Make Me Smile Monday

Every once in a while as I'm working about the house I see something that makes my heart sing. My busy little 2 year old boy being read to by one (or both of) his older sisters who are 7 and 5. It paints the sweetest picture. He sits there snuggled up close listening contentedly as they read away. When my oldest first started to read and was fluent enough that she could read simple stories out loud I began to encourage her to read to her younger sister. It didn't take much and before long it was a common thing. I can hardly believe that only a few years later and now they are BOTH reading to their younger brother.

What a blessing to have books to read, a comfy couch to snuggle up on, eyes that can see, books to hold and the ability to read. I am so incredibly grateful! I love the sound of their voices and the sight of the togetherness they share over the love of books.

Make Me Smile Mondays

Something I really love that I've seen on a number of different blogs are days of the week that have been designated to a specific topic. For example someone might decide they have a lot to say about sweaters and they'll make posts on Saturdays call "Sweet Sweater Saturdays". (Of course I'm making this one up!) In time I'd like to share some of them with you, but being new to the blogging world I'm not quite sure about the proper way to go about this. Once I've had the chance to figure that out, I look forward to sharing them with you. :)

In the mean time I've decided to start one up here on Life's Journey called "Make Me Smile Mondays". I'm going to start sharing one "little thing" every monday that makes me feel incredibly happy and blessed. You know those times in life when just for a few seconds everything seems to slow right down and you're overwhelmed by a sense of gratefulness for the people (and sometimes even places and things) in your life? Well, I'd love to start sharing some of those moments. Keep an eye out for Monday's post, I can hardly wait to get started!

Recipe Keeper

When it's time to make up my menu plan for the week (and the accompanying grocery list) I don't usually feel very inspired. I enjoy cooking and trying new recipes but I don't like how long it can take to come up with six meal ideas (I reserve one dinner a week for leftovers. My mother-in-love calls this "best of the week" and I've chosen to adopt the term.) while I'm also trying to mix things up a bit week after week. I sometimes find myself trying to remember our family favourites off the top of my head in an effort to avoid searching for them. This is because they're located in three different places: online, in my cookbooks and the 1" binder where I store my printouts and hand written recipes.

Enter this beautiful recipe keeper my mom gave me a while ago.

Knowing it would take a ridiculous amount of time to transfer all of my recipes into it at once, I've slowly been writing out my favourite recipes from the binder I was just talking about onto the fresh new pages of my recipe keeper. As part of the process I went through the entire binder and got rid of the recipes I don't use or know I'm never actually going to try. This cut the number of recipes I had in half. I've been really enjoying how uniform all of my recipes look written on the same pages all the way through, and the fact that it's divided into sections like this:



So today when it was time to meal plan I had a great idea!

I can use this little binder to keep all of my favourite meal ideas in one place. All of my favourite recipes from those 3 different locations! That way, when it's time to sit down and meal plan I can pull out my binder and simply look through it. It will be so much easier to mix it up if I have a large group of favourites to pick from instead of trying to remember them on my own. This makes it seem so much less intimidating to me to try and come up with 1 or 2 new recipes each week just for fun. As new recipes become true favourites they will be added to the binder. If it gets full enough that it becomes too time consuming just to flip through it I'll simply make a reference sheet at the front of the binder listing all of the meals in the binder so I can give it a quick scan.

I imagine this is not a new concept for many, and it's a pretty simple one - but I'm really excited about it! I can hardly wait to get all of my favourites in one place!