Organizing your Kids Part I

I know this is supposed to be a blog about organizing your house, but hey, your kids LIVE in your house so you might as well organize them too while you're at it.  I'm sure their future wives or husbands will bless you for it and it might help with your sanity as well.  

Launch Pad

I think a launch pad is an essential part of kid wrangling.  What is a launch pad, you ask?  Well, it can be just about anything - a hook, a shelf, a bulletin board, or even a chair.  What you need is a specific place to keep their bookbag, coat, lunch box, and whatever other stuff that needs to go to school with them.  Then whenever they have a homework assignment, or a permission slip, or a school book that needs to go with them, you put it in the launch pad and they have a pretty good chance of remembering it.  Note that this tip works well for parents too!  

Homework Station

This year, we started something new in addition to the launch pad.  I set up a homework station - just a little plastic organizer with a collection of file folders for completed assignments, homework in progress, and papers from the school that I need to read.  This really helps with getting the papers out of the bookbag, but not letting them get scattered all over my kitchen.  We also incorporated extra paper, pencils and other items so he can do his homework at the kitchen table where we can supervise him.  

Chore Checklist

We also started a new checklist concept this year.  My son has ADHD so getting him into daily routines and patterns is extremely important.  But as the old saying goes - you can lead a boy to college, but you can't make him think (or something like that!).  So I sat down and thought about all the things I wanted him to do in a day - make his bed, wear clean clothes, take a shower, do his homework, practice his instrument, etc.  I put them all on a checklist and put spaces for every day of the week.  As he does every item every day (hopefully!), he checks it off the list and then keeps count of his check marks.  

However, I needed to create some motivation for him to want to use the check list every day. So, what does every 10 year old boy want?  Video games.  And money.  So we decided that he could not play video games until a certain number of items were checked off his list.  If he got at least 13 out of the 17 items completed, he could earn up to an hour of video game time and he got a dollar of his allowance.  If he got at least 15 of the 17 items done, he earned a fifty cent bonus and a bit more video time.  It hasn't been a perfect system and we've refined it a bit here and there, but on the whole, it's worked better than anything else we've tried.  

Room Organization

Kid's rooms can sometimes be a nightmare.  I know mine always were.  One thing that helps is to really cut back on the amount of stuff they have to deal with.  Several years back, I started banning toys from the bedrooms and that was the best decision I ever made.  The only things I allow them to have in their rooms are clothes, books, and stuffed animals and that makes it a lot easier.  I also make sure there is a large laundry basket and a trash can.  I just recently labeled his drawers and that is also a big help, but you need to go in a couple of times a year and just help them to reorganize and restructure a bit.  

On Line Organization

One thing that has been a big help to me is my Google calendar.  I have the ability to set up recurring reminders on both my account and both my son's accounts.  I set up a schedule of reminders to clean the cat boxes, clean their rooms, have my older son and husband check the fluids in the cars, empty the trash cans, and do the vaccuuming.  That has been a really big help because I'm terrible about remembering to do things on a set schedule.  But my computer remembers for me just fine!  

Truth or Consequences

In order to accomplish all this, you need to have some consequences in place for when the kids don't do the things they are supposed to do.  We have several different methods that work for us.  First of all, it is a standing rule that if someone doesn't do an assigned chore, they not only have to do the chore the next day, they also have to do a penalty chore of my choosing.  We also have something fun where if they don't make their beds or do some other simple chore, their brother can do it and charge them $1 fee.  That's actually a pretty good incentive because it really ticks them off.  And on the chore checklist, if I catch him marking down anything he hasn't actually done, there is a two day penalty of loss of video games.  Yes, I'm a mean Mommy, but it's working and it's saving my sanity, so I declare it a good thing!    

Stop by next time and I'll give you some ideas for getting kids up and out the door in record time!  

My SITS Spring Fling Contest

Welcome SITsas and friends! My most favorite blog site - The Secret is in the Sauce or "SITS" is having their Spring Fling event today. They are not only offering a fabulous giveaway every hour all day long, but just about every SITS member is offering a give away on their blog. All you have to do is click the pretty button below to go to the site and pick which contests you'd like to enter. Fun stuff!




