Glove up--It's chicken surgery time in the kitchen! Dr. Young’s operating room is ready and she’ll show you how easy and fun it is to take a whole chicken and cut it up yourself.

In chapter eight of her book, The Joy of Being Disorganized, she talks about an overachiever named Janine who couldn't say no to people and went overboard in Martha Stewart-like fashion. Don't worry---cutting up your own chicken is not going to throw you in the crazy cook follies. It's a handy way to save lots of money and gives you the bonus of making delicious and nutritious bone broth to help take the chill off those frosty winter nights. Watch this video to learn how!

 

3 Keys to Having an Organized Home

Part two

As I said earlier, but it bears repeating, in the 40 years that I’ve been helping women who were desperately disorganized, there has been a common thread that connects them. It’s a thread of love, caring, compassion and creativity and a desire to have an organized home and a happy family. Many have told me personally they didn’t think they could get organized. Many had given up, until a light went on in a blessed AHA moment.

Be sure to read Key #1 Decision if you haven’t already. 

This blog is about commitment. I hope you’ve done the assignment for Key #1 and are ready for Key #2. The women I’ve met over the years who suddenly realized it was possible to have a clean, cozy organized home, discovered a dormant spark just waiting to be ignited. The spark is usually flamed because of commitment.

Key # 2 Commitment

Once you’ve made your decision to have an organized home, be committed to it. The best way to stay committed to anything is to go into it for the right reasons. If you got married because your husband was a good dancer and he looked like George Clooney, you’re probably not still married to the handsome hoofer.

I was 35 years old when I finally made the decision to get organized for the right reason. All my futile attempts prior to that were based on trying to make my husband, my mom and my friends think well of me. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”

Shake it baby!

Nope, we're not at the disco we're back in the kitchen saving time, money and carbs. This time we're talking about one of my favorite subjects—mayonnaise. When you get to the end of a jar, you're going to add some yummy ingredients, put the lid back on and shake it! Voila-- you've just created a creamy, gourmet salad dressing good enough for a fancy five star restaurant. Who knows.....after you blend up this flavorful masterpiece you just might decide to open one!

And for the heck of it I'll toss in a LOW CARB white sauce that's delicious. Also, since I no longer eat sugar-laden catchup I make this instead.

If you don't believe me about the carbs, look at the back of a catchup bottle and read how many there are.

Stop the habits that got you to this place where

you want to lose weight.

 When you decide to lose weight by eating healthy; until you establish the new habits to support the lighter body you want, you’ll have to stay alert to the way you were eating and what you were thinking when you created an overweight body. In other words, you have to stop the habits that got you to this place where you want to lose weight, and establish new habits that’ll get you that healthy body you want.

 A habit becomes a habit when you think and do something over and over (about 21 days) until it’s automatic. Once it’s a habit, good or bad, you no longer have to think about the action in order to do it. When you are establishing a new habit, you have to be mindful of the thought that created the old habit in order to be successful at changing.

 I had to strip my kitchen of the stuff that was making me fat

I was 65, when I lost 35 pounds, so don’t give me any guff that you’re too old to lose weight. I knew I’d be trying to talk myself into my old ways of thinking (and subsequently eating) every time I opened the cupboard or the refrigerator, so if I wanted to eliminate that constant self-bickering, I had to strip my kitchen of the stuff that was making me fat. (For me, carbs were the culprits.) I dumped all the sugar, flour, rice, pasta, ice cream, corn and any processed foods like bread and cereal. That way I removed the possibility of those arguments and reduced the chance to talk myself into eating something to one place, the grocery store!

You can’t eat it if you don’t buy it

 

Many give up on getting organized,

then a light goes on in a blessed AHA moment!

 

Over the next three weeks, I’m going to share with you a major key to having an organized home. You won’t want to miss any of them. Each key has a simple assignment, I hope you’ll follow. Each assignment will prepare you for the next key and in the process you will have that AHA moment

In 42 years helping women who were desperately disorganized, there has been a common thread that connects them. It’s a thread of love, caring, compassion and desire to have an organized home and a happy family. Many have told me personally they didn’t think they could get organized. Many had given up, until a light went on in a blessed AHA moment. Flylady was one of those women.

