New Pen Love

I love my new pens!  I don't know if I've ever written about my love for office supplies.

I love office supplies!

I always have to look at them when I'm at the store and if given a choice of "window shopping" I'd go to the office supply stores in town rather than the mall. :D

Today the mailman brought me these...



I ordered them here.

I just wrote with them for a little test and they are wonderful! And I LOOOOVE the colors!! 

They make me feel like being creative. :)

I just have to keep up with them now and not let DD or DS get ahold of them.  

Actually, DS likes these pens... and he keeps up with them pretty well so I didn't mind the price. In fact we bought them a year ago for our trip to Indiana and he still has them!

You

You know you have too much homeschooling stuff when you clean the shelves (AGAIN!!!) and take boxes of books and miscellaneous things away and you STILL have no empty shelves when you put everything back!

Is it just me???

Working routines...where are they?

Remember flylady?

Some folks may have never heard of her at all.  I met her years ago and she quickly changed my life, but I outgrew her.  All those e-mails!  All those reminders! I just didn't need them anymore.  But I still revert back to her basic cleaning lists and the routine lists I created back then when I get overwhelmed.

Well, my weekly schedules and demands have changed and I finally realized that those old lists just don't fit anymore!  It's time to rethink my week and what I need to get done on each day of the week.

I was talking with a friend the other day and she said something similar about her routines too, or actually lack thereof.  She realized that certain routines saved her so much time, that she needed to establish some other routines in the day to save time as well.

There are certain days that we are home, and certain days we are not and I'm still not used to it after a year of this schedule!  It's time to do some serious thinking and planning and get some *working* routines in order!

So the problems are:

• having the school week planned out
• having all books/supplies ready 
• we need lunches ready ahead of time
• I need a healthy quick breakfast ready ahead of time for those days we are running late
• I am getting behind on household chores
• I need time for my creative outlets too
• Wednesday nights are so late and Thursday comes so early ;)
• fitting in exercise time
• having the exercise equipment, clothes, music etc ready to go
• meals planned
• grocery list done
• chores more evenly distributed between the family
• there is probably more but that's enough to start!

I'm going to work on this tonight!  I'm actually excited to get some things written down and put into use.
For instance I need to plan ahead and make Wednesday and Thursday as easy as possible.

I'll be back with my plan when I get it done!

Ack!

July is practically over, I'll be gone most of August.  Where has the summer gone?  I haven't posted in over a month!

I am working on some school plans but there are so many family things going on too.  My SIL has been living with us for a year and a half and she is moving this weekend.  For me that means moving furniture (mostly mine) vacuuming, rearranging, organizing, dusting, sneezing and doing it all over again until we get things situated.

I hope to get to Wal-Mart before the weekend's over and pick up some things that we need.

I also had a new granddaughter come into the world last weekend and am preparing for the trip to see her in August. Can't wait!

So much to do so little time!

Maybe I'll post some pics and plans soon.

View from my desk

Kitchen Before

 This is what my kitchen looked like last night. Because I have been so busy working on another project.  It looks a lot worse through a camera lens! LOL  That's how I realized how bad it looked.  Not one clear surface!!!

Kitchen after - ahhh

Much better!

Aldi

They have just opened some Aldi stores near us. (If you consider 30 miles near, we do.)

We'll be checking it out this Friday. I've never been to one. If it's really worth it we'll work it into our shopping routine at least monthly.

Workboxes and Planning

I can't believe it's just about time to start a "new" year for us! DD is graduated and on her way to college classes and work. Now it'll just be DS and me. Bittersweet.

I'll be rounding up what he's going to do next year but right now we are actually doing a bit of school every day. He really needs to keep in the habit and we are trying some neurological exercises we learned from Little Giant Steps and they need to be done consistently.

We have also been doing something called workboxes. Let me tell you, we LOVE them! They make everything run so smoothly now. I could post all about them but just check out these places for the best info.

Joyful Mother of 6 workboxes - ours look just like this.

Heart of the Matter workboxes.

There are many more but you'll get the gist of it from these two.

Once more I will say we love it!

Bunkbeds Part 3

I'm very tired this evening but we got ds's side of the room painted. YAY!

If you can see from this previous pic the walls were a yellowish color. Not very 11 year old boyish. :(

Here's the wall after we painted it blue. (That brown square is where there is a window to the kitchen. I covered it with cardboard for now. Just keepin' it real!)

Here's the yellow-green stripe.

All done! (See! No cardboard!)

Not quite, I decided to take some green to the other perpendicular wall.

Oh and we got some new tubs for the shelving so they all match now.

Now it all looks cohesive!

If anyone needs reminding, here's what the room looked like in December.

(Note to self: Find somewhere else to store that stack of large white paper.)

Bunkbeds Part 2

We got the bunk beds put together today!

We had no instructions.

It only took about 1 1/2 hours.

Here's a pic -(not a very good one but I couldn't get it all in on my phone camera)

Everything's still a little messy. The boys (ds & dgs) were playing on the beds (shocked?) and left them this way.

Here's a shelf I put in ds's room to hold toys, music stuff, and some clothes. I used the baskets I had so nothing matches right now, but it holds SO MUCH! In fact it holds everything that 3 separate pieces were holding before so it cleared up much floor space.



The picture's pretty dark so here's another one labeled to show how everything fit. Click on the pic to enlarge.



I hope to get everything in shape this week. Maybe, just maybe even paint the walls! We'll see. When it's completely done I'm post more pics.

Food Notebook

I've kept a food notebook rather than recipe cards for years. I arrange my recipes by weekly menus I create. Then I just go to that week to find the recipe.

I'm about to make a *NEW & IMPROVED* notebook with all the healthy recipes my family likes. I'm experimenting and doing more cooking than ever and I actually like it! Shhhh don't tell!

My Flylady Daily Routine Powerpoint

I made this powerpoint a long time ago but just now found a way to share it! This scribd site is so cool!

The boxes on page one are clickable, and the little home button on the bottom right will take you back to page one. You can also just scroll through pages from the arrow buttons on top of the scribd frame, but the front page clickable buttons are how I designed it to work.
The look of the pages were achieved with shabbyprincess digital scrapbooking papers.

Changing Things Up

Early on Christmas Eve day we cleaned our carpets, and well one thing led to another and this is the result.

Here is the TV area,


this is the new dining area,


this is a new "sitting" area,


from another angle,


here is DS's "space" - this is temporary right now (isn't everything in my house that way?) while Nannie is in his old room.


He has lots of room to play and a little more privacy since we won't be eating in his room all the time!

What do you think?

Home Organization & Routines 2

Another thing I do to help the day run smoother is to break it into sections. I don't really follow a schedule per say but we do have an order to the day.
I divide it into morning, afternoon, and evening.

Morning is usually:
Chores
Breakfast
School
Cleaning/Laundry
Lunch

Afternoon is usually:
Clean up from school and lunch
Breaks (Free time)
Get ready for supper
Finish Laundry
Errands/appointments

Evening is usually:
Clean up from supper
Family time
Free Time
Bedtime routines

We tend to get more done before lunch than any other part of the day. I like it that way, but if I'm not careful to plan some things I'd like to get done for the afternoon and evening, this time can slip right by and I feel unaccomplished. I am really trying to keep a low stress level in my days and just do the "next thing" on my lists.

Home Organization & Routines

There's a lot of info out there about organization and I for one love all of it! I'm a junkie. I just wish I was always truly organized in every facet of my life, but I can say that the things that I do have a simple system for truly make my life easier! Here are some of those things:

First off we de-clutter CONSTANTLY. I began this with flylady years ago and now I see the fruits. A de-cluttered house is easier to clean.

Second, we each have 5 chores every morning so with my children and me doing 5 each that's 15 chores every day! Some of them are personal chores.
(Anyone who's ever had a 10 yo boy knows that "showering" has to be on his list!)

The basic things we need to start the day are:

Mom
1) Meds & Quiet Time
2) Shower and dress for the day
3) Make bed (strip it on Wed for wash)
4) Swish and swipe my bathroom
5) Sort laundry and wash one load

DD 17yo
1) Shower get dressed for day
2) Make bed (strip on Wed for wash)
3) Empty dishwasher
4) Straighten living room
5) Sort laundry and wash one load

DS 10 yo
1) Shower, get dressed for day [he usually showers at night]
2) Make bed (strip on Wed. for wash)
3) Swish and swipe the hall bathroom
4) Feed & water the dogs
5) Gather your laundry

When we do these things every morning, we start the day with the house in relative order and I can concentrate on other things like school, or errands. Of course in order to unload the dishwasher it has to have been loaded and run the night before!

There are other things we do but I'll save them for another post.

Pencil Holder

I made this rolling pencil holder for ds a while back and forgot to post the pics. I wanted something to keep his colored pencils in that would easily fit into his school supply box and be easy to grab and use.
I think it holds about 36 pencils.
I used left over fabric from other projects.
It actually rolls up quite small and since I took this picture we started folding down the top so the pencils don't slide out when rolled up. It was a quick and easy project!

Getting back to "normal" (whatever that is)

Now that I'm not working, I decided to do some "spring cleaning" before we get back to a regular routine. Here's the list:

Monday - errands/doctor appt
Tuesday - Kitchen
Wednesday - Kid's bedrooms/clothes
Thursday - Bathrooms
Friday - Master bedroom/clothes

Monday I plan to get back to a school routine.

King's Kids and Books

Today was a productive day for me. I woke up early with King’s Kids on my mind. King’s Kids is our children’s church at the church I attend. I’m in charge of curriculum and lesson planning as well as volunteer rotation. The holidays had gotten the better of me and I was a bit behind in paper work and organizing. So I prayed, “Lord, be glorified and lead me” and I got down to work. Four hours later and I had everything planned out and typed up through the end of May! Wahoo!
I even went to the dollar store and bought candy and prizes, enough to last 5 months. After that I began to aggressively sort through our bookshelves. I love books, I really do. It wasn’t always so. I wasn’t an avid reader growing up, it’s just since I began homeschooling 7 years ago that the love emerged. But on the other hand, I like to know what I have and where it is and lately things just seem to get shuffled from place to place. So I took my highlighter and my Amblesideonline booklists and began to labor. My children are currently in year 2 and year 9 (large gap I know, tell me about it!) so I made each one a shelf at his/her height so that their current books are easily accessible. Next I sorted the other books by year. I tried to get rid of the year 1 books my ds is finished with, but he didn’t want to part with them. He thinks he might read them to himself someday (he still isn’t reading yet). Given the struggle we’ve had with him, this was music to my ears. He’s connected with those books!
Back to the shelving. We have 4 5-shelf bookcases side by side in our sunroom/dining room. I made the first one just for art, crafts and music books. The next bookcase holds science books and supplies, math manipulatives and one shelf for extra language art things. The next bookcase holds all the AO/HEO books that I’ve collected along with notebooks on the bottom. The last case has our current books plus extra history and biographies. It looks so much nicer. I’ve read about others books in their home libraries and that sounds sooooo wonderful, but really I just don’t think I could handle that in real life. I’m learning to be content with what I have and this is one lesson I struggle with so getting rid of books and other items is cleansing for me.
Here's a picture of all my hard work.

The table you see is not our dining room table (ugh! it needs a table cloth!). We borrowed it from my mom during Christmas and we just kept it up. It's small and sturdy and we can work there and keep the dining room table cleaned off for meals (that's the plan anyway!LOL).

Flying

I'm working with Flylady again and this time around I can see progress that I've made over time. There are certain areas of my home and my life that are "organized" but there are always more to work on.
My kitchen is organized as far as the cabinets and drawers go, but the "shiny sink" had long been forgotten. So I began again, soaking, scrubbing and windexing my sink.
I woke up this morning to a shiny sink and Flylady is right; it made me smile! ;o)

Finally!

Well, I guess I'm finally up with the 21st century. I have a blog. I had felt a bit intimidated but I decided to "just do it".
My blog may seem more like ramblings at times, but hey, I'm new at all of this. I hope to be able to share ideas about homeschooling, homekeeping, Children's Ministry and all the other activities our family is involved in.