Naturally, I have to have a giveaway too. I have a great report for you of "Smart Tips for Smart Grocery Shoppers" and I'll include my quick 'n easy grocery list form, so you can put together your grocery list in 5 minutes or less and not forget anything you need.

There are three ways to enter the giveaway - 1. Share your favorite cleaning tip in a comment below for one entry. 2. Click my Subscription button and sign up for a new subscription for two entries. 3. If you are in the Salt Lake area, you can sign up for my next Messy Moms class which starts in two weeks. Details are in the post above and you can click on the Paypal button to pay (or I accept checks, cash, or other credit cards). That will get you an extra 5 entries!

Then click on the SITS button above to go back to the site and enter more giveaways!

This contest is now over. I've picked the winner via a randomizer.

Research Randomizer Results 1 Set of 1 Unique Numbers Per Set Range: From 1 to 24 -- Unsorted Job Status:

Set #1: 13

The winner is Tamara at Tamben7996 (I had two Tamara's in my comments). I'll be contacting you to get an address to mail your report to. Thanks so much to everyone for entering my giveaway.

Declutter Weekend

I had a very productive weekend! We were having a big party for my husband's birthday - about 18 people, so went spent most of the weekend tidying up and getting ready for the party. In the course of doing all that, we ended up removing a TRUCKLOAD of unneeded stuff out of our house. Yes, a truckload! And when you consider that our house isn't really all that cluttered, that is quite an achievement.

Here's how we did it. First I organized all the movies. This project has been in progress for a couple of weeks. As we have been repainting our basement, I decided to switch my movies and my books. I had half the books in our built-in bookshelf downstairs and half in a freestanding bookcase in my guest room and the same thing with the movies - half in the basement and half upstairs. So I decided to switch them and get them all in the same place, so it would make more sense. Here is the final result:


I sorted out all the movies by category and labeled each shelf to help keep them organized. There are chick flicks, kids movies, westerns (my husband has a whole shelf!), action movies, comedies, and dramas. As I was doing this, I sorted out all of our old home movies and put them in a special place where they would be extra safe and I also weeded out a large box of VHS movies that were either duplicates, or ones we had taped off of TV. I made a list of those movies so we can work on buying them on DVD a few at a time. I wish I'd thought to take a before picture, but believe me, it didn't look all nice & neat like this. Movies were stacked up all haphazard and messy taking up a lot more room.

Here is the final result on the bookshelves:



Again, a great improvement, though I didn't really get rid of very many books. I had already decluttered two big boxes of them before we moved into this house two years ago.

While I was putting all the movies in order, I had my son bring up his whole toy box, one drawer at a time. Now that he's 10 and very into video games and computers, he doesn't play much with toys any more. So I asked him to pick out 5 or 10 toys out of each drawer that he really wanted to keep and the rest of them went into the giveaway box. Fortunately, he's always very good natured about this and doesn't seem to mind giving away toys as long as he can keep his favorites. In fact, I think he's a little relieved to have a bit less to deal with. So, that added 2 more big boxes to the truckload.

Then our DVD player broke. I know perfectly well that we wouldn't ever get around to getting it fixed, so I just had my husband borrow the one from our basement TV for upstairs and put the old one in the truck. We have a Tivo downstairs so we rarely watch DVD's down there anyway and that's just one less piece of hardware to deal with. And I'm sure someone can take the time to fix it up.

This afternoon, I spent a couple of hours helping my youngest son organize his room. His dresser was a complete mess. Every drawer was filled to the brim with a haphazard collection of clothes with no rhyme or reason.

So we took everything out of the drawers and his closet (scary!). I sorted everything by type of clothing and size so I could see what fit and what didn't and how much we had of each type of clothing. Then I was able to determine how many drawers I needed to allocate to pants, shirts, sweatshirts, etc. In order to help him keep more organized in the future, I took my handy-dandy label maker and neatly labeled each drawer so he will know exactly where to put his clothes away and where to find clothes when he wants them. I was surprised at how many really nice items of clothing he had that were going unworn because they were hiding around at the bottom of a drawer under a stack of outgrown clothing.

