Planning & Executing work, school, life flow

Hello and welcome to warrior divas real talk for real women. This is your host Angie Monroe and I am excited to be here with you today as we unpack a few fun things that we're going to talk about. The just an early reminder as we get going on in the show, you can always find out more information about what we do who we are how to get in touch with us by going to divas impact com that is divas impact.com you can listen to the podcast you can read our blogs, you can send us messages and learn more about our conference. This
Coming up. So, I am going to get us started today. You know, when I started divas impact a few years ago, I told people you know, we want to change the way women think and speak about themselves and others. And it sounded all nice and cute. I talked about, I told them we would talk about things like faith, family, fun, fitness, fashion, food and a lot of other words that begin with F and some that doubt. And, you know, over the time that we've started this podcast, we've talked about several different things. We've talked about freedom. We've talked about
finances a little bit. We haven't quite gotten into that one yet. But we haven't talked about fun, and it's the end of summer, schools just got back into session. And one of the things that I'm starting to realize is if parents don't have a good balance in their life work, and I'm not even calling that a balance, I'm calling it flow a work-life flow.
Then there, they don't give one to their kids. So this was a little bit more evident this year.
My daughter has two kids that are starting kindergarten and I don't have any kids in elementary, junior high or high school anymore. My youngest ones going back to college again. But as we started looking at, how do you plan, when you've gone from a schedule that summer vacation, summer camps, kids home all the time, kids eating you out of house and home, to now you have to plan a structured environment. You have to make sure they're in bed by a certain time. You have to make sure that their homework is done, you have to make sure that you have that time with them. There was a video up the other day on social media about a kid that was getting in trouble with the law because he had posted something in a video game he had written
Something out in a video game. And the cops were there. And they were talking to him and his mom and his mom were saying he's just a little boy, he was about 1516 years old. He's just a little boy. And so there was this whole big dynamic that was going on in there. So how do we, if we're not going to invest in time, energy and effort into our life flow to manage our own time? How are we going to teach our children and lead by example for our children to manage their time for their work-life flow? So over the summer, a lot of kids get up, they sleep and lay, they eat and eat and eat and eat. They play video games, they watch TV, if the scheduling around the house is good, they go to camps if they
if they don't have the money for camps and they play outside until it's time
to come
Man, I mean, that's what we did when we were growing up, right? The generation that we had, we didn't have all those video games we had Atari. I'm dating myself there at Atari, Nintendo, things like that. But we didn't have the things that kept us indoors. So summer meant hanging out by the pool, going to the lake playing outside playing soccer, playing baseball, whatever it was, we went outside, we played until our mom whistled, and if we were further away than our moms whistle, we knew we were in trouble, right? So we also knew that when the sun started going down, it was time to go home.
The other thing we knew that every parent in the neighborhood had the ability and the permission from our parents to whoop our butts if we missed
in their area. So I'm not saying today's parenting is bad. Today's parenting is different than what we had back in my day. So
With the challenges of YouTube, and yes, this is on the YouTube channel as well, of YouTube, of video games of cellular devices and tablets and all the things that we have come into our home. How do we find a way to make space for them to make decisions on their own, not just based on what's being fed to them from these devices, right?
