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Welcome!
Thanks for visiting my blog. Hope you find some helpful hints for organizing your time and space. My passions are to help you make home a refuge instead of a crisis center, and to help you function in peace rather than chaos - at home or at work. I have switched my main blog to 1-2-3 ... Get Organized on WordPress, so please visit me there.
Last week as we sat down for dinner, the girls asked us if we were missing something since we had neither utensils or plates on the table. Nope, it is a crazy dinner.
I had printed the list below, cut it into strips, and placed the strips in a paper lunch bag. We proceeded with dinner, eating one item at a time: pork chops, pasta salad, and fruit.
With each item, each person drew a slip out of the bag. He/she must eat that item using the utensil and container on his/her slip of paper.
We laughed so hard throughout the entire meal. We topped it off with brownies which we had to eat using no hands! One of the girls suggested whipped cream, so we had a glorious mess putting our faces into our brownies. And we have pictures to provie it! Unfortunately, we are not allowed to post pictures of our foster daughters. :(
This simple list turns an ordinary dinner into a crazy, fun one! Thanks to my friend Margaret for giving me the idea.
Pan lid with a wooden spoon
Punch cup with a spatula
Heart dish with a plastic knife
Plastic cup with a relish fork
Pan with tongs
Pie plate with a large ladle
Angel food cake pan with an ice cream scoop
Bread pan with a measuring teaspoon
Syrup pitcher with a teaspoon
Mug with a soup spoon
Juice glass with a measuring tablespoon
Serving bowl with a slotted spoon
Corn dish with a butter knife
Egg cup with a small ladle
Glad container with chop sticks
Spring form pan with corn holders
Stock pot with salad serving fork
Large measuring cup with a rubber scraper
Large white bowl with a cooking fork
2-quart pitcher with a melon baler
Crockpot with a wooden spatula
9 x 9 pan with a slotted spatula
Cake pan with ice tongs
Corningware with an icing knife
More on organizing summer fun:
Have some well-meaning people given you gifts that don't relate to your interests, skills, or priorities? Sometimes people give gifts they would love to have themselves rather than study their recipient's desires. Without meaning to, they may have piled some guilt onto you.
Or you may have those in your life who think you need to know how to do certain things and provide you with the associated tools. They may not care if you want to do those things, but are imposing their own expectations on you.
Or you may have bought these items yourself because you "should" use them, thereby heaping expectations on yourself.
- You may have received craft items from an artsy person, when you think you're doing well to draw stick figures.
- Or some do-it-yourself tools when your typical DIY outcome is to glue your fingers together with super glue.
- Or you may have purchased fancy gardening gadgets because you feel you should have curb appeal like HGTV, but you really hate gardening.
If items around your house produce guilt because you think you "should" use them, but they just don't fit with who you are, get rid of them! Someone out there would love to have those things that are oppressing you!
Life is too short to be bound by yours or someone else's unrealistic expectations!
More on decluttering guilt:
If decluttering is overwhelming to you, start small.
For example, if you're decluttering clothes and can't bear to part with all your "small" clothes or "large" clothes, don't get rid of all of them. Select a few outfits you really love, in case you change sizes. Just don't keep them all!
Or, if you're decluttering books, start with one shelf. See if you can get rid of half of the books on that shelf. Ask yourself, am I going to read this again? Would someone else benefit from it?
Don't feel you need to tackle your entire decluttering job at once. Start small!
Remember, you want to surround yourself with possessions you love. Do not let your clutter overshadow your beloved items and make it so you cannot enjoy them.
More on decluttering:
Three Steps to Decluttering
I was asked to review the Personal Microderm, a microdermabrasion at home product by SkinCareRx. I'm not sure how this relates to organizing, but who would refuse?
The personal microderm is easy to use once you get used to it. It is a small hand-held appliance with two sizes of rotating heads - one for the face and one for the body.
It only took a few minutes to go over my face and hands, the areas I was most concerned about. Both areas look improved after just three uses. And it's so nice to use it right at home.
Gotta squeeze some more fun in before summer ends!
Visual Scavenger Hunt - hide small items out in the open (either inside or outside), but blending with surroundings.
Example: chocolate chip on a brown window sill. Things to hide: paper clip, staple, rubber band, penny, twist tie, chocolate chip, raisin, birthday candle , red hot, piece of gum, push pin, nail, balloon, screw, button, key, straight pin, golf tee.
Give each person a list of all items “hidden.” They write down where the item is located without moving it or giving away the location. The one who finds the most items wins.