That little exercise netted us a large bag of trash, plus a large box full of nice outgrown clothes and shoes. I'm sure a homeless shelter or other charity will definitely appreciate them. It was a lot of work, but it does feel so nice to have all our books, movies, toys, and kids clothing so nice and organized.

Quick cooking tip

Here is a quick and easy cooking tip I learned from a book called Queen of the Castle. It's called Whack-a-meal. What you do is pre-brown your hamburger using your crock pot. You put a couple of pounds of hamburger in your crock pot and leave it for 4 hours on low - stir every hour or so.

Then you drain it and let it cool. Then put it into gallon sized zip lock freezer bags. Be sure to get it as flat as you can and get all the air out so it won't get burned in the freezer. When you're ready to use it, you just whack it on the counter a few times to loosen up the frozen hamburger and pop it into your recipe. Isn't that clever?

New Messy Mom's Workshop for March

I am getting ready to set up a new Messy Mom's workshop starting in March. To give you a little background on my workshops, they are four week sessions that are taught right in my living room. I try to pattern my classes in a way that is similar to the Weight Watcher's format - each week we have a combination of lesson time and time for sharing our experiences. I want to hear what challenges each person has and whether or not they have benefited from the previous week's lessons. That helps me fine-tune the workshop to provide the most helpful information to you.

The reason I have it as a four week workshop is to give my students a chance to build on each week's lesson. Let's face it, we've all been down this road before, many of us several times and we have to build up our credibility all over again, both with ourselves and with our families. We've all tried the latest and greatest gimmicks, books, websites, and advice from friends and family to get our darn houses cleaned up! Some methods have been more successful than others, but I don't know many people who have had the opportunity who have been able to attend a live class like this to get ideas from a real person in a way that works for them.

Here is the basic plan for the 4 week workshop:
Week 1 - Basic daily cleaning routines and your vision for the home you want to create
Week 2 - The easy way to declutter your house and what to get rid of and how
Week 3 - Get your family on board. How to get your family to participate in the daily cleaning process without fussing, arguing and nagging, and how to get them to show more appreciation for your efforts.
Week 4 - Resources to keep you going in the future/Getting your finances in order

The base cost of the workshop is $50 for the series - prepaid. I offer a 10% discount for signing up with a friend or relative and the first 5 people to sign up with receive a free gift.

I'm starting a new advertising program, so I am expecting these classes to fill up pretty quickly. If you want to reserve a spot, you'll want to contact me pretty quickly. Click HERE to E-mail me for more info or click the Paypal button to sign up for a class.

Slacking off a bit

Dear blog friends - I hope you don't think I'm ignoring you. I know I haven't posted as often as I normally do, or visited your blogs as much either, but it's just been busy lately. I've had 4 stamping events to prepare for over the last two weeks, so I've been spending a LOT of time in my stamp room lately and my husband has been making rather pointed comments about me staying up later and later to mess around on my computer.

So, I've decided to just cut myself a little bit of a break and not give myself a hard time if I don't get my posts put together as often as I would like. Hope you understand!

Learning to Let Go

I think I am in a unique position to understand the importance of not hoarding things. Over the course of our marriage, we have lost all four of our parents and had to clean out two full houses worth of "stuff". And believe me, these people were hoarders. Not the scary type of hoarders who save mountains of newspapers and stuff, but normal Mom & Pop type hoarders.

It made me sad when I was going through my Mom's house, particularly her craft room, which was crammed to the rafters with unfinished projects, art supplies, and expensive, unread craft books. I kept thinking if she'd spent more of that time and money on doing fun stuff with us instead of all this useless junk, what great memories I would have instead of cussing her while I was wading through all this stuff and trying to sell it for pennies on the dollar at an estate sale.

