Frantic Friday & Fun

Yesterday was a kind of lazy day with not much to blog about and nothing to take pictures of.
I cleaned the windows at the front of our home, helped a lady from church who has a hernia, so I did some dusting and vacuming for her. In the afternoon I had 2 hours just for me alone, in which I dressed up and put on some heavy make-up, to practise for next week friday. In those 2 hours my parents came over to visit me, so I opened my frontdoor for them, dressed up and acting like, well, the character I'm going to be..... Dad didn't even recognise me at the first sight, so I think it's going to be a good disguise.
Thursday evening was kind of busy, as DD8 will have balletlessons and tapdance lessons, and then DD11 will have her tapdance lessons whilst once every 2 weeks DD8 will go to a club from church after tapdance, and DD11 will go to another club from church after tapdance. So after playing mums private taxi, I did some small repairs on the girls clothes.

Friday is almost always my most busy day of the week.
On friday I walk my postround, and go to 2 different groceryshops to get all my groceries for a week (unless I forget something... muahaha!) and there is also a charitiy shop that is only open on friday, so I try to go there as well, you never know what treasure lies hidden there.....
After bringing the girls to school this morning, I went to the first grocerystore, where I met the mum of one of the other girls from DD11 balletclass, so had a chat with her about the girls practising points. When I got out of the store it had started to rain, oh no!!!!!!! And I had to walk that postround!!!!!!!!!

DD13 is homeschooled, but she wasn't very motivated today, so let's say it wasn't really a great start of the day.I did do a part of the postround, but had to get the girls home for lunch all too soon.
After bringing them back to school, I went to the second grocerystore and picked up the rest of the groceries, and went to the charityshop right afterwards, where I picked up this fabulous book end.

When I got back home, Garden Patience had arrived, what a super cute doll! I had so much fun with her!

Of course she will get her own real photosession and some more attention in my dolly blog.
But I still had to finish that postround, which I didn't manage before school was all finished, so had to wait until DH arrived back home from work, so he could look after our DD's .
As you may have guess I haven't been doing much in the kitchen today, DH even cooked dinner whilst I finished my postround.
The only thing I did was make some more apple compote.

Inspired by my sisters decorating for fall The Greedy Minimalist, I decided to do something with the old stuff I had lying about:

the old stuff

As you can see, I had quite a fun project for this evening.

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......