Thursday 25 April 2013

Don't miss out by having vouchers expire on you!

I bet you've been here too - you remember, (or find) a gift voucher you had forgotten about.... cool!  Then you check the expiry date..... and you are too late, it has expired already.... uncool!

These days with all the daily deals available (GrabOne, TreatMe, etc) it is easy to buy vouchers, but perhaps less easy to remember to use them on time.  That makes your money saving voucher a big fat waste of money.  The same can apply to vouchers you are given, which someone has taken the time to select and spend their hard earned money on.  (Just conveying my own guilt here!!!!)

So what can you do?

1.  Keep them in a safe place.
For me that means a clip & pin on my notice board.  That way I know where to look.  They live there until I am ready to redeem them.



2.  Track their expiry dates.  I use Errands to do this (see my blog post on iPhone Household Organisations aka Lists!), but you could just as easily make notes in your diary.  Notice I say notes, not note, that way you can give yourself advance warning that the voucher is due to expire.  In my phone I will set the expiry date as the due date, or note it in the description, but set up weekly alerts that the voucher expires.  How close to expiry these alerts kick in depends on the type of voucher.  You will figure out what works for you.


Good luck on using those vouchers for fun times rather than guilt trips!

Thursday 18 April 2013

iPhone Household Organisations aka Lists!

I love using an iPhone, it has revolutionised how I organise myself and my home.  My daily goto app for lists and organisation is ErrandsNote, there is no sponsorship, just my unsolicited opinion on really handy app and how I make use of it to run a household.

 
Things I use Errands for:
  • Shopping list: bits and pieces shopping, not groceries (still use paper for that!)
  • Errands list - things I need to do whilst out and about
  • Cleaning rota, see cleaning entries (to come)
  • Christmas or holiday/vacation preparations
  • Things that need to be done at home: making appointments, finding/booking tradespeople, fixing and mending, even reminders to take meat our of freezer, call my mother, or check the TiVo guide for what is on in the Sunday theatre timeslot
  • Project managing in my volunteer roles
  • Creative projects I want to do
  • Tracking voucher and gift card expiry dates x-ref (I will blog on that topic too)

Why I like it:
  • Helps me remember!
  • I can set alarms
  • Ticking jobs off gives me a sense of accomplishment, especially if the daily schedule could be perceived as mundane
  • Can set jobs as recurring - handy for ensuring sheets are changed regularly and cleaning rota (I will blog on that topic too)
  • One place to refer to when planning day and week
  • Seeing what is planned for the week helps me set goals and ensure I am not packing in too much i.e. pacing myself!
 
Some examples:
I enter tasks as needed and then can see them in different views, for example:
Tasks to Focus on today

All tasks by due date

Voucher Expiry Dates

Cleaning Rota (entered as recurring tasks)
 

Friday 12 April 2013

Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping Sanity Savers

Before kids grocery shopping used to be a whole different experience.  My partner and I would go together.  Discuss products, read labels, compare nutrition and prices.....  Now it is me, and I need to do it before my three year old gets over it.  I am lucky, my kids are great at the supermarket.  I take their lunchboxes, and they sit in the trolley and eat their way around the supermarket.  But when they run out of food, I can feel my time to shop running out, so I try and make it as streamlined as possible.  For me that means four key ingredients:

1.  Meal Planning
2.  An Organised List
3.  Shopping fortnightly (with a top up shop during the week, where I only need a few perishable things like milk, bread fruit and fish).
4.  Good use of my freezer - I buy bread and meat ahead and freeze.

So lets look at each part:

Meal Planning
Why plan?   No more stressing about 'what's for dinner'.  Save money on throwing away food you thought you would use - only buying what you need.  Ensuring healthy and varied meals for your family.
How? I start by pulling two pieces of paper out of my scrap paper stash.  Ideally no paper leaves our house (via the recycling bin) without both sides being used, so I have a stash of paper to use the back of.  Things that have been folded in the post are in my basket, and nice flat pieces are on my kids desk for them to use for drawing and writing.
The first is turned into a meal plan for the coming fortnight.  I indicate each day with a letter, and then write what we will have.  Sometimes I end up swapping the meals around, but planning like this means I know what I need to buy and when I need to get stuff out of the freezer.  I keep a list (mental and physical) of favourite family meals and cycle through them, using a combination of sure-fire-winners, things I want us to try, and things we like to have sometimes.  There is a seasonal variety too.  During the fortnight, if think of something we could have in the next fortnight, I'll jot it at the bottom, and that makes the next lot of planning easier.  You can see the meal plan on the cat clip in the picture.
The second piece of paper is the next fortnights shopping list, see below.
After I've planned the meals, I add the ingredients I need to the shopping list on the fridge, depending on what I already have in the fridge, freezer and pantry.
Both lists are attached to my fridge.
Sometimes we have an 'eat out the pantry' or 'eat out the freezer' fortnight, where we just focus on reducing the amount of stuff in the pantry or freezer.

