Tackle it Tuesday...Working on Building a Better Blog in 31 days.

Last week I started the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge. I signed up for the e-mails and have been following the blog. The premise is to do the tasks each day & improve the quality of your blog by the end of the 31 days. This is at least the 3rd year Pro Blogger has done this & looking at some of the previous years posts was also very informative.

I'm still working on pieces of some of the tasks leading up to today, but overall I feel like many of the things I have already been doing on a random basis. Now I need to start focusing on doing them on purpose because now I know they are GOOD things to be doing.

My tackle for today involved reading through each e-mail I have received and following up on the tasks that I hadn't completed yet. Since I signed up late, I have only gotten the first 5 e-mails, but the nice thing about this challenge is that you can start at any time during the month & they will send out the e-mails individually to you, rather than overwhelming you with all the info at once.

Today is day 9 on the blog & because the task is to join a forum for my type of blog, I'm going to skip ahead & do it. I'm excited to meet other people who are participating & see how they are using the challenge to improve their blogs.

Head over to 5 Minutes for Mom to see more Tackle it Tuesday!

Making your Home a Haven

This is a Blog carnival I discovered this week that I think could be really helpful for me. I'm playing catch up a bit.



My Morning Routine:
1. Get the kids out of the house in time for the bus
2. Spend a few minutes talking with Hubby before he leaves for work
3. Start a load of laundry
4. Check the news & e-mails
5. Breakfast

This week's challenge is to implement an Evening Routine!

Your evening routine can consist of five (or fewer) things that you can do each evening to help give you (and your home!) a better start the following day. Sometimes the extra 5 minutes spent planning ahead for the next day is all it takes to make your home more of a haven. :)

Evening Routine:

1. Put away food
2. Pack Hubby's lunch
3. Load the dishwasher
4. Put a load of clothes in the washer/dryer

I'm writing down what I currently do as both of these routines, but I think that participating in this carnival will help me to focus on these things & figure out what I should change to make my life run more smoothly.

Go Check out Tammy's Recipes to see more Making your Home a Haven.

A few pictures

From Sunday morning

My oldest daughter (almost 9) cuddling with her new Cotton Candy Webkinz Lop

Baby Daughter at her favorite spot at church....the water fountain & then having a melt down on the floor because she had to let someone else have a turn.

My 3 1/2 yr old is getting so BIG...she loves this dress & had a great time twirling it's ribbon

Doesn't she just look so grown up & serious in this picture?

Music Monday

Our church choir, including two of my kids, did a BEAUTIFUL job of this song at the end of Easter services yesterday.

Getting ready for Easter

Family Fun Friday

Since today is Good Friday, my FUN event is going to be Easter related. Last night, while the kids were obliviously watching TV, I hard boiled 2 dozen eggs. It is much easier to do this while the kids are otherwise occupied. Once the eggs were cool, I put them back in the carton & back into the fridge.

Over the years, we have tried all kinds of special dyes. Some of them were fairly expensive, but the results were less than spectacular. This year I decided to go with the cheap standard dye. It cost a whopping $1.50. It is the kind that you add vinegar to a cup of cold water and then drop in the color tablet. We will be doing this outside on the deck. Each of the kids will get to dye 6 eggs any colors they want. Once they are done, we will add stickers and put them into the cute little holders that are part of the dye box. When we are all done, they will go back in the fridge. We will bring them out to decorate the table for Easter dinner. Then eat them as egg salad and deviled eggs next week.

On Saturday we are going to an Easter egg hunt at our church. We donated 5 dozen filled plastic eggs to the event at a cost of about $4. My four youngest kids and my granddaughter will have a blast hunting eggs with their friends. Sunday evening we will hunt more plastic eggs at home in our yard. My kids never tire of hunting for Easter eggs and could spend the whole day hunting them over and over again.

Hop over to Moms by heart to see more Family Fun Friday.

7 Quick Takes Friday

--1--

As I mentioned before, Hubby & I are Angel's baseball fans. On Wednesday we watched the game online. Hubby kept raving about what a wonderful new rookie pitcher the Angels have this year. He pitched six shut out innings it was his season debut. Later that night he was in a car accident and early Thursday morning he died of his injuries. This young man, Nick Adenhart, was almost exactly one year older than our oldest son. My heart aches for his parents, team mates, friends and family.

