I'm Half The Size I Was Yesterday!

Some of you will notice that I've shortened my 'viewable' thingamy in your feed readers. If you subscribe to Lizzie's Home in a feed reader, I'd love to get your thoughts and comments about the whole partial vs full feed debate.

I hope those that 'love and sub' Lizzie's Home won't find the extra click too inconvenient :) While I absolutely love Google Reader just for the simplicity of doing the rounds of my own favourite blogs, I personally don't have a problem with clicking through to a person's 'real blog'. Having said that, there does seem to be two very distinct camps on this issue. Chillihead and Shannon from Blogging Basics 101 covered this topic back in August. They made a good point - they consider partial feeds to be a kind of 'Hey, I've put something new up! Come on by!' I agree with this. It's almost like receiving an invitation in your mailbox to an afternoon tea with a whole bunch of your closest friends :) But I'm also keenly aware that not everyone follows my way of thinking, so I thought I'd open it up for discussion.

Do you have a preference, within whatever feed reader you personally use, for partial or full feeds, or don't you mind either way? I'd love to hear your opinions.

Cheers,
Lizzie

Weight Loss...Take 3145

Well. Nothing like a quick burn on a BMI calculator to make you feel horrid!

I'm now about 20kg or around 44lbs overweight. Somewhere around 3kg/6.5lbs ago I officially moved up from the 'overweight' to the 'obese' category for my height on the BMI scale. Yeah I know, BMI isn't the best indicator for progress - yada yada. But obese? I knew I was gaining weight again but now I just feel as though I've been run over by a train :(

I've gone on and on about my plans to lose weight before - just see the 'Weight Loss' label in the archives box. No need to recount reasons A, B or C for why I need to lose weight or how hard it is to lose weight or why my family history dictates I should lose weight. It's all been said before. But sheesh!

I need to think some more on this. Every other time I've joined a weight loss challenge online, or posted my grand diet plans here, or inserted purdy little weight loss progress boxes, I've failed. So the itty bitty ticker in the 'Meet Lizzie' section is about all the frills and whistles I'll bother putting up this time around. Small enough not to be intrusive and large enough to remind me not to blog with a bar of chocolate beside me. I am, however, considering joining the Live Well Wednesday gals, if for no other reason than because I like the CWO column anyway, LOL.

Gosh I wish I was born with oodles of willpower, sigh.

Cheers,
Lizzie

Where I Admit My Ignorance

Quick question for my more technologically-savvy blogging counterparts - can someone give me the heads-up about stat counters and feed readers? At the moment I have my Google Reader account set to display my posts in their entirety right in the reader - do people viewing my posts this way still count as a 'hit' to my stat counter? Or do they only count if they actually visit http://lizzieshome.blogspot.com directly? Does it make a difference if you set your preferences within the reader to only display the first few lines of each post?

Any help on this would be much appreciated!

Cheers,
Lizzie

But she'll Look SO Different!

My baby, my adorable Miss Moo, is having her first 'real' haircut tomorrow morning. At newly-6-years-old, all her lovely, loooooong hair is being cut off. I'll hold off posting the 'before' photo because I can guarantee it will seem so much more dramatic when I post it next to the 'after' shot. Sigh.

Moo has visited the hairdresser only once before, for a simple trim. Most of the time I've neatened up the ends myself and I've been trimming her fringe (bangs?) since she was old enough to have one. But her hair is now at that length where people comment on it - it has become her defining characteristic. She can sit on it. So why are we getting it cut?

It wasn't a conscious decision to keep it long - it just sort of happened. When it started to get nice and pretty we liked it so much we just never considered cutting it. When she was younger, she had this gorgeous golden streaking through the sides of her hair from where it was pulled back in a ponytail (her hair is mostly light brown). Then when she started school at the beginning of 2007 it was fantastic to be able to pull it back in a plait (braid) each day. But it takes so long to get ready in the mornings and though I'd happily put up with the extra work - I love long hair on little girls - she has been asking for some time now to have it cut up near her shoulders. In other words, the kind of dramatic change that will turn heads for other reasons when school goes back at the end of this month after 6 weeks of holiday.

When she first started to talk about The Cut, I subtly steered the conversation away and that worked okay for a few months. But lately she's been more insistent and I'm finally at the point where I've just decided to let her make the decision. I will miss her long hair terribly, but I'm happy to cut my morning 'get ready' time as well, so we'll see.

So at 10:45 tomorrow, I'll be sitting in our local salon with my little-but-suddenly-a-lot-more-grown-up daughter, asking her if she really wants to cut her hair for about the ten billionth time in the last week. I hope we don't end up with a horrible cut - I'll be devastated. I'd probably cry! We're going simple - just a bob, but we have no idea how it will behave once the length is taken out of it as she's never had that style before. The poor mite could be cursed with her mother's hair, which inevitably kinks out on one side rendering a bob rather frustrating. Once it's cut, it's gone forever, probably never to reach that length again. I did debate within myself about telling her straight out no to getting it done, but much as I love her long hair now, at some point I'm going to have to let things like this go. Better her hair at age 6 than body piercings at age 14. Or tattoos at 16. *Shudder*

Update tomorrow...sob.