You need to think long term and realize how this might come to roost on your children. If things go in the normal way, you might have 20, 30, or even 40 years before this becomes an issue, but we all know that this can happen very unexpectedly. My cousin and his wife died suddenly and violently in their mid-30's and left behind 3 orphaned children. Things like that happen sometimes, and if something terrible like that happens, do you want your children to have to deal with your whole house full of junk, in addition to all the other traumatic stuff they would have to deal with?

Cleaning out a house after a death is a terrible thing. It's exhausting, both physically and emotionally, it's heartbreaking, it's frustrating and annoying, and it's just about the least fun thing you can imagine doing. My in-laws were very clean people and not pack rats (so we thought) but we had a big eye opener when we started digging into the drawers and closets and all the little hidden areas of the house - ugh! They had saved every pay stub, every birthday card, every paid bill, and 20 years worth of bank statements - what a mess. And because we were out of state, we had three days to do the whole house. I've never worked so hard in my entire life and my kids and husband did too. Everyone hated me by the end of the week, but we got most of it done and the neighbors and people from Goodwill had to deal with the rest of it.

So take a minute a go around your house and put yourself in your kid's shoes and imagine them having to deal with your house if something happened to you. Then take some action and get rid of some of that stuff.

On another note - do you have a will and a trust? Yes, I can see your eyes rolling. I can see that guilty look on your face. This is something you HAVE TO DO! Yes, I am yelling. As I said, we have lost 4 parents and not one of them had a really proper will set up and it cost us THOUSANDS of dollars - real serious actual dollars that we could have used to buy cars, pay for college, or put towards retirement and instead it was just wasted on lawyers, court fees, and other unnecessary expenses. I think most people have no idea at all about what happens to your property after you die. Let's look at two scenarios:

John and Sally are married and own a house that is in both of their names. They have two kids and no will. John suddenly has a heart attack and dies. In this scenario, Sally would have no access to any money other than what she can grab out of their checking account or what she might have stashed in her name. She can't sell the house, his vehicle, or any personal belongings of his until it is cleared by the court, which may take months and will require very high cost legal representation. Our lawyer cost us $38,000 for a simple transfer of property. If you can't come up with that kind of money (and who can these days?), you are going to be stuck with a property that you can't easily sell and will still have to make payments on and maintain.

If the estate is large enough to require probate, the state will automatically take 10-18% right off the top. Chew on that for a minute. Sally will most likely be awarded custody of the children, but if some relative decides to kick up a fuss and paint a bad picture of her, that could even be a chancy thing and they could end up placed with another relative or even in foster care. And in the meantime, Sally is grieving, trying to figure out how she is going to support her family, dealing with insurance companies, and lawyers, and real estate agents, maybe for the first time ever and she is going to be tearing her hair out and downing tranquilizers just to keep her sanity.

Now here is the second scenario. Same circumstances, but John and Sally had a properly written will and have a simple trust set up with their house and all their major property in it. The house, vehicles, and all other property passes smoothly and automatically to Sally and all she has to do is show the death certificate to the proper parties and have John's name removed from the assets. She can mortgage them or start selling them the day after the funeral if she so chooses with no questions asked, no lawyers needed, and a minimum of taxes to be paid. Custody of the children is prearranged with backup plans set in place as needed if both couples were to die or become incapacitated.

Which scenario would you choose? I know which one we would. About a month after my father-in-law passed and we saw what a heck of a mess we were in for with his estate, we found a good estate lawyer for our own estate. We didn't have to go far, we found one right at the end of our street. We sat down with him for about 2 hours, answered some questions, made some decisions, and paid him about $1,000, which was without a doubt the best money we've ever spent! Then in less than a week, we had a will for each of us, a trust, power of attorney forms, guardianship forms and everything needed for every possible combination of catastrophes that could befall our family.

That's more than I usually share in a public blog about my finances, but this is something I feel so strongly about. As an adult, you have a duty to put your business in order to protect your family - you just have to. You need life insurance, wills, backup custody plans, the whole enchilada. 'Cuz I've been on the receiving end of a situation like this and I'll tell you, it ain't a pretty picture and it is easily the most stressful period of my life and I'm not about to put my kids through all that and I hope you won't either.