)

DD11's loot

DD9's loot

and everything of DD9's tin laid out (she really wanted to have a picture like this)

A Busy Monday

Yesterday I had already planned lots of activities for today, so I thought I could use a little help.
The thought occured to me that I could use some of Fly Lady's routine's to help me get everthing done I had planned.
FlyLady has a lovely concept of routines that might help you get through the tasks of managing a home, when you're a side-tracked home executive. The first time I started with her program, must be approximately 5 years ago, and I have been using some of her routines ever since, or maybe even before knowing about her.
Well, the program got a bit at the background over the past years, but when I had to empty the drawers of my old dining set, I found my control journal, and I decided it could still be useful, although it needs to be adapted a bit to how my days look now, compared to 5 years ago.
One of the things to help me through my busy day is to do stuff the night before.
So I set the table for breakfast, packed the girls schoolbags, laid out my clothes for tomorrow and even a bathrobe, as I wanted to take a shower in the morning.
Although I went to bed at a decent time, I didn't really sleep very well. (I might have been drinking too much coffee on sunday, as I was so tired the other day, that I just wanted to have a nap, but instead took a cup of coffee, each time I felt up to taking a nap).
My alarm was set at 6.45 am, and usually I'm up even before it goes off, but this time I just had to struggle to get out of bed, so it was already 7 am  when I got up.
However, I knew everything was ready, so I went to the bathroom, did the Swish & Swipe and had my shower. When I was ready to get dressed, the girls were getting themselves dressed too and we managed to reach school just in time. (this due to the fact that DD8 was having one of her I don't want to get out of bed days)
When I got back home I started a load of laundry, unloaded the dishwasher, got meat out of the freezer for tonights dinner and started on peeling apples.

And by the end of the morning this was the result....
I always have the girls at home for lunch, so I didn't really have much time to do anything else with my apples, apart from making some dough for an apple pie.
When the girls were back to school, I went to the post office to send off a parcel to New Zealand, and found out the hairdresser was open on monday, so I finally had my much needed haircut. I'm quite pleased with the result, and the hairdresser understood my choices completely. (I've got psoriasis on my scalp, so like to cover that up a bit, but my hair is very fine and thin, so needs to be quite short to make it look ok-ish. Also when cutting it into layers there won't be much hair left for the bottom layers......... On top of that I've got a very naughty crown on my hairline, so that needs to be taken into account too)
I went back home quite pleased with myself, as I had been able to build in some me-time in my day.
I finally baked that apple pie, which is really delicious.

There was also a basket of laundry that needed to be folded, and I still had some time for it, before it was time to collect the girls from school.

DD11 had been buying a pufferball (or whatever it's called) on saturday, but yesterday it was already leaky, so after school we went to the town centre to bring it back.

Back home again I started cooking dinner. I had decided on 'hete bliksem' (on old dutch recipe). I had a quick search on the internet and combined 4 recipes into a recipe of my own:
-a big pot of peeled apples
-enough potatoes to make a stew with it
-an onion, finely chopped and glazed
-bacon
So I cooked the apples in one pot with a couple of cm's water, cooked the potatoes in a different pot, with some more water.
chopped an onion and glazed it. btw, after some 20 years I'm still very happy with my multi-mix quatro, which is doing every job I think a kitchen machine might be able to do, but takes up much less room.

As you can see it did a great job on my onion.
When everything was cooked I added some salt, pepper, cinnamon, grounded cloves and nutmeg to the stew and I just loved the result. (the girls not so much, as they had never eaten it before...)

After dinner DH sorted my postround for tomorrow, whilst I took care of getting the girls ready for bed and tucking them in.

Somewhere during the day we managed to sort through the hats, scarfs and gloves, and got some ready for donation:

Now the only thing I ought to do is get DD11's points ready for her first balletlesson with points tomorrow.

I might probably do that tomorrow, and just get everything laid out for tomorrow and go to bed at a more or less decent time now......