Category: Susie’s Chem Free Zone

Get a little more organized with a Planning Notebook! FREE Printables!

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog4 Comments

This year has been busy already and I’ve been on a mission to get a little more organized… I really NEED the organization and simplified routines that we had before. I spent a little time and revamped my planning sheets for our Home Binder so I thought I’d share them with you.

You’ll find sheets to keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, upcoming holidays and events, garden planning schedules, family meeting checklists, goal planning sheets, habit trackers, seasonal to-do lists, daily/weekly/monthly planning sheets to keep you on track, blog planning sheets, and meal planning sheets plus a pretty cover! You can check out these older posts for some ideas of upcoming holidays to celebrate.

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Put your Meal Planning on Auto-Pilot with the Perpetual Meal Plan for Winter – FREE Printables! (Updated)

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog23 Comments

Yay! I did it… my first big project of the year. I actually finished the Meal Plan that I’ve been working on and I wanted to share it with you. I know it’s not perfect and I’m sure there will be some changes made to it but it’s a place to start and I’m happy with that. These were inspired by The Dinner Calendar written by Fannie Merritt Farmer in 1915 but they have some modern recipes, most of which can be found on the blog. I love that I can pull/print recipes one time and be able to use them again and again over the next few months! The kids are also working on a list of muffins, oatmeal, quick bread, cookie, and dessert recipes as an add-on to this meal plan.

Why plan for the week or month when you could plan for the years to come all at one time? We have been using this for a week or so now and it has helped tremendously! I’ve also been able to simplify my Cozi calendar by using this meal planner… so nice!

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I don’t have enough time to get it all done!

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How many times have you said this or thought this? How stressful does it feel when you feel this way?

Maybe it’s not that you don’t have enough time but maybe you have too much to do, too much to take care of, too many unnecessary obligations. When you have young kids that time can slip by all too quickly and in the blink of an eye your toddler will be towering over you with keys in his hand.

I know that things can get really crazy, really quickly around here and I’m sure it’s the same in other homes as well. The past week was a train wreck with us being sick and not being able to do many of the things we had planned to get done so now we are almost a week behind already for the New Year!

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Make Life a Little Easier… Free Master Grocery List Printables!

Published on by Susie @ Pollywog's Place Blog1 Comment

I’ve definitely been trying to streamline things around here… in some ways, we need to look at our homes as a business and try to find ways to make things run a little smoother. I’ve had a master shopping list for a while although I’m not sure if I’ve shared it here. I might’ve been a little inspired by these vintage-style grocery boards**:

The problem with our previous shopping list was that it was outdated and our diets/tastes have changed quite a bit. I wasn’t quite as health conscious when I first made my grocery list so I did have things like Koolaid and Bisquick on there. We’ve also been growing some of our own veggies and making some of the convenience foods like ranch seasoning and onion soup mix so we don’t buy them anymore. We really want to try to grow some of our own herbs to make them even better!

I took a little time one evening while Mr. Awesome and the kiddos were out to look through our grocery purchases over the past year… yeah, it did take a little time to sort through the orders we have placed but it was worth it. I know the orders I went through didn’t show EVERYTHING we bought over the past year but it did give me a good idea of what we are buying regularly and how much we are buying. Some of those things were quite surprising!

When we did our pantry makeover, I really wanted to see just how much space I needed to dedicate to certain items before getting too happy with my organization.

Photo by Mark Stebnicki on Pexels.com
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Creative Gift Wrap Ideas

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I don’t know about you but my phone has been going crazy with notifications about packages that will be arriving as we just finished up the majority of our Christmas shopping. I have a huge black tote in my room that I am keeping the gifts in… yes, I believe they will all fit in the one tote this year.

Now, I have to figure out how to wrap them. I have a bunch of leftover paper from years past. There was a time when I liked to have things color coordinated and usually each kiddo had their own paper to keep things a little more organized as the tags seemed to get lost before Christmas morning. I have always seen the towers that people do with different figures and they look so cute but I don’t want to buy special paper for them.

I have an idea of just buying some fabric and making reusable bags but maybe making them so that they could stack and make these adorable gift towers… with our new 3-4 gift rule it might make this a real possibility!

Here are some cute pics of the ideas I have from Pinterest:

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