Grownupish

A place where I can build my best 'adult' life, even if I don't feel like one yet.

  • Saturdays are for dreaming

    What do I want out of today (my real day off), this week, this month, this year, my life?

    These are the sorts of questions I ask on Saturdays. It’s a worthwhile exercise for your brain. I try to set at least one goal every Saturday – of any duration.

    Every Saturday, I am going to set four goals and revisit the following week and see how I’m doing…you can hold me accountable.

    Right now, I’m heading into a busy school week. I’m refreshed and relaxed after a week off. I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to, but I did get a lot done and I am feeling decidedly less stressed than I was going into the break. The obvious goal is to make sure the school week doesn’t destroy all the relaxation progress I made last week. But what does that look like?

    My goals to assess in a week are:

    • Break even on grading (same amount coming into the ‘to do’ pile as goes out in the ‘finished’ pile). This will keep my stress level manageable.
      • deadline: Friday
    • Complete at least four strength workouts (20 min each). These workouts keep me healthy and aging well. I both love doing them and tend to put them off…what can I say, I’m complicated.
      • deadline: Friday
    • Finish one pleasure reading book. When I was a teen, I read voraciously, but other hobbies snuck in. I have been trying to read more now that the kids are bigger and I have more me time, but I am guilty of reading half a book and then putting it down. For instance, I am partway through Hail Mary by Andy Weir, but I haven’t touched it in months. This is the one I want to finish next.
      • deadline: Nov 1
    • Clean office. This is a guest room for Thanksgiving when family comes to visit. And right now it’s a trash dump. Must. Fix.
      • deadline: Nov 1

    Goals are good, but everything says that accountability is the best. Here goes.

  • Food Friday: A busy week ahead.

    We all have something that keeps us sane. That daily ritual or simple task that we do that just reminds us that the world is continuing to spin. Life is normal.

    For some people, that may be making the bed every morning, that gives them a sense of calm, that the day can move forward – this is not my thing.

    For me, it’s knowing what’s for dinner each night ahead of time. If I know what the next dinner is going to be, I can relax knowing that I have things under control. If there’s no plan, then I immediately feel like something is off-kilter; my world isn’t right.

    And for some of you, this next sentence will sound crazy, but … If I don’t get to cook dinner at least four nights a week, I get stressed. I need to know I’m in my kitchen, my happy place, at least four nights a week.

    This week, I need to realize, that my world is crazy and that’s ok. I have school events several nights this week that are going to keep me out of my kitchen. And that is stressful for me. But planning what dinner is for the rest of the family makes it a little better.

    What am I thinking about for this week’s meals:

    1. As always, what’s on sale. If I can keep the food budget down and still make tasty dinners, it’s a win every week.
    2. I am trying to work a bit more turkey into the menu now so there’s a month between our last turkey meal in October and Thanksgiving, but I still have enough bones for stock.
    3. What can I make that accommodates 2 nights when my family needs to feed themselves and I’m not home for dinner.

    The plan:

    Saturday: BBQ Brats and Peaches. This wasn’t used last weekend when I was feeling under the weather one night.

    Sunday: Honey Baked Turkey Wings. I just found this recipe to use with Turkey Wings and I am so excited to try it. I’m going to make it alongside some Velveeta mac and cheese, which is a family favorite.

    Monday: always leftovers here, we all get home after 7 on Mondays, and it’s easier to just find something and eat it.

    Tuesday: Smashburgers. I’ve been craving burgers for a while.

    Wednesday: Out at an event, the family will likely eat leftover mac and cheese and brats, and they won’t even be sad about it.

    Thursday: Pulled pork tacos. This is the solution. I make a big batch of pulled pork in the slow cooker (pork shoulder is on sale) and season a bit up for pork tacos tonight. That leaves…

    Friday: I’m out again, so the family can have bbq pulled pork sandwiches for dinner. Again, they will not be sad at all about this.

    And that gets me through my crazy week. Next Saturday I may be out again, but that’s a problem for next week’s menu.

  • Thankful Thursday: At least last week is over.

    Sometimes you have a great week.

    That was not my last week. My last week was the other kind of week – you know, the one where everything that could possibly go wrong did. The one where 2 back injuries (on separate days), one bee sting to the torso, and 2 gallons of laundry detergent on the floor that needs to be cleaned up are all real things that happened.

    Those are the weeks that we most need to look for things to be thankful for.

    So, that’s what I’m gonna do. Five things I am thankful for, even after the week that was cursed.

