The Printables That are Changing My Life {and yours too!}

February 6, 2014September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

I’m a former teacher, you know. A former teacher who didn’t just believe in the power of a great graphic organizer, I was that teacher who actually used them before it became mandatory to demonstrate every lesson with a thinking map.

Now, I’m unpacking the word homemaker into a title I can live with–a home maker. I make a home everyday with my words and actions and responsibilities. Which means I need a ~~little~~ lot of organizational help. Because while I might be able to churn out a lesson about independent and subordinate clauses that uses a graph I designed myself and meets the quotas of our new standards, I’m a little lost in the home making department sometimes.

I overwhelm easily. I don’t know where to begin and my lists all start to look the same.

Surely I’m not alone in this misery?

Thank the Lord for people like Kayse Pratt. She’s a former teacher, too, but she’s actually still using her amazing graphic design skills to conquer her home. She wrote this great ebook on home management that will walk you through a step by step guide to setting up your own home management notebook (like a lesson plan for my house!) and she also writes incredibly encouraging posts on motherhood and marriage on her blog. {and yesterday she released Worth the Fight: Lessons Learned in a High Maintenance Marriage if you’re needing some encouragement for your marriage as well}

So today, she’s offering you a treat! One of my readers can win her complete set of home management printables. She’ll even let you choose between the awesome teal and orange color scheme like this:

Or you can go pink and grey right here.

My absolute favorite printable is the monthly meal planner. You know how you think you’ve got the hang of something, but then you see how someone else is doing it and it just seems so much better?

That’s how this makes me feel. It inspired me to just create a list of thirty possible meals for the month and then when I go to plan weekly, I have this list to refer back to. This way, there’s only one time a month I’m burying my kitchen table in my favorite cookbooks and getting distracted by all the delicious looking finds on Pinterest when I meal plan.

We’re also about to start using the Spending Tracker to keep up with where all the miscellaneous cash is going, and even Joshua got excited about the Financial Goals sheet that I’ve already filled with a list of really important things we should be saving for, you know, like a new sofa.

Making home simpler. That’s my kind of plan.

To enter leave a comment on this post telling me one way you’d like to be more organized! I’ll use randomizer.org to pick the winner. One comment per person please. Oh, and if you’re one of my sweet readers from facebook, comments there won’t count, so please leave one here! If you don’t know how, just drop me an email at lindsbrac@gmail.com. Comments close on Tuesday, February 11, 2014.

Did you hear how I’m giving away lots of my favorite things this month to celebrate mine and the blog’s birthdays? Click over here to read about it and enter to win something else!

This post contains affiliate links.

family · Home · joshua · linkups · one word 365

One Little Corner of Sanity {Behind the Scenes}

January 21, 2014September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

We’re rearranging. Again. Either we’re furniture moving junkies or incredibly indecisive. Or both. But really, it’s just that we keep trying and trying to figure out how to live best in the space we have (that whole contentment struggle) and so that necessitates constant motion until we get it right.

Or until I get a new idea from Pinterest or the IKEA catalog and it’s back to the moving we go. Thank the Lord I have a tolerant husband who actually agrees with me about most of these projects. Except when I change my mind halfway through. Then he gets a tad frustrated and there might be some ~~yelling~~ strong discussions.

I was tempted just to show you the one picture. Because it appears from that little corner that we might actually have a plan that is organized and working. But that would be false advertising. Like telling you how there’s less than a 100 calories in a serving of Oreos. That’s only true if you only eat one and who does that?

We do have a plan. It’s just that each step scaffolds upon the other, and I can only handle so much chaos at one time. So for now, we have a corner. And ~~a couple of~~ several messy closets. And rooms that really look like this.

Linking up with Crystal today to tell the story Behind the Scenes. Join us over here!

family · Home · linkups · one word 365

On Being Content {OneWord365}

January 14, 2014September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

So I jumped on the bandwagon. But then I read this and almost jumped off. But my “un-word” would have to be “un-complain”, and really what are you when you don’t want to complain all the time?

Content.

