Archive for the 'Family Organization' Category

My new corner office - and the job to go with it.   

January 1, 2009 | 2 Comments

The Feminists lied to me!

As a child of the late 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with the general understanding that housekeeping was what a woman did if she lacked the education, ambition, or intelligence to do anything else.  Running a household was the most mindless thing a woman could do.  Of course we could work 80 hours a week and slip in a little housework here and there.  No big deal, right?

Ha!

I’ve done both.  Ok, maybe I’ve never pulled an 80-hour work week.  Not even in the late 90’s when you had to put in 80-hour work weeks before the cool geeks would even give you the time of day.  Sorry, I guess I missed out on that bit of geek cred.  I kinda like sleep occasionally.  But I’ve been a working mother with a corporate job, a work-at-home Mom running my own businesses, and even (for brief periods) a stay-at-home Mom with no outside work responsibilities.

Anybody who tells you that managing a household is mindless has never actually done it.  Running a household - at least a household like mine! - is like negotiating Middle East peace, balancing the federal budget, running a corporation, and changing blow-out diapers, all at the same time at 4 AM on the day after Thanksgiving at WalMart.

For quite some time, I’ve been operating under the idea that if I could only get things to a baseline, get everything organized and figured out, life would run smoothly.  Unfortunately, I really need peace and quiet to do that kind of thinking, and well…that’s a pretty rare commodity around here.  Rather than giving up on the idea and just accepting life as one crisis after another, I’m trying another tactic:

I’ve taken a new job:  CEO of Ballad Family, Inc.

Responsibilities include oversight of various divisions including Education, Food Service, Accounting, Human Resources, and Site Maintenance.

Salary: $1000 per month.

According to the budget, there should be about $1000 left over at the end of every month.  So why have we been living paycheck to paycheck?  I have no idea.  I can’t even begin to tell you where that $1000 goes every month.  So, that’s my first goal.  To accurately track our budget, eliminate waste, and stick that $1000 into a savings account where it can’t go wandering off.  To achieve this, I’ll need to examine each area of this operation and streamline it.

I’ll be sharing my progress with you, in the hopes that what I’m doing will inspire and give you some practical tools to use in your own household.

And yes, I even have a corner office.  My Christmas present from DH was a complete re-organizatin of our bedroom.  What was once a storage and sleeping room is now an oasis of order!  I’ll post more about that on Tuesday, when I re-join Tackle it Tuesdays.

Tackle it Tuesday: The Laundry Room   

April 15, 2008 | 8 Comments

Ok, this is one of those tackles that makes me look around and wonder WHY on Earth it took so long to figure this out. Ah well, that’s life, right?

My laundry room has always been a messy area with piles of dirty laundry arranged on the floor - one pile for whites, one for colors, one for reds, one for jeans, one for towels and linens. As you can imagine, with a family of 5, those piles get big and topple over on a pretty regular basis!

When you have little boys doing their part to carry dirty laundry downstairs to the laundry room, that doesn’t exactly contribute to the neatness factor. I’ve never caught them at it, but I suspect sometimes those piles of laundry are a bit too tempting and get jumped in too!

Sure, this isn’t exactly a life-altering burst of inspiration, but it’s amazing how a half-dozen plastic bins can make a huge difference! Last weekend, I found 32 gallon plastic bins on clearance for about $7 each (ok, so they’re pastel blue and purple, Easter colors, but who cares? They’re in the laundry room!). I bought one for each of my laundry piles and voila! No more laundry on the floor, and the whole laundry area takes up a lot less space.

This was such a spur-of-the moment Tackle, I don’t even have before pictures (although if you saw my Basement Storage Room Tackle, you’ll get a pretty good feel for what the laundry room looked like….). Here’s the After picture though - I’m sure you can see the vast improvement! That reminds me, I need to switch laundry while I’m down there taking pictures!

As an added bonus, the clothes are easier to sort now too, because the piles are clearly separated. So now I have boys who can carry dirty laundry to the basement and put their own clean clothes away, I feel a lesson on separating laundry coming on! (Hey, at least I can rest easy knowing that they won’t go to college without a clue how to achieve clean clothes.)

Crisis Management - How Not to Fall Off the Face of the Earth   

April 7, 2008 | Comments

I haven’t posted here in - what, over a week now? - and I’ve missed it! Unfortunately, just as everything seemed to be chugging along fairly normally, 3 separate crisis situations landed in my lap. And that’s not counting the fact that my husband and one of the boys were sick all weekend, and today I have all 3 boys home with fever and coughing.

