A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place!

I'm OCD, we all know this... I have issues with having to have order in almost everything I do... I also have a husband who... I swear takes joy in seeing just how red my face will turn when he makes a sandwich in the kitchen I just cleaned and leaves it a disaster... bread crumbs on the counter, mayo on the cutting board, spinach dropped on the floor... OY!! he does it on purpose I'm sure of it! and after he cooks... OMG it looks like a bomb went off in there! But the food is AMAZING, he is one hell of a cook :) so I smile and enjoy my DELISH meal and go clean it up later... but seriously babe HOW in the heck DO you get spaghetti sauce on the ceiling!?  Anyhoo back to me and my issues lol.

Do you have to have order with your little one's toys?

I do, everything has a place and everything should be in its place!

For a while my husband convinced me to just let them have all their toys in big toys boxes commingling with each other, it was a DISASTER!  For one thing they could never find anything they wanted to play with because everything was just one big mess and because it was all just a huge mess that was how it always got left, things got lost, things got broken and after a while I finally said we are going back to doing things my way.  My way is: A bucket or container for each and every different type of toy with a label on the front to let them know what goes in there.  My husband was convinced I was saddling the kids with my OCD issues by making them clean up and sort their toys in this manner, that was why he just wanted a big toy box "let them be kids!" he said... "Kids make messes" he says...  Um, I don't think teaching your kids to be organized is "saddling them with OCD" but whatever...
 
I do realize that I take it bit further than most might, rather than just a bucket or bin for action figures in general, I have specific ones for the different types:  Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Star Wars, Super Heroes, Ben Ten etc... but honestly the boys are not going to play with their Luke Skywalker and their Superman at the same time, so it makes perfect sense to me to have them in separate bins.  

I have had a problem for years, when it came to labels because often their collections would outgrow the containers they were in. So I would have to move them into bigger containers, or they would lose interest in something and it would get donated or sold at a garage sale and I'd have this bin with a label on it. Sometimes I'd just stick another one over it for whatever was in there now but after a while that starts to looks like garbage and the labels themselves start to peel and get all mucky.  I had bounced around the idea of laminating some labels like I had seen here and here but laminate sheets can get spendy and doesn't solve the problem of what to do when their interests change.

 One day I was cleaning out a drawer of my husband's old junk and I came across a pile of these little plastic sleeves:

And I thought... I can do SOMETHING with these, so I set them aside, and then as I was scraping an old label off a bin later that week I remembered them.  I Googled to see what the measurements of a baseball card are (2 1/2 x 3 1/2) and I got busy!! 

I have been putting pictures on the boys labels since they were babies so even though they are now 7 and 9 I can't help myself but to always Google for a cool pic of whatever toy it is and use that as the label.  I put it in my editing software and just told it to make the image the correct size.  Then I repeated for all the toys they have.  Printed them out and then cut them to size.  Then I had to get all the old labels off the darn bins... rubbing alcohol is your friend here squirt some on, let it sit, come back and then it should be a LOT less work to get the label and all the goop off.

If you don't already have some of these baseball card sleeve things laying around (ask your hubs he might have a stash somewhere) they are really cheap!  Like 100 for $1 and you can get them at any Comic book shop or hobby store.  The ones we had might have been a little more expensive as they had a black backing and not totally clear but I bet they were not that much more.  There are also some thicker really nice ones that are like 25 for about $3.00 if you want them to be really sturdy.



Run a bead of hot glue around the outside edges of the card holder and press onto the container.  Be careful not to touch the tip of your hot glue gun to the card holder because it will melt it.  Then slide your printed image into the sleeve and viola! Neat organized labels!  

But the BEST thing about these for me is that they are SO EASY TO CHANGE!!  NO MESS, no label goo... just slide out the printed image and slide in whatever new one you want to change it out with!

And... don't limit yourself to labeling toy boxes!  I have gone kind of crazy with them around the house.  I have them on the dishwasher:

 Just use those cheap free magnets you find all over  the place to hold them on!

I used a hole punch and zip ties to attach them to my kids catch-all baskets that I keep at the top of the stairs.

Hole punch and zip ties to label containers in the freezer.  Told ya... I kinda went crazy :)

Hey before you go, I wanted to share one other thing with you all today...  We read SO much around here, seriously PILES of books and we LOVE the library!  We check out so many books.  We always have a HUGE stack to carry up to the counter.  I have two library baskets in our house; one is filled with the books we need to read, and one is filled with the ones we have already read, that need to go back.  We have to go empty that basket about 2-3 times a week (of course we always bring home more too!) Anyway... I have found that checking out books from the library is a GREAT way to determine which books are worth buying and are destined to become favorites!  Two that we read this morning over breakfast that we just LOVED were Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers, which is about a bunch of CRAZY, WILD animal crackers on the loose



and Spoon, which is about a little spoon who thinks he is kinda dull and not cool like his pals the fork or chopsticks, but he learns that spoons are pretty awesome too!


