Menu Plan Monday

Years ago, when I first had a blog, I found I'm an Organized Junkie and Menu Plan Monday. I was hooked. I had never planned meals before and found myself with 2 kids and a stressed military life. I got right to work with this and had some success with it.  Now I have 3 kids and a military life and planned meals is my lifeline.

 

I recently found a menu planning template at The Nourishing Home that I love. My favorite part is the "Do Ahead" section. This allows me to jot down things like boil eggs a day or two ahead of when I need them or cook extra chicken to make chicken salad sandwiches.  I print this out each week and store in my home binder. I check it each morning to see what my day looks like. 

Stress-saver!!!

 

Sunday:  Pizza

Monday: Fried Potatoes & Eggs

Tuesday: Baked Chicken, Green Beans, Potatoes

Wednesday: Meatballs, corn on the cob

Thursday:  Ham, Macaroni & Cheese

Friday: Dinner Out

Saturday: ??

I also plan out breakfast and lunch. We are all about making meal time easy during this deployment. I buy more easy to make meals and cook much less from scratch. It was so hard for me to break myself from the way I was cooking, but I was so stressed. Right now, in this moment of our lives, you will find more frozen pizzas and chicken pot pies that I have ever bought before.

Preschool Time - Sensory Bin Overview

 I took some inspiration from Carisa at 1+1+1=1 and made some sensory bins for Scarlett. She sits at the table and can work on these and I can see her from the living room or the kitchen. 

The clear bin is a shoe box bin from Big Lots. It does have a lid. 

The yellow bin is from Dollar Tree.  

All the little accessories are pulled from the kitchen, toy box, or under the beds - totally not kidding!  

 

This bin has multi-colored rice and some fun blue accessories. We are not necessarily doing a color-of-the-week thing, but we do things like this to emphasize colors. 

Cotton balls, foam shapes, and rocks make up our other sensory boxes.  Scarlett loves the rocks most of all. I think we will add 2 more bins just so there are some variety. 

Lastly, I have 2 of the yellow containers that my husband brought home at some time. These just have some fun things to keep a little one busy. I keep this on the table next to her sensory bin. Scarlett will bring us a book or yell at ask us to play with her.

These bins are not more of our preschool curriculum. They are just fun. More on these later.

I am linking up with Homeschool Creations Preschool and Kindergarten Community. 

Such an abundance of great ideas.

Two Days In A Row

It's summer break and Scarlett loves to paint (ahem)!

You might can tell! 

If she didn't look so happy, this would feel like a parenting fail! 

This is what happens when you are cleaning up and leave a toddler to paint. 

Happy Girl! Bring on the Summer Fun!

Best Outdoor Toy Ever

 This toy is one of our absolute favorite outdoor toys. Kids come from everywhere when we pull ours out of the garage. We have toted our 2 Flying Turtles all over the USA and they are still in great condition. They hold up well to any kid, any size. We have had turtle races with grown men before and its so fun to watch.

 

The Original Flying Turtle® (Teal) : Amazon.com : Sports & Outdoors

Many colors available. We have green and purple. 

We have used the mess out of these things. This purple one is about 7 years old and is missing one of the hand-grips. Considering kids bikes don't last 7 years, we think the Flying Turtles are doing well. I am not sure that Caroline knows that her purple turtle has been taken over by the toddler.  She will soon.

 

This is one of our many outdoor adventures this summer. Finding things to do with a toddler in and around a townhouse is a little challenging. Scarlett props her feet up on the bars and we push her around. She is learning to "drive" better each week.  

More toddler fun in the works. 

*this is my own personal review for the Flying Turtle. We really do love ours and in no way were we compensated for this review. 

Almost Summer

We have finally got this deployment started. The whole unit is on the other side of the world.  Just this morning, I received a call from the Family Assistance Office just to see if we were doing OK.   Ryan has already been gone for 4 months, but because he is National Guard this time around he has just made it to the desert. We have many more months to go. 

 

As thankful as I am to have a family picture, this one is terrible. It was pouring rain! It was loud in the room where these pictures where and they were trying to get as many done as possible. It was a stressful day and I think you can see it on all of our faces!

School is winding down. Thank you very much!!!

Field Day is over for the elementary kids. Jackson was in about 4 events. Most of them involved him running. The boy is fast!

We still have Sports Day for the middle school kids. Somehow Caroline figured out how to be a cheerleader during sports day and not do any other sports.  Although cheering can be tough, I do believe that they will get the easy way out this year.

Scarlett has one more week of daycare and then I think she will spend all her spare time trying to get into the "water." We added extra locks to the doors to keep her in the house. We are also going to be potty training this summer. I bought her a little kids potty. She refuses to use it, choosing to sit on the potty like a big kid. Who does she think she is!!

We finally dropped that bottle habit. She has had a bottle consistently for a little over a year. She only nursed before that and would occasionally take juice from a bottle. Now she is 2 and we just dropped them all together. The truth is we lost them all.   Hopefully when they are found they can be trashed without Scarlett seeing them. 

 

My girls

They will be friends one day. Fiercely loyal to each other. They will fight for each other, love on each other, and cry for each other. There is peace in seeing sisters bond.

Deployment Has Started

This the most pitiful countdown tracker ever. The truth is that we are just getting started on this deployment.  This is an app called Doing Time.

 

There are many more days to come. This is not our first deployment, but it is the first deployment with the National Guard. Everything has been chaotic.  We are so glad just to get this deployment started so that we can start counting it down.