Monday Meanderings: July 14-20

Life has been so crazy for our family these last few months. I had a wonderful visit with my parents for their anniversary but as soon as I came back I was up to my eyebrows in Vacation Bible School stuff (it was my first time as director and the first one for our church so the stress levels were basically off the charts). Last week I tried to catch up on the house since I had basically ignored it for 2 weeks and had been away for 3 weeks before that. I ended up catching up on sleep and being slowed down by heat several days. I (and even more, my hubby) am SO READY FOR VACATION. Well, let me rephrase that. I am so ready for a REST. Vacation-ready is something I have to do this week. It will require some planning and lots of little bites to arrive at travel day with everything I need, the house in some reasonable good shape to return home to (and just in case the landlord needs to get in for some reason) and with all 4 children and my husband with their heads intact. (Can you tell that packing can be a bit stressful around here?)

Must Do's this week focus on getting house and family ready for our trip to Germany for a missions conference followed by some family vacation time. There are two appointments to fit in as well -- Haircut Wed and Dentist on Thursday.
Today's focus will be laundry so that I will have everything clean to choose from while packing.

I had to head to the big grocery/super store this morning to order the kids' school books for the fall. I also wanted to pick up the snacks for the trip and whatever food items I would need to turn the contents of our fridge and freezer into meals for the week. Hubby wants to see if we can empty the fridge before we go and then maybe turn it off while we are away. We'll see. Like a good girl I checked the supplies we have to use up and tried to make a menu of lunch and dinner items that will use them up. Here's what I came up with. After returning 3 clothing items that my hubby bought for the kids on clearance that didn't fit, using 2 other credit slips/carrefour cash-back coupons, my entire order (including juice boxes, nuts and raisins for the trip, pate and individual jelly containers for making sandwiches on the road on day 1 and 2, potatoes, eggs, frozen chicken patties for lunch, bread, plastic plates and napkins, and a few other things I cannot remember) only required me to pull out a 20 euro bill. Yippee!


Clean out the fridge/freezer menu
Meal 1: Baked fish, steamed frozen broccoli
Meal 2: chicken sandwiches, chips
Meal 3: hamburgers and buns, salad
Meal 4: landlubber's paella
Meal 5: fried chorizo sausages and eggs, toast
Meal 5: crockpot beef stew
Meal 6: fried rice with bacon and scrambled eggs added
Meal 7: pizza or pepperoni rolls
Breakfast -- eat up the 6 bagels that I bought at Lidl a few weeks ago when they had products from the USA.

Add a couple of lunches of leftovers or sandwiches and we should be set through Friday evening. That should completely clear out the freezer of all but 2 boxes of puff pastry (any ideas for using those up?) and some extra pepperoni. I may give that away to some friends. Oh, the other thing in the fridge is my bounty from the spring strawberry freezer jam fest. I will have to see if they can be transferred to a friend's freezer or just give them away. Problem is I wasn't thrilled with how it turned out (used a different brand of pectin that called for less sugar. I like my jam much sweeter and thicker. I will go back to SureJell in the future.)