So, my daughter, she's moved into a new home, she's set up her home with her and her kids and all that stuff getting ready for school, and she had to figure out okay, what do I do for meal plans? How do I set this up? And as I was telling a friend about this, they're like, you know, that's some information that would help me. So I'm going to go over the next few minutes here and just tell you a little bit of how I planned out a week when my kids were growing up to see if that might help some of you parents out there
That is back in the thick of things back to school sports starting up all that stuff and you don't know quite how to juggle it. So like I said, I had three kids that are raised. Then we had to bonus kids that lived with us at different times that road back and forth to practices. Their parents were single parents are worked odd hours and couldn't get them where they need to go. So we were those fill-in parents, so to speak. So whenever I got up on Saturday morning, you can choose whatever day of the week you want to do it. I prefer to do Saturday morning, I get up bright and early. I make a list of all the things we had planned for the week ahead. I'd look at the family calendar. I knew when practices where I knew when games were. I knew when they had to stay late at school. I knew everything that was going on from Sunday until the following Saturday, right? And so I would look at what all we had and then I
started making meal plans based on what our schedule was. I didn't want to make a five-course meal on a night that we had softball practice, and had baseball games at the same time. No, I needed to have things in place. So Sundays was always a big meal, we'd have a roast or we'd have sometimes it would be like a sports weekend where my kids just needed the veggies for the day. And so Sunday was our day of rest, we'd get up we'd go to church, we'd come home, and I would have things in different crockpots in the house, I'd have wings and I'd have
pulled pork for pulled pork sliders, and I'd have all these different things that they could just grab and go throughout the day. And they could rest. They could watch sports, they could do cut, catch up on homework, they could nap, they could do everything and there wasn't a structured time on Sunday for us to just have
The formal dinners and everything. Now Mondays, always made sure the meals could be done in 30 minutes or less. So one of the other things I did was a lot of times we cooked up all of our meat for the week on Sunday. So whether I was smoking a brisket or grilling some chicken or making hamburger patties up already, all of that stuff was already done on the weekend, I'd brown up hamburger meat or sausage or whatever to throw in with spaghetti later on the week. There were a lot of things that I did when I had bigger spaces of time, then I did during the week. So then all I had to do is come in warm-up some meat and put on the plate the vegetables that we needed, and if you buy fresh vegetables, I know we've been taught that cans are good. Even frozen is good. They're not there are too many preservatives in there. Fresh frozen is better than
canned, and fresh is better than frozen. I'm going to tell you that 100 times over. I know you're if you're watching on YouTube, you're looking at me going, what does she know about this? I'm just telling you, it will make a huge difference in what you're doing. But taking some green beans and pairing it with a chicken, having a salad that you can put on the plate that's already pre-made. You can do a lot of the prep work well ahead of time to where you're just throwing it all together, right. So when the kids come home from school, you're like, Yeah, but when they come home from school, they're starving and they want a snack and all that stuff. We had a basket that's set on our counter. They came in, they could get a certain drink off of a certain shelf in the refrigerator, and then they could grab one snack out of the basket on the counter. And that was all they got until dinnertime, that couldn't eat us out of house and home. That's what they got. There are nights that we had burgers where we would pack burgers in Ziploc bags and take them to the ballpark with us because
That's what we could afford to do. Yeah, we throw bags of chips or fruit or whatever with them, but it was stuff we could do. So finding a way to work with your schedule and still feed your family on a budget, because a lot of the times we're looking at things going, why can't feed my family healthfully on a budget?
hogwash, you absolutely can. The thing is, is knowing how to do that and knowing where to look for these things.
All the grocery stores sell these things in, in the organic and in a non-organic way. If you can't afford the not the organic, don't get organic, get the other ones. But find a way to find a place to start is what I'm telling you.
People are like well, I can't eat pasta. I can't eat pasta. That's great. Good zucchini. They have this little thing called a spiral. Iser you
You can buy one that fits in your hand spits on the counter, you put it through the spiral Iser, it makes these noodles you throw in the pan, they're done in five minutes, literally five minutes after the water's boiling. If you've gotten on the Insta pot craze, I made BBQ chicken the other night. I'm telling you 30 minutes frozen to cooked, completely cooked, it was all done. And that was me pulling it out of the pot ready to put it on the dish. Nice quick, easy things to keep you from going through the drive-thru.
Here's the thing. A lot of us are so stuck on instant gratification ourselves. That's what we're teaching our kids. We go and we order in a box and we drive up to the window and we expect our food to be ready when we get to the window. And so we're disabling a huge generation of children that aren't going to have healthy foods made for them because all they're going to do is speak into a box and drive-thru window to get
There, and we need to continue putting steps in place to educate ourselves and educate our kids on how to eat healthily. Now, I'm going to tell you some of the best meals we ever had. My mom and dad, my dad was a police officer. He didn't make a lot of money, my mom stayed home.
Back then at it. I don't know if anybody's ever heard of the government cheese. It's kind of like a big block of Velveeta cheese type thing. And we'd have the block of government cheese that we got. My mom would make homemade flour tortillas. That my friend, my friend's mom taught her how to make.
We had beans, like the beans that you buy in the store in the bag that you have to soak and then you cook. Well, we'd have been with a meal on Sunday, and then later on in the week, my mom would take those beans and refresh
them. Yes, like by hand in a skillet, not in a can read fry them. And then she would take that mix about a half to a quarter to a half a pound of hamburger meat in with those three fried beans.