That reminds me - gotta call the school and let them know the boys won’t be there today!

Ok, that’s done.

So I have two reasons for posting today. (Ok, 3. I feel horribly guilty about not posting in so long!) First, crises happen to the best of us. No matter how organized and on top of things we try to be, stuff happens. Second, life turning upside down is not an indictment on your ability to manage your life.

I spent a good chunk of last week flirting with a relapse into major depression because I blamed myself for the mess life had become. If I had only been more organized, more disciplined, more psychically in tune with circumstances beyond my knowledge or control, none of this would have happened!

Perhaps.

However, until I develop psychic powers and the ability to function on less than 8 solid hours of sleep (better yet, 9), crises are going to keep happening. That’s just reality. What matters is how I deal with them. I’ll be honest, by gut instinct is to curl up under a blanket and hide. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them go away. Most of the time it just makes the crisis bigger.

So, I’m being brave this week. I’m facing each crisis individually, as rationally as I can, and dealing with the uncertainty. What else can I do? If I try and hide, the boys come find me

Guess what? Facing these situations head-on makes them less scary. I might not have made a lot of friends today as I dealt with things, but that’s not the point. Ok, so I’ve been downright blunt today. (I like to call it “honest”!) I haven’t sugar-coated anything. I’ve explained, in some detail, exactly what the problem is as I see it and exactly what actions I expect from each individual person involved.

So far, so good. I can’t say that anything is 100% solved yet, but at least I’m not hiding from the problems any more.

As for the second reason I’m posting today - that life turning upside down is not an indictment on our ability to manage - sometimes circumstances are simply outside of our control. And sometimes there’s just so much going on that something falls through the cracks. It happens! And life goes on.

And you know what? Anybody who gives you a hard time or makes you feel like a failure because you missed something either has entirely too much time on their hands, or is covering up their own failures.  Ignore them.  They aren’t particularly helpful, and therefore you don’t have time for those people.  People who encourage you and reaffirm your inner strength, on the other hand, are the emotional equivalent of dark chocolate and a really good massage.  You always have time for them!

Tackle it Tuesday: Three Year Olds Can Put Away Laundry!   

March 11, 2008 | 6 Comments

First off, I apologize - I meant to have photos to post of this project, but my camera up and died yesterday! Hopefully it’s just the battery and I’ll be able to post photos later this week.

Ok, now on to today’s Tackle. I have a family of 5 - soon to be 6 (if you haven’t already, check out the nursery blogging project!), and with our 3-year old potty training, let’s just say we generate a LOT of laundry! One of the biggest challenges to all this laundry hasn’t been getting it put through the washer and dryer, but getting it all put away. I can get through about 4-5 loads of laundry in a day if I stay on top of it, and it’s easier for me to put it all away at the end of the day, rather than put each load away individually. I usually sort and fold laundry while the kids are in their bath.

Here’s the problem with my existing system: by the time I have the clothes sorted and folded, the boys are ready for bed. I can’t really get the clothes into their dressers and closet while they’re trying to go to sleep, so their clothes end up being stored in laundry baskets.

That’s gotta end - it’s driving me nuts!

There are two reasons that the boys couldn’t put their own clothes away: First, they would have to accurately figure out which clothes belonged to which person, and second, they would have to remember which drawer each item of clothing belonged in.

On the first point - figuring out which person each item belonged to - I bought 3 smallish laundry baskets. They’re just big enough to hold one boy’s clothes, and small enough for them to carry or push them down the hall to their room. I labeled them with each boy’s name in their favorite color. As I’m folding, I sort the clothes into each boy’s basket.

On the second point - helping them remember which drawers are theirs and which holds shirts, pants, etc. - I’m turning that problem into a homeschooling opportunity! Our oldest is starting to read independently, our middle son is starting to sound out words, and our youngest is learning to recognize his name and his brothers’ names.

I found index cards with manuscript lines printed on them, and some clip art showing shirts, pants, and pajamas. I made three cards for each boy, and wrote a label for each drawer in the boy’s favorite color, then taped a picture of the clothing item to the card.

Now, each boy has a color-coded laundry basket with his name on it, and three drawers with color-coordinated labels with his name, the word for the appropriate clothing item, and a picture of the clothing that belongs in that drawer.

To test the theory, I lined up the full baskets in the hallway outside their room, and sent them each in to put their laundry away. It worked - even my 3 year old got all of his clothes put away in the correct drawers!

I’ll try to get pictures posted later this week, once my camera is working again.

