A Sort-Of Organized Kids' Closet

I am weird for lots of reasons, but one of them is my obsession for the way my laundry is folded. I don’t like to have anyone help me with laundry because they don’t fold things exactly the way I like them. Yeah, I’m the mom that should be giving my kids responsibilities like putting their own laundry away but instead I’m too worried they’ll do it wrong.

Time to lighten.up.

I have come to the conclusion that raising children that grow up to be contributing members of society really should be IS more important to me than how their clothing looks folded up on the shelf. But since I’m still…me…I couldn’t just leave it the way it was and give the kids a “good luck!” I had to tweak it a little with the (possibly unrealistic) hope that it will make things easier and neater for them.

I have loved the free printables that Ashley and Jamin offer on their site from time to time (I used one on my washi tape wall a while ago), and when I saw this post in January about how to organize kids’ clothing I knew I’d hit the jackpot! Cute drawings, cute colors, AND they’re from The Handmade Home?! Umm…yes, please!

So I picked out the ones I needed and got to work. I used my trusty old washi tape to hang them in the appropriate cubbies and within about 30 minutes I was done! Confession: I used up the last of my heavier cardstock paper printing out signs for Judah’sBeatles party, so these are printed on regular ol’ printer paper with no problems yet. Knock on wood ; )

 

Since I have separate cubbies for the clothes I lay out for each munster the night before, I used yet another Handmade Home printable, their lovely gift tags. I just opened those up in PicMonkey and added my kiddos’ names in fun colors and called it a day. Victory is mine!

The girls are actually pretty excited to put their clothes away, and Judah is in charge of the socks and undies baskets. I’ll be honest, I do still go in and tidy up those cubbies every couple of days (they’re in plain sight as soon as you walk in!) but all in all, I’d say we have a winner on our hands.

Moving Right Along: Moving With Kids

Just popping in for a quick ‘hello’ and a note or two about moving with kids. I have now survived four moves with one or more children running around, and we’ve all made it through alive! Here are a few tips I’ve found that go a long way toward making things a bit more bearable for everyone.

Talk about the move ahead of time. Don’t forget to include the fact that they probably won’t be going back to the old place once you’re moved out. I think younger kids have a hard time with this; they keep waiting to go ‘home’ and they don’t realize the new place is permanent.

If possible, take them to the new house to look around and play before the move. This helped our kids with the last move since they were already familiar with the house. *If you can visit during the day and evening this is even better. New places are scary in the dark!*

Point out to them which room will be theirs and help them imagine how everything will work. “The bunk beds will go over here and then I was thinking we’d hang such and such a picture right there on the wall” will get them excited and starting to picture their new space.

Let them pack up a few things of their own that are special to them. Judah and Adaleine have no preference for certain toys or books, but Eden was very worried that all of her special toys needed extra care. I gave her a basket to put her special things in and she felt a lot better.

The ideal for moving day would be to have the kids out of the picture for the entire moving day. For us this just wasn’t an option so we made arrangements for them to go play at a friend’s for a few hours. It covered one full trip to and from the house. I think it helped them to go back to the house mostly empty rather than seeing it get torn apart bit by bit. That’d be like a little kid’s horror movie! : )

Last tip: try to set up their room first. I know it will drive you nuts that first couple of days to go into the kitchen and see boxes on all the counters. But trust me, they will sleep better and feel more at ease with the whole move if they have a semi-peaceful place to call their own.

Even with all the helpful lists in the world, the truth is that moving with kids is hard. Hopefully these tips will help ease the transition for everyone and make it seem like going on a new adventure rather than leaving behind an old life. Just remember that the things that seem little and silly to us mean a lot to them, so try to find new ‘special’ things in the new place. They’ll start rocking again in no time : )

Moving Right Along: Packing up Toys & Preserving My Kids' Brains

I’m popping in really quick today for a mini-post on packing up toys. (This is almost like I’m failing at the 31 Days Challenge, but not quite)

I mentioned here that I think toys should be one of the first things you pack up. I packed up dress-up clothes about three weeks before we moved and didn’t get one request for them until we had been in the new place for a while. This obviously wouldn’t work for every family; my kids aren’t nuts about playing dress-up like my sister’s some people’s kids. : )

It looks like Judah's playing dress-up here, but he's really just squirrel-watching. With protective eye gear.

Books got packed up. I left out maybe ten books for the kiddos and then the rest with in small tubs along with coloring books. I also went through the books as I was packing them and got rid of any that were torn, beat up or just held no interest for my kiddos.

The Boy has a gift for getting books out. He's a stealth mess maker.