We would have homemade salsa made from our garden because we had peppers and onions and tomatoes we grew in our backyard in this city. Just because you live in the city doesn't mean you can't have a garden. And nowadays a lot of cities have community gardens. So find yourself a community garden to get involved with because so you can learn about growing and educating yourself. So we had those things that we made and we did ourselves and those meals, we would take that that refried beans with the hamburger meat and the flour tortillas, spread it on there with some sausage and some cheese and have our homemade burritos.
Those were some of our favorite meals. Another one was back in the day when spam. Now I don't recommend spam anymore but back when spam was cheap, it wasn't a novelty.
We would get Kansas spam we would fry that up. We would have to make a sliced tomato sliced onion in a box of crackers and that would be our meal for the night. It's not about being over the top and trying to win Master Chef with your meals and having the perfect photo and all of that stuff. I shared a photo the other night my husband made he's trying to beat my recipe on pulled pork so he decided to smoke a pork shoulder and he brought it in and it had a great taste to it. All that stuff. It just didn't set up the way we would have expected it to had a great taste to it though. So I made the sandwich up with it, put it on the bun, poured some barbecue sauce over it, set it on the plate and the picture looks
Amazing even though it was sitting on a styrofoam plate,
the food was amazing. But it has, it's not about the pictures. It's not about even
having all the right colors on the plate and all of that stuff. It's about finding a way to balance yourself and how you do it. So take a look at your calendar. Look at what can you do this night maybe, you need to do the grilled chicken with a salad and maybe a fruit cup. You can make up a thing of fruit salad on Sunday and it'll last for at least three to four days if you put in the right juices to keep it all going together. Do you?
We did this week we did the pork shoulder on Sunday. We did some steak on Monday on.
On Saturday. We did the pork shoulder on we did
steak on Sunday we did the chicken on Monday, we went out to eat last night, celebrate my daughter, my friend's birthday. But tonight we're doing veggie packets. We're chopping up a whole bunch of vegetables, we're putting them together and we're pairing it with the leftover meat from those meals. Again, reuse leftovers. Don't just use them all at one time. Get your kids involved, have them be responsible for certain parts of the meal, whether it's setting the table, or whether it's helping to wash vegetables or get them ready in a pan or whatever it helps have them get involved.
Now,
a lot of the times they go Okay, well, that's great. You've made your meal plan for the week. What do you do? I said, Well, then I make my grocery list. Well, here's what I had. When I was growing up. I'd make my grocery list. And I had a spreadsheet that I knew at different parts of the store how the store was laid.
out that I was going to. If I was in the dairy aisle, these are all the things I need from the dairy aisle. This is all I need from the meat. I'm a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to my grocery list, all right. But here's what you have now. You have online ordering.
You can go online, you can put your stuff in Walmart, at Albertsons, even Amazon, you can order ahead of time. You can tell them, you're going to come and pick it up at a certain time, and go get your food and you don't even have to walk in the store. Why is this important? Because it keeps you on task. You're not shopping at the store and wandering the aisles looking for things that you don't need.
And another thing, if you're in the store, and you're going up and down the aisles, you're probably in the worst part of the store you can be at all the best food for you to be eating is going to be on the perimeter.
The store. So you're your milk, your meat, your veggies, all of those things. If you look at a store, they're on the outer perimeter of the store. They're not on those aisles. So let's, let's explore some ways that you can make some wise choices for your meals. Ask your kids what they want. My one of the things my daughter's doing this week is some of the things some of the meals that they've made this week, they're saving some of the meats from that. And they're going to do make your pizzas this weekend. And so they'll have pepperoni and they'll have chicken and they'll even have some beef and some sausage and things like that from their meals this week that they've set aside to go with the meal on Saturday when they make their pizza and the kids are involved. And they've got the little Betty, Better Homes and Gardens, Junior cook cookbooks and Paula Deen Jr. cookbooks and
It gets the kids excited about investing in food. I was at my daughter's house last night watching them didn't have to go to a PTA meeting last night. That was awesome. Because my daughter is now having to go to those things. Hahaha. But as I'm sitting there at the meat is there at the meeting the kids were going, we want a snack. I'm like, have you had a snack? Yeah, we had one when we got home. Well, but we want another one. I'm like, well, dinner so much here. You want me to fix you dinner? No, we want to have dinner with mom and dad.
