My Own Personal Weirdness – Page 19

Crafts, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL #15 & my scrapping rules

Well, today was an easy day on the challenge, as I had already done all my medicine when doing my medicine cabinet & linen cabinet earlier in the challenge. Instead I spent my day organizing old photos (the drawer of scary is mostly done now; just the unlabeled to figure out now) & scrapbooking Christmas 2010 for each of the kids, plus my own album.

This brings me to my new scrapbooking rules for the year:

1) I have to scrapbook something every week, preferably one event per child plus one event for my own scrapbook.
2) I have to use what I already have in my stash, with the exception of glue/tape, unless I totally run out of background papers (unlikely, but that’s the next thing I might run out of).
3) I have to finish last month’s photos before I start this month. If I get past last month, I need to go back through the photo stash and scrap something else from the already printed photos.
4) I have to wait for the photos to go on sale on one of my printing sites or stores before printing anything new. In desperation (meaning there were no sales this month and I’m out of past photos to scrap), I can print locally for regular prices.

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organization Challenge, Day 14

Today’s challenge was to clean out your bathroom under-the-sink areas. I have two bathrooms, but both cupboards were already clean (I did them a couple weeks ago). Here they are, all clean & tidied:

So instead I cleaned out the drawers/other cupboard in my two bathrooms sink areas.

Here’s my sink-side drawer:

Mostly I just took out some stuff that needed to live in the “extras container” I made yesterday or on my bedside table (my mouth guard & glasses case), and put in another longer organizer leftover from one of the other rounds of organizing. The small darker organizer holds my barrettes & bobby pins, the bigger white one underneath holds the longer hair bands & ponytail holders. The front white container holds all my makeup (and no longer contains any jewelry or safety pins).

Here’s the cabinet under the drawer:

I took out all the kid pictures (why were they even there? no idea), put the curling irons into a basket, as I don’t use them that often, and my hair dryer stays out by itself, as I use it all the time. In the back lives my travel bag, filled with all the little travel sized items. The bottom shelf holds my velcro curlers (not often used, so at the back), largest headbands (the kind with long tails hanging down to mimic a scarf), the roller brush that needs to go to my mom’s house, and my weekly facial/special hair oil type stuff. All tidy now. No more swearing at the tangled cords for me!

Next up, the kids bathroom:

I organized that top drawer with a rubbermaid bin that holds all their toothbrushes (why so many for 3 kids? no idea!), toothpaste, dental floss, etc. The other side has their hairbrushes, combs, travel bag, and first aid what-to-do card (in case I hit my head again and require first aid). Middle drawer (kid towels, hand towels for that bathroom, and kid washcloths) just got refolded and stacked. Third drawer (swimsuits) got checked for size, the too-small-for-anyone one’s removed for goodwill, and the rest refolded & restacked.

I really hope that those places aren’t on tomorrow’s list for tidying, but if they are, well, I have a whole other project that I was needing to do this week anyways that I’ll do in it’s place. 🙂

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organization Challenge, Day 13

Yesterday was Day 13 of the 21 day challenge, but as we do Saturday as our Sabbath, I’m doing my cleaning today instead. Today’s challenge was to clean out our medicine cabinets. Now I’ve been looking at everyone else’s and for the most part they are doing those little behind-the-mirror places, but I don’t have one of those. I have a big closet o’ medicines and other supplies in my bathroom. So that’s what I did. (The medicine stuff for the kids bathroom was covered when I did the linen closet, which is the giant cabinet in their bathroom – even bigger than mine.) I discovered a) disgusting black mold in the top of the top two shelves, b) lots of extra razors & tampons, only 7 items that went into other cabinets, and d) only 4 items that went into the trash. Other than the mold, that was actually pretty good. (And the mold was only there because we have no ventilation in that bathroom. No vent, no fan, and no working window.) I took stuff out of all the cupboards, scrubbed the whole cabinet down with bleach, regrouped some of it according to who used it or how often it was used, and put it all back in. I removed the annoying under-the-shelf shelves out because they just made it harder to access stuff in the back and used the ice bin I’d removed from the freezer to store some stuff upright that I normally didn’t see in there (massage related books & supplies). I moved the tiered shelving I took out of the spice cabinet for the most frequently used medicine and put the extras & not-often-used stuff behind it all. I moved some of the cleaning supplies down below the sink, a few odds & ends out into their various homes, and tossed four expired supplements.