This can be added to the decathlon as one of the games.
More about organizing summer fun:
Can you believe it's almost time for school?! Here's a blog I've done before to help reduce the stress of getting ready for school. We used these tips for our own daughters and some of them for our foster daughters. Hope you enjoy them:
If we took our cues from the stores, we would think summer is over, even though it seems like it just began! After the 4th of July, all summer clothes are on sale and winter clothes will soon be on the racks, even though we are sweltering! Great time to beef up your summer wardrobe, if need be.
If you need to shop for back-to-school clothes or if you have children who need to do so, here are a few tips:
1. Take inventory of what you have. If you have children, tackle this job one child at a time. Make a list of all tops, categorizing them separately - short sleeve, long sleeve, t-shirts, dressy, dressy casual, etc. Do the same with bottoms - shorts, capris, jeans, skirts, dress pants, etc.
2. While going through the closet, start a donation pile and a throwaway/rag pile and a giveaway pile for clothing you want to pass on to specific people.
3. Make a list of all the possible outfits, both summer and winter.
4. It will become obvious which articles of clothing have no matches or matching accessories - shoes, socks, jewelry, belts, etc.. Make a shopping list.
5. NOW it's time to shop! If you are shopping for your children, make back-to-school shopping a fun event. If you can, take one child at a time, have lunch together, and make it a special day.
Even though this process takes a while, it is far more productive. You may discover outfits you never considered, you'll clear the closet of unwanted items, and your shopping will be intentional rather than haphazard, which will likely save you money. And you and/or your child will have a list of outfits to wear - especially helpful on those days when choosing an outfit seems overwhelming!
Similar topics:
Organizing Your Child's Room
Get Oranized Month 2009 - Organizing Your Clothes Closet
Get Organized for School - Clothing Inventory
Getting Organized for School - Learning Style
I had some much-needed time off during the last of July. I celebrated my birthday and got royally spoiled by my husband: flowers, a card and a salmon dinner he cooked himself. And a day to read - such luxury I don't often get. :) And to top it off, one of my daughters surprised me with a visit!
I also spoke at the National Gift Basket Convention on "Leaving an Intentional Legacy" about planning your time around your passions, priorities and gifts so you are doing what you are designed to do. Busy, but a very interesting and enlightening experience!!
Our five foster daughters came back on the evening of the 29th and we've already been to the emergency room twice! Back to reality!
On to my funny little blog for today:
The Secret of Not Having to Clean Every Day
I read recently about a way not to clean each day: get some get well cards and put them on your mantel so that when friends drop by they'll think you've been sick! LOL!
Just wanted to let you know that I'm taking the rest of the month off from blogging. With some vacation days ahead, I'm trying to make sure to have a few restful days. With five teenage girls in the house, I'm ready for some days off! LOL!
I'll be speaking at the National Gift Basket Convention during my time off, but it will be a change of scenery and normal activity, which is refreshing and rejuvenating.
I'll be back on August 2.
Bev
It's easy to end up with a massive sorting and purging job with digital photos - they accumulate so quickly! Here are a few tips to make it easier:
- Delete pictures on your camera you don't like. Do it immediately after each picture-taking session. You can determine which pictures are best, which are duplicates, etc.
- Use these filters:
- Is it blurry?
- Do you love it?
- Will you want it in five years?
- And my favorite - do I look better that I do in real life? LOL! I do NOT want to keep pictures of myself for posterity in which I look terrible!
- When going through old pictures, use the same filters. In addition, get rid of photos of people and places you don't remember or that are no longer meaningful.
- Back up files in several places: internally on your computer, externally on a DVD or external hard drive, on online digital sharing services (iPhoto, Snapfish, Flickr, Picasa, etc.)
- Periodically, go through your photos to see if they have lost appeal over time. By being ruthless before saving your photos, it will make this job easier.
More on photos:
If you've read my blog for any length of time, you know that squirrels have been the bane of my existence! They have eaten my plums, blueberries, and raspberries, destroyed my herb seedlings, and now - they can demolish a $15 bag of bird feed in two days! Do they have an Overeaters Anonymous for squirrels?!
After making a baffle that was unsuccessful, we hit upon a winner - PVC! We have a 4 x 4 post that holds our bird feeder. A genius at Lowe's told us that there are 4 x 4 PVC covers for wooden posts. I will forever be grateful to that man!