Cheers,
Lizzie

Impossible Standards?

(© Mary's Little Lamb)

I've been thinking about my homekeeping skills lately.

I really wish I was one of those uber-organized Mums who zoom through the house righting all that is cluttered and wrong, but I'm not. I struggle. I have routines, sure, but the fact of the matter is, they're only as good as the person doing them and, well, plenty of time I skip right over them.

I've been a Flybaby in the past. It took me two years to discover that a woman shouldn't need multiple daily email reminders to keep house! Flylady is great for the community aspect - I was part of a great Yahoo Group for Aussie Flybabies for at least a couple of years - but for the last several months of that I was not even subscribed to the Flylady site itself, just hanging on to the group because of the friends I made there. And to be honest, three-quarters of what we discussed wasn't in any way connected to keeping the home! People have asked why I left that group and I've been telling them that it really stopped serving my needs, that's really all it was. I still have friends I 'met' there who email me and that's okay! I will say one thing about Flylady though - she's a motivation powerhouse, LOL. Her enthusiam is kind of catching, but at some point I believe one of the coolest aspects to learning how to declutter by her system is to learn how to declutter HER. There's no shame in unsubscribing girls!

Of course, I took other things away from my Flylady experience. I learned how to make daily routines and even though - ahem - I'm not all that great at executing them sometimes, I do recognise the value in having them. And I picked up a weird attraction to acronyms and started making my own, LOL.

Fast forward a year or so, and I discovered blogging - the writing and the reading. I fell upon blog after Christian homemaking blog and while I enjoyed reading them, I couldn't help but wonder why I wasn't blessed with the gene which would naturally steer me toward the kitchen sink, or the mop bucket or - gasp! - the toilet bowl. I've always been interested in organization, decluttering and just making things pretty, but I don' t seem to have that bit of DNA which connects the 'wanting to do' to the 'doing the do'. It's so frustrating! I want to make bread by hand! And I want to line-dry my clothes each and every single day and if it's raining, I want to WANT to use a string underneath the verandah instead of my natural inclination to load up the dryer. I want to love ironing! I want to be consistent and fabulously good at menu planning and cooking. I want to go to bed each night knowing there's not a single dish left on the sink. I want to wash windows (well okay, not that much, but...) I want to get up 'while it is still dark' and get the appliances humming before the rest of the family wakes. I want to have time to do all these things, the motivation to do them, the energy - oh gosh, the ENERGY - to do them. And I want to do it all with a smile on my face and cookies in the oven.

Oh good grief - I think I just hit on my problem right there. I want to do it all. Because 'some' women do. Why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we set ourselves up for what usually pans out to be failure? There's nothing wrong with standards - and sure, mine are probably lower than most, I'm the first to admit that - but why are we in constant competition with our mothers, our mother-in-laws, fake TV mums, ourselves - or even Miss Suzie Blogging Homemaker? Why do we do it?

I had a whole set of resolutions set up for 2008. I also tend to micro-manage, in case you haven't yet picked that up, LOL. This morning, I'm throwing them in the bin.

The only people I need to please is my own family.

There's a great quote I bring up from time to time - gleaned from an article called "A Practical and Money-Saving Approach to Grocery Shopping" by Mrs Mabyn Clark, which I originally saw on the LAF website.

"What are the cornerstones to running an efficient household? I
would have to say they are clean laundry, a clean kitchen (especially clean dishes), and three square meals a day. Without a vigilant attitude towards these things, we can hinder any other efforts we make in our homes."

I always loved this quote because when I first read it, I'd taken a break from organizing some peripheral closet or some such thing, and was having a cup of tea and catching up on my favourite sites on the Net. I looked up from my seat to see dishes littering multiple surfaces in the kitchen, two or three full (and dirty!) laundry baskets and (at 4 or 5 o'clock) nothing organized for dinner. It hit me like a brick. And not one of those itty bitty ones either - we're talking the big ones they use to make retaining walls, LOL. Perhaps part of my problem is that I look for homemaking tasks that give me the biggest visual 'payoff'. A cleared-out shelf or cupboard is obvious. Menu-planning, not so obvious. You would think that a clean kitchen and full bellies would give you the same kickback, and it does, but because you're doing it everyday, there's a tendency to forget that the mundane things can often give the biggest rewards. I know I have :)

Lady Lydia wrote a blog post almost three years ago called Organizing For Success which I've permanently linked to here on Lizzie's Home for a long time. In it she describes an attitude of just doing 'one thing' at a time if you're feeling overwhelmed. I'd go a step further and say that Mrs Clark's example above - The Golden Rule of Three, if you like - is the absolute bare minimum one should aim for in any given day. I know that I myself have to pare back to basics in order to build back up to the level I know I need to be at. Just three things - meals, a clean kitchen and clean laundry.

Seems easy, doesn't it? So now, I'm off to put on a load of laundry...(LOL)

Cheers,
Lizzie