simple blogging

April 3 in 30: Getting Saner

April 29, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I always sit down for one of these posts at the end of a month and am amazed how quickly the month has flown by! But I’m happy it’s May because the weather is really warming up now, and our house is getting much more comfortable.

For April, I feel grateful to have participated in Ashley Pichea’s featured challenge, working through Simple Blogging. For the most part, I’d say I didn’t necessarily learn as much from this book as it leant me a fresh perspective on my blogging activities.

Interestingly, I tried blogging less this month, and that worked fine to keep me focused on the tasks involved in keeping up with real life, but halfway through last week, I was in a bit of a funk. I finally sat down and started blogging and realized that blogging is good for me. It’s some of the other things (social media, etc.) that go along with it I don’t enjoy so much.

In not blogging, I’d cut myself off from some of my favorite posts, and the ones that readers tell me they appreciate: my Chinese kitchen, my gratitude journal and Cultivating a Positive Family Environment.

So I’m still working on balance. Hmmm…guess that makes me human, huh? (If you’ve got balance perfectly worked out, let me know. You can do a guest post!)

Here were my goals for April:

Work through Simple Blogging – Done. Great book with lots of thought-provoking material.
Get into a proper routine – We had an off day last week, but for the most part, we’re back in the swing of homeschool. We’re running almost a full schedule, with history, math, spelling, writing, handwriting and science. We have yet to add in art, which we keep neglecting when things get busy, and is one of our primary loves. Need to fix that!
Get Hold the MSG on a better schedule. Last week, that involved postponing a post. I needed to breathe. I have lots of ideas, but the practical matters of life: getting our furniture and curtains and continuing with settling in took precedence. I’m not unhappy about that, and I’m sure the post will be better when it’s finally up.

All in all, I think I’m headed in the right direction in terms of balance. And I think I’m learning to be truer to myself with my blog and social media.

What were your goals this month? Are you closer to them?

- Carey Clark

April 3 in 30: Keeping Up

April 15, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I’m getting there with my goals. My biggest challenge at this point is that the amount of activity during the day is so much greater here than when we were back in Canada, that I’m not making the time to have “office hours” because there’s always something unfinished to do elsewhere.

Then it’s hard for me to keep my online activities relegated to the part of the day where they belong. Just in the last week, I made jam, froze a bunch of strawberries and mulberries, made homemade granola and homemade almond milk, baked two loaves of gluten-free bread in my toaster oven, started a batch of sauerkraut and a batch of kombucha, in addition to making and cleaning up three meals a day! Oh yes, and laundry–it all has to be hung out. There are no driers here.

I realize a lot of this is setting-up activity. I won’t have to freeze berries every week, nor will I have to start sauerkraut or kombucha. These are things I’m doing to get set-up in our new home. I’m also getting closer to a meal plan, so I can simplify my market-going.

I’m plugging away, and I know it will get better soon. Slowly, I’m getting into a routine.

My goals for this month are:

Work through Simple Blogging: I’m making my way through. Most of the tips are simple–things I can incorporate smoothly into my life. One challenge I’ll pass on: If Facebook is a time-waster for you, consider your goals for using it. Wow. I’m still thinking about that one. I want to stay connected to friends and family back home. That’s definitely one of my goals. But with Facebook’s new format, I find I’m often hearing about the trivial a lot and missing important events in some people’s lives. Is there a better way?
Get into a proper routine. I’ve been doing better at starting the day right, but I must confess, there have been mornings this week when the computer was on my lap when my kids woke up. I want to change that, and it means keeping to office hours in the afternoon. (Refer to the challenge mentioned earlier.) I do feel that the rhythm of things is getting better, and it will resolve as I work on it over this month.
Get Hold the MSG posts on a better schedule. The kids and I expressed our desires about this, but didn’t bring it into reality last week. With the kids and JavaMan pitching in, we’ve managed to think up several innovative posts for the next few and hope to get some material built up so that we can be ahead of the game. I’m also planning to set up subscription for Hold the MSG so people can be notified when the post is up, and we don’t miss out on readers, even when we don’t get the post up “on time” as planned.

