Greenhaven

I love my Sundays.  Sundays are family days.  Our weekends are often full but my preference is that we are home on Sundays.

Weekdays are busy.  Saturdays are filled with children's sport.  Today we are all choosing our own at-home recreation.

I should be cleaning my fridge.  I don't do it anywhere near as much as I should.  My fridge often has containers of leftovers, veggies and unrecognisable items that I have forgotten about for far too long.  Ewww!

I figure there are two ways to stop this waste.  One would be to go through my fridge a couple of times a week and make sure I use what's stored in there.  The other would be to ensure I know what we will eat each day and only buy what we need.

I recently discovered an app perfect for my needs.  It's a menu planning app called mealboard.  I purchased the app for $5.99 and I'm loving using it.  I can choose to upload recipes from the internet or I can type in my tried and true everyday meals.  I then enter the number of servings each time I add a recipe to my weekly menu plan so, when cooking a double batch, I just increase the servings.  Easy peasy!  Once cooked, I have a spare meal for the freezer.

I'm so much more organised with my food now.  Each week I create a menu plan by clicking on a meal for each night, including any larger batch meals for freezing for a rainy day.  From that, the app creates my shopping list from the ingredients.  I can also add other items that I need to buy to the shopping list.

So now my cooking and my shopping are much more organised and I'm finding we are spending less.  I buy exactly the right amount of food for the week and each morning I check the app to see what we are having for dinner.  It helps me plan my day and my time if I know what I’m cooking that night.  I only choose four or five meals for the week because we often have a night on which we eat leftovers or the kids sometimes have sausages at the club on training night. 

So what have we chosen to do instead of cleaning the fridge today?


Wrapping a present for a party.

Spinning

Googling football videos.

Playing with nephews.

Last minute homework.

I have no affiliation with the meal planning app.  I'd just like to share what works for us.

I hope you're enjoying this lovely cool Sunday.

When I began this blog I promised to post about our journey, warts and all.

Instead, when life got too hard, I stopped writing here.  It's been nearly two years since my last post.  I don't even know where I've put my camera and my life has changed dramatically.  So much so that I don't know how to fill the gaps succinctly but I'll try.

I became too busy to post in 2016.  I was offered an opportunity to learn a lot about myself and my effectiveness in community work.  I gained an extraordinary amount of information about community groups, being subjective about my use of time, my personal strengths and weaknesses, how government and organisations function, how to effectively communicate with people and the list goes on.....

It was a huge year for our entire family and coincided with a point in time that I was thoroughly overwhelmed by our attempts to live sustainably.

I was trying to be as self sufficient as possible, from gardening through to milking our goats and producing cheese from their milk.  Homeschooling the children was either very time-consuming if I was doing it well, or guilt inducing if I was spending too much time on self-sufficiency and not getting around to lessons.

These pursuits were wonderful, they truly were!  I loved the pottering around living our lives - the spinning, the cooking, the gardening.... However we didn't keep it manageable.  Our family had taken on so much that we were doing nothing well.  I was feeling dejected by the chaotic mess that was our life.   At this time, the dread of fire I developed every summer was playing with my head.  Our property was at high risk of not surviving during a bush fire.

The introspective journey of the program I undertook in 2016 made it clear to me.  Life needed to change.  I pushed passed my fear of the volume of work required to prepare our property for sale and set to work.  All else was put on the back burner and by April in 2017 we had relocated closer to my adult children and my grandkids.

I enrolled my children in the local schools so they could make friends in our new community.  I set about finding groups to join so I could know people and make a new life for us. I joined several committees and craft groups and the children joined sporting clubs.  I deliberately became a pub-goer for the first time in my life.

It worked.  Tomorrow we have lived in our new home for a year and we feel firmly entrenched and well accepted by the wonderful and diverse folk in our new town.  Unfortunately our environmental footprint is larger than it was at our last home.  It's an area that needs attention but I can't continue with the intensity of the lifestyle of previous years.  My sustainability was unsustainable.

I hope to post again soon about our family and the smaller daily details. 

Right now I'm trying to make an impact on a different level.  I'm trying to create change at a community and organisational level.  Hopefully all efforts count and if we all keep on trying, in our homes and out in the wider world, we will leave the world in a better place for those who follow.

 I'm in need of some down time today. I've had a huge, productive week outside of my home. This weekend I am trying to balance catching up on household organisation and giving myself a well earned rest.

A little school holiday fun sees us baking chocolate muffins and heading to a friend's place.  A couple of days of beaches, buckets, fish and sea snails.

There's something incredibly satisfying about making things for yourself. It's nice to identify needs then feel you are able to satisfy that need without turning to someone else outside of your home. Perhaps it creates a little bit of security because you know you are not totally reliant on the outside world. Perhaps it's just the sense of pride that comes with being capable.

I'm dragging myself, worn, damaged and battle weary, away from summer and into the arms of Autumn.  The days are beautiful!  Cool and gentle mornings begin with birds telling me they feel just as I do. They are warbling and trilling in a way I never heard through the hot, dry summer.

My whole life seems to be in constant change. In the garden it's trying new methods, repositioning where I grew last season's vegetable varieties; on the farm it's introducing new animals, new hatching/birthings; on the maintenance front it's trying new nesting boxes, changing which poultry live in the orchard, moving paddocks to suit the seasons...