Purging and Yard Sales

Our church had a yard sale to benefit the quizzing team.  They are going to California in July for finals and they need close to $1000 per person.  They have been doing different types of fundraisers throughout the spring and early summer, the latest one, a huge yard sale.

I don't usually do yard sales because I don't feel like we have good enough stuff to sell and most of the time I would rather just give my stuff away, however when I heard about this one I started going through my whole house just to see what things we could donate to it.

I ended up having a car full of stuff, old books, kids clothes, clothes that no longer fits me, lots of  toys that were in great condition and kids books.  I'm happy to say most of our stuff sold on the very first day and it made the team close to $100!!! Not bad!!

Of course the thing I liked the best about it was purging my house of all this extra stuff.  Especially the kids' rooms and the basement! It is a great start to my home organizing summer!

Organizing Post II

Last on the organizing list was my linen closet. This proved to be my most difficult project to date. I have tried to organize this thing before and was never very successful.
I tried to follow the advice of this organizing book that I had recently purchased, Organize Now!: A Week-by-Week Guide to Simplify Your Space and Your Life by Jennifer Berry. Linen closet is on week 39 but I wasn't going to wait that long! Btw this book is excellent!!!

She writes that you really only need two sets of sheets per bed, three if you have a flannel set for winter. Needles to say I have more than three sets. The kids' bed have four sets ea plus two flannel sets ea. I also have extra sets for guest's beds. That's a lot of sheet sets!! Plus blankets and pillows, again for guests. I have a lot of our winter stuff in space bags but that still did not create enough room for everything.

Thank God my very cleverly smart Mother in law suggested I keep the kids' sheets in a plastic storage box in their own rooms. Plus we have an under the bed storage box that we only use for Roxbury, I decided to put all the flannel sheets in that and under A9's bed.

Then I purchased three plastic storage boxes, one for ea of our rooms. I also got rid of a couple of sets that were not being used at all. This is what the linen closet looks like now!I also followed the books advice on putting over the door hooks on every door.

Linen closetCoat closet
A9's door (found them at Target for $2.50)
X7's door
Bathroom door
My bedroom door
Basement door
I'm so happy that we were able to do everything I wanted to get done before school starts this past weekend. We have one more week of summer vacation!!!!

Organizing Post

For the last couple of months I've been taking a break from homeschool planning and instead spent some time organizing my home and my schedule.
I found various organizing blogs that helped me create a planner that suited all of my needs so I don't keep forgetting the things that need to be done and also how to get rid of clutter and hot spots all over my home so that I don't need to spend too much time looking for the things that I need.

My first find was of course Pinterest. Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can "pin" pics of the things that you love. I started by looking at homeschool rooms and from there I kept finding pics of family command centers. That's when my journey into organizing really took off.

Here is a pic of my new family command center. The purpose of the command center is to have a place upstairs where I can keep track of mail, appointments and things. My real command center of course is my desk downstairs, but I found that I needed something upstairs as well.

This is what it looks like now... everything I need upstairs is in here!

Next I found Organized Home.com, where I was able to create my own household notebook planner, blogs like Simple Organized Living and Organizing Your Way also allowed me to make a plan as to how I wanted to organize my home.

I did a lot of purging in the last few weeks, I tackled the basement first, my home office and the kid's desk areas. Here is a look.
Here is DH's side, I was able to give him the smaller desk and we added a shelf above it.
I added a new filing cabinet, a couple of baskets, the phone sits here as well. This is also where I keep my household notebook. I updated my filing system as well...

Here is the pic that inspired my new filing system!(I found it at Pinterest!) Mine is not color coded but it looks pretty similar, I needed two filing cabinets instead of just one.

Next we organized the entry way, we needed more wall hooks so my Dh made me a brand new one using hooks we already had! It is semi homemade! This is the one by the front door.This is another one Dh made me by the back door!My room! I added hooks to hang my bags instead of having them all over the floor.
There is a hook in Dh's side of the room as well for his Club bag to hang nice and neat!
I also decided to organize the bathroom closet. Yes, those are Flylady cleaning equipment right in there!

The room closets were organized as well, all closets throughout the house! I'm sad to say this is the end of the organizing projects for now, school is starting next week and Clubs is starting in two weeks and so is co-op. I need to focus on those things now. I do have one last project, my bedroom night lamps.
I will be going to Ikea (YYYYYYAAAAAAYYYYYY) in the next couple of weeks to buy them.... Hopefully all these changes will make this coming year a lot easier to manage, that is after all the point of organizing!

Homeschool Break

I have taken a break from all things homeschool to work on my home. After thinking of nothing but homeschooling for the last four years I needed to take a break and concentrate on home for a while.

I will be posting about some of the changes and pics after Roxbury. See you then!