Things are coming along. My overall goal this month is to bring life into a proper balance. I think I’m getting there.

- Carey Clark

April 3 in 30: Simplicity

April 8, 2012 by Carey Jane Clark

I’d like to be able to declare that all the bins are unpacked, my house is completely organized, and I am on top of it all.

In reality, it’s been a whirlwind since we arrived, with jet lag and the cold. We are furnitureless. We had houseguests approximately two weeks after our arrival and since they left, JavaMan has been in Korea addressing a visa issue. He returns on Wednesday. I’ll be so glad to see him.

I was so tired tonight, I sat down to watch the end of a movie with my kids and fell asleep on my bed fully clothed, with a sweater and an apron! THEY kissed ME goodnight, and I woke around 2:30 a.m. bewildered at what had transpired!

However, the homeschool room is looking like and functioning as a homeschool room, we’ve been posting weekly at Hold the MSG (Mandarin lessons for kids), and the kitchen is up and running. In fact, I’ve been downright experimental there. I’m determined to make gluten-free work here, since we’ve seen such benefits for Sweetpea. So far, I’ve located recipes for and/or experimented with:

pizza dough – nailed this one. It’s so good, and yes, I will share very soon
bread – found a simple recipe with easily accessible ingredients and tweaked it–the mix was slightly wet the last time, which with gluten-free results in a fallen loaf (although it wasn’t too bad). But going to take another run at it tomorrow and see what we can do to perfect things
dumplings! This is a huge coup! We’ll still end up in situations where we’re at someone else’s house or at a restaurant and can’t avoid it, but if we can make our own dumplings at home, gluten-free, it will go a long way.
crackers – yes indeed, homemade gluten-free crackers
matzah – this won’t be something we’ll eat every day, but it came in handy over the weekend for our traditional Seder dinner

I’ve continued to work on freezing strawberries and mulberries so we’ll have berries to eat for the rest of the year, and I even located a simple pectin-free strawberry jam recipe so I can deal with some of the strawberries I’d rather not throw away, but aren’t good enough to keep for eating. Today I figured out how to get my hands on jars for the jam.

But as more and more time gets consumed by living–not to mention that this week we slipped back into the homeschool routine–I’m feeling the need to simplify my online activities. So this month, I’ve joined the 3 in 30 featured challenge: Simple Blogging.

Here are my goals for April:

Work through Simple Blogging – This involves reading a set number of chapters per week of the eBook and incorporating changes into my blogging life. For the most part this week, I felt pretty good about what I read, although I confess to allowing myself to succumb to online distractions when I’ve sat down with the intention of blogging–what the author, Rachel Meeks, calls “productive procrastination.” At some points, I was able to pat myself on the back–for having a clear purpose for my blog, for example, or for using Evernote for organization–and at other points, I felt a gentle wrap on my knuckles for things I know to be doing and don’t do enough–like planning posts in advance. I tend to keep mental notes, which clutter up brain space and can be easily lost! I have begun to implement some of these suggestions, but still have work to do.
Get into a proper routine – Because our days are exactly the opposite to North America (12 hours ahead means I’m sleeping when most everyone I know is active), it’s very tempting to check email and Facebook first thing in the morning. Did so-and-so get back to me? Are there blog comments? What are my friends and family up to? However, this doesn’t work well with our family, and means my kids greet me in the morning with a computer on my lap. Not okay. It can also delay getting breakfast and homeschool started. I am determined to get back to a proper morning routine. We live here now, and if people have to wait longer to hear back from me, or I have to wait longer to hear back from them, so be it. My family is more important.
Get Hold the MSG posts on a better schedule – There’s quite a bit involved in posting the weekly posts. It takes 3 hours via VPN to upload the posts to YouTube, for example, and after a little meeting with the kids last week, we decided to break up the work into segments, so it’s not too much all on one day. We’re planning and working on the next post right after the last one is live. The great side benefit to this is that our kids are focusing much more on their own Chinese learning, and much more motivated to practice.

What does April hold for you? Are you spring cleaning or making any goals?

- Carey Clark

Carey is a homeschooling mother of three and author of the contemporary inspirational novel After the Snow Falls. She blogs here about the many adventures of her expat family.