72-hour kits

After 2+ years in the Young Women's presidency, I just got released.

I'm not surprised and I was ready for it, but I wasn't quite ready for just how sad I felt about it. I've really loved getting to know our beautiful, smart, strong young women and I'll miss seeing their smiling faces multiple times a week.

I've been moved into Relief Society to serve as an instructor, which I'm quite looking forward to. I find that I always seem to get more out of the lessons than the people I am supposedly "teaching" (pretty sure I'm not the teacher in these situations...).

As a side note to this change, it means that I did not earn my YW in Excellence Medallion during my time in Young Women's. I made a lot of progress and got pretty close and I can pick up where I left off the next time I get called into YW, which I'm sure will happen in the not to distant future.

One of the 10-hour projects I've been working on (or not so much) for the past several months was emergency preparedness. My goal for the Faith Project was to finish an emergency kit, 72-hour kits, and a 3-month supply of food storage. It was maybe too ambitious and definitely more than a 10-hour project.

Even though it's no longer working toward personal progress, I decided I wanted to finish at least the emergency bucket and 72-hour kits before baby comes. I've done 72-hour kits before, but it always got put in a shoe box, stuffed on some remote shelf, and forgotten about. Not to mention that it's usually things we don't normally eat and so it just expires and we throw it out.

I wanted to try a different, more organized approach this time. I looked at several websites to get basic ideas for what should go in a 72-hour kit. Than I adapted it slightly with things we'd actually eat, made a list, and did some shopping. I also ordered two cheapy, $8 backpacks off Amazon to put them in. And then Hans and I had this conversation.

Hans: Do they need to be backpacks? Can't we just put them in those Rubbermaid storage containers?
Me: Well yes, we could. But I was reading some people say that backpacks were good for grab and go. And down the road, it'll be easier for kids to manage.
Hans: Why do we need two? Can we put them in the same bag?
Me: What if we get separated for some reason? The idea is that each person is responsible for their own food.
Hans: Why is yours a horrible pink?
Me: I thought it'd be easier to see/find in an emergency situation.

And there ya go - the reasoning behind some of my decisions.

After collecting all the food, I made some little printables (which you can have, if you want!). The first is little "menu cards" that say what a day's worth of meals might look like.

This helped me pack the right quantity of food in each Ziploc bag (freezer, gallon size!) and it would (theoretically) help us ration ourselves in the event of an emergency (instead of eating all our food the first day and then being hungry). You can download these menu cards as a pdf here, but you may want to adapt them with foods your family normally eats.

The second thing I did was make a master list that is now posted on our message center in the kitchen. It lists all the things that are in each kit, printed on heavy cardstock and sealed with contact paper. Then I printed out these little tags (extras are in a ziploc sandwich baggie attached to the back). Each tag has when the food item will expire and then it's taped next to that item. Orange means within six months, blue within a year, purple is longer than a year. I made it visible in the kitchen so that we can glance at it every month and see what we need to eat and replace. Download the chart and tags here.

I packed each backpack with 9 bottles of water (3 for each day), plus the three gallon-size baggies of food, and (DON'T FORGET!) each backpack has a gallon-size baggie (double bagged, actually, to try and avoid contaminating smells)  of dog food for our fur babies. These are now being stored in the closet under the stairs with our yet-to-be-completed emergency bucket. I'll be putting additional water, clothes and other supplies in that. That's the next project =)

I'm excited to check this off my list and hope that we'll be able to keep up with our 72-hour kits now that we can see it on a regular basis. Poke me if I forget to check those expiration dates.

And if you're curious what's in my kit and don't want to download the PDF:

Day 1
Breakfast - oatmeal, v8 juice
Lunch - tuna fish, applesauce
Dinner - soup-at-hand, peanut butter crackers
Snack - zone bar, hot cocoa

Day 2

Breakfast - chewy granola bar, v8 juice
Lunch - beef jerky, applesauce
Dinner - ravioli, trail mix
Snack - zone bar, hot cocoa


Day 3

Breakfast - oatmeal, v8 juice
Lunch - Easy mac, chewy granola bar
Dinner - soup-at-hand, peanut butter crackers
Snack - trail mix, hot cocoa


+ 9 bottles of water per person
+ 1 gallon-size dog food per dog

Amazon backpacks purchased here.

Cleaning and Organizing Part II

My ten-hour project for choice and accountability has been taking shocking long. I haven't worked on this since March when I did the kitchen re-organization and spice jars.

Last week I finally got around to finishing it off by cleaning out the office and organizing all my craft and hobby crap.