My husband removed the bird feeder and the bird house attached to the post. He then slipped the PVC cover down over the post and instant squirrel baffle! For the price of one bag of bird feed! The slippery surface of the PVC prevents the little critters from climbing up the post.
Can squirrels smell PVC? We haven't even seen a squirrel approach the bird feeder. We even set up our video camera so we can relish the sight of squirrels slipping off the PVC. And it has been several days since installing the PVC. Our only worry - that they will jump off the tree onto the bird feeder. Then it may be time for me to invest in an air gun! Just kidding!
More on squirrels:
Are you on the go continuously? Do your kids have activities scheduled several days a week?
I remember wondering if I would damage my child's potential if she didn't play on the select basketball team. As it turned out, she didn't pursue basketball beyond high school.
But parents feel those pressures:
- if I don't get him started in baseball now, he'll be behind his peers
- she is so talented in singing, I don't want to squelch her desire
- he wants to take art lessons, so why not?
- it's much easier for a child to learn a foreign language - an hour of Spanish lessons a week couldn't hurt.
I remember one of my daughters asking if we could reduce the number of activities (all were her choices) so she could have time to play. Argh! Her older sister liked to be active all the time, but she needed some space.
So another piece to this juggling act is to know your child, know yourself and know what you and your family can handle. Don't be afraid not to have your child enrolled in all the activities your friends' children are enrolled in. Don't be afraid to say no.
It is much more peaceful to give your child and yourself some space rather than overscheduling your child, and therefore, yourself.
More on discernment:
To continue my series on Organizing Summer Fun When Everyone is Bored: A unique dinner is a bit complicated but a lot of fun. You give your family/guests menus (see below) which have strange names for the items served. They choose what they’d like to eat for four courses. They don’t know that their utensils are included in the unusual descriptions below.
It makes for a unique experience to see what people end up with for each course - applesauce, fork, butter, and ranch dressing, for example. Dish up each course and laugh!
Change the menu and make up your own names for them, if you wish. Even teenagers like this dinner! :)
Menu:
Unique Dinner
Welcome to your unique dinner – a luxurious four-course meal. Please choose what you’d like to have for each course – four per course.
Souper scoop Cluck and muck Green mush
Mud Cool and refreshing A la mode
Stabber Farm sauce White mountain
Hockey puck A dab here, a dab there Chop stick
Cow spread Smashed Jonathan Slices and spices
Larry slices
1st Course ______________________
(your name)
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
2nd Course ______________________
(your name)
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
3rd Course ______________________
(your name)
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
4th Course ______________________
(your name)
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
Unique Dinner Translations:
Spoon - Souper scooper
Chicken Parmesan - Cluck and muck
Green Bean Casserole - Green mush
Glass of water - Cool and refreshing
Mashed potatoes - White mountain
Fork - Stabber
Knife – chop stick
Napkin - A dab here, a dab there
Roll – Hockey puck
Butter – Cow spread
Applesauce- Smashed Jonathan
Apple Pie – Slices and spices
Sliced Cucumbers - Larry slices
Ranch dressing - Farm sauce
Vanilla Ice Cream – A la mode
Gravy – Mud
More summer fun:
I recently read Anytime Reading Readiness by Cathy Puett Miller. What a gold mine of information - a must-read for all parents of pre-readers and early readers. The book details how we as parents can instill a love of reading in our children, from infancy and beyond. My philosophy: if you can read, you can learn to do anything!
Cathy teaches read-aloud skills that guarantee great story times. And she shows us how our conversation with our small children can contribute to successful reading. Who knew?
A plethora of games helps make pre-reading and reading skills fun for our children. And pages of resources insure that we'll never run out of ideas.
This book is not a "teach your child to read by age two" kind of book. It is a balanced guide to help your child read when he or she is ready. As a parent you are empowered to look for signs that your child is ready to read and use those moments.
Don't be tempted to skip over the introduction - it lays the foundation for years of successful reading with your child!
Anytime Reading Readiness would be a very meaningful baby gift or an anytime gift for someone you love with small children - or for yourself!
More on helping your child succeed:
Here's a first-hand report from professional organizer Debbie Bowie about how to manage when you encounter crises in your life.
“ 'Things went downhill when we had three family crises in a year,' said a new client who was explaining how her lovely home had evolved into a cluttered, chaotic mess.
It is very common for people to lose control of the order in their homes during times of crisis. Crisis situations that go on for an extended period of time consume time, energy and the motivation required to maintain an organized home.