    1. It was my fall break. Why is that something to be thankful for? Because it meant I had time to deal with those things. Time to recover from the first back injury. Time to clean up the 2 gallons of laundry detergent on the floor. Time to sit down afterwards and just be. I’m thankful I didn’t have to fit all that around a work week.
    2. Easy health care. I don’t take this one for granted, and I know that a lot of people don’t have easy access to healthcare. My insurance (thankfully) has a teledoc type service that’s available 24/7. That meant that one of my injuries could be taken care of even though it was 10pm on a Saturday. That’s something I am grateful for.
    3. I’m not allergic to bees. I may have, kinda, sorta, panicked when I got stung, because I have a childhood memory of being stung by a bee and swelling up profusely. So when I got stung I was sure this was a hospital run for me. Thankfully, it wasn’t. Just an itchy bump for a few days. Grateful.
    4. Medication. (Is this doubling up with #2? Am I cheating?) If it weren’t for the meds I’m on right now, I would be in a lot more pain. I am thankful that I live in the age of modern medicine.
    5. My husband’s patience. I know I was thankful for him last week. I am trying not to double up. But when he ran to the pharmacy for me at 10:30 on a Saturday after watching me bawl in pain and whine all evening, I couldn’t tell you how grateful I was for him. I simply could not have driven myself. He’s amazing.

    I’m starting to really like this once a week sit down and come up with five things you are thankful for exercise. I highly recommend it. It makes even cursed weeks like last week seem…not so bad.

  • Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

    This post appeared here once, then got deleted, the reappeared, then got deleted – because my blog kept almost getting started, and then I decided it wasn’t good enough so I tried something else.

    Funny that…I was letting perfect get in the way of good.

    I wanted to get this thing started though, and the excuses were endless:

    Perfectionist Me: But I don’t have any pictures…

    Smarter Me: Just start writing.

    Perfectionist Me: But I don’t know how to do ______ in WordPress….

    Smarter Me: Just start writing.

    You get the idea.

    The problem was (is) I am a perfectionist at heart. This doesn’t look the way I want it to (yet), and I can’t tell WordPress to do what I want to do (yet) …but I decided to just go for it. Learn as I go. It’ll get better over time.

    But it’s started. And that’s what matters, because I can’t get better at something if I don’t practice. I tell my students that all the time, why can’t I listen to Smarter Me?

  • Five Frugal Things: There’s no crying over spilled laundry detergent.

    There was nothing this week that was massively frugal, at least – not for me. But here are five little frugal things I did to save money this week.

    1. Shopped the ‘clearance’ aisle at the grocery store. This week I got some Gum Recession toothpaste for 25% off. I just went to the dentist this week, and gum recession was a discussion. I can feel like I’m doing something about it.
    2. I ate only leftovers for lunch for the last four days. I go back and forth on leftovers. I always feel virtuous if I eat leftovers for lunch (or breakfast, or dinner) but many leftovers just aren’t as good as they were originally. One of my favorite things to do is look at the list that’s on the fridge and see if I can give leftovers an upgrade.
    3. I planned three dinners that use food that we already have in the house, specifically from the freezer.
    4. We had an, only funny in hindsight, accident earlier this week which ended up with about a gallon of laundry detergent on the floor of my laundry room. Instead of mopping it all up and using new laundry detergent, I wiped it all up with rags and have been putting one of these ‘detergent rags’ into each load as I’ve needed to do another load. Just because laundry detergent was on the floor, doesn’t mean it can’t be used. It’s a little like the 5 second rule…for detergent.
    5. I waited to go grocery shopping until I had to drop The Kid off somewhere else, saving gas by only doing one run.

    These are all little things. But that’s the point. I have been working for a while on making little decisions that support my goal of wasting less money.

  • Money Mondays

    The original plan was to make this a money blog. But, honestly, I don’t feel like quite enough of an expert to make every post about money. Plus – I just wouldn’t be as good at it as Matt and Joel over at How to Money. (Seriously, if you’re looking to get your money life in order, their podcast is fantastic!)

    But, I also want this to be a place where money is a large part of the conversation, because money management is a big decider in whether you get the life you want or not. I want to have (eventually) enough money advice/information here that if someone stumbled upon my site and read through some posts – they’d be set on the right path money-wise.

    So, I hereby declare every Monday will be Money Monday!

    Today I wanted to talk about the first and most important rule about money: Spend less than you make.

    Easy to understand. Not always easy to put into practice. In order to do that you have to 1) be making money 2) know how much your spending and 3) ideally, only be spending money you already have ‘in hand’ and going into debt.