New and Improved Bedroom

Last week my daughter and I had a long talk about her room. No matter how many times she cleans her room it always looked messy. Sometimes it was so bad(after playing with her little friends) that she had no idea where to start.

She had no room and too much stuff... we decided to do something about it. After praying about it for two days, yes you read right, we prayed about this!!! So after praying it finally came to us.. well to me.. I stripped her room of everything, EVERYTHING but her bed, desk and dresser. Nothing on the wall, nothing in her closet.

I left it like that for a couple of hours just so she could see how much better it looked empty than with all her stuff. Then we began the process of determining what would stay and what had to go.

She did a great job of letting alot of things go. I think she was a little worried that all her stuff would be gone but we were able to keep a lot, we just need a new way to store it.

We got rid of two pieces of furniture, her bookcase and her little drawer. We put her books in a light green crate, just like her brother has in his room. We got rid of some little stuff she had in her little drawers and we moved things around in her closet.

Since I got rid of all the stuff she had on the walls I needed to figure out what was going to replace them... we went to Target over the weekend and she picked the perfect thing!

Here are a few pics of how her room looks now!!

She picked dots, they look great on her wall!

I had to move her dresser a little and there's her crate with all her books. I will be moving her peg a little higher and to the right.

As a reward we bought her a new quilt set from Target, no more ballerinas!!

I moved her phone next to her desk and got her a small bulletin board.

This is a French memo board and it will be going above her headboard, we ordered it online because Target didn't have it in purple. We should be getting it this week!

Her room is much more manageable now, it doesn't look as crowded and the new quilt looks perfect in her pink room!

It Was the Best Weekend, It Was the Worst Weekend

The title pretty much describes how our weekend went. First the good, Halloween! Nina and Grandpa coming over to visit the kids for Halloween. Cool costumes, lots of candy, light the night at the Church, hot chocolate, all good!!

Now the not so good. First X5 getting a fever two hours before trick o treating, had to drug him up(Tylenol & Motrin) so he would be good to go... we only trick o treated for an hour, 6 to 7.
The next day A7 got a fever, more meds! No Coop for them on Friday, I still had to go since I was teaching a class, which got canceled for something way better.

Now here is where is gets really not so good, on Saturday I got sick, no fever thank God, although my Dh thinks I did have a temperature... just a chest cold, lots of coughing, sinus, body hurting, no energy. This really sucks on a normal weekend, when you have company it double sucks!!!
I got to go to Church on Sunday to welcome our new interim pastor. They prayed for A7 & X5 although lots of Moms were panicky that the kids had the flu, the bad one!! I assured them they did not.

The kids are all feeling better, thank God! No more fever just cold and cough, been giving them cold and cough meds. As for me, feeling much better, been taking head and chest decongestant meds... as for school...

I thank God for the way He has lead me to plan our homeschool. One book a week, lessons from that book for the whole week, math the same way. Which means that we have a whole week to get things done, which means if we don't get a lot done on Monday we have the rest of the week to do it!!!

I decided to start school after lunch today, give our bodies time to feel better, let the meds do their job. We'll get done as much as we get done today, we have a whole week to do this, no worries!!

Let me leave you with some Halloween pics of the kids!!!

Asoka Tano and Captain Rex!

Dh is dressed as Legolas and I'm dressed as a Doctor!

Kids and a friend dressed as Wolverine!!!!

Fall Table

I love Fall, it is my favorite time of year. All of the best holidays happen in Fall... Halloween(lost of candy) Thanksgiving(lots of food) and Christmas(4 days after Fall ends so I include it in there!).
I love Fall decorations, especially in the kitchen/dinning area. It makes everything so warm and cozy!

Thanks to Nina (for pointing out centerpieces ideas) I finally have some Fall decorations for my dinner table. Yesterday I had a tea party for the ladies of the Church and I decorated the table with a Fall theme!

I know for some this looks way simple but for me this is a BIG DEAL!! ha ha! I'm going to look for some plate settings that'll look good with the table cover. My DH told me I should dress the table up for dinner everyday like this! I'm trying to convince him to let me get a Fall plate set, a small of course, 4 plates, 4 mugs maybe salad plates shaped like leaves!!!

Update:
Here is a pic of the table now!

Our School Room

A lot of the homeschool blogs I follow are blogging about their school rooms, so I thought it would be fun if I blogged about our school room!

We have most or rather all of our school stuff down in our basement, that's where we have the most room. We usually do our crafts or anything that has to do with games like pattern blocks, legos etc. We have craft materials, crayons, markers, color pencils and lots of paper. As well as school materials, glue, pencils, scissors etc. I started this corner while there were still young! I guess I had a feeling we would be homeschooling!The kids have their computer downstairs and we have a nice big world map and a dry erase board! We found the board at Lowe's for less than $10 and