Ok,  so I have decided to start a chemical free diet for my family in hopes that it will improve Michael’s behavior, attention span, and focus as well as improve the overall health of my family. Michael is behind in some areas of understanding and he seems to be hyperactive, oversensitive, and has a difficult time sitting still or focussing on one subject for any period of time. He basically can’t seem to stop talking (very loudly), moving, or whining. He also has had dark circles under his eyes for basically as long as I can remember. The doctor thought it might be allergy related and lately I have read several blogs and articles regarding added dyes, chemicals, and preservatives in our food having a huge affect on some children’s behavior. In other words, some children have a sensitivity or allergy to some of these additives. In order to assess whether Michael has an additive or dye sensitivity  I have decided to completely remove as many of the chemicals and dyes in our food as possible to see if there is any noticeable change. I am not going completely organic so there will probably still be a small amount of chemicals in our food due to pesticides and fertilizers used in the growth of our foods. I will buy about half of our fruits and veggies from organic sources but all other food will be conventional but without additives. I am going to keep track of what we eat and which brands I have found to have the least additives.

Sunday was our first day on the diet. To read about how it went check out my new blog (dedicated to health and food related topics). I will still be updating this blog with family related stuff. I just didn’t want to fill this blog with recipes, chemical info, and food ideas. Anyways if you are interested in my thoughts on all natural food and recipes go ahead and check it out

So this post is long overdue. I just realized that my blog does not yet know that I am pregnant with baby # 3 and that we found out that IT’S A GIRL! We are ecstatic. I am so excited to decorate our nursery like this…

and buy clothes like this…

and this…

All I can say is I hope she is not a tomboy because I have been looking forward to having a frilly, lacy, flowery little nursery since I was a little girl.

Well I have successfully added a few new routines to our lives. Every morning we have family work time where the kids and I clean up the house. This has been wonderful because the house has been staying so much cleaner and doing it every day makes it so we don’t have as much build up and the kids know what to expect. We have also started going to the gym almost every weekday. I have started a water aerobics class 3 times a week and I love it. I have also started planning meals in 2 week increments and only going shopping once every 2 weeks. This helped us to more closely stick to out grocery budget for the month (it was a little over because we got new bed stuff for our kids). It has been nice to have a bit more of a routine. I have several other things I want to add into our schedule one a time. I want to add 1. 20-30 mins of reading time 2. A learning/lesson time for Michael. 3. I want to get back into the habit of scripture reading and prayer. But for now I am satisfied with the habits I am forming and will try to add in a new one once this one feels strongly established.

So this post is probably long overdue but we have been making a lot of changes to our house since we moved in. We got new windows

We re-did our floors downstairs, removed the fireplace to give us more space in the livingroom, and painted the living room beige…

showing fireplace wall before

new wall

kitchen after

So we spent Christmas at my husbands parents house. When we are there the kids spend a lot of time playing in the playroom (which happens to adjoin to his food storage pantry) The door to the food pantry does not close properly and does not have a lock so my father-in-law “child proofed by moving all the food to the upper shelves of the pantry where the kids “couldn’t reach”. Well we didn’t plan on the children using the shelves as a ladder. I came downstairs to check on them to find Zeal on the top shelf of the pantry and this…

Big Mess part 1

Big Mess Part 2

Needless to say our father in law will be purchasing a new door most likely with a lock.

So we decided to do things a little differently this year and headed off to San Diego for Thanksgiving. It was our first Thanksgiving with just our own little family. We had a great time and did a lot of fun things with the kids. We stopped in Las Vegas for a day o n the way there and saw the Bellagio, Water show and botanical gardens, the Mirage Volcano show (which Mercury cried all the way through), spent several hours in an arcade without spending any money because the kids just loved sitting in the cars, motorcycles, and other games, swam in the pool.  Then when we got to San Diego we went to Lego land and the kids rode their first rides and Mercury drove a car for the first time. We also went to the Wild Animal Park, the San Diego Temple grounds, The Mormon Battalion Historical Site, Several parks, and a couple Beaches.