They were moms carrying the burden of being disorganized, and having low self-esteem because of it.

 

With the 3 elements to success in this series of blogs, you will have that AHA moment. These women I’ve met over the years who suddenly realized it was possible to have a clean, cozy organized home, were stay-at-home moms, moms who worked outside of their homes as doctors, attorneys, writers, bankers, artists, teachers, nurses, singers, computer geeks, ministers and a thousand other vocations. These were moms who were successful at jobs outside their homes and successful at being wonderful mothers. But they were also moms carrying the burden of being disorganized, and having feelings of low self-esteem, desperation and worry.

Key # 1 Make the Decision

With a decision to have an organized home, it’s good to know what you think that means to you. If you want perfection, you already know that’s not going to work for you, so give it up! If you want immediate change, you know that’s not going to happen either. So how about a decision to gradually get organized just to please you?

"I don’t know where to start!"

This cooking video shows you how to make low carb tortillas. Enjoy!

 

6 Romantic Ways to Spark up Your Marriage (Part II)

To me romance is all about creating magical moments in your relationship that will take little time out of your busy schedule. Stop thinking you’re too busy for romance. Remember you chose to spend your life with your husband, so enjoy him.

 

Here are 6 more ideas I’ve collected from some very happy couples as well as some tried and true ideas from yours truly. (Please note: I’m on my second marriage.)

1     Crockpot sex

I use my crockpot a lot in February letting it’s savory scents waft throughout the house. The aroma goes straight to a primitive part of my husband’s brain that tells him all is well. Remember that old saying, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? I’ve found it’s true and the kitchen has proven to be a very romantic room to most men. (Not that they want to “do it” in that room necessarily, but they appreciate good cooking.)

2    Be selfish

6 Romantic Ways to Spark up Your Marriage (Part I)

Romance is not just about sex. My mom cracked me up, after reading some article in a woman’s magazine about sex being the main reason for a happy marriage, when she said, “If sex was the cause of happiness, then hookers would be the happiest people in the world.” 

 

To me romance is not just about sex. It’s all about creating magical moments in your relationship that will take little time out of your busy schedule. Stop thinking you’re too busy for romance.

 Here are 6 ideas I’ve collected from some very happy couples as well as some tried and true ideas from yours truly. (Please note: I’m on my second marriage.)

1.   Use your calendar

I know Flylady would agree with me that most of us SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) are romantics at least in the literary sense of the word. We both advise having a date night once a week. We love books and movies about romance and we both know that being organized helps in the romance department. (If you don’t shave your legs regularly, you’re not going to want to be romantic and your mate probably won’t be either.)    

Just a little bit of planning will pay off. Plan a romantic rendezvous during the month. You can get a room at a local hotel or plan to have the house all to yourselves. Just the anticipation of being together in this way will add spark to your romantic life.

As you read the ideas in this blog, write the ones you like on your calendar and don’t plan on doing all of these in one month. Spread out the ideas throughout the year.

Maybe you’ve thought, ‘how can romance be put on a calendar?’ Well, you’ve got four Saturdays this February and one of them is Valentine’s Day, so go get your calendar and put a heart on every Saturday this month and let your creative mind come up with some great ideas for each one of them. If date night has sort of fallen off your radar, now’s a good time to start over and reinstate it.

2    Let the pros help

 

Don't let your anger

rob you of your peace and joy

 

How would you like it if everyone in your life could read your mind? Would your family and friends like what you sometimes think of them and about them? Would you like to know what they think about you? Yikes! This is getting to be a scary thought. Would you want to know?

I was furious!

I thought about this today when I got mad at a person who will remain anonymous. Have you ever been so mad your lips press white, your teeth clench, your eyebrows wrinkle into a frown as your nostrils flare out like Louis Armstrong’s did when he’d play the trumpet? And the thoughts! Well, today mine made me wonder if clairvoyant people ever stay married.