So that’s it. That’s not just a word I’m claiming for this year. It’s an attitude I’m developing and hoping to nurture in my children because last night my nine year old sat in a sticky kitchen chair while I mashed potatoes and told me that the truth is she’s just jealous.

Jealous of her friend’s fancy clothes, their big house, the horses in the pasture. Jealous that some kids are already being told they’ll attend the trendy private school after fifth grade, and she knows that’s not in our future plans. Jealous because she doesn’t have her own electronic device and she barely has her own room.

I don’t want to foster those feelings. I don’t want to smooth them over and say this lifestyle we have is just temporary and someday we’ll have a bigger house, and clothes that aren’t consignment, and maybe even a horse for her to ride even though all of that is probably true.

Because if I can’t help her find contentment now without all that, how will she ever find peace with it? How will I?

For I have learned to be content in whatever circumstance….

Philippians 4:11

That was my grandfather’s verse. He’d written it in the back of his Bible and he modeled contentment for me. He had nice things, some of the best things actually, but he was most content with basics and a campfire in the woods. He knew the secret of living well, and I wish I’d listened more.

So this year, I am striving to emulate his presence by reminding myself to be content in three specific circumstances.

1. Content With Myself: We all have a different level of capacity. I am learning that just because other people may multi-task really well, or be able to manage home businesses, or grow their blogs into salary-producing establishments, or homeschool half a dozen kids while writing a novel, doesn’t mean I have to. My capacity is not there right now. Honestly, it is all I can do to manage laundry, dishes, and meal planning some weeks, much less all the volunteer and church work I’ve heaped on myself. How I ever worked full-time and managed our home is beyond me. But then again, that was when I had two less children and full-time daycare. My life is vastly different now. I simply can’t do it all anymore and that’s okay.

2. Content With Our Home: We have, by most standards (especially when you consider four kids), a small house. It’s about 1400 square feet and there’s nothing particularly charming or unique about it. We bought it almost 8 years ago with the intention of fixing it up and flipping it. Then the market crashed and since we have no equity and no option for refinance that doesn’t include money down, we’re stuck in an upside down mortgage with a property that was never supposed to be a long-term home. See why I need to work on being content? But here’s the truth: it meets our basic and current needs. There are four bedrooms, so only two of the four have to share. The master tub is big enough for them all to take a bath at the same time. There are hardwood floors and new kitchen counters and a laundry room (not a closet!) that’s big enough for pantry storage as well as the piles of dirty towels. My husband has plenty of yard to work in and the kids have plenty of room behind the house to play. Over the past year, we really began to try and embrace this as a home and we’ve made some changes I’m going to be sharing with you throughout the year. Finding what’s good and not comparing our home to everyone else’s takes a conscious effort on my part. But I want to know that I can be content wherever we live because it’s my family that makes any place a home.

3. Content With My Family: Comparison is a trap that robs us of all joy. (hmm…Maybe my un-word should really be “un-compare.”) For instance, I love my kids. I think they are smart and funny and interesting and whiny and uncooperative and delightful. They’re not perfect and yours aren’t either. But for some reason, we trap ourselves into comparisons. My girls brought home report cards yesterday that were all As and Bs, so I refused to scroll through my facebook feed because I didn’t want to see all the posts about who got straight As. It’s great if your child did, it’s great if you posted about it, but my personal issue is that I make that all about me. I make it all about how I should be helping more, quizzing more, trying harder to make my kids into model pupils who excel especially at reading and language arts because, hello, their mother is a certified teacher! But when I do that, I’m not finding peace with who they are. I’m trying to make them into someone else. For a long time, I’ve carried an image in my head of my perfect family. Guess what? My perfect family is nothing like the image I had because this family I have is real. This family is love.

So that’s it. One word that I somehow managed to make into many.

Content.

I’d love to hear about your one word. Or many. Or just how you’re becoming content in whatever circumstance?

Home

How to Open Yourself to Real Hospitality

November 11, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

They bounded into the parked car yesterday spilling Bibles and coloring sheets and discarded headbands onto seats and the floorboards and they were squealing and giggling and talking all on top of one another.