Daddy and Mercury on the kids first ever ride

Zeal got to meet Bob the builder but Mercury was too scared so he just looked from afar

Mercury loved the train at Legoland

Mercury got to drive

We discovered that our kids are much smaller than gorillas at the Wild animal Park

We ordered giant pizza

Then we went to the beach

The kids LOVED playing in the sand

We really enjoyed the trip and spending quality time with our kids. We will definitely be taking more family vacations in the future (probably not for the holidays though).

I didn’t realize what great strides I was making in de-cluttering and moving toward minimalism until I found some really old pictures of how I used to decorate my home. I will share a few so that you may see what I am talking about. These pictures are from about 5 years ago when Dave and I were still in College and lived in an apartment compared with our current home.

I used to decorate my dresser like this…

Now it is a little more simplified…(also painted white with new hardware)

My side tables used to look like this…

and this…

But now they look like this…

and this… (also stained them and added handles)

I used to stuff my hutch with all sorts of things…

Now I’ve pared it down a bit…

I used to stuff my entertainment center to the brim with knick knacks and decor…

Now I have a much more stream lined approach…

And last but not least here is our old cluttered desk…

and our new more basic and simple desk

Now a lot of this “de-cluttering” and minimizing was due to having children who would break most of the items I used to decorate with but also I now find joy in clear spaces and have realized that the less stuff I have the less stuff I need to clean, find, lose, and worry about.

This was written back in June but is still quite applicable

I have so many thoughts rushing through my brain and the main theme seems to be simplicity. I want to de-junk my life. I am starting with physically de-junking and simplifying my house. I am also planning on switching to online billing since I seem to gather a lot of paper mail. I have so many things that seem so difficult to let go of.  I am hoping I can get myself down to one “memory box”. I want to take everything out of my closet except clothes and shoes. I cleaned out our storage unit yesterday. I brought a whole van load of stuff to DI it felt good to let go of all that stuff. I keep trying to come up with questions to help me let go. Like, when was the last time I used this, in five years will I even remember that I had this, will I miss it when its gone, do I really need this, and other questions like these. I am beginning to love emptiness and simplicity. My life has become increasingly crazy, cluttered, and busy.

Fast forward four months to the present. I have kept my kids room relatively in the same condition as the last picture and I have achieved getting my closet down to only clothes, shoes, and our safe that holds our important documents and such. I also took a lot of stuff out of the office closet. Unfortunately I haven’t let go of most of that stuff yet because I just shoved it all into the storage unit that was clean back in June and now cannot even be opened without fear of things falling out onto you. So I need to have another go at all that STUFF and see how much more I can actually get rid of. It is so freeing to get rid of things. I don’t know why it is so hard to do. I just make all these excuses about why I need to keep all this JUNK. Also I think that children’s toys magically reproduce during the night because we keep getting more and I don’t know where they all come from. I am getting ready to do another purge because we definitely have way too many and I know they don’t even play with most of them.

OK so I know I didn’t blog about it but there was like a one week period about a week after I started my crossing where my kids were actually obeying and being good little children and there were hardly any messes. Then Dave started back to work. Now we are in a TRANSITION phase again and my children have reverted back to the crazy mess-making versions of themselves. Did I mention that my kids don’t handle transitions very well. My sweet adorable loving 2 year old has become a whiny screaming trouble maker and my 3 year old has become a stealthy destroyer. It seems as though I cannot leave the room for even a moment. There has been so many messes of late I can barely keep track of them and I sometimes feel like I am going crazy again.Some of our recent messes have included:

Coloring with permanent marker on the computer screen and desk

Ripping open and pouring out an entire box of cereal all over the living room

Pouring a tub of oatmeal all over the kitchen

Dumping dirt from the back yard all over the patio

Pouring out an entire 1 lb bag of tortilla chips all over the kitchen

Throwing almost every meal on the floor when they think they are done

Tossing diapers and socks all over their bedroom during a “nap”