Play-Doh got thrown away. There. I said it. The Play-Doh that we had was either dried up and crusty or it was all mixed together so much it just looked brown. Lame. Also, I hate Play-Doh, but I keep telling myself that didn’t influence my pitching decision too much. (I’m in denial. Leave me alone.)

Get in the box, Mrs. Potato Head. Go quietly, ma'am. We don't want any trouble.

I wish I could tell you that I had some perfect system to decide how many toys I left out for my kids to play with, but that’s not true. You want to know my secret? I figured that even if I packed up every.single.toy. in the playroom there would be more throughout the house that would be left out for their use. I was right. Worked like a charm.

If you can pack up the major categories like dress-up, books, Legos, dollhouse, toy kitchen, etc. then the rest should just fall into place. And I really think that the fewer ‘toys’ my kids have, the more creative they are forced to be. That’s how I keep their brains from melting out their noses. You’re welcome : )

Moving Right Along: Getting Ready to Move

While preparing for our last move, I called my sister countless times to whine about how much I hate moving. She was a trooper to put up with it, especially since she and her family had also just moved and her experience was far more stressful. (Think moving out of state into an apartment for only one year with two kids and another one on the way. Yeah, my whining was silly.)

But like I talked about here, our landlords wanted to sell the Mouse House and we didn’t want the stress of showing the house and not knowing if we’d have a place to live in a month. And the truth is the new place is great. It is somewhere that I can see us living comfortably for a few years while we pay off debt and save a down payment for another house of our own.

So long story short long, I was kind of moving against my will. Sounds so dramatic, huh? Picture me with my hand to my forehead collapsing on a fainting couch. Oh man, I would love to have a fainting couch. Anywho, back to moving…

This isn't exactly a fainting couch, but if TJMaxx wanted to donate it to the cause, I wouldn't object : )

 The first thing that I would suggest to anyone preparing to move is to purge. Not in a Seinfeld ‘refunding’ way, but in a ‘get rid of all this crap that we have no idea where it came from’ way. If you’ve got a couple of months before you move it might be a great idea to have a yard sale. If you’ve got less time than that, I would suggest giving it all away.

Giving perfectly good stuff away is tough for me. I am a cheapskate to my very core, so when I see something that we don’t need that I could get a few bucks for my first thought is to try and sell it. I did this with a few things but what I really should have done was just get it the heck out of my house. I have a few friends whose daughters are younger than mine, so I gave them shoes and clothes that they’d outgrown. A stroller we no longer use went to another friend.  Excess dress-up clothes went to a little girl at church who loves to play dress-up.

If you come across something that is stained/broken/worn out/no longer useful…pitch it! Now is not the time to see potential in every scrap of fabric and wonky picture frame. Do not move trash just to throw it away a month later. This one was also hard for me and I honestly could have done better. Learn from my mistakes, people!

My final word of advice for The Great Purge is this great idea that I shared yesterday: someone else is happy with less than what you have. When all is said and done, all this stuff is just…stuff. They’re just things. Is it worth snapping at your kids and being a grump because you’re stressed over the move and all the things you have? Consider how blessed you are to have all of this stuff and let the stress go.



Moving Day! These kiddos were such troopers. I am so blessed with these little gifts from above.

 This is one lesson that I feel like I’m in the middle of learning. Maybe if you’re a young whippersnapper it will take you less than 30 years to become as wise as I am. HA! I’m sorry; I couldn’t say that without laughing! : )




 

Moving Right Along: Basic Moving Tips

As I believe I have established, I have a little experience with moving. It’s funny though, how every move is different and I learn something new every time. Some of the things I learn are totally common sense that I feel like I should have been born knowing, but some of them are really just good ideas! Here are a few of my basic moving tips.

~    Before you pack up anything, do a quick sweep to toss stuff you know you don’t need. This is not the in-depth purge you do while packing, but you’ll feel better if you can get some ‘stuff’ out of the way.

~    Label two sides of every box—not just the top! You can’t see the top label if boxes are stacked.

~    Speaking of labeling, if you feel so inclined, using a color coded system for labels works like a charm. I started out doing this on our last move and gave up halfway because I couldn’t remember which color went with which room. (So ashamed to admit that!) : ) {This site has a great free template that you can print out on shipping labels.} I know that 'dining' is misspelled on these labels, but you can use them as a starting point for your own labels, if you feel inspired

~    If you are a shopping bag saver like some weird people *cough*ME*cough* those things are awesome for wrapping up your glasses and stemware. Use them to wrap individual glasses and then lay down another level for the next layer. Side note: I feel super fancy saying ‘stemware.’

~    If you’re looking for good packing boxes, check out grocery stores (HyVee, Kroger, etc.) and liquor stores. These are very sturdy boxes and they aren’t too big, lowering the risk of overloading and ending up with a box that only Tom Hardy could carry.