Here's the thing that a lot of you don't realize is the table. When you take time to sit at the table with your kids and have conversations about how their day went in putting cell phones away. Don't even let them come to the table. You sit there and have educated conversations with them. They will unveil their whole world to you.
You just have to show that you're interested.
I know some of you are sitting there going well, we don't have time to sit at a table. We don't have time to do this. Make time at least twice a week to do this. It's important.
There are test results and, and surveys and all that stuff that shows that kids learn and grow better and better adjusted. When they have dinner around the table, their grades are better. There's so much that happens when you have that bonding time at the table. Some people look at you nowadays and go, well I don't even know my child. Well, when was the last time you sit down with your child, when was the last time you sit and had a conversation with him?
Other than talking at them.
So these are some of the things that we want to work on with the life flow, get them out from behind those video games have them being involved. Another thing that
happened this week is
a sporting goods store and an NFL player went shopping with some of the kids for our local youth sports activity, a youth community program we have here. You heard us talk about a couple of weeks ago when I had Tracy Robertson Coburn on Metsys peewee football and cheerleading Association. Every community has a sports league that doesn't matter if it's soccer, softball, baseball, across hockey, archery, whatever it is, they have these youth organizations that are important to the community.
They're important because it's work kids learn to test their limits. It's where kids learn to believe in themselves and build self-confidence. They learn how to fail forward, they learn how to be successful, even when they're not winning. So there's a lot of things that come from being a part of these youth organizations. And I want to challenge every one of you
You do not only put your children in one, but find a way to be invest involved yourself, whether it's as a team mom, a coach, and investor, whatever that may be. We have gained over 20 years of our 20 plus years of involvement in this organization. It's going, my husband's been involved for over 20 years, I've been involved probably over 40 years with this organization.
We have had friends and loved ones that we trust to no end. And I have learned lessons from them. They have learned lessons from me. And we were the parents that help support each other when life got yucky, right. Sometimes people go well, that's my church, and that's great if your church is that way for you. But you know what, there's a lot of churches out there that just aren't that way for their people. So today
I want to challenge every one of us to find a
Way to feed our children and invest in our children, feed them with sunshine, make them get outside and play. Make them get out from behind the blue light of the computers in the video games, find a way to invest in them with time and energy, spit around the dinner table.
Find a way to invest with them
by feeding them healthy Whole Foods
and find a way to invest your flow of life
by knowing that you're going to touch generations with what you do today as their mom.
As I said, I've been dealing with the cold over the last few days. And so my voice is a little cranky and a little congested today. So I apologize for all of that. But today before we get going I want to talk about our everyday diva
I know the example of the importance of these things. Because my friend Kim Slater, who does all of our creative design here, her mom is somebody that helped instill some of these things and her mom is our editor for our magazine and our blogs and, and when we do our podcasts, she rewrites. She gives a fresh take on the podcast every week and the blogs that we do. And her name is Susie Tracy. And she is phenomenal at what she does. But she also knows the importance of spending time and investing in your children.
And so she's our everyday diva today because
we are benefiting right now of the investment she made in her daughter. And she's making now in her granddaughter and her daughter is making in her daughter
See, we're not talking about divas impact being something that it's just you and me in a room and we're just going to talk and happen and it's going to be us getting our stuff done.
Now what we're looking at is we're trying to make a shift, a cultural shift from where we're at right now, to doing better, being better, and paying it forward better. Then, then the last person.
Now again, I'm your girlfriend, and I'm not telling you that your parenting bad, I would never call a mom out on parenting bad. What I would do is I would say,
if you're struggling, let us know how we can help.
And only you know if you're struggling there, well, that some of us may be able to see it.
But until you're willing to admit you're struggling, you won't accept the help.
So feel free to email us you can email us at podcast at divas impact com you can nominate an everyday diva, you can
recommend a guest to be on our show. And you can send us your fun things, your family mealtimes, your special hacks, life hacks that you do to help your family stay on task and, and grow and develop and to have that good work-life flow, school life flow, whatever that is for you. And so today, I just want to thank you for joining us and being with us. And as always, I look forward to seeing you next time. Be a diva. make an impact.