It took me three hours to sort through all the crap. Look at all the trash we had in that room! Why did we have all this? Ridiculous.

I was able to get all my crafts into plastic bins and labeled! I originally wanted to do vinyl but don't want to cough up for a silhouette or cricut. So I went with stickers. We moved up a shelving unit from the garage and it fits perfectly in the closet. So much better!

Oh, and as a total aside... in the boxes in the closet I found a bunch of stuff Hans' mom gave us before she moved and I found.... tons of baby pictures! Little Hans was so cute. Here's a sampling.... :)

Put on your shiny

For last night's mutual activity, the Beehives wanted to have a mini "spa night" and pamper themselves. It ended up being really fun, easy, and we were even able to tie it back to a talk given recently by YW General President, Elaine S. Dalton.

Sister Dalton talked about how when her daughter was very little, she used to watch her mother getting ready for church and mirror her movements. Sister Dalton had a special, thick face cream intended to prevent wrinkles (and jokes that "it didn't work") and her daughter, who called it "shiny" wanted some too. Together, they would put on their shiny and be ready to go. Sister Dalton's talk is about what really makes us beautiful, and the things we can do to put on that shiny.

I whipped up a little handout with a quote from the talk (feel free to download and use for your class!) and we discussed the concept of "putting on your shiny" while we made sugar scrubs and painted nails. It's a quick and easy activity that doesn't take a lot of prep work or expense, so I'd recommend it if you need a last minute idea.

Homemade Sugar Scrub

What you need:

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup olive oil (or almond oil, if you want less smell)

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 Tablespoon honey

You can also add Vitamin E or essential oils if you want other benefits/scents.

Some sort of container (we used mason jars)

Put in the brown sugar first. Fill the container pretty full because once you add the oil, it cuts down size considerably.

Add the olive oil slowly (we did 1/8 cup at a time) and allow it to trickle down before pouring in more. Mix between additions so that all the brown sugar is soaked and it doesn't just sit on top. 

After it's thoroughly mixed, add in the vanilla and honey and mix well.

Then go paint your nails :) 

[They painted mine gold.... if you're wondering....]

Spring cleaning and organizing

I had a problem. In my kitchen. I could never find anything, things were crammed in random places, and there were a few cabinets I was afraid to open for fear of stuff falling out. I'm not sure how it happened... but it was ugly.

Sidebar: Even though I haven't mentioned it in a while, I'm still working on completing the Young Women's personal progress program. As a leader, I technically only have to do the three required experiences for each value and three (i think?) ten-hour projects. But I'm actually really enjoying it and getting a lot out of it and I do think it's helping my girls that I'm doing it too, so I'm trying to do the whole program instead of the leader-abbreviated version.

In any event, one of the options listed for Choice and Accountability ten-hour projects is:

Choose to be more orderly in your home by completing a cleaning or organizing project. Record in your journal how doing this helped you in other areas of your life.

What wonderful motivation to do something I badly needed.

I broke it down into three steps and I've actually only finished the first two (I have about 2.5 hours left to go and that'll be in the craft room). But I'm so excited about the difference already that I had to share! I'm loving my kitchen now that it's easier for find things.

Step 1: Re-arrange and organize

This is a cabinet I used to dread opening because pot lids would fall everywhere. Adding just one lid rack changed everything and gave me so much more space!

Container Store Lid Organizer, $4.99

Same deal with the pans. All laying on top of each other, all crammed into a too-small cabinet in the island. I swapped spots with another cabinet and now all bowls and such are here and all pans are....

here! Add some large standing racks and it's now much easier to find what I want and grab without disturbing everything else.

Container Store large four sort racks, $4.99

 Prior to this, I had baking stuff crammed everywhere. Cookie cutters in various drawers. Cupcake liners spilling out of cabinets. Gel dyes all over the place (and frequently tipping over, staining my white cabinets). So out with the spices and cookbooks, and in with a dedicated cabinet for baking! With small plastic bins (with lids!) from Target, I've organized spatulas and knives; dyes, sprinkles, and decorating tips; and cookie cutters. Mess is contained and organized. Thank goodness.

Cookbooks moved into the pantry (for now...):

And spices moved into what used to be a junk drawer.... (junk, be gone!)

Step Two of my project was all about the spices. As I was moving them to this drawer, I discovered I had three oreganos, two nutmegs, two garlics, two gingers, and several others. The problem? I could never see if I had something, so I just bought another one. And the baggies? I started buying some spices from the bulk section of HEB because I didn't need large quantities of it and then realized... hey, this is so much cheaper! One of those spice bags cost me about 30 cents and would probably have been $2-3 if I'd bought the little McCormick Jar. I decided to re-organize everything into uniform containers, throw out the plastic bottles, and start buying just from the bulk section as needed. So the drawer got a makeover....