I Really Do Cook, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Saving Money

ABFoL Organizational Challenge, Day 12

Day 12 of the organizing challenge brought us to the spice cabinet, which I’d been thinking I’d organize this week anyway (on my modified Flylady calendar it’s the kitchen/dining room/laundry area week, so I’ve been very happy with the overlap on this last few challenges). I took all the spices out, made circle labels for the tops, organized them into bins (recycled from fruit cartons to save money) according to how I use them, and put them back away. Most things stayed on their original shelves, but I made sure that second shelf had labeled columns that made sense, rather than everything thrown in there willy-nilly. (And yes, to those observant folks, I do keep super glue & sharpies in there. That little bit of counter there is useless for most things besides drying wet glued items and labeling things.) That third shelf just got tidied, as that top shelf is too small to store anything anyway other than flat. The circle labels were made using the big sheets of sticker paper Wal-mart used to give out when you got portraits there (the software to make the stickers did not make cute things, so I never got around to using it) and my handy-dandy circle punches (which saved me money since I didn’t have to go out and buy little circle stickers!).

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organizational Challenge, Day 11

For Day 11, we’re supposed to clean out our freezers. We have two, the little one in the house (which is the one I use) and the big one in the garage (which scares me). I chose to do the one in the house. The big one would have required a lot of me climbing into the freezer to pull things out (it’s a chest freezer) and knowing my luck I’d get stuck in there and die.

Here’s what I did: I threw out all the old egg whites I’d been saving but never using. I threw out the orange peels because I never could get a hang of that recipe that used them. I put all the ice pack-type stuff in the door, where I can find them, except the larger ones which now live in between the two bins in the bottom. I sorted out all the fruits & veggies into the bin on the left and the nuts & grains into the one on the right. Ice cream and sorbet stayed on the top shelf in the back (we never eat them), meat moved up to the top shelf, the ice cube tray that held the trays moved out (we never put ice in there anyways), and the juice moved front & center so the kids could find them for easy lunch making. And that is all. The spouse says that if I really want to try organizing the big freezer that he can help me tomorrow afternoon on that. I’m okay with not know what’s out there, I really am.

My Own Personal Weirdness

“A bowl full of Lemons” challenges

Over at the blog “A Bowl Full of Lemons” they’re having a 21 days to organized house challenge and since I’m doing some of that already, I thought I’d join in with my before and afters for a bit of fun. I started late – on Monday night – so this is just a couple days of catch-up to get in sync with the rest of the group.

Day One was to clean your Junk Drawer. Well, my computer area junk drawer was already tidied earlier this year (hehe), so I went for the kitchen junk drawer. I looked to see what I’d need, ran over to Dollar Tree to get some supplies, then came back and started to work. Well, there was so much stuff in there that I had to send the overflow to the silverware drawer.

Day Two was to clean the top area of your computer desk. Mine was in desperate need of that, so I was quick to finish that one. I got inspiration from the original post to use a little mini tower I had leftover from the craft room move on the desk. The kids already love having it there full of pens and tape and notepaper that they can use! (They’ve been banned from my scrapbooking desk)

Day Three was to clean out your “Tupperware” cabinet. I did my storage container drawer. I bought two tall boxes while at the Dollar Tree earlier to hold a) the small containers the kids use for lunches and b) the lids to the rest of the smaller containers.

Day Four was to clean out your linen closet and ohwow did mine need it! I found 3 full size sheets (for a bed we got rid of 5 years ago), 10 twin sheet sets (only keeping 2 sheet sets per kid, 2 sets for us adults), 9 toddler sized sheets, a whole lot of curtains that didn’t fit our house’s needs when we moved in (7 years ago), and a huge number of empty bandage wrappers. The sheets & curtains all went to Goodwill and the trash went out the door, too. (Those boxes across the top hold china and off-season kitchen goods)

Day Five was to clean out your under-the-kitchen-sink area. Mine wasn’t too bad off, but I did repackage all those little refill bottles that we got on sale last year into something more managable.

Day Six was to clean out your dresser drawers. Umm. The one that needed the most work I had done a few weeks ago, but the rest got purged a little and now I can find all my socks again. Yay for socks! Also I had too many pairs of pajamas, most more than five years old. I’m sending one pair to my mom’s house and one to my mother-in-law’s house and now I can go visit without having to worry about “Did I pack my pj’s?” (No photos here as I am disinclined to show you all my underwear.)

Day Seven was to clean out your pantry. My pantry needed some TLC and I managed to get all my baking supplies into a basket for easy baking fun! 🙂 I also used baskets to tame the Back 40 where the rarely used supplies (Seaweed? Check. Shortening? Check. Oil for the FryDaddy? Check.) go. The flour, sugar, & shortening moved upwards to live with the rest of the baking supplies and the giant bowls moved out to the garage (we bought them for a church event; I will check and see if the church needs them before donating them).

