Change Is A Comin’….

Things have been a little crazy around here (or a LOT crazy)

Because…

We’re moving!

In two weeks.

Clear across the country, to Washington State.

It’s a long story but basically, we’re losing our home here in Tennessee and moving to Washington to live with my parents in their big house out in the country.

 I feel like I have to add that we’ll be paying them rent and getting jobs, we won’t just be bumming around. 🙂

Please don’t feel sorry that we’re losing our house.
We know this is what God wants- He orchestrated the whole thing.
He gives and takes away, and we know that this is Him taking (a big) something away for us to purify us from our attachment to worldly goods and comforts. Honestly, it’s been really freeing.

Okay so here’s the scoop because I know you have questions so I’ll try to answer some of them:

We are WAY underwater on our house (a.k.a. owe more than we could sell it for) and couldn’t sell it if we tried (and we wanted to in the spring!)
But we just accepted the fact back in April that we couldn’t sell or rent our house and were planning to live here for who knows how long and then…
God opened a door.
A big one.
Not the one we expected, not the easiest one to go through, our pride (and credit) has taken a hit for sure!
But the right door.
So we’re walking through it.

We got behind on our mortgage and were frantically praying for God to provide, and he said, “No.”
He has something better for us in Washington, and I’m so thankful that even though it’s been a hard process, I’ve had such a peace about the whole thing.
I know He’s got us. So I don’t have to worry about anything. (which is hard, because worrying is kinda one of my favorite pastimes.) But I really feel at peace now. It’s wonderful.

We’ve sold almost all of our “stuff” and are planning to drive across the country on a 5 day road trip with whatever we can fit in our trusty little Toyota Corolla, along with our two kids and dog Lucy AND our kitten, Baby Kitty.

We. Are. Crazy.  Who brings a kitten cross country? We do.
Also: who names a kitten “Baby Kitty”? We do. Original, right??

ANyway.
I’m so looking forward to my parents being able to see the kids (every day!) and for the kids to get a rural upbringing without gunshots in the night and drug deals on the corner.

Yep. That really happens where we live now.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the rednecks that live behind us that blast their country music and ride their go-carts around their back yard ALL DAY LONG and blow dust all over my clean laundry hanging on the line…

Then there are the things that we’ll miss here like our dear, dear friends; going running along the Mississippi, the fun free events that are available in the city and just the pretty leafy trees and the cicadas humming and the fireflies twinkling in the twilight.

Instead, we get to wake up and look out at fog-covered cow fields and run around in a huge yard and see bald eagles on a regular basis flying over the blue, blue ocean and not have to worry about getting obliterated by a tornado.
We’re going to be right near the beach so we’re really excited about building sand castles and taking nature walks and just enjoying the things in life that matter-God and family and being outside with each other, enjoying God’s creation together.

Please pray for us, that we wouldn’t go insane on the trip and that we’d get there safely.
My blog posting may be a bit spotty here in the next few weeks but I promise you I’m taking a TON of pictures on our trip across this beautiful country. I can’t wait!

Natural Body Care Series:A Discovery Of Face Wash From An Unlikely Source

A couple of nights ago I was taking a shower and reached for my face wash, then remembered that I’d used the last of it the day before and forgot to buy more.
(drat!)

Face cleanser is one of those things that I’ve wanted to make on my own but am kind of scared to/don’t have the money to buy expensive essential oils and beeswax or shea butter or anything like that, so I haven’t made it on my own yet.

I was kind of in a pinch, because I needed to wash my makeup off before bed so I just grabbed our Homemade Tooth Powder and used that.

Now, before you think I”m crazy, let me tell you what’s in it.
It has baking soda, coconut oil, a tiny bit of salt and some peppermint extract.

Guess what gals? It worked great!

The peppermint made my skin all tingly and clean and refreshed, the baking soda and salt exfoliated my skin and the coconut oil moisturized it and took off my makeup, leaving my face fresh and clean and feeling soft.
I am SO happy I discovered this!!

I used it again last night and man, I loved it even more the second time since I knew what to expect.
If you’ve ever used Burt’s Bees Deep Cleansing Cream with Soap Bark and Chamomile, that’s what it reminded me of.  Except without the soap bark or chamomile. But you get that same feeling on your face as you do with the Burt’s Bees cleanser.

Anyway, if you want some frugal face cleanser, try this out! Just follow the recipe I have on my
Homemade Tooth Powder post and add in about a teaspoon of coconut oil and you’re in business.
I love that natural ingredients have so many different uses!!

Natural Body Care Series: Homemade Deodorant

Hi!

 It’s been a while since I did a Natural Body Care post, mostly because we needed to use up the rest of our store-bought deodorant before I delved into the world of making my own AND because I kept forgetting to buy coconut oil.