Tackle it Tuesday: The Monthly Budget   

March 4, 2008 | 4 Comments

Ok, this week’s project wasn’t nearly as inspiring or creative as last week’s Big Board, but it’s arguably just as crucial. This weekend I tackled our budget for March. I’ll admit, I dread the project every month, but when it’s done I have to admit I feel like a huge weight has been lifted.

It’s fear of the unknown. Unless I write out a budget for the month, I have literally no idea whether or not we’ll have enough cash to make it through the month - and odds are we’ll end up with a nasty surprise around the 15th because we just didn’t keep track of how much we were actually spending.

So there you go - it’s not glamorous, but it’s necessary for maintaining sanity. Of course, writing up the budget is the easy part. Sticking to it all month is what gets difficult.

That’s my big question in this post. WHY on Earth is it so darn hard to stick to a budget? Sometimes unexpected expenses pop up. I understand that. But even when that’s not the case it seems like the math I do at the beginning of the month never seems to match up to reality by the end of the month. Any ideas as to why this is and how to make math reflect reality?

End of the month, time to plan!   

February 27, 2008 | Comments

It’s February 27. This Saturday is March 1.

So what? In my experience, the last few days of the month is the most crucial. If I scratch out time today or tomorrow to write out our budget for next month and plan the projects I know are coming up in March, odds are around 90% that we will stay withing budget and complete most or all of what we want to.

If I don’t get around to working up the budget and planning the month until sometime during the first week of March, guess what? First off, we will have already gone over budget one way or another. Second, I’ll feel like I’m playing catch-up all month long, and I won’t get nearly as much done as I’d like.

So that’s the goal for the next two days - write up a budget and plan out the projects I need to tackle in March.

Tackle it Tuesday: The Big Board   

February 26, 2008 | 11 Comments

Shauntelle over at A Beautiful Abode suggested that I should join the Tackle It Tuesday meme, so here goes. My big project this week is the Big Board. I tried to get pictures, but it’s kinda hard to photograph something transparent, so I’ll just give you the quick rundown.

I’m a very visual person. I need to see everything going on, for my own mental health. If I can’t see it, I’m likely to forget about it, and that usually has consequences. Bad consequences. So there’s the background for this project. There’s a lot going on in this family, and I need to be able to see it all at once.

I have my household notebook, but it’s simply not big enough to show me everything at once. I decided what I really needed was a really big whiteboard - ideally about 3′ x 4′. I could go bigger, but that’s the size of the wall space I can devote to this. When I priced out whiteboards of that size at the office store, well….I decided that household organization probably isn’t worth a week’s worth of groceries for the family. So - it’s time to get creative.

Step 1. Get a big sheet of plexiglass. I spent $19.95 for a sheet that measures 3′ x 4′ at the local home improvement warehouse. While you’re there, pick up some picture wire and some strong wall hooks. I’m using Hercules Hooks because they’re rated to 150 lbs. and don’t need to be drilled into a stud.

Step 2. Drill two holes at the top corners of the plexiglass.

Step 3. Thread the picture wire through the holes and knot securely on the back side.

Step 4. Put the Hercules Hooks into the wall so they line up nice and straight.

Step 5. Hang the Big Board.

Not too hard, huh? The great part is, plexiglass takes dry erase markers perfectly. They erase better than real whiteboards do, I think. There’s no scrubbing, and no ghost lines left if you leave something up for a week or more.

Now, I have a different color for each member of the family, an area where I list out what I need to do each day for about a week, and a brainstorming area for - well, brainstorms, notes to self (or others!), and general mind dumping.

We’ve had this up for about 10 days now, and the family has already learned that if they need me to know about something, they write it on the Big Board. If it’s not on the Big Board, I don’t know about it and I’m not responsible for remembering it!

So there you go. My first Tackle It Tuesday post. Here’s to plenty more!

The Weakest Link   

February 22, 2008 | Comments

We’ve all heard the phrase “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Well, this week I made a very revealing discovery. When it comes to keeping a household running smoothly, there are two basic methods:

• The CEO method, in which there is one primary person in charge of keeping the whole system running smoothly.
• The Co-Op method, in which everyone has responsibility for some part of the system, and enough knowledge of the rest of the system to step in if one person is unavailable.

Wanna take a quick guess as to which method most of us use?

In our house, I’m the organized one. I accept that. I’m really good at planning, organizing, and coming up with new ways of getting things done. I’m also only one person, and a pretty average one at that. I don’t have some extraordinary gift for squeezing 25 hours out of the day.

