Making Your Home a Haven: Day 8

Crystal is back with another challenge. Thanks for taking the time to do this!

1. Refresh Your Spirit.

I can't stress how important it is to begin your day on the right foundation - the solid Rock! You may not have hours to sit and study God's Word, but you can take a few moments to commit your day to the Lord, to soak up the richness of His Word, and to ask Him for strength and grace for whatever today holds.

How did the Lord encourage your heart this morning? Share with us!

I'm still in Exodus for my daily reading - I left off yesterday when the Israelites had just left Egypt, but hadn't yet crossed the Red Sea.

2. Do Your Morning Routine.

Do you have a simple morning routine? If not, sit down right now and write out a short list of five things you'd like to accomplish in the same order every morning. Put this list somewhere obvious where you can reference it often every morning until you have it memorized.

• Dressed & ready for the day
• Tidy a bathroom
• Pray
• Go over memory verse
• 5 minute room rescue
• Empty the dishwasher
• Eat breakfast & take pills
  
• Read daily devotionals
• Read Bible passage(s)

I don't have computer time on the list, because it's not something I feel is important enough to list, but I usually spend a couple of minutes on the computer before heading downstairs when I eat breakfast, empty the dishwasher and dish drain, and read my devotionals and Bible. The bathroom cleaning is one items that sometimes gets skipped over. If I've overslept or have to get out the door quicker, I'll often leave it until I get home. It's easy to postpone, especially because the bathrooms usually are in good shape. My floors are often terrible, but my bathrooms are usually ok.

3. Take Time to Plan.

What's on your to-do list today? If you don't already have a short to-do list written out, take a moment to write one out right now. Keep it to 10 items or less and then number them in order of importance and work on them in that order. Don't start on #2 until #1 is done. And so forth.

Share your to-do list on your blog today and keep us posted on your progress!

Today's to-dos are brief:

1. Work
2. Meijer - buy a few grocery items (i.e. dip ingredients) and stocking stuffers
   
3. Fix dinner
4. Fix blue cheese dip for work party tomorrow
5. Bake batch of wedding cookies
6. One load of laundry
7. Spend 15 minutes planning our trip
8. Spend 15 minutes working in my office
9. Spend time with L
   

4. What's On The Menu for Dinner?

Do you have dinner planned and prepared? If not, pull something out of the freezer, stick something in the crockpot, whip up a casserole, or get as much prep. work done as you can for dinner.

Post what you're making (or made) for dinner if you have a chance!

Minestrone soup, with salad and bread. I love soup and love cooler weather because that means I can fix soup! It's not prepped or anything, but it's a quick recipe and won't take long once I get home.

Update: L didn't want soup, so we had the spaghetti he requested.

5. Project of the Day.

Put on an apron, light some candles, roll up your sleeves, and let's get to work! Today's project is the bedrooms. You can either choose to tackle all of the bedrooms, or you can just pick the one which needs the most work and start there. Set the timer for 15 minutes and do a quick pick up, declutter and throw out trash, do a quick dust and vacuum, and you're done!

Take before and after pictures of the bedroom(s) you clean and share them on your blog.

Our bedroom is my biggest homemaking success - it looks good 99% of the time, and when it doesn't it's a quick fix. And that is usually only when we've just returned from vacation or something. But I'm glad for the challenge because I do need to spend some time in the guest room - we just had a visitor and I haven't changed the sheets after that, so today for my load of laundry I'll wash those sheets, put fresh ones on the bed, and make sure the room is ready for the next visitor. Which I think will be in February, but it'll be nice to know the room is prepared.

Updates to follow once I have anything to report.

Update: I never got on the computer again yesterday evening to update then, so this is pretty late for an update. The store run took much longer than I expected - long lines and not enough people working the registers, so I immediately scratched my plans to make a batch of cookies. That was not a necessity, so it was easy to postpone to another day. I also spent a lot of time with L yesterday evening, so I didn't do anything in the guest room. He'd been gone the evening before so I wanted to make sure I didn't ignore him to wash some sheets that can easily wait for another day. And yes, I could have fit that in in small segments but that would have meant several trips up and down the stairs and I didn't want to do that. ;)

But! The blue cheese dip is ready and waiting, I won't shouldn't have to go to the store again before we leave, and I only have one more day of work before vacation! And it's really only like a half day what with the big holiday lunch and stuff.