Friday, September 23, 2011

My day at home

Wow, life just gets busier and busier... literally every day. Things keep moving and some of it I will share in time, but meanwhile life goes on at home. We continue to eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and lots of snacks as well as pick up and drop off kids, get our homework done (this includes me by the way), do the chores that are priority and still try to spend time together. Oh yeah, and work and sports and classes and all that other stuff going on.

I am happy to stay put at home for once today and I look around my house feeling happy with what we've got and what we are doing here. I only get one day a week at home, if I'm lucky, so I like to savor it.

I get to spend my Fridays off with my youngest while the older two are in school. He is quite a player and can keep himself busy for hours building these amazing... things out of the collections of random hand me down toys from his older brother and sister.













One thing that I've made routine around here is ditching the dryer. For a while that involved hauling the laundry outside and hanging it on the line (which I love to do actually) but I just got fed up with the rain always happening after I hung the laundry and then left to go to work or run an errand... only to come home to clothes that were even more wet than when I hung them up. What a waste, especially if the only option at that point is to use the dryer, which will end up using even more energy because the clothes are extra wet at that point.
So I went to a locally owned hardware store and bought a super awesome wooden jumbo drying rack. I had a small one before that didn't hold a whole load of laundry, but with the additional super awesome jumbo rack, I can easily do 2 loads of laundry and hang them in my living room and still avoid the use of the energy sucking dryer.

This will be even more fantastic once we start having fires in our fireplace because the clothes will dry super fast. And for big things like sheets, I just hang them on the curtain rod in the bathroom.



One other little random saving secret that I wanted to share, for those bacon lovers out there: I save all of my bacon grease.
We don't eat bacon a lot but when we do... I use a spatula to get all of the left over grease in a jar that we keep in the fridge. We use it for cooking eggs or adding to certain foods for that special bacon flavor. I have added it to mac and cheese and also popped popcorn in it... at least one of my kids is vegetarian, so I don't use it as much as I'd like but I'm always looking for more uses for leftover bacon grease!

Ok, that's all I've got for now. I've already made my butter for the week so now I'm off to study and organize a fundraiser! Oh yeah, and fold the laundry...




3 comments:

  1. The other great thing about using a drying rack inside this winter, is that as the clothes dry, they will add a little moisture to the air.

    I have several of these from IKEA http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50095091. They hold a TON, and they fold up so narrow that I can fit two between the fridge and the wall (in the summer, I dry a lot of laundry on the deck right outside our kitchen door).

    The best thing is that I can put a drying rack in each kids room, and dry their laundry in their room - it makes it so easy to fold and put away their stuff. And when they are home on laundry day, they can do it all themselves.

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  2. Oh, I like that rack! I also really like the idea of putting the kids clothes in their room... there isn't a ton of extra room in there, so they would be forced to fold (hopefully) and put away their clean clothes to make space. I love good ideas like this, thanks!

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  3. The IKEA racks are really handy. You can postion the arms in more of an "V" formation, too, if you have long things to dry. And you can put up just one side if you want to use it in a small space.

    I've used mine weekly for two years now, and they still look and perform like new.

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