I know you can get this way cheaper on Amazon, but I just wanted to try it  with a little bit to begin with, so I didn’t have a huge jug of coconut oil sitting around.

I know. Excuses, excuses.

If you’re interested in any other Natural alternatives to store-bought hygiene products, check out the
Natural Home and Body Care tab at the top of my blog; all the other posts I’ve done on this subject are up there.

So.
Homemade deodorant.
I have to confess that I was kinda scared to try this one, mostly because when I was a kid, my mom and dad made a switch from regular deodorant with aluminum in it (which can cause cancer) to the natural “crystal” deodorant and it did NOT work for them.

At all.

I still remember the B.O. and it wasn’t pleasant. (Sorry mom and dad. Love you! ) 🙂
They switched back to regular eventually and I was left with the distinct impression to NEVER use natural deodorant, unless I wanted to smell like I didn’t use it at all.
Which, for a high school girl would pretty much be the worst thing ever.

Thankfully, I’m not in high school anymore -it’s been 10 years…wow.
I’ve overcome that fear of natural deodorant and tried making my own and- it works!

So would you like to know how to make your own yummy-smelling, natural aluminum-free deodorant??

It’s pretty simple.

I used about 1/2 cup baking soda
4 or 5 Tbsp virgin organic unrefined coconut oil
1 tsp or so of cornstarch

Take these ingredients and mix them around until you get the consistency you want, then put it into the container of your choice. It looked like frosting when I was done mixing it and smelled so good, I may have tasted it.
(It didn’t taste like frosting.Unfortunately.)

I was using an old deodorant container that I’d rinsed, so I wanted the deodorant to be pretty thick so it’d stay in the container and not ooze out.

Take that, lady speed stick! I made my own, better version of you!!

The old deodorant was REALLY hard to wash out!

Keep in mind that coconut oil will liquefy when it gets warm, so keep your deodorant in the fridge if you don’t want it to melt.
To use, just take out of the fridge and apply as usual. The coconut oil will soak into your skin so it doesn’t stain your shirts or anything, and you’ll smell amazing.
Every time I put it on, I want to eat an Almond Joy. Thankfully, I never have any around the house. 😉

This isn’t an antiperspirant (which really you shouldn’t use anyway since sweating is your body’s way of getting rid of toxins and cooling itself- why trap toxins in your body on purpose?)
so you’ll still sweat, but it shouldn’t smell.
The baking soda neutralizes the odor and the coconut oil moisturizes your underarms and provides that amazing aroma of tropical paradise. 🙂

I love it, and its so easy to make!
Don’t think I’ll ever go back to using store-bought deodorant, that’s for sure.

Have you made homemade deodorant before?
Did you use different ingredients? I’d love to get some more recipes and try them!

This post is shared at Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways.

Banana-Zucchini Bread- A healthy version

It’s zucchini season and no doubt if you have zucchini growing in your garden or you’ve visited the farmer’s market or the grocery store lately you’ve seen it everywhere.
I’ve seen it on sale like crazy, and I don’t have any zucchini plants growing in my garden. I did, but they got eaten by snails or slugs or something. 😦

Anyway, I actually found this recipe because I had some bananas that were on the verge of going bad and didn’t really feel like freezing them plus I had some frozen zucchini from early spring; that I needed to get rid of (we’re working on eating through everything in our freezer) so I thought I’d make some banana/zucchini bread to use it up!

I found the original recipe on Allrecipes.com (click here for the link) but as always, I modified it a bit.
So here’s my modified version:

Beat 3 eggs til they are foamy.

Add:

 3/4 cup olive oil,
 1 cup organic sugar,
1 cup grated (and extra juice squeezed out if it’s been frozen) zucchini
3 bananas, mashed
1 tsp vanilla

Mix!
I didn’t actually mash up the bananas first since I was using my stand mixer- it did the job just fine for me.

Next, add your dry ingredients.
3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/8 tsp. allspice
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1tsp salt

Mix again, til everything is well combined.

Pour into two greased loaf pans and stick in a 325F oven for 50 min,

 or until a knife comes out clean when you poke it into the middle of the loaf.
I only used 1/2 cup of oil because 3/4 sounded like too much, but then my bread ended up a bit dry. Not horrible, but I should’ve just followed the directions there! Or added another egg or something.
I like how it turned out though, minus the slight dryness.
Hubby says it isn’t dry, but I think it is just a tad.

We’ve already eaten one of the loaves, and the other one will probably be gone by tomorrow afternoon.
So if you have some zucchini sitting around waiting to be used, go ahead and make some zucchini bread! 🙂

Food Waste Friday: Sneaky Flies!

Hi, it’s time for….