“Can we invite the pastor’s family over for lunch? Can we, can we please?”

Little eyes and wide stares and bated breaths of anticipation hung over the back of my driver’s seat and my husband just shrugged his shoulders and put the decision all back on mine.

“Ummm….I guess so…” I trailed off thinking of the unswept floor and the finger printed door and the sink full of bowls and sticky plates I had thought were alright to leave this morning.

They scrambled back out the side doors and hurdled back across the front lawn in the shadow of the cross to find the pastor and ask. Joshua followed and I sat down and wondered what I had just done.

There was teriyaki chicken in the crockpot and it was nothing special. I was going to microwave vegetables and reheat rice and gracious knows, there probably wasn’t enough sweet tea.

But I said yes.

I said yes because I’m tired of saying that our tiny house isn’t big enough or fancy enough or just plain enough.

I’m over teaching my girls that something has to be perfect before it can be appreciated.

I don’t want to just preach hospitality; I want to really live it.

Which means I have to open the front door. I have to resist the urge to apologize for the toys and the bikes and the incessant trails of leaf bits that follow the wake of my four children. I have to embrace the now and stop waiting for some pin-perfect future that involves an actual dining area and enough seating for when a family of six invites over a family of six.

I thought I was doing that with Friday night pizza. I’ve made that our night to have company. That’s our night to rotate through our circles of friends and our circles we’d like to know better, so we can embrace fellowship and build relationships.

We’d just had friends over this past Friday for the first time in a month and all our kids piled in the back bedrooms and made elaborate haunted houses we were forced to pause conversation for and tour.

It was loud and chaotic and made me think that we should probably put a hold on Friday nights during the winter when it’s too dark for them to take the crazy outside.

Because once again, I’m trying to fit a life into a ready-made expectation that’s just not feasible for the beautiful mess I’ve been given.

But it doesn’t ever occur to my kids that our house isn’t big enough or clean enough or that I might not be able to stretch that meal.

I told them I want to be more like Jesus, so I guess they just figured teriyaki chicken can be multiplied like loaves and fishes. I guess they figured Jesus didn’t worry if someone’s home had a separate dining room or an eat-in kitchen; He just came anyway.

And isn’t spontaneity always the truest form of hospitality? It’s not all fancy soaps and monogrammed towels and three-course meals on perfectly mismatched china.

Sometimes it’s paper plates and homemade pizza and clinging babies and magic cookie bars brought to share.

Sometimes it’s just saying yes when reason says no and opening the door and being real.

It’s saying “welcome to our home, we’re glad you’re here” and not apologizing for the life that’s spilled out all over the living room rug and the bathroom counters because that life is who you are and these people come to be with your people, not to be with your house.

So I said yes. It was wonderful and freeing and enlightening.

I think, from now on, there will be a little extra in that crockpot each week, but the sink will probably still be hosting dishes, and there’s really no hope for the floors.

How are you opening up yourself or your home to hospitality this holiday season?

Friday Five · Home

Small {five minute friday}

August 16, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

It’s Friday and that means it’s time to write for five minutes, no editing, no backtracking, no overthinking. Lisa-Jo provides a prompt and in this community we write and then we encourage one another. So link it up, friends, and share the love.

This week’s prompt is….

Small

The wide wood planks are the color of honey and just as sticky under the the baby’s chair but they still sparkle through the grime when the summer sun hits full-force at five o’clock in the afternoon.

Yellow-gold walls disguise crayons and remnants of art-displaying scotch tape and the baseboards are witnesses to three babies who have learned to scoot and crawl and walk across the floors of a home that was never meant for four.

A house that was never meant for four. Because this home certainly was.

There’s a garden plot he and the girls tilled by hand and there are splatters all over the carport because I let them help paint our “new” table. My fridge has never opened all the way because there’s a wall in the way and sometimes one can’t get through the door for all the babies and shoes and kittens.

It’s so small here that my mother told me when we moved in that I could never have another baby in this home.

I’ve had two more.

And I’ve learned that small is a state of mind and not a state of hospitality.