It was here all along...

I've spent the past couple of weeks looking off and on for new containers for our books. It's not that I didn't like the baskets that we used last year, but they had a few problems. Violet broke the handles on hers within the first month of school. The fabric lining kept sliding around. There are all kinds of white scratches on our cabinets from taking them in and out. Some of the books were getting bent as the girls tossed them in at strange angles. So we've been looking around at our options.

After checking out numerous plastic tubs, dish tubs, plastic shelves, portable files, crates, and even a few more baskets, we have been to WalMart, Target, Staples, Office Depot, Michaels, and Bed Bath & Beyond (some more than once). I was leaning toward the Really Useful Boxes at Staples, but I didn't know how I would like them. I don't like the idea of laying books down flat. (I envision bent pages everywhere). Truthfully, I didn't want the hassle of multiple tubs out at the same time or to argue with the girls over putting the books back in the various tubs correctly. Then, too, they are a bit pricey. Still I was about to resign myself to the fact that it was the best choice available. Then as I was looking around Baby Henry's room while waiting for an internet page to load the other day, I spied it. The perfect sized box. Not too wide, not too tall, deep enough to force the girls to put the books in straight and best of all completely free.

It turns out I might have to thank Huggies for making their boxes smaller a few months back. (Although I still don't like paying the same price for fewer diapers.) A little bit of contact paper and we're ready to start loading up the books. Now I just have to figure out how to keep baby Henry out of the memory boxes and the drawers with the pencils, markers, scissors, etc.

Mission Organization: Getting started in my office

I decided the easiest place to start in my office was with the closet (mostly because I need somewhere to shove everything else before my mom gets here this afternoon). My first project: school related curriculum and supplies. We now have a storage cabinet down in the basement, which my DH rebuilt from the built in dining room cabinets in the old house. I confiscated the top left shelving section for curriculum and school supplies. It only took a few minutes to sort the waiting-to-be-used-again on the shelves. I even found a few things to sell and started a for sale box of things to list online.


Sticking to my schooling theme, I tackled a couple of the drawers in my desk. I sorted my overloaded paper drawer and moved the unopened boxes of filler paper and unused spiral notebooks down to the school cabinet. That leaves enough room for printer paper (white and colored), a couple of packages of lined paper, the card stock I use for printing booklets, some envelopes, file folders for lapbook bases, and a few empty two pocket folders. I also sorted out my drawer of catalogs and teacher materials.

The room may still be a mess, but that's two boxes and two drawers down and one step closer to more organization.

Mission Organization: Saving my office and my mind

If you had visited my house last night, you would most likely have come away with the impression that I am an excellent housekeeper. The carpets were vacuumed. The kitchen floor swept. The dinner mess was over from the dishes and pots to the table and counters. All the school supplies were tucked neatly back in their cabinet. You wouldn't even have known I did 4 loads of laundry yesterday. It was actually all folded and put away. I will confess it wasn't completely immaculate, but it was about as perfect as it gets with 3 kids running around all day.

The truth, however, is that no matter how much progress I am making with the rest of the house. There remains one area that I can never quite seem to get cleaned: my poor, neglected office. Don't get me wrong, I'm in there every day working on the computer. I carry projects in and out all of the time (bills to pay, papers to file, things to sell, school booklets and planning pages). Despite my best intentions, however, I have never gotten the mess quite under control. The farthest I usually get is to clear off the floor (mainly by piling things in the closet) whenever my mom comes to visit. I'm constantly losing papers in there and wasting time sorting through pile after pile for the one piece of mail that is missing. I have been known to discover missing library books under the piles. So what makes this time different? Why do I think I can actually organize things now? This is supposed to be the baby's room by May. That means I have a lot of relocating to do. I hereby resolve not to solve this problem by packing and stacking boxes of things down in the basement. It's time to face my mess, save my sanity, and put an end to the dysfunctional, disorganized, sore spot in my house which is currently called my office.

Here's my starting point:
Somewhere under is a beautiful working surface, I never get use.
Once upon a time, there were piles here on the floor before the last child-sized tornado came through the room.

The closet: curriculum waiting for the next student, a box of things to sell(one of many), craft supplies and paper remains from classes I taught last year, and that doesn't even count the shelf you can't see.
A keyboard I usually can't reach, a sewing table that I would like to get to and use one day, and a bunch of stuff I currently cannot identify.