Day Eight was also a scary day, as my front hallway closet could kill you, or at least the bottom half could. EVIL. As I cleared it out I realized two things: 1) I have too many bags and 2) my husband has too many gimme caps. So I stacked the hats all up for my husband to peruse when he comes home (he has 4 slots in the organizer free to store hats, so he can keep 8, I figure) and I put my donation pile into some of the bags I don’t want to keep (win/win, right?). I moved games and puzzles out of the closet to go live with the other games (except Risk, which has 8 trillion pieces so I think it still needs to live up high).

Day Nine was the Toy Organization challenge. I have to admit that that is one we’ve been working on for a while in this household. The kids get so many toys each year, even with our in-laws giving “experience” gifts and us only buying one present per kid per holiday, it gets pretty ridiculous around here. We do make them clear out a few things before each birthday or holiday, but that’s just not doing it for us anymore, not with three kids to one bedroom, so we’re allowing a bit of a spread of the stuff to make it easier on all of us. The Lego bricks and more solitary toys live in the Room of Requirement, the games all live out in the living room (which is where we play them anyway), sports stuff lives in the garage or outside, and the rest is in the kids room. (I took more photos, but this post is getting long enough!)

Day Ten (that’s today!) was to clean out your laundry room. Fortunately for me, that was on my own list for today! 🙂 Mostly I just tidied up, labeled the shelves, wiped them down, wiped down the washer & dryer & walls, hung things back up, and put things back in place.

Crafts, My Own Personal Weirdness

A little bit craftier

After spending the better part of the last 4 months decluttering & tidying up the house and developing a routine for cleaning that actually works, I’m finally getting around to the point that there’s time in my schedule to do a bit of crafting each day. Here’s what I made a couple days ago:

Part of it is that snowman that I had so much trouble photographing. Part of it is a little collage Greg and I made of paper and sidewalk chalk and glitter glue. The rest is an old frame that had seen better days and yet more glitter glue (plus a little sheet of paper that says “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow). It hangs in my back hallway across from the Kid Command Center.

Speaking of the Kid Command Center, let me introduce you to that as well:

We’d been having our family calendar in the front hallway, kids school notes on the fridge, our chore lists (now just called “dailies”) in the back hallway, and it was all confusion! So we made a Kid Command Center (why yes, we are a house full of boys!) in the back hallway by their rooms. I used an old bulletin board that had four frames around it that no one ever used (the board is too small for my uses in the craft area). The frames hold a list for each kid of their dailies (which just sounds better than chores, right?). Each kid has a slightly different list, according to age and need. Since they’re behind glass, we can mark things off daily with a dry erase marker, which makes me happy in so many ways (no more printing lists! save the trees! oh my sanity!).

I also have my Must Do list up there. We had a funny moment when I was trying to shrink our lists down to fit and mine kept overflowing out it’s frame. One of the kids said “Mommy, your list is sooooo long! Is that why you’re always tired?” *sigh* Mine now has two entries that basically say “Do one thing from the weekly/monthly list.” Other things on the lists: piano, scout activities, Bible time, personal reading for everyone, picking up toys (which already needs to be rephrased to “Pick things up off the floor” not just toys, as the boys now have more shoes than I do).

Yesterday I started the process of moving out of the craft room. I know, I know. I was so excited to have a craft room, but you know what? I realized one day that every time I go to do some kind of craft or to make a gift or something, I go into the craft room, gather up my stuff, come out into the living room or my bedroom or the kitchen and do my work there. The craft room idea would be great if a) it wasn’t so ever loving dark in there and b) I didn’t feel like I was stuck away from everyone. And yes, I did try lamps (Nick got me a cute little task light that I love) and letting the kids bring stuff in to do while I was in there. But what happened was that the room turned into the dumping ground room. So yesterday I cleared all the junk out of my grandmother’s desk, put all of the craft supplies that I found elsewhere around the house (the ones I use on a daily basis, I guess, since they weren’t in the craft room) into it, then grabbed my big wheeled cart that I thought was full of supplies and started emptying that. And that’s where the craziness started. I thought I had all these boxes full of craft supplies. Bins and bins of them. But as I emptied out drawers what I saw was a lot of memory stuff (kids papers, kids art, movie stubs, fliers from places we’d ate at or went to) and not as many of the craft supplies that I’d been expecting (Oh I do have a lot, don’t get me wrong, it’s just a manageable amount). So after hours of sorting all my supplies miraculously fit into my grandmothers desk and the little cart next to it. (The memory stuff? Not so much. I need a whole other day to sort through that and figure out where I’m storing it).

What’s going to happen to the craft room/studio/study-oh (as Greg calls it)? We’ve decided to make it our Cave of Solitude. But that’s another blog post. 🙂

Around the House, Family Time, health, I Am Traveling, My Own Personal Weirdness, Parenting

Happy New Year: 2011!

It has been a sincerely and completely crazy week. I’m not even going to try to tell all of it, that’s how insane it’s been.