We would really have to monitor our thoughts if our friends and family could read our minds! Does just thinking about that make you want to be nicer with what goes on behind your mouth?

For now, let’s just be grateful our thoughts are ours and they don’t get out without our permission. Oprah said, or maybe it was President Trump, “Count to ten.” That really does help, but maybe counting backwards from fifty would be better. That way the mind will get distracted from thinking mean thoughts and by the time it gets to the number one, it can think nice thoughts again.

But what can we do when someone makes us mad? We have to acknowledge it. We’ve read so much psychobabble to know stuffing our feelings isn’t healthy and most of us don’t want to hold a grudge and carry our grievances around forever. The sooner we can get over our bouts with anger the better. Here are five things to do when you get mad.

1. Admit you’re angry

There's nothing wrong with being angry. So give yourself a break. Have you ever had someone ask you, “What’s wrong?” If you answer, “Oh nothing,” you’re missing an opportunity to get your anger out in the open and resolve it. Don’t be an oh nothing martyr. 

 

My mouth gets me into more trouble than any other hole in my body.

That’s the very first line in my book The Mouth Trap: the butt stops here! Thank goodness we only have one mouth. How many times have you wished that you didn’t say that, or didn’t eat or drink that?

I’m sure there’s a legitimate reason why we were made with one mouth and two ears, instead of the other way around. Maybe there’s a clue here to the ratio of use. What if, just for today, we listen more than we speak? How do you think you’d feel tonight when you go to bed?

We’ve been blessed with the precious gift of speech, but this gift (as with every gift) can be abused and come back to bite us. Balancing speaking and listening will serve you in great ways. I’m suggesting we use our mouths half as much as we use our ears (just for today).

Here are 6 benefits to speaking less and listening more. At the end of my blog, I’ll share how I stopped nagging as a young, single mom of three children ages 4, 9 and 12.

     1.   Accomplish more

 As long as your goal is to make your world a better place, doing will always beat speaking unless you’re Oprah. When your focus switches from talking to doing a household chore, you’ll accomplish so much more. When you speak less, you naturally do more. If you could hush up for five minutes a day, in a month you’ll have given yourself two and a half hours of quiet action time. Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, so is a hug, a home-cooked dinner, a clean bathroom, fresh laundry and a hundred other acts of love.

      2.   What’s important shows up

You’ve got a smart phone, so who’s the smartest, you or the phone? You’re the smart one if you limit your use to what serves you and uplifts you. Information overload created by the Internet is a choice. You get to decide how much of your time is going to be spent on the Internet or yakking on the phone. The next time you start to call someone, ask yourself, “Is this really important or will I be talking just to hear my own voice?” If it isn’t important or you miss hearing your voice, hang up and write a thank you note to someone you love and as you write, say the words out loud.

      3.   Reduces stress

Think of something you can do with your family, in silence. See what happens if you and your mate go for a walk without talking or watch the sunset without comment or eat a speechless meal. Terry and I play a card game with friends that involves dealing many different hands starting with each person getting one card up to one hand where each person gets 13 cards. One of the hands is declared a silent hand and no one is allowed to speak until the next deal. It always ends up in laughter and it’s usually a woman who breaks the silence!

Terry and I love to watch professional football and I love to snack while I watch! So I’ve always made sure we have “football watching snacks.” Our snacks used to always include what the advertisers were able to entice Nelly (my inner child) into buying i.e. chips, dips, beer, pizza AND PLENTY OF IT!

I ask myself why? Why do I have to eat while I watch football? The answer was impressive: Just because we do. Now I’ve known Nelly long enough to know when she’s in the room. An answer like that is obviously one from a child.

I love it when Nelly has my attention because that’s when I get the most wonderful ideas! So I said,

 

My experiment during the game was most enlightening. Terry got his chips, but I also made deviled eggs and had a lot of fresh vegetables cut up for him too. Nelly and I just had celery. (My surprise was a train ticket to Seattle to see my grandchildren who live up there.) I chose, just celery because I wanted this experiment to be drastic and I wanted to keep my attention on Nelly.