Pulling apart their beds and pushing the bed across their bedroom

Tipping over the rocking chair to use as a jungle gym

Putting small holes in the walls with various items

Drawing on walls with any writing tool the can get a hold of

Unraveling all of the toilet paper

and

Tearing up books

Those are just a few of the ones I remember.  Now in addition to making a lot more messes than usual they have also been a lot more whiny, disobedient, and just plain naughty. Some of the other things they have been doing are eating toothpaste, drinking water from the backyard hose, bring bugs into the house, sneaking outside every chance they get, screaming, yelling, and fighting. It has been very loud and very chaotic at our house. It seems as though there is constantly some sort of mess or crisis happening right now and I feel like I all the work I did cleaning and organizing is slowly being undone because I am spending all my time and energy helping whiny children, cleaning up messes, and separating fighting toddlers. Yikes! I am really hoping that this is just a transition reaction and that with time and routine they will revert back to the lovely children they were a few weeks ago very soon. Wish me luck

Well I must say it has been tough to try and apply all these new ideas at once. I have been doing much better at several of them. For instance, I have been taking my vitamins and supplements every day so far and have been working daily on my de-cluttering/cleaning (although I must say it seems as though clutter and messes are creeping up much faster than usual and I still haven’t gotten everything put away from vacation), I also bought a ton of fruits vegetables and whole grains and have been serving them at meals (so far the kids have spit out just about every vegetable they have been served but at least its going in before it comes out…progress right?), I have not been more active physically but I do think I have been more active spiritually we read a little bit of the scriptures as a family and I have been reading a book about teaching your children the commandments before bed. So there is still room for a lot of improvement in both of those areas.

Great book! Write them Upon their Hearts by Marcus Barnes

Now for the purpose of this blog post…parenting after vacation. I don’t even know where to begin. This has been a ROUGH week for my parenting skills and I am pretty sure I have been a meaner mom and not a nicer one this week. But to my credit I am pretty sure my kids are behaving MUCH MUCH WORSE than usual. In fact I once again feel like I am losing it on a daily basis. I am not quite sure where to go from here but I am really hoping that once I get a hold on the house again and our schedule normalizes itself and they get used to the idea of no tv again that they will also normalize (or at least calm down a bit). Here is an example of a day to give you an idea of what a month and a half of vacation detox looks like. Wake up to bundles of energy and desires for food, get food, buckle kids into chairs (experience has shown that not to do so is a bad idea) leave room for five minutes to get dressed, come back to discover that somehow they have escaped their chairs and gotten into finger-paints, play-doh, garbage, food, spilled drinks, and thrown their breakfast all over the kitchen. So then you must clean up all the messes and while you are doing that they start screaming and fighting so you go to see what is going on and you see your 3 year old chasing your 2 year old with a bottle of febreeze. So you take the febreeze and head back to the kitchen to finish cleaning. Then you realize things are quiet … too quiet. You walk out of the kitchen to realize the children have decided to play out side without supervision, you corral them back inside and decide it might be best to save the mess for later. So you sit on the couch to be sure you have a view of the whole play area then you become the play area. The children decide to climb, poke, pull, and otherwise harass you instead of playing with toys. So you play with them for a while. Now its snack time. Oh boy this time I stay in the already messy room but it doesn’t seem to matter because when they are done they throw the container of yogurt on the floor or smear it on the table making yet another mess in the already messy kitchen. Now normally I would make the child clean up their own yogurt but seeing as how there are so many things to get into in the kitchen since we have not finished unpacking from vacation I figure it is best to do it myself while the kids take a nap. So, now its nap time. The kids start out in the same room…I quickly realize that’s not going to work based on the giggling coming from the other side of the door. So I separate them. Finally sleep… then time to clean up all the messes from this morning and try to get some of the vacation stuff put away.

Then the kids wake up and it all starts again…mascara on my bedsheets and the walls, bathroom cleaner covering every surface of the bathroom (which happen while Mercury was going “potty” he has been insisting on the door being shut recently), Zeal gets a hold of scissors somehow and cuts up some buisness cards, yelling, screaming, fighting, dumping all the toys, and messes everywhere. Welcome Home

This is VACATION DETOX!