Cleaning Up from Christmas

As much as I love Christmas, the first thought that usually comes to mind the day after Christmas is: "Now where as I supposed to put all of this stuff?" So in an effort to get my house reorganized before we start school again next week, I thought that I would start with a to do list.

1. Purchase wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, and cards for next year
2. Pack away wrapping supplies, empty shirt boxes, and tissue paper
3. Clean and reorganize Jessie and Violet's room to find a place for new presents
4. Clean and reorganize Benny's room to find a place for new presents
5. Put away my own gifts and remind DH to put his away
   
6. Take any toys / clothes removed from the kids' rooms to Salvation Army
7. Take down and pack away Christmas tree, outside lights, and nativity set
8. Pack away kids' nativity set, Christmas books, stockings, tree skirt, advent calendars, and Christmas cards
9. Pull greenery off advent wreath and return plastic holder to church
10. Remove Christmas tablecloth and replace with winter one
11. Put up Christmas village on entertainment center for winter decoration
12. Return DH's recliner and coffee table to their normal places

Goal: Finish by Sunday evening

Saying no to multitasking

Some weeks even the best schedule created with the best of intentions fails miserably to get things accomplished. The girls have done no chores this week. I think the only housework that I have done has been 1 load of laundry, vacuuming 2 rooms, and washing dishes just in time to reuse them for cooking. What happened?

1. Swim classes twice a week make it hard to do afternoon cleanup.
2. Tuesday we made an extra trip to town to get the groceries that I was too tired to stop for Monday
3. Wednesday afternoon we ran into JCPenneys when my Mom called and said they had winter coats on sale, and the sale ended that day.
4. Benny came down with a fever and has been extremely snuggly (It's hard to be productive and snuggle at the same time.)
5. I haven't been feeling all that great myself.

Now it's Thursday, and I have a ton of housework to do. As I was trying to think of ways to multitask and combine in order to save time, I recalled an article that I had read some time ago about successful CEOs. Did you know that successful CEOS don't multitask? The Money magazine article says:

"The biggest mistake most people make, according to Winston, is multitasking. 'Successful CEOs do not multitask,' she told me. 'They concentrate intensely on one thing at a time.'"

As I recall, the last time I tried this it worked great. Off I go to tackle my house one focused step at a time.

Getting Ready for Vacation

eEvery October our family enjoys spending a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. With the official countdown now down to 11 days and counting, I realized that I haven't even begun to plan this year's trip. So to help organize my thoughts, I thought I'd try a vacation planning to do list.

Meals - Goal: Finish by Saturday

1. Establish a meal plan for the week.
2. Create a list of groceries required for the plan.
3. Divide the grocery list into items to the brought along (spices, Rice milk, snacks) and items to be purchased in Avon.
4. Make some snacks / meals ahead of time. (Possibilities: waffles, zucchini bread, muffins, pancake mix)
5. Tell DH how much cooler space will be required.

Packing - Goal: Finish by Thursday except for last minute items

1. Find last year's vacation list (Done.)
2. Modify list based on new needs. (No playpen, diapers, etc. required for Benny this time.)
3. Type list on computer this time so I don't have to flip through several spiral notebooks next year.
3. Monday and Tuesday - estimate clothing needs based on current forecast and start washing.
4. Monday - take recycle tubs to center to empty and wash thoroughly for packing.
5. Tuesday evening - may need to do some shopping for pants for Benny or more shorts for me depending on weather.
5. Wednesday - have kid's determine what videos/toys to take (Rules: no little pieces, no dolls, must fit in tub) and pack, also rinse and pack 1 bucket of sand toys
6. Thursday - pack kid's clothes, highlight any items which need packed on Friday, set aside clothes to wear on Saturday
7. Friday afternoon - any last minute laundry (usually for me), wash sheets and remake beds, clean out refrigerator to avoid unexpected science experiments, and pack my stuff
8. Friday evening - make a list of items to be gathered when we wake the kids up to leave (pillows, stuffed animals, my toothbrush, etc.)

Other:
1. Find substitute teacher for Violet's Sunday school class.
2. Make sure all library books due that week are renewed or returned. Return all ILL books.

That's all I can think of for now. Hopefully, laying it out will help me not procrastinate until the last minute. (My DH hates it when I vacuum and mop at 9pm the night before we leave.) Now off to work on that menu.

