Hoping it lasts!

I've reorganize my  fridge!  I'm so hoping it will last.

I cut down on condiments, put all the veggies at eye level and added lazy susans.

We are now using the wine fridge for leftovers.  Keeps the main fridge so much cleaner. I don't have a before picture of the inside but on the counter is all we took out of the fridge!

It aligns with minimalism but to take it a step further, I am making a 2 week rotation meal plan to keep my fridge packed with only the regular food I know we'll eat. It should save me money too...

Reusing foil balloons!

I saw a few years ago to we can reuse foil balloons and I have been doing it since but apparently not everyone knows about it so I thought I would share this secret ;-)

All you need is a straw! 

 You insert your straw in the opening. I suggest to always tie your balloons in a way that you can safely removed the ribbon.

You have to insert  the straw really deep  and then you can deflate or inflate your balloons as often as you want! 

Minimalism in a crazy household!

I'm jumping on the minimalist bandwagon!  With 6 kids plus my niece living here full time its going to be interesting!  I'm also not the best at interior design so my house is a bit of everything.

We are still color coding all the kids dishes and Tupperware for school and it has been working really well for a few years now. 

The kids have two towels each and they keep them in their bedroom. They are in charge of them.  I do have more towels for adults, guess and occasional water spill... or flooding in some case!  

I started decluttering my closet and the boys. I also got the girls to do outfits.  It's not perfect but already so much better! 

You'll be able to follow our journey here!  

New beginning! New dayhome!

I'm doing this post a bit quickly, lack of time at the moment, but I want to start writing again and have it as a base for our new dayhome too.  I didn't use my blog for a while, like two years already!

We are starting a new chapter of our lives. After moving around a bit, we settled in St-Albert, really close to my husband home town, Legal. It is nice to be close to the family again and having the cousins play together. We decided to have more kids so I'll be home for another few years. Time to have a dayhome again and have some friends for my little boys!

I love kids, which is a good thing since I have 6! I love planning activities and seeing them smiling.

Our new francophone dayhome is called Six Elements. The name works in French and English, it fits with our six kids and it's also the 6 main elements in our body so it represent everyone in the dayhome!

I am from Montreal and moved to Alberta in 2002. I met my husband shortly after and we've been married since 2006! My husband is fourth generation French-Albertain! We have six beautiful children born in '01, '05', '07, '09, '15 and '17.  We have 2 in school, 2 homeschooled and the two boys.

I've had a dayhome for about 10 years and I am looking forward to start again!

Kid's dishes

We have a way to simplify dishes at home and make it easy for me to identify who didn't do their job.

All my kids have to clear their own dishes from the table.  In a perfect world I would be with them all the time at meals and would be clearing off the table in one shot...  but it doesn't happen that way in our life.

I bought colored dishes at IKEA and they all chose a color. This way if I see dishes on the table or even a glass of water somewhere I know exactly which kid left it!  We have been doing it for over a year and it works.  No kids seems to have figured out that they could just used an other color to get their sister in trouble...

Mimi: Orange
Mina: Dark blue
Lily: Pink
Clo: Green
Guests: Light blue and Yellow.

You can't really see on the picture but we have light and dark blue in there!  In the other drawer we have the utensils with the same colors.  They are in lower drawers to make it easy for them to get their own dishes and put them away when they empty the dishwasher.

I just don't know how to remove the white from the dishes, I have to look online for a solution.  Anyone found a way to deal with this?

Some of our first preparations

I started with creating a board on Pinterest and looking at a few, ok a lot, of the ideas on there for a Canadian roadtrip. I also made a list of some of the problems we encountered while doing a roadtrip from Edmonton to Montreal and back in 2012. Those were my starting points for this roadtrip.  We will go through those problems and post as we fix them.

This is our transportation:  Dodge Caravan 2013 and trailer with boxes on top:

Problem 1:  Blankets and pillows gets in the way or fall on the ground and get dirty, especially when we get out of the van.  I decided to make a homemade version of a ceiling storage I saw on Pinterest....

Here is the original idea...

Here is my homemade version made with a section separator for an old tent and jumping rope!

It holds really well even with stuff in it and doesn't block the view for the driver. We even put some clothes like big sweater and the car sunshade to block the sun in the windshield when we don't use the vehicle.

Problem 2 (a,b and c!):

Air mattress that don't stay inflated,
No privacy from the kids when we all are in the tent,
No shelter on the beach to change.

I got a Kamp-rite and I am planning on getting a Disc-o-bed Bunk cot too for the kids.

Here is the Kamp-rite double tent cot.  It is so easy to install, comes with it's own travel bag and fits two adults comfortably.  Only two 2 section poles. 4 doors with screens. Comes with a rain cover. Makes a lounge chair. It has two mats inside to sleep comfortably.

We can now install it at the beach or anywhere we need on the side of the road. We can also install it in our tent and have a completely private sleeping quarter while still keeping an ear on the kids.

Banana chocolate chip coconut muffin

We had some ripe bananas and the kids wanted to make some banana bread.  After thinking of it, I decided to make them into muffin so it would be easier to bring for school and picnics. I am pretty proud of myself!

I used this recipe with some little changes:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/flours-famous-banana-bread-recipe.html

I used coconut oil instead of regular oil and used the sour cream.  I added chocolate chip in it and shredded coconut on top of some. I didn't put walnut as I don't like them.

Even though I added chocolate chip I did not adjust the amount of sugar. It was still really good but my husband would probably prefer a less sweet version.

I left them for 45 minutes at 350 F but I think they could have been taken out a little bit sooner.  Not burnt but too crispy for my taste.