I definitely think these are two that we will be purchasing to add to our personal library.  Check them out from your library and if you love them like we did we'd love to hear all about it!!

I am linking up over at:
Gluesticks

To Menu or Not to Menu... That is the Question

Sitting down to plan this week's meals before heading out to shop and I was wondering... Do you guys plan menus?  Do you use online meal planners or just good old pen and paper?  Vegweb.com has a great meal planner that integrates the recipes on their site. I LOVE Cozi aand their site has a shopping and and meal planning page, I also really like the printable worksheets from Laptop Lunches.  But when it comes to crunch time I like good old fashioned pen and paper.  But with a twist of course!!  I put the worksheets inside page covers, you know like the kind we used to protect our book reports with?  Print out a few slip them in the covers, and keep the covers together with a report holder both are super cheap and then use dry erase markers for your planning :) 

Usually I am neater and a bit more organized but I am still in "full steam ahead" mode with one more party to go this weekend before I see the finish line.  Anyway just thought I would take a second to share, on my way out, and see what methods you guys use, if any, for planning your families' meal planning. 

Here are mine so far:

Oh... btw *side note* those "fish tacos are Tempeh Fish Taco's from my friend Rhea's Blog
http://theveeword.blogspot.com/2012/05/tempeh-fish-tacos-zesty-lime-corn-and.html you should check her out!

Many Hands Make Light Work

Kids, staying on schedule, money and housework... all of these things stress me out!  Add to that, the fact that I am quite OCD about most things, you get a pretty stressed out mama most days.  I have been really trying to work on letting go of things that really don't matter and not letting them stress me out, I have also been working on giving the kids more responsibility around the house and these things go hand in hand.  If I ask my son to sweep the floor, I cannot then freak out that he did not do a 100% OCD job like I would have.  I need to thank him for his effort, perhaps show him what he missed and leave well enough alone...  it's one thing to say that and a complete different thing to actually do it.  If I just jump up and redo the job behind him, I have negated the sense of accomplishment he was feeling by sending the message "You didn't do it good enough" and I am not alleviating any of the burden on myself if I just run around behind the kids and redo everything they did.  It's a conundrum for me, I want a clean house and I want my children to pitch in, which means I have to learn to leave well enough alone and let them do the best they can with time and practice their standards for doing their housework will get better (I hope!).

We have tried a few different methods of allowance and chores.  We don't believe in just buying our children anything their heart's desire.  Don't get me wrong my kids are spoiled as can be but we try to save the spoiling for birthdays, Christmas and other special occasions, they are spoiled enough on those occasions to last them the whole year :) But they ask for things like toys or a video game or whatever and instead of just giving them a blanket NO for an answer we tell them "Save your money and you can buy it."  Problem was we were not giving them any money, so that little gem didn't really work too well.  So a couple years ago we decided to start giving the boys an allowance we gave them $10 a week, but we very quickly realized that giving them an allowance for doing nothing is pretty much the same as just buying them whatever they want. They didn't have to do anything to earn the money and they just took it for granted and even asked for advances lol, an advance at five years old!  We had to think of something else.  So I tried to make a chore chart and assign chores.  I told them they would get their allowances if they did all their chores.  That worked for like a week but they hated having chores assigned and more often than not it ended up with us fighting with them to do their chores and them being upset that they didn't get their allowance.  If they didn't do all their chores I would have to explain why they only got half or none of their allowance, "You didn't earn it!" Anyway, needless to say this whole chores for money thing has been a big headache for me for years.

My younger son is quite the little entrepreneur and will do just about anything to earn money, the older one not so much most days he'd rather go without his allowance than to have to do "hard labor."  My younger one will ask, "Can I go rake the pine needles for money?" "If I clean my sister's room can I have $2?" and once about a month ago he wanted money for a new Star Wars action figure really really bad and all of a sudden he had a loose tooth somehow, and the very next day it was out! Quite suspect! :)  Anyway as you can tell I have spent a lot of my time trying to figure out a fair way to have the kids help around the house, earn money and not be the evil slave driving mama my oldest thinks I am some times.

My boys also have lots of things I need to keep track of and get pretty disappointed in mama when she forgets.  At any given time my boys can each be involved in 2 out of school activities.  Cub Scouts is always one of them and the second one changes with the seasons from T-ball, to acting classes, football, gymnastics, swimming lessons... etc.  They also have a rotating schedule for their specialist classes at school (Music, P.E., Library) and the days are different for each one of them, so we sometimes  almost always scramble in the morning to know who has P.E. today!?  We live in the Northwest and in the winter time when the snow is on the ground the kids have to wear their snow boots to school and be sure to pack their tennis shoes in their backpacks for P.E.  If they don't have lace up tennies on P.E. day they have to sit out on the sidelines for the whole class, it sucks for them and forgetful mama has caused this to happen a couple of times.  They also need to return their school library book on library day and that usually means a 10 minute frantic sweep of the house trying to find the darn book. Another thing that adds stress to our morning routine is the hunt for shoes and backpacks.  I have a designated place in each of their rooms for both of those items but they rarely ever end up where they belong, they usually end up tossed in the hall somewhere. 