~    Don’t load a big box full of books. Unless you really are friends with Tom Hardy and even then…maybe check with him first.

~    This one I’m sure you know but I’m going to say it anyway just in case a male stumbles on to this blog post: label ALL your boxes. You will not remember which one had your underwear, you will not ‘keep an eye on it,’ and your wife/mom/girlfriend might smother you with a pillow if you don’t. Just do it.

~    Pack up the freaking toys first! If you have kids, you have toys. If you have toys, you have too many toys. And if you have too many toys, your kids will be happy and refreshed to just play with boxes for a couple of weeks anyway. Trust me on this one. Leave out a few books and something they can use to hit each other with and they’re set. And you’ve already got the boxes, ‘cause you went to HyVee and got them, right?

~    Leave hanging clothes on hangers and use a plastic garbage bag to wrap them up. This works best if the garbage bag is unused, but it really depends on how smelly your trash is. That’s your call.

~    Pack one area at a time. You can use three different boxes to separate items from your closet, but stick to just your closet. Don’t pack the way my sister does. (Closet to bathroom to kids’ room to dresser to linen closet to—what was I doing? Oh! My closet!) : )

There are more ideas I want to share, so once we get to a couple of room-specific posts we’ll get into the nitty gritty details. Happy packing!

Summer Reading Plan

Eden has turned into quite the little reader lately, so I'm looking for a Reading Rewards Program that will challenge her to keep reading over the summer. I am also looking forward to spending time reading to Adaleine and working on her letters to help her earn rewards too!

Here are a few different systems that I'm mulling over. There are a TON out there, so you know I'm completely overwhelmed trying to figure out which one is the 'best' one. I give myself more grey hairs...

Yes, I know we're in the second week of June and I need to get on it already, but cut me a little slack. I'm a hard-core procrastinator.

This blog called To The Moon and Back has a list of different businesses and organizations that participate in Summer Reading Programs. Bonus!

This balloon pop idea by Chicken Babies blog seems like a lot of fun, and she's also got other programs she's used for past summers including this bookworm chart!

 

 

 

 Jamie at This Lunch Rox used these Summer Reading printables from HowDoesShe to motivate her kiddos, and she includes a really great list of books to add to you little munsters reading list. Check that out here.

 How do you get your littles to read during the summer? What system do you use? I can use all the advice I can get! :)

Traveling With Kiddos: Popsicle Stick Puzzles

Two days in a row?? There is a pretty decent chance that the world may be coming to an end, but hopefully it’s just a rush of motivation on my part.

I’m back (for the second day in a row—didn’t know if you caught that) to share another little craft idea that I stole from someone and made my own. That’s what Pinterest is for, right?!

 

 

This one wasn’t quite as quick as the Matching Tubes, but it’s one of those things you can do while you’re watching Charlotte’s Web with the kiddos. It gets harder toward the end of the movie and Charlotte dies because everything gets blurry for some reason. But I digress.

For this I had almost everything on hand already and I just printed out the pictures onto cardstock. The only thing I had to buy was the rubber cement, and I’ve been meaning to pick some up for a while anyway.

 

 

Super simple: just find pictures your little munsters will like and print them out onto cardstock. Regular printer paper would probably work too but I make no guarantees. From there I just cut them out and flipped them over so they were right-side down on my TV tray high-tech crafting surface. I brushed the rubber cement on just a little at a time since it tends to dry really fast and just lined up popsicle sticks along the back. Once I had the back of the picture glued and sticked (?), I added a little weight to make sure the sticks…stuck. It sounds like I’m not making sense, but I totally am.

 

 

Once your glue is dry, just take your handy dandy box cutter and slice those sticks apart. I was initially worried that the puzzle might be too hard since I only had the really narrow popsicle sticks, but I gave it the good ol’ college try and was able to put them together with minimal tears. Just to be safe though, I printed out a reference picture for the kids so they know what they're building.

 

 

Wouldn’t it be so cool if I could keep up this momentum and fill you in on a bunch of little projects? Yeah, I don’t think it’s going to happen either. A girl can dream : ) Have fun!

So Many Books...So Little Time

It all started in about 1991. I was eight years old and had just had my tonsils out. My favorite movie was The Little Mermaid and I had been promised lots of Jell-O and endless movie-watching while I recovered. But after about 600 viewings of my ‘favorite’ movie, it was getting lower and lower on my list of favorite things.

I’m not sure why, but my cousin (well, my second cousin actually but who’s keeping track) loaned me five books. Up until then I don’t remember being much of a reader. But all of that changed with my very first Mandie book.

 What’s really funny is that my (second) cousin didn’t lend me the first five books in this series. I think I ended up with books 6-10 but I was nevertheless completely hooked. Thus began my life as a reader. I consumed the Mandie books, saving my allowance to buy new ones when they came out and becoming more and more invested in the characters and their lives.