    When you’re a New Adult that’s a lot harder than if you’re older like I am (I like to think of myself not as old…but a Veteran Adult). When you’re fresh out of school, or even still in school, you have a very small income, you ‘need’ a lot of stuff to get started in life, and the world is much more expensive than you expect it to be. A budget will really help here, but we’re going to talk about budgets later on, they can be scary.

    If you’re me, every month, I put a set amount of money into four different ‘not spending’ buckets – College kid tuition, Little Kid future college tuition, a car savings account, and a retirement account, because these are my four major savings goals right now. That money goes out of my checking account – and I don’t think about it anymore. I can’t spend it because I already earmarked it for something else. You don’t want to start big like this – having money to save gets easier the more money you bring in, but you have to start somewhere. It’s like building muscle – you don’t go into the gym and come out 5 minutes later looking like a bodybuilder. You do some exercises with small weights – but you do it bunches and bunches of times, and eventually you do start to see muscle building up.

    If you are already putting something aside at the beginning of each month, bravo! This is the most important think you can do to have a healthy relationship with money. If you aren’t I challenge you to try the following. This month, (right now even) take $5 and put it aside somewhere and don’t touch it. Ideally, this somewhere would be a savings account where it’s accruing interest, but it could be in a drawer, in a jar, in a piggy bank, under the couch cushions, anywhere – so long as you know where it went. You aren’t allowed to touch that $5, except for emergencies. You know, real ones.

    If you do this every month for a year, you have at least $60 (more if you put it into a savings account that gets interest). It’s not a lot, but it’s a start, and an important one.

  • Sundays are for restarting the week

    My Sunday Restart.

    • Make sure laundry is caught up.
    • Prep my breakfasts for the work week so they are grab and go
      • This week I’m making simple overnight oats with chia seeds
    • Have Monday and Tuesday’s lunches for me ready – I’ve already packed up leftovers for both days.
    • Pre-made things that batch cook.
      • Today is easy. I am going to make homemade yogurt and fruit topping for it for my husband’s lunches, and that’s it. It’s way easier than it sounds.
    • Make sure the kitchen is clean before bed to start the week of right.

    The rest of the day is for family, volunteering and things I choose to do. Maybe I’ll read that book…

    What can you do today (right now?) to make your week easier?

  • My Food Philosophy

    I really wanted that to say ‘Food Filosophy’ or ‘Phood Philosophy’ but alas, they both just looked wrong.

    Anyone who knows me IRL knows that my love language is feeding people. I adore cooking, and I want to give everyone I love real food.

    At home, this looks like strategic meal planning. This feeds* my belief that ultra processed food is unhealthy and just plain not as tasty as real food made from real ingredients. But it also keeps my food budget down. Ingredients cost less than processed stuff, and much MUCH less than eating out/take out.

    One of the things I do every week is sit down sometime between Thursday night and Saturday morning and make a meal plan around our schedule and the chaos that is day to day life. I shop every weekend, and I prep a bunch of food on Sundays (especially for a work week.) Today I thought I’d give you a sneak peak into this week’s plan and how I think about things as I plan.

    This week’s plan needs to keep in mind:

    1. It’s a full school week and all the activities that contains.
    2. It’s October, and I need to have enough freezer turkey bones in the freezer by Nov 1 to make a big batch of turkey stock before Thanksgiving; ideally without burning my family out on turkey – it can’t feel like Thanksgiving turkey.
    3. I’m still challenging myself to empty the freezer out and use at least one thing out of the freezer every day. Partially because I need the room for the turkey stock, but also because it got completely out of hand and now I just want it cleaned out.
    4. And a guiding principle every week: Food waste is bad. Therefore I need to use anything up that will go bad.

    The plan for this week:

    • Saturday: Apricot and Brie stuffed turkey breasts, popovers, steamed broccoli.
      • This puts more turkey bones in the freezer without feeling like a Thanksgiving prequel. I’d eat roast turkey and mashed potatoes nearly every day, my family does not agree with this philosophy.
    • Sunday: Grilled sausages, grilled peaches, and cut up veggie sticks.
      • Sausages are from the freezer – and are peach habanero brats, so obviously peaches should be grilled too.
      • The weather is gorgeous so we should be grilling.
      • Grilling means don’t even turn the stove on for a side veggie.
    • Leftovers every Monday.
      • This is the late night for The Kid and me, and it helps to prevent food waste.
    • Tuesday: Pork Udon Soup
      • Pork strips are from the freezer.
      • Less than 20 minutes start to finish if you use boxed broth
    • Wednesday: Mac & Cheese from Smitten Kitchen
      • Deb doesn’t know me at all, but we adore her and her food around here.
      • This recipe isn’t on her website – it’s from her cookbook, but man it’s good, it’s basically shells alfredo with peas. But the peas make it healthy…right?
      • Less than 20 min start to finish.
      • Not surprisingly, I’ll probably add more veggies to mine (like leftover broccoli from Sunday or more kale from the freezer).
      • This also uses frozen peas from the freezer
    • Thursday: Shrimp in red pepper cream sauce over couscous
      • I can pull more veggies from the freezer for me.
      • Less than 20 min. start to finish for a busy day.
      • The Kid just decided he likes couscous again so I’m gonna take advantage of this while I can.
    • Friday: leftovers
      • another chance to prevent food waste.