My family is generally good about helping out - as long as I tell them exactly what I need done, and give them a deadline to have it done by. Unfortunately, when I got sick early this week and ended up spending three days essentially on bedrest, everything ground to a screeching halt. Literally. By Wednesday evening, the family ate frozen pizza off of paper plates. (Not that there’s anything wrong with either frozen pizza or paper plates on occasion!) Laundry hasn’t been done since Monday. Don’t ask about the shortcuts we’ve taken in homeschooling this week!

The CEO method of household management has its benefits - you have a single point of contact for household management questions, and well, sometimes management by committee just doesn’t work.

If several members of your family are good at organizing and managing, the Co-op method might just work for you - one person is responsible for laundry, another deals with meals, someone else does the planning.

It’s a great idea, but a pure Co-op method won’t work in our family so we need a hybrid approach. And we have a hard deadline to implement it - if I’m still occupying the corner office in this household when the baby arrives in May . . . I don’t want to see the chaos I’ll come home to!

So here’s the plan.

I’m expanding upon my current household notebook, and will document a lot of the processes that I “just know” right now - like the stuff that I know goes on every week’s grocery list, and how long we can let dishes or laundry go before nobody can eat or get dressed. The overall goal here is to ensure than when/if I am gone for several days at a time, the entire household won’t grind to a halt again.

Wish me luck! This isn’t a small project, and I’ll post progress here as I go along.

There’s no such thing as a small victory   

February 11, 2008 | 1 Comment

A victory is a victory, period!

This weekend, I had a pretty ambitious list of stuff to get done. This was the first weekend we were home after traveling the for the past two weekends, so I was in major catch-up mode. On Friday night, I made a comprehensive list of everything that needed to get done, appointments we had, everything. I wrote it on a big sheet of newsprint (borrowed from the kids’ art supplies!) and tacked it up on the living room wall.

By Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted and convinced that we had spent all weekend running and gotten nothing done. Until I started marking off all the tasks that we had accomplished, and I realized that we had actually finished well over half of what I planned. Considering the ambitiousness of the plan, getting half of it done is a real victory!

When we label our victories over the craziness that is life “small” we minimize the time, effort, and creativity that went into those accomplishments! There’s no such thing as a “small” victory! Take the time to celebrate your victories and see how much more motivated you are to keep on going, even on days when your motivation is practically non-existent.

Little Luxuries   

February 9, 2008 | Comments

We all have those small things in life that tell us “Everything is ok,” or “Life is under control.” For me, it’s a good mocha - or if I’m at home, it’s the luxury of sitting on the couch drinking a cup of coffee while it’s still hot. Or the ultimate luxury: baking fresh bread. It’s been a couple of years, at least, since I’ve been able to spend a day in the kitchen creating loaves of sourdough and potato-rosemary bread.

All these little things that speak to me, that tell me “Life is as it should be” are all based on two things: time and resources. Baking bread and drinking a hot cup of coffee take time, without the sense of guilt that I should be doing something else, something more productive. They also require resources (which implies planning). A hot cup of coffee requires a clean coffee cup, beans, and filters. Baking requires ingredients - sufficient flour, fresh yeast, live sourdough starter or fresh herbs.

Life - my life at least - is loud, messy, and often chaotic. I have a lot of balls in the air at any one time, and juggling them requires me to be at the top of my game pretty much all the time. Providing myself with the time and resources to indulge in those little luxuries is one way that I am able to provide everyone else with what they need.

Sure, I don’t get that hot cup of coffee every morning - this morning, for example, I woke up at 1:30am when my 3 year old had a bad dream and needed to sleep with Mama, then again at around 3am when my 4 year old joined us and my husband fled to the relative peace and quiet of the couch. At 5:30, I got tired of hushing my wide-awake 3 year old so he wouldn’t wake his brother and sent him downstairs to watch Baby Einstein videos with his Daddy. At 7am, my darling little insomniac threw a screaming fit just outside my bedroom door. Time to give up on getting any sleep at all! Needless to say, on the morning that I really needed a hot cup of coffee and 15 minutes of peace and quiet . . . winning the lottery was probably more likely.

Life is like that sometimes, and you have to roll with it. But I know that this evening, after the kids are asleep, I’ll spend an hour or so on my latest home organization project (more details about that little gem coming soon!). It’s work, but I know how much stress it will relieve, so I’m actually looking forward to it.

What are your little luxuries? The symbols in your life that tell you all is right with the world?