What I'm NOT Worried About

Here are the things that I'm not worried about at this point.  We are all human, and our time is limited.  There are only a certain number of things any one person can do in a given week, so something has to give.  Here are the things that I'm not worried about at this point.

1. Cooking from Scratch.  My family is hard enough to please when it comes to food.  I struggle each week simply getting a decent menu plan together.  Until I get better at planning food, I feel it gives me a bit of a break to use cooking helps.

2.  Doing my hair and makeup everyday.  I want to be able to do this, I really do, but I don't want to get up early enough to do this along with my devotional, my exercise, and my daily planning.  So, again, something has to give :).  Until I can discipline myself to get up earlier, a ponytail is just going to have to suffice for some days.

3.  Crafts.  I want to be crafty, I want to make things by hand, but the time is just not there.  I don't have a lot of knowledge in how to do things like this, so I'm learning a lot from the very beginnings and that is time consuming.  So, for now, these will be regulated to a small part of my week.

4.  Gardening.  It might sound like a strange one, but my family is big on gardening, so I really want to try to do this, but it's another thing that I don't have the time to put it it right now.

Those are all that I have come up with so far.  I'm sure I will come up with more as I go along, but this is good for now.  Mostly, my goal with this is to simply give myself permission to NOT do everything.  I'm not SuperMom or Wonder Woman, and I cannot accomplish it all.  And that's okay :).


If you're interested, here's the link to Money Saving Mom's blog on the same topic: here.

Focus Areas

I've broken down the things that are important to me (or important that I do) into 6 areas.  I have personal, marriage, mothering, home management, ministry (which for me includes my extended family), and fun.  I got these basically verbatim from Money Saving Mom, if you're interested in what she has said about them.  She also has a printable you can use if you're into that sort of thing :).

To break them down a bit more, here's what they entail:

Personal: spiritual disciplines, my relationship with God, exercise (I consider it not only vital to my health, but also my mood and outlook tend to be much better when I've gotten some exercise in)

Marriage: Don't expect to see too much posted on this as it is a bit private.  I do plan on restarting my goal of weekly at home dates.

Mothering:  Basically anything I can think of to help me be a better mother, anything from activities to Bible verses to help me through my day.

Home Management: Another self-explanitory category.  Will include cleaning, decorating, finances, anything to do with running my house.

Ministry:  I want this one to be ways that I can specifically get myself to find ways to minister to those around me each week.  Too often we are guilty of thinking about doing something and then never getting around to it.  Ideally, this will rid me of that excuse.

Fun: A way for me to still dabble in projects but hopefully get me to finish them at the same time.  I have some serious trouble when it comes to finishing what I start, so maybe that will keep me on track.

As I said, I'm still working on the goals within these categories.  I'll post them in a few days, but first up (hopefully tomorrow) I want to focus on things that are NOT on my list of things to do right now. This is another idea I got from the Money Saving Mom website, and I'll link the specific page in the post.  (Honestly, right now I need to be getting to bed, so goodnight!)

A New Start on an Old Plan

Kent and I spent the last four days on vacation.  It was wonderful and fun and everything a vacation should be, but beyond that it was a time for me to sit and reflect.  The craziness of the summer has really gotten me out of my rhythms and I'm struggling now that summer has ended.  Abigail started preschool a few weeks ago and that has sent my already struggling routines further into the realm of undone things.  Sooo, back to basics it is!  I'm going to start Monday with posting my goals for the week (okay, probably Sunday night, just to be sure).  Hopefully by focusing on a few things at a time I can get things back into shape.  I have a few more long term goals to set down before I can break things down weekly, but I plan on finishing that up this week.  I'll try keep this updated as I go along, but there's so much running through my head that I have trouble knowing how to get it all down in writing!  So, here's the beginning :).

Dunlap Love

My friend Kaylyn is super crafty and makes some wonderful and beautiful things.  God has been working on her recently to use her talents in a way to serve those in need around us, specifically orphans.  She recently put together a blogspot for her business, Dunlap Love, and has outlined what she plans to do with her creations and the money she makes.  I'm so amazed by her godly heart and desire to serve, so I wanted to share with all of you.  (You can also find her on Etsy!)