    That’s the week. Tasty from scratch meals every day without too much fuss or time in the kitchen. This week doesn’t even ask much of me to plan ahead on Sunday, and most of the meals are 20 min or less start to finish. Leftovers become lunches for me, and I don’t even have to spend extra money for lunch.

    * pun intended.

  • Thankful Thursday

    I touched on happiness yesterday. Today it’s all I’m going to talk about.

    I am a pretty happy human. Optimistic, easy-going, hard to upset. There are a few things I’ll get angry about, usually when someone is being mistreated. Really though, I’m usually content and upbeat and always there for others when life gets them down.

    There are two things I have cultivated that make this possible, and one of those is gratitude. I am exceptionally grateful for all the good things in my life, many of which are not actually things. Looking at what I do have every day makes it much easier to ride out the times when something doesn’t go my way.

    Thursdays are going to be my day to thank the world. A day dedicated to the things that make life special, big and small. In no particular order, here are four things I am especially grateful for today.

    1. My wonderful, charming, delightful and supportive husband. We’ve been together since high school, and he has always been there for me through the hard parts and the easy parts. This year will actually be our 25th wedding anniversary, and that’s pretty darned awesome. I am truly grateful he puts up with me every day.
    2. My children. I often joke that as a teacher, I have 100’s of children, but in this case I mean the two that “I made”. They are charming, and intelligent and wonderful humans and I am proud of them every day. The Kid is a middle schooler and College Kid lives (too) far away and isn’t not really a kid anymore.
    3. Good food. I expect that we will discover over time that food is a major theme here. A really good meal can make a tough day a whole lot better. I don’t mean a gourmet or expensive meal. (Although those can be amazing too.) I mean a flavorful, satisfying, and nutritious meal in your belly can bring a comfort that not many other things can. I do my best to produce good food daily for my family, and I am always grateful at how a family dinner can bring us all together.
    4. And today I will pick a small one to round this out. The end of 100 degree days here. From October to April, the Phoenix area can’t be beat weather wise. But From May to September, you really question whether humans were even meant to live here. Last weekend was the first really beautiful weekend, and this coming weekend promises more. I am extremely grateful for that.

    It looks like the theme this week is comfort. All of the above are things in my life that bring me comfort. That comfort makes it easier to deal with discomfort that comes along. So, I pass it to you – what’s one thing that you are grateful for today that brings you comfort?

  • What made me start a blog?

    I’m a teacher.

    I don’t mean ‘I have a job teaching’ (although I do.) I mean, I am a teacher at heart. And I really wanted to share what needed to be taught most.

    What I see is a gap…The problem with being a classroom teacher is – you teach your wonderful students one subject for a year, then they move on. But there’s no, “what does the real world look like?’ class.

    So many of my students march off into the world knowing subjects, but not life. They have social media – but we all know that isn’t real life. It’s not going to help them see how to build their own lives.

    At first, I thought this was going to be more of a ‘how to adult’ site. But teaching that requires more interaction with my students than a blog would provide. So I decided I would start here with a snapshot of my life. An ‘adult’ life. The things I think of day to day, the things I manage day to day. And, more importantly, why.

    How and Why I choose to eat/cook/feed my family the way I do.

    How and Why I manage my money.

    How and Why I drive a 13 year old car.

    How and Why I choose how I take care of my health.

    How and Why I … whatever else I think of.

    Because seeing it in action, and choosing to take what resonates with you and leave what doesn’t, that is how a person figures out their life. I’m a real person with a real life. It isn’t always pretty, it isn’t the most glamorous, exciting, or fast-paced. But it’s real. It’s authentically mine. And my life makes me happy.

    If I help even one person get to an ‘adult’ life that makes them happier, this blog is totally worth it.