Our school cabinet

I would love to have a separate school room with vast bookcases full of resources, maps on the walls, a large dry erase board, and separate areas for each of my kids to sit and do their work. We do have an unfinished basement, which we may be able to make use of in the future. Until then, we make do using the dining room table for seat work and hands on activities and the living room for reading.

Although it is always my intention to put away all of the school books and supplies before dinner, I must confess that last year there were quite a lot of days when centerpiece of our table was an assortment of school books, papers, pencils, and miscellaneous booklets. My DH's one request for the summer is that I find a way to better organize the school supplies so that the table is cleared for dinner (and not by moving stacks of books to the floor either). I didn't want the supplies just thrown in one big jumble in the kitchen cabinet so that we ended up with bent books and missing papers. Here is what it looks like:
Top left: Manipulative's - cuisenaire rods for math; pattern blocks, attribute blocks, and interlocking blocks for critical thinking, some pegs with which Benny plays on occasion.

Top right: Timeline notebooks for both girls, lapbook folder for each girl (geography and history), I also put my planning notebook and folders with check sheets, images for lapbooking, and our Bible curriculum.

Bottom left: 4 plastic letter trays stacked. On top are Benny's Kumon books and a pencil box with our math wrap-ups plus Benny's alphabet egg puzzles and number frogs. The next shelf has ziploc bags with Violet's completed history and geography booklets. Below that are two more ziploc bags with history and geography booklets for Jessie. On the bottom is our color card stock.

Bottom right: The 3 drawer plastic unit holds pencils and erasers in the top, dry erase markers (and the eraser when we find it again) in the middle, and scissors and glue sticks in the bottom. Above the drawer unit are Jessie's and Violet's memory boxes.

Jessie and Violet each have their own basket which holds all of their individual books which fit nicely into the remaining space in the bottom.


That's our cabinet with our current material. When Benny gets a little older we can expand into the other half of the cabinet, we just have to relocate the books on tape, the remaining play food, and a few miscellaneous books which I probably just need to go on and sell anyway.

Unused material is stored in boxes in my office closet, and I have a desk drawer for teacher's guides and catalogs. I think that's it other than the library books which have their own crate in the girl's room. It may be small, but I can find what I need and it's easier to clean up this year as well.

Our Memory System

Our memory work has changed quite a bit from last year to this year. Last year, Jessie only had to memorize Psalm 139 for Sunday school and a couple of the poems in FLL 2nd grade. (I just didn't like the selection of poems that much). Review was built in. We said all of Psalm 139 every day up to the new verse, and we said the new verse 5 times. For poems, we just reviewed when FLL said to review, ignoring any poems we weren't memorizing.

Fast forward to this year, our church has switched to a new Sunday school curriculum so instead of memorizing a block of scripture for the year (or semester), we have different verses almost every week for each child. I decided to increase our poetry memorization. Jessie also has Latin vocabulary to work on and some grammar definitions that need to be cemented down (the FLL definitions just didn't seem to stick). I needed a system that would not only introduce new memory work but also provide some systematic review.

I started with the Scripture Memory System from Charlotte Mason. Jessie and Violet each have their own 3x5 index card box with dividers for daily, even/odd, each weekday, and each day of the month. Here's Jessie's box:
Then I decided to color code the index cards. Both Jessie and Violet have purple cards with Bible verses and pink cards with poetry. In addition Jessie has green cards with grammar definitions and yellow cards with Latin vocabulary. The purple(Bible), pink(poetry), and green(grammar) cards will be filed according to the Charlotte Mason method with the exception that I won't put poetry and grammar cards in the Saturday or Sunday slot. For Latin, I only used half an index card per word or prayer. I divided the cards in three stacks and have a green (let's go memorize) rubber band around the words needing daily review, a yellow (caution don't forget me) rubber band around words we'll review weekly, and a pink (in place of red for stop we haven't learned these yet) rubber band for cards we haven't started yet. For now I'll keep the Latin cards in the back of the box.
Future ideas for expansion. I still have blue and white cards for any new memory work, maybe another language or something for history like the Declaration of Independence, Paul Revere's Ride, or the preamble to the Constitution. I'll probably break the Latin weekly review stack into a weekly and monthly stack sometime next month. Next year, I'll probably split the Bible verses into one box and the other verses into another box for Jessie.

Jessie's comment about her new box. "Oh, that's cool. Mom, you're so organized." I don't know about organized, but at least I'm getting closer. One step at a time.