I had been brainstorming for a couple of months for something I could do that would bring together all of these things; organize their schedules, keep track of chores (without assigning them), apply a monetary value to the chores in a way that was easy for me to keep track of, and do all this in an easy to understand, easy to manage way that would make our lives easier and look cute.  Of course it was Pinterest to the rescue for this project!  I found a bunch of ideas for different chore charts and family organization stations there. My two faves of the hundreds I saw was this magnetic chore chart where the kids pick their own chores and are in charge of how much or how little they work and earn, and this homework message center.  I took what I liked best from each of them and created something that I am very happy with! 

I LOVED the idea of letting the kids pick their own chores.  I bought wooden discs and printed out all the chores I could think of, and Mod Podged them onto the discs, then hot glued a small magnet to the back.  I used a label template for 1 1/2 circles but just printed them on regular paper and used my scrapbooking circle punch to cut them out.  You could also just buy the circle labels and skip the Mod Podge step.  I made WAY more chores than I would ever expect them to do but I did this on purpose for the days when my youngest son is feeling especially entrepreneurial and wants to earn more than usual.  I assigned a monetary value to the chores based on how "hard" I thought they were.  For example I gave making their beds a .25 cent value and vacuuming the living room a $1.00 value.  I did make some chores things that I expect them to do on a daily basis, I made those worth less .25 and .50 each for the most part and I made them out of smaller wooden discs so they are easily identifiable.  I ask them each night after dinner if all the small chores are done for the day then I go in and take them off their boards and jot down on the daily schedule how much they earned that day.  Most of the chores are on the larger wooden discs are are things that should be done once a week, they do not do most of these, I still clean 90% of the house :) but they are helping and to me ANY help is better than no help!  On Sunday I go and tally up all the weekly chores they did, add that to all the daily amounts I jotted down over the week and pay them out.  I even made a special bonus "Extra Helpful to Mama" one that I can add to their boards at the end of the week if I think they have been exceptionally helpful that week.  Their money goes into jars with their names on them stored on a shelf right above the chore charts, so they can visually see what their hard work is getting them.

In addition to keeping track of chores and money, their boards have monthly and weekly calendars and a spot for notes.  I bought cheap Walmart poster frames 16X20 I think they were five bucks each.  They don't have glass on the front but a cheap thin sheet of plastic which makes a PERFECT wet erase board.  I just printed out monthly and weekly calendars from Google and added a little spot for notes, with some coordinating scrapbook papers in each of the boy's favorite colors to make it look pretty and glued all this to the backside of the insert that came with the frame.  Now I can just use wet erase markers to set up their schedules, know who needs their library books or tennis shoes when and keep us on track.  For the magnetic chores to stick I went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of metal, it was like $6 and I had the guy there cut it into 3 strips for me.  One went behind the plastic insert of the small black frame I already had to hold all the chores that have not been done yet and the other ones went into each of the boy's boards.  I measured out where I wanted the chore section to be and then hot glued the metal to the cardboard backing of the frame.  When I did this I didn't think about the fact that I was not distributing the weight evenly and when I first tried to hang one up it hung all lopsided and I got really discouraged for a minute.  Then I thought COMMAND STRIPS! and ran out and got some.  Everything in this corner (except the shelf) is hung with command strips and I am very happy with how strong they are and that I didn't have to put a bunch of holes in my walls.  I added the little cubbys (just some office organizers I bought for a quarter each at a garage sale a while ago) for holding school newsletters, reading journals, school library books and the like.  We already had the bench in that corner but it was being used to store books and just as a random clutter catch all.  I am so happy it is being put to much better use now.  I put the boys school shoes and rain boots in the storage area and now they can store their backpacks on top of the bench and sit there to get their shoes on in the mornings.  This little corner is in the hallway right outside their bedrooms and it's pretty close to where their backpacks and shoes ended up getting tossed normally so I think they should end up there by default lol.  I added the shelf with their money jars and printed out and framed a couple of my favorite quotes pertaining to chores and housework.  The "Many Hands Make Light Work" is a great one to help the kids understand that the more that people help out the easier the work will be, and the other ""Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing."  by Phyllis Diller is a hilarious reminder to me to let go, not expect perfection and enjoy the imperfection that is childhood.


I am very happy with the finished product and the boys really like it too!