Transfer in progress....

Voila! 

Yes, I realize there are two garlics. Some spices that I use a lot got two jars to keep me from running out faster.

These cute little 4 oz. containers came from Specialty Bottle and were 70 cents each. I ordered 35 and they fit perfectly in that drawer. Heads up - shipping is $10! So it's better to order more or you'll pay more on shipping than you did on the actual tins.

Next up: The dreaded craft room. Stay tuned.

Newspaper Prom

The Beehives were in charge of this week's joint mutual activity and when they told me what they wanted to do, I was a little skeptical. In fact, I was skeptical right up until about 15 minutes into it when normal Wednesday chaos quieted down a bit and they really dove into it.

What you need:
As much old newspaper as you can find (Being a former paper employee helps - Thanks, Danny!)
Duck tape in fun colors and designs
Scissors

We had the Laurels and Priests pair off - we had two groups of Priest/Laurel and one group of three Laurels (with the Bishop's daughter offering to dress as the boy). Where were all our Priests?

Then each of the three groups got to choose their teams from the Mia Maids, Beehives, Teachers, and Deacons. The teams could do whatever they wanted to dress their Priest/Laurel, as long as it was modest.

We ended up not only with some cute dresses, but coordinating zebra print ties, a sword, and a cape. It was a nice activity for the leaders to sit back and enjoy while the kids went nuts with creativity.

Didn't they do a nice job?

New beginnings

Last night we had Young Women's New Beginnings. Since this year's theme is "Arise and Shine Forth," we went with a sunshine theme.

(invitation)

The cookie cutter came from Amazon. I used my favorite sugar cookie and royal icing recipes from Bake at 350.

The cupcake wrappers were cut out of yellow scrapbook paper using this template. I used my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe (shown back here) and used chocolate chips instead of snickers. The recipe is kinda oily, I guess, because the wrappers had oil spots on them after just a few hours.

And congrats to Lise for finishing her YW Medallion! We're so glad to have had you the past year.

(stolen from Bro. Whiting's facebook....)

Happily Ever After

I've been a busy bee the past week preparing for tonight's Young Women in Excellence program. Malinda - I had no clue how much work went into these things. Thank you.

We're using Jenny Smith's "Happily Ever After" script and going with a whole princess/pink theme. Here's the program I designed for it:

Sisters Briggs and Barclay did most of the decorations, but I did make tissue-paper poms! Ok, Hans helped. I've always messed them up before. Dang Martha Stewart makes it look easy. But after finding a good youtube tutorial, I learned that the trick is more tissue paper (10 sheets, not 8) and pipe cleaners to tie it off. Amazing. (No pictures... my camera died :()

I also did food.

The pink lemonade cupcake recipe is from Sweet Cheeks. It's not my favorite, but they turned out pretty well and fit with the theme. My oven was causing me fits last night - I tripled the recipe for the first batch and about half of them burned in 18 minutes, though the recipe says to bake 20-25. Last night was NOT the night I wanted to re-make cupcakes, but I did another double batch and set 'em for 14 minutes. I kept having to add time and I think they finished in 20-22 minutes. Gosh darn inconsistent oven....

I've never used gumpaste before and was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have any difficulties with it. I bought the pre-made Wilton stuff from Hobby Lobby and added some light pink food coloring. Then I just used a small crown-shaped cookie cutter and let them dry wrapped around the round handles of every cooking spoon and rolling pin in my kitchen.

The sugar cookies are the same ones I made back here (apparently I only make pink royal icing. Oh well). I wanted to do some scroll designs on them but by that point it was midnight and I had icing in my hair and 2 dozen burned cupcakes and didn't care. So I just threw some edible pearl sprinkles on them.

The girls sounded beautiful and it was a great program. I'm so proud of all of them.

Glitter = not smart

Why did I think that glitter and 13-year-olds would mix?

For mutual last week, the girls decided they wanted to decorate craft cones like Christmas trees. Fine - I've been wanting to do that, too. I asked them to bring the cones and I'd supply yarn, berries, modge podge, glitter, etc.

Most of the girls went for glitter. And they were really creative! I love what they came up with. I don't love how much glitter was on the floor in the relief society room.... and all up and down the hall ways... (how? don't answer. I know).

I think it's supposed to be a smiley face?

Sofia and I went yarn.

It's the easiest project ever... You just start at the bottom and wrap up til it's done. And stick some berries in it for color. Mine's not done yet, but I'll post a picture when it is.