Monday we wrote in our workbooks, ran Zhu-zhu & Kung Zhu hamsters all over the house, made food in the Easy Bake oven, looked up recipes to make reasonably priced food in the Easy Bake Oven, and generally stayed in our pajamas until it was long past time to be out of them.

Tuesday we did more of the same, but this time ventured out to a Post Holiday Jollies party at Double Daves with my former MOPS friends.
The kids ran around like crazy, the adults ate far too much in an attempt to recomp some of the money we spent on food the kids weren’t eating, and we generally laughed a lot and agreed that Christmas is totally ridiculous. A good time was had by all. 🙂

Wednesday we got up and after a couple false starts drove to Ft. Worth for D’s orthopedic visit. We got completely turned around at some point (bad directions, yay) and ended up getting to our appointment with only 4 minutes to spare, which was agonizing, as we’d left more than an hour of leeway in our schedule. My friend Kay watched the younger two at the park (along with her two) while I took D in to the doctor alone. He had his xrays done, his legs measured four ways (on a block, on the xray, with a measuring tape by hand, and another way I’ve forgotten now), and we got the whole hemihypertrophy schpiel again, as the med student in with us had never heard of it. The doctor reassured us that despite D’s “deformity” (his word, not mine), he was actually in really good shape and did I read any hemihypertrophy blogs or belong to any forums? I tried not to laugh at that. (For a really long time I was one of the top three hits on Google for hemihypertrophy) I explained that I had at one time, but really it got to be too much. The doctor said that D’s leg length difference is getting worse, not better, and that we need to keep coming back at 6 month intervals to keep an eye on it to make sure it’s not damaging his pelvis or his spine or anything. When he’s around 15 (sooner, if it keeps growing too fast), they’ll have to break his growth plate on the one leg so the other can catch up. I’m hoping that the health industry comes up with a better answer by then, as that sounds incredibly painful and time consuming and what 15 year old boy wants to take a time out from life for something like that?! Aie. Anyway, after the appointment, we went back to Kay’s parents (now Kays home as well, but they have two houses at the moment and it gets confusing) house and took the kids on an adventure and let the play games and fed them multi-colored pancakes for dinner. I think Kay has better photos than I do, but I will post those when I see her next.

Thursday I spent in pain because of all the driving I’ve been doing lately. Yay, pain. D and B each had friends over to play video games. G’s friends couldn’t make it, due to illness (argh), but B & his friend let him play Mario Kart & Wii Music with them, so he was pretty happy anyway.

New Year’s Eve day we spent running errands with Nick. We got fireworks for a future display (once the burn ban is over, I’ve been chanting this for months) and other stuff that required a trip out towards Nick’s parents house. Hung out there for a while with his dad. We had a big surprise over something that I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about yet, nothing family related, exactly, but something big we’re still talking over and making decisions about.

For the evening festivities, Nick made a whole lot of German food (sauerbrauten, red cabbage and apples, caramelized onions, etc) and

I made a lot of decorations that said 2011 and poppers for the kids.

My parents came over to eat and celebrate.

The kids got to do both my kind of poppers (with candy inside) and the more explosive kind (confetti explosion) and smoke bombs and sparklers. We had a bit of dancing in the living room and then an early countdown to the new year for the kids. Actually, for everyone.

My parents left right after that and Nick and I decided we’d had enough for the day and went to bed, too. 🙂

New Years Day was a Saturday and therefore a church day, but therein lies the madness, so we ended up going to services at two different churches. Like I said, not something I’m up for discussing at the moment, but it did take up all the day and into the evening. We had dinner at my parents house here in town, with the two D’s making us the Crazy Cantina Chili from the original Star Wars Cookbook. It turned out all right, kind of like Taco Soup, but without the meat (my dad threw some in at the end to fill it out a bit).

Yesterday we took the kids out for basketball practice, but there weren’t many kids there. They had fun, though.

We spent the afternoon at home doing necessary cleaning type stuff. I set up a Kids Command Center in their hallway with all their important info like calendars, lunch menus, emergency numbers, chore lists with dry erase markers, etc. I’ll do a post about that and the art we made today as well sometime tomorrow.

Anyway, hope everyone is having a very pleasant new year so far. 🙂

Around the House, My Own Personal Weirdness

From Twitter: 12-06-2010

6:07 pm: Had a nice quiet day at home after a whirlwind weekend (dinner party, baby shower, date night, christmas program). Ahhh…#

From Twitter, imported by moi.

My Own Personal Weirdness

From Twitter: 11-18-2010

8:36am: Will never forget waking up to the horrific news about Bonfire: 11.18.99.
4:08pm: Friends, I’m taking an internet hiatus for a bit. Please do call us up & we’ll do stuff! Just want to focus on people not pixels for a while.

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