--2--

Our weather has been really unpredictable. Last weekend we had nice warm temperatures in the mid 70's. By Monday we had snow flurries and on Tuesday, it was snowing hard & swirling around like a blizzard.....none of it stuck around because the ground wasn't cold enough, but it sure made an attempt at bringing back winter. Yesterday, it warmed back up into the 70's with sunny skies and we are now supposed to have WARM weather at least through the holiday weekend. I thought it had killed all my daffodils, but one of the flowers seems to have survived!! My tulips are now in full bloom and don't seem to have been effected by the COLD at all.

--3--

On Tuesday Hubby had vein ablation surgery on his right leg. This involved having holes cut into his leg to insert a laser catheter into a vein & KILL (Hubby's word) the offending vein. Hubby is not overly fond of doctors, but he decided that the condition of his legs was bad enough that he was willing to undergo this procedure. It was done at an outpatient surgery center under local anesthesia. The procedure itself was much more painful than Hubby had anticipated, but he made it through. He currently is still planning to go ahead with the procedure scheduled for the other leg at the end of April. It's been three days since the procedure and we are starting to see some improvement. His leg is less swollen, his foot is less swollen & the skin of both his foot and leg seems to be trying to return to a more normal color. He is supposed to return to work on Saturday.

--4--

On Wednesday our 8 yr old daughter finished her tests at church for becoming a full fledged member of the choir. Up until now she has only been able to wear the blue choir robe, but starting this Sunday she will also be wearing a white coda over her blue robe to show she has earned full choir membership. This took her many months and she is very proud of the accomplishment. I should mention that our 10 yr old son is also a member of the choir and he earned his coda almost immediately after joining the choir in the Fall. He had quite a bit of previous music education so it was much easier for him and really didn't seem like quite as big an accomplishment. I'm hoping to get a picture of them both in full robes this weekend & will share next week.

--5--

It's been a busy blog week and next week will most likely be even busier. I've found a couple new blog carnivals and am really enjoying them. My newest favorites are Making a Happy Home Monday (which I haven't actually done yet), Family Fun Friday and Three Things this Thursday. Several days a week I am participating in more than one carnival, right now it is a LOT of fun and most of them help me in some way. Some are motivational, others make me really THINK. At this time in my life I think they all add to helping me get it together. I've noticed a lot of people trying to combine several carnivals into one post, it seems to work for them, but so far for me, the more I write the more I feel like I'm getting out of the experience. I'm also participating in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog with my friend Janet. I like my blog, but I've wanted to tweak it some to make it more ME. I'm thinking this series may be the answer.

--6--

This Sunday is Easter!!! All week I've been seeing posts about Resurrection eggs. I am not a very crafty person so, if I've heard of this before, it didn't stick in my brain. It sounds like a GREAT way to teach the kids the true meaning of Easter. I wish I had been together enough to start last week on Palm Sunday, opening one egg each day to teach them the significance of each day of Holy Week. We will be decorating hard boiled eggs later today and I'm planning to do the resurrection eggs with the kids afterward. On Saturday we will be going to an Easter egg hunt at church and then a special children's service. On Sunday we will start the day with the kids getting their Easter baskets, then we'll head to church. The middle kids are singing at both the 9 am & 11:15 am services. I'm hoping Baby Daughter will sleep through at least one of the services so that I can participate. Afterward we will come home for some family time. Unfortunately, Hubby has to work from 9 to 6 on Sunday because it is not an official national holiday. We'll probably have a family Easter egg hunt in the yard after he gets home.

--7--

Next week I'm hoping to get some major Spring cleaning done. The kids are out of school on Monday, not sure if I will make them help or just enlist them to keep the babies busy. I also need to start thinking about what we are doing for our youngest son's 11th birthday & Hubby's birthday at the end of the month. I've been neglecting my food blog and need to give it some attention in the coming week too. I'm working on an idea for it that I think could be fun, just need to find the time to get it started.