An Organised List
So on meal planning day there are two lists.  One on the fridge, and one blank template which I start adding items to AFTER I've done the grocery shopping.  I'll put the other one aside and it can go up on the fridge once grocery shopping is done.  I can jot on it anything we could not get and can wait a fortnight for.
I organise my list into sections, following the layout of my supermarket.  Thus there are sections for
  • Fruit, Vege, Bulk and Eggs
  • Meat and Fish
  • Deli,
  • Frozen
  • Bread
  • Grocery.
And to be further organised, the grocery items are written on there in the general order in which the appear in the aisles of the supermarket.  e.g. if toilet paper is in the aisle I will come to half way through my journey around the supermarket, it goes halfway down the list.  This really does save backtracking, and thus my energy and sanity.
When we use something up, we add it to the list.  Simple.
Then I add what I'll need from the meal planner,
Then I check our stores of fruit, vegie, milk, eggs, and bread and add what we need

It is a system the whole family can buy into and use.

Meal Planning and Shopping Lists on Fridge

Shopping Fortnightly
Simply put this means less time at the supermarket overall.  A good thing.  It also means I use my car less, as I can walk most other places, but cannot get a weeks worth of groceries into the buggy now my daughter and my family are bigger!

Good use of my Freezer
Have you noticed most 'dashes' to the supermarket usually end up costing at least $20, even if you only went in for bread!  So it does make sense to go less often, and definitely don't go when you are hungry!  You can minimise these visits to weekly if you plan ahead and keep what you need in your fridge, cupboards and freezer.  I buy bread for the week, and keep it in the freezer.  This works really well.

So there you have it, the key ingredients to staying saner as dinner time approaches or the supermarket shopping day looms!

Thursday 11 April 2013

I don't cook every night!

Despite being a stay at home Mum, (and oh yes, having nothing better to do with my time, yeah right), I do not cook every night.  I plan my meals ahead fortnightly, and grocery shop fortnightly (I will do a post on that process).  And I have nights off cooking.  How?  Simple really.  On some of the nights when I cook, I cook extra and freeze it.


When I was pregnant with my first child I got carried away and filled a 440 litre freezer with precooked meals.  We were still eating them when he was one (as I found you can actually cook when you have a baby, wow!).

Having a big freezer, and lots of meals in it, taught me that I needed to organise the freezer.  So this is how I do it.  It is rough and ready but it works.

1.  Label all meals.  Ideally that includes what it is, what it isn't (i.e. whether it has rice or not, how many drumsticks made it in there, etc), and perhaps the month and year.  I do this most easily using that type of sticky table that is called 'invisable' because it is matt and you can write on it with a pencil.  I have a standard lead pencil, but also a white one, as that shows up better on some containers.  I keep these pencils and a rubber in the kitchen drawer so I don't have to hunt for them when packing the leftovers.  I simply rub-out the previous content description and put on a new one.

2.  Cool the food in the fridge and then freeze.

3.  My freezer has drawers, and I organise them as follows so that food is grouped and easy to find.
  • Top Drawer: bread and bread rolls.  
  • Second Drawer: parts of meals (i.e. not complete in own right, e.g. frozen grilled capsicum, frozen leftover rice, etc).  
  • Third Drawer: complete or almost complete meals, family size.  
  • Fourth Drawer: Single size meals, or enough for two kids.   
  • Fifth Drawer: uncooked meat, oven chips.  
  • Sixth Drawer:  Yummy treats - ice cream, cakes, muffins, slices.  A good weight management tip is to freeze most of what you make, so that at least defrosting time slows down the consumption rate.

Freezer Chart
4.  The chart.  I have a large piece of paper attached to the fridge using magnets.  It is usually the back of some poster or bit of packaging.  I don't have to change it often, we are on our third in seven years!  You can see on the picture above that it has a section for each drawer.  I keep a pen on top of the freezer.  When an item for drawer two, three or four goes in the freezer, it gets written on the chart.  when it comes out it gets crossed off.  Easy.  So you can look at the chart before you open the freezer, choose what you want, and use it.  It also makes meal planning easier as you can see just how many containers of Lasagne are already in there!

Welcome, here we go!

I like being organised.  
I believe in minimising my impact on the environment.  
I love running a home for my family which is healthy and happy.  

Sometimes I feel apologetic for these things, as being a 'housewife' is definitely not in vogue these days, and embracing chaos seems to be a popular mantra.  There are times in life when you may have to embrace chaos to stay sane, and different personalities cope differently with chaos.  But I know me, and I don't do chaos very well.  It leaves me feeling really anxious.  What leaves me feeling good is being organised and knowing I am on top of ensuring my family are cared for.  It gives me a sense of accomplishment.  So in case, this is you...  then you might get some helpful ideas from this blog, or at least know there is someone else out there like you, and that YOU ARE OK!

And if you are not even remotely organised, and feel dreadful about it, then hey, YOU ARE OK too!  We all do the best we can with what we have.  Maybe you want to be more organised, but remember, you just need to live the life that is right for you.  Learn more about your personality type*, and embrace your strengths and learn to deal with your weaknesses.  It takes all types to make the world. And the world needs YOU!

What you won't see here are beautifully styled photographs - my shots will be from my real world, which is imperfect, just like yours!  And if I mention products, it will be because I know and love them and would not want to do without them, not because I get anything in return.

* I find this book handy, even if you are not religiously inclined, as it is very easy to read and understand and the author is very entertaining!  Personality Plus by Florence Littauer