 I thought I was going to get away scot-free this week. That is, until I went into the kitchen a few days ago and found 5 or more flies trapped in the bag my homemade bread was in.
( I didn’t take a picture, sorry.)

I let the flies out, but just couldn’t bring myself to let anyone eat the rest of the bread. There was about half a loaf. sigh.
I fed it to the chickens, who enjoyed it VERY much, so at least it wasn’t a total loss.

Other than a few kid leftovers (which also went to the chickens- love those chickens!!) that’s all the waste we had this week!

Maybe next week I can remember to CLOSE the ziplock bag after using it and no flies will crawl all over our bread. (ew!!)

In other news, our chickens started laying eggs!!!! I’m so happy. 🙂 We’re only getting one egg a day, so A chicken is laying…we still have 10 more to find out if they are hens or roosters. Its fun to find the egg every day- today the hen laid it in the backyard right in front of us. Hopefully more hens will start laying soon, but in the meantime, we’re really enjoying those little tiny eggs. (they get bigger as the hens lay more.)

How did you do this week?
If you want to read about more people’s battle against food waste, hop on over to Kristen’s blog
The Frugal Girl and check it out. She is the lovely lady who inspired me, and tons of other frugal minded people to be more aware of the money we throw away through food waste.

Refashion:"New" Shoes For The Price Of Nothing

Hi!
 I mentioned on Facebook a few days ago I’ve been working on refashioning a pair of my shoes, and they’re done now so I’m going to share them with you!

I love these shoes. They’re just inexpensive, cloth shoes that are made kinda in the TOMS style but without the price tag. I think TOMS are really cool; and the mission behind them (giving a pair of shoes to someone who needs them for ever pair that is bought) is awesome but I don’t have fifty bucks to drop on a pair of shoes.

These were $10.99 at Ross, which is more up my alley.

Anyway, as any cloth shoes do, they were bound to wear out.
I seem to have a pointy big toe and wear out all of my socks in the toe first, and that’s what happened to these sad suckers as well. (is this just me, or does everyone’s toes do this?)

I’ve actually been meaning to fix them for a while, but just hadn’t gotten around to it….
then one day I decided: that was the day I’d start fixing my shoes!

I have some fabric that is kind of water-proof feeling…not completely, but it’s one of those fabrics you’d make an outdoor tablecloth or something out of.
I just put my shoes on the fabric and cut around the toe and the heel and then had to cut another set of toes and heels out because the first ones were too small when I tried to fold the edges under.
(so maybe you should measure??) 😉

This is a project you can do even if you DON”T have a sewing machine, because these babies were sewn entirely by hand. It didn’t take too long either, about an hour a shoe and that’s with refereeing kids and fetching snacks every 10 minutes or so.

I got some black thread and my scissors out and just started sewing, folding a tiny bit of edge under as I went for a nice finished look.

I decided to sew fabric around the sole inserts too since it had worn off about two weeks after I bought the shoes. (I never said they weren’t cheap…)  and I did use my sewing machine for that, but you could do it by hand as well. I just folded the fabric around the foam insert and then sewed around it and cut off the excess fabric.

The underside of the sole insert

The top of the sole insert

Ta-Da!!

I really like the way they turned out, although I wish I”d have thought about making them less cool and artsy and more ‘match with everything-y’. Oh, well.
I have a few more months at least before the rainy fall/winter season so I’ll enjoy my artsy $11 Refashioned shoes from Ross until then…when they’ll probably wear out just in time for boot season. 🙂

Speaking of which…if I had $$$ and $328 to blow…ahem invest on in a pair of boots, I’d get these:

                                   

Frye Melissa Button Boots in Cognac Vintage….they are just so pretty.
 So are virtually any other boots by Frye. I stumbled across them last spring and still think they’re beautiful.
A girl can dream, right? 😉

An exciting day!

Guess what happened today??

We didn’t win the publisher’s clearing house $5,000 a week for life prize (I know, that’s what you thought it was, right??) . 😉
We aren’t pregnant.
We went running this morning around Patriot Lake at Shelby Farms, and it was great.
We said farewell to some sweet friends who are moving back near where their families are. Best wishes and lots of love to them.

Also….(and this is the exciting part!!)

We got our first chicken egg!!!!!

I seriously almost burst into tears when Ethan brought it to me, his eyes shining with a huge grin on his adorable face.

It was freckled, tiny, and beautiful.

Also it was delicious.

We fried it right up in some butter (because E dropped the egg and cracked the shell) and oh. my. gracious me.

It was DELICIOUS.

Bright orange yolk full of gorgeous nutrients…MM!
If you’ve never had a free-range mostly grass fed chicken egg, you have to try one. Right now.
You’ll never want to buy eggs from the store again!

I’m so excited to see the rest of our chickens start laying, it’s going to be fun!
In the meantime, does anyone have advice about actually getting your hens to lay eggs IN the nesting box?