Kid's Toys

I promised Brenda over at Unsolicited Advice, that I'd put up some pictures of my toy organizers.  This is one area that I've actually gone and spent the money needed to get things somewhat under control.  I still need to do a few things to get it totally workable (one of which would be to figure out how to get a 3 year old to help me clean up more...) but we're doing pretty well with it.  I did a bit of reorganizing as I was taking these pictures, it was needed and is going pretty well, so I like the set up right now.

We do have a "play room" it's our sunroom/porch, but I have it set up for the kids.  Yes, I was a preschool teacher so the urge to create "centers" runs deep in my blood :).  I didn't actually segment things off, but we do have a general flow to the area that I really like.

Play Room/Porch:

These storage shelves are some of my favorite things.  I LOVE them :), but they do hold a bit too much for my kids at this point.  When all the bins are dumped (which is about 4-5 days a week around here) Abigail gets too over loaded to help clean.  I went through yesterday and cleaned each drawer out about halfway to have fewer toys in general circulation.  Doesn't seem like they've noticed yet ;).  The majority of our toys live out here.

I also have this storage box in the living room:

 It's sort of my catch-all for things that don't fit into a nice category in the bins outside or in the kids' rooms.  We have video game items in a basket on the right, but the left is basically where I dump toys if I don't feel like (or don't have time) to sort them out to their proper areas.  Some of the bigger things do live around the outside.
And, just for perspective, here's how the area flows together.

In the kids' rooms, I don't really keep very many toys (at least, I don't think I do!).  My kids love to be around the action so only rarely do they even want to go play by themselves.  I used to keep more in their rooms, but they would only drag it out to the living room.

Abigail mostly has the toys that are too old for Nathan.  He would either tear them up or choke on them.

And Nathan gets the toys that are really too young for both kids.  :) I just put these in here, though, so he's quite curious and ready to undo my work.

And that's it!  I've tossed a lot of toys, we don't keep ANYTHING broken,  and I sell old stuff and doubles regularly at consignment sales.  We're still working on keeping it all put away (I cleaned for these pics, lol) but we at least have a place for everything even if not everything stays in it's place.  Also, I'm working on tags for the bins so anyone cleaning up will know where things go.  Hopefully that will be the last piece needed for this particular area.  :) It would be nice to have one actually done.

One Down, One to Go

I finished the coupon declutter...sort of.  It's all put away and contained at least, but I really need to take some time to go through and toss the expired ones.  Sigh, another day.  For now, I'm going to TRY to simply focus on the fact that at least the clutter is hidden away a bit.  And I have enough space to put new circulars away, so the clutter should stay away for at least a little bit.  I don't have a ton if extra space, though, so tossing old coupons may quickly become a priority.  Anyway, here are my after pics:

The yellow folder on the left is where I threw all my loose coupons.  Not ideal, but at least if little hands grab it now, they won't scatter all over the floor.  Eventually I'll find homes for the binders and other things that are just sitting there, but for now, this is better than in was!

Oh, and if you were wondering all those coupons went here:

I'm thinking about getting an accordion file to hold them that way I wouldn't be chained to the filing cabinet every Wednesday when I'm clipping for grocery shopping.  It might work, but it's also another thing to buy, and I don't have the money right now.  :) Eventually I'd like to have my home all spiffy and organized in cute ways, but until I can afford that I'm trying to just plain get it organized.  In whatever ugly/functional way I can.

New Nap Time Ideas

I've been doing the same thing day after day during naptime a la "The FlyLady".  Clean kitchen, declutter for 15, daily mission, flip laundry, 15 min computer time, one item from the WHB, etc. (I posted on that here.)  But it has all become kinda boring.  I never feel like I'm getting anywhere and that for me becomes a problem.  So I've decided to consolidate a bit and see if things will work better.  Here's the new plan (just for nap, the rest of my day is pretty much the same right now):

Sunday: Planning
Monday: Yard Work/Car clean out
Tuesday: Cleaning
Wednesday: Menu planning/Office items
Thursday: Free
Friday: Organizing + Mop Kitchen/Dining Room
Saturday: Usually with family, but if I'm home I'll probably add another cleaning or organizing day, whatever needs to be done most.

It's been kind of a rough first week, but I'm going to try this again next week to see how it works.  I like that I'm not doing the same thing everyday, but I did notice I got a bit more sidetracked this week.  Especially Wednesday.  Sitting at the computer for "office work" is never a good idea if you don't have a plan.  Which I didn't.