An argument can probably be made that I started reading so obsessively to avoid other, more messy things that were going on in my family and my life at that point. But the fact of the matter is that I’m no shrink and I just loved to read! : )

After I started to outgrow my beloved Mandie, I started another series called the Twelve Candles Club. I was so in love with this series that I even started exchanging letters with the author, Elaine Schulte. Looking back, I so appreciate her willingness to take the time and energy to answer the letters of a young girl whose life she was affecting.

I always had a book with me. I took a flashlight to bed and read under the covers waaaay past bedtime. I hid a book in my lap at school so I could read when I should be listening to the teacher (not terribly proud of that). I read in the car, I read while I walked home from school, I even took books to most family gatherings and shut myself off in a room somewhere. I loved that even though it didn’t feel like work I was learning so much and getting to experience different times, lives, and places.

Fast forward to the present. It is 2013, I have three kids, a husband who is gone a lot, a house to keep, and bills to pay. Needless to say my reading time is limited to the bathroom (just keeping it real!) and those few moments I can keep my eyes open after I crawl into bed.

I still recognize that there is so much to learn from a good book—fact or fiction—and want to continue my…education in many areas. As the stacks of books piled up and toppled over, I decided I needed to get a bit more organized about what I’ve got and what I really think will have a positive effect on the little life I live here with my munsters and husband. So I busted out one of my handy dandy notebooks, rounded up all the books on my nightstand and kitchen counter and went to work.

I have books about money and home-making, books about marriage (and sex!), books about parenting and then Pride & Prejudice. I’ve read P&P about 12 times; I just love it and I’m due to read it again. : )

After listing them all out, I decided that some of them are just going to have to wait. Sorry, Jane Austen! You’re at the bottom of the list. I’m currently reading One Thousand Gifts and Miserly Moms. I’d like to keep myself limited to reading three books at the most at once, that way I won’t get overwhelmed. Because when I get overwhelmed, only Hershey’s and Netflix can fix it. And that seems like a step in the wrong direction. : )

Do you have a list of books a mile long that you’re reading? Any tips on how to prioritize what books to read first? Does anyone else have trouble finding time to read? Take books to the bathroom? That always reminds me of that “Seinfeld” episode when George takes that book to the bathroom at the bookstore. Ah, George. 

Operation Get My Poop in a Group

You know that scene in What About Bob? where Bob is getting ready to leave his apartment? It’s been a really long time since I’ve seen that movie so I could be remembering it totally wrong, but I just picture him saying, “Baby steps to the door. Baby steps to the elevator. Baby steps to the…” You get the idea.

That’s the general idea with “Operation Get My Poop in a Group.” Where it all started is this: my house is a wreck. We moved in at the beginning of June and I had such high hopes for the organizational possibilities of this house. There are three bedrooms! A kitchen with an attached dining area! Laundry room instead of closet! Two bathrooms! Great big living room! And do you know what all of that means?!

It means zilch if I don’t just—here it is—get my poop in a group! Sorry, Mom. I know you probably think that’s inappropriate, but I toned in down from what I say in my head. : )

Here are some of the things I want to conquer: all of my kitchen cupboards (one at a time so I don’t go completely bonkers), bathroom cabinet, kids’ closet shelves, kids’ closet hanging storage, downstairs bedroom/office/dumping ground, laundry area…Hmm. Maybe I should just say I want to organize my house.

The problem is though, that I can organize it all I want but if I don’t KEEP my poop in a group so to speak, it will all be a mess again in a week. Okay, a day. So what I really want to do is find some systems that really make sense for me and my family and the way we live. Can you tell I stalk the IHeartOrganizing blog? I am unapologetically obsessed.

I decided to start off small with the cabinet where I keep my food storage containers. I also keep paper towels and extra spices up there, so I had to make sure it all worked to shove neatly arrange it all back in there. First I took it all out.

I have a bit of a mish-mash of storage containers here, but the ones on the right are AWESOME for Miss Eden's lunches

Then I went through each container and lid and matched them all together. Anything that didn’t have a match got tossed. Adios, losers!

Oh, and I also made a mental note to ask someone to buy me some glass storage containers for Christmas. Anyone?

It’s not rocket science; it took me less than ten minutes and that includes interruptions for kiddos crying and giving Eden iced animal crackers to go feed the ants. I just put on a little Allen Stone and I was in the zone.

My pared down collection

My newly organized cupboard!

See? If I can try to get my crazy house organized you can, too. One step at a time. Baby steps to the kitchen, baby steps to the cupboard, baby steps to empty out the cupboard…Good luck! : )