Ethan found ours in the yard, right by the back fence where the hens like to hang out and take dust baths but I’d really rather them lay eggs in the nesting boxes. So if you know, please tell me!!
I read something about keeping the hens in the coop til mid morning because that’s when they usually lay?? Does that work?
I don’t know.
I suppose only time will tell. 🙂

Also tonight, we pulled up our dead squash plants and found these cute little snakes under the dirt.

We all held then and visited with them for a minute, then we let them go back to their home.

Eliana laughed and said the snake was licking her when she saw it’s little tongue flicking in and out. 🙂

That’s all for tonight.

I’ll be back in a few days with a sewing project: how to renew your cloth shoes (aka knock-off TOMS because I can’t afford to pay that much for shoes) by re-upholstering them. Fun!

Food Waste Friday: It’s Friday Already??

Man, I feel like this week has just flown by.

However, we managed not to waste any major food- just a few leftovers from the kid’s dinner last night that they didn’t eat. (you know, when they take like three bites and then are done and you try and try to get them to eat it but they won’t, even though you don’t give them any food the rest of the night?) Yeah. Those little bits.

Other than that, no waste!!

Yay!!!

In other news…
Our chickens are just about to start laying eggs and I am SO looking forward to having fresh, free-range eggs to eat! yum!

That’s all folks, see you in a few days and hope your weekend is fantastic!!

A Simple Snack Recipe: Stove-Top Popcorn

Hi, I realized a few days ago that it’s been awhile since I shared any recipes with you all, so here is a quick, easy, healthy snack that we love to enjoy.
Once you make it, you may never go back to microwaved popcorn. (At least I hope so. That stuff is NOT very good for you.)

If you’ve ever had old fashioned, stove popped popcorn you know that it is delicious and fluffy and devoid of all of the chemical “butter” you find in microwave popcorn or that gargantuan tub of heart-attack causing movie theater popcorn.

I remember as a kid my mom making huge amounts of popcorn and then we’d salt and butter it and pour it into a paper grocery bag to take to my uncle’s football games in the fall. It would be cold and windy and more often than not it would be rainy but with warm woolen blankets and salty, delicious popcorn it was well worth it to sit for a few hours and watch him play until our fingers got numb and our noses got red and my brother and I nearly fell asleep, then we’d head for our nice cozy home and fall into our toasty warm beds.

I love making popcorn for our kids, and they love to help. It’s so much fun for them to pick out a few yellow kernels and drop them into the sizzling oil, then when it pops they make a game out of trying to catch the kernels as they pop out, sometimes onto the kitchen floor. 😉

Here’s how we make our stove-top popcorn: it’s super easy, I don’t even measure!

You need:

~A big pot with a lid, preferably a heavy-bottomed one so that the heat is distributed evenly across the pan.
~Oil of some kind. I usually use olive oil because it’s healthier than canola and gives the popcorn a nicer flavor.
~Popcorn, of course! If you can, get the organic kind because the regular kind is almost certainly genetically modified. We go back and forth between organic and regular, depending on how much money we have that month.
~Salt or topping of your choice
~A big bowl

The How To:

Put your pan on the stove, turn it up to the highest heat setting and pour enough oil in to cover the bottom of the pan.

Take two or three or four kernels and drop them into the pan. This is a good place for your kids to help, because the oil isn’t hot enough yet to burn them.

Leave the lid off, and wait for those kernels to pop.

When they pop, your oil is hot!

I made a mistake here, and put the lid on too early. When I poured in all the rest of the popcorn, it took too long to pop because the pan had to heat back up and I ended up burning a bit of popcorn and not all the kernels popped. So leave the lid off when you put the first few kernels in, so your pan can get really hot!!

Dump in enough popcorn to cover the bottom of the pan, put the lid on (quickly!) and let them pop away!

Shake the pan back and forth on the burner a few times, so that the popped popcorn doesn’t burn while the rest of the kernels are still popping.

When the popping slows down to just a few pops here and there (or when you smell it starting to burn!), turn off the heat and leave the lid on for a few more seconds to give those last few kernels a chance to pop and then pour your nice hot popcorn into a big bowl and salt it up and enjoy!

We don’t use butter on our popcorn, with the olive oil you don’t really have to. It leaves the popcorn nice and flavorful without the extra saturated fat that butter gives you.
 You can sprinkle other toppings on as well, like nutritional yeast for a healthy but cheesy flavor, or cinnamon and sugar for a “dessert” popcorn or whatever else you like. We’re boring and just do salt. 😉

This is shared at Frugally Sustainable’s Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways. Hop on over and check out the hundred plus other awesome bloggers who’ve shared cool stuff about homesteading, frugal living and real food cooking!