It’s not uncommon for people to find that once they’ve gotten past the personal crisis–illness, death in the family, caregiving for aging or sick relatives, recovery from surgery–they have another crisis on their hands, a living space that is such a mess that they have no idea how they will ever get it back to its more orderly state.
Twice in the past year I’ve been thrown into crisis mode, first when my step-father began deteriorating mentally and had to have brain surgery and then when my disabled brother developed a serious infection in his artificial knee joint requiring surgery, weeks of IV antibiotics and another knee replacement.
Both events were incredibly energy consuming for me because I was a key decision-maker, the coordinator of communication between family members, a key source of emotional support, and I had my own fears and other feelings to manage.
It was all I could do to get through each day dealing with the crisis at hand, much less tend to my small business and maintain order in my home. Those two crises were an opportunity for me to learn how to get through difficult times without losing control of other parts of my life.
Here are 6 of the important lessons I learned:
1. Identify tasks to be done no matter what.
Then do them! I am the money manager in our house. So, making sure bills got paid and that money was in the right accounts at the right time were two tasks I had to get done so we could avoid consequences like ruining our credit rating. Keeping us afloat financially during those difficult times helped ground me. I liked knowing that no matter what else happened, we were operating on a firm financial foundation.
2. Defer whatever tasks you can to other people.
Instead of trying to keep everything in order by myself, I asked my husband to do many tasks that normally I would have done to maintain our home and our lives together.
Also, people offer help during times of crisis. Let them! Last summer when I had bi-lateral bunion surgery I asked friends to help provide food and walk my dogs. They were happy to have something to do that would help me, and their help provided a type of emotional support I really needed.
3. Lighten your load by eliminating obligations.
It became clear to me pretty quickly that helping my mother and step-father through my step-father’s health crisis and staying healthy myself during that stressful process was more important than writing checks for a professional organization. I actually chose to resign from two volunteer positions because taking care of family and myself were the priority.
4. Control paper flow even if you can’t regularly process it.
You may not have time to do much with paper that flows into your house on a daily basis, but you can make sure that it all flows to the same place. That way, when you need to find something in that pile of paper, you have only one place to look. You might stack it in piles in your home office or get an open box and store it there. Just don’t let it float throughout your space!
If you want to go one step further, pull out bills and magazines/catalogs/newsletters. Put the bills in a highly visible location so you don’t forget about them and so they are easily accessible when you are ready to pay them. Place the magazine, catalogs and other reading materials in a location where you spend time reading. Removing those items from your paper pile will make it shrink and also make it easier to access things to read when you need a source of distraction.
5. Resist the urge to do nothing.
In times of personal crisis it is very normal to shut down because of overwhelm, fatigue, or just not knowing what to do. While it is important to take breaks to rest, recharge, and recover, it is not a good idea to go to ground and let everything go.
It takes only a day or two for your space to go from being a peaceful haven to a chaotic nightmare. Then you not only have a crisis going on outside your home, but also inside your home. You have no safe place to retreat. Messy houses scream, “You slob! Why don’t you do something about this mess!”
Make yourself do at least the bare minimum to maintain order, like controlling the paper flow, washing the dishes, straightening up daily.
6. Remember that maintaining a basic order will ground you during difficult times.
You may resist doing maintenance activities because you are exhausted, but if you override the urge to stop and plop on the sofa and instead do a few tasks to keep your space neat and organized, you will find that doing those things will help ground and calm you.
You will then be better able to go out and deal with whatever challenge is going on. If you are physically incapable of maintaining order yourself, because of illness or disability, ask others to help you do that. Many people want to help in some way. Let them know that their help will ground you and facilitate your recovery."
More on crisis management:
We have a couple of foster daughters who make others late. One has terrible organizational and time management skills. But both make others wait because of control and power issues.
So I have decided on this strategy: when we designate a time when we must leave, if someone holds the rest of us up, that person must repay that amount of time to each person kept waiting. And ... the person(s) who was kept waiting gets to decide what the tardy person must do for her during those minutes.
So far, we've not had anyone be late. But I can imagine what nasty chores will be chosen when it does happen! LOL
By knowing ahead of time the consequence of tardiness, people may be more considerate and not waste others' time. The tardy one will not be allowed to hold the rest hostage without recourse.
And it takes some of the emotional stress out of the situation because there is a cost incurred when someone is late. By calmly noting the number of late minutes to be repaid, it is not necessary to escalate, taking the power away from the controlling person.
One of the girls asked if it applies to us adults, and it does. As long as the girls do not ask for things at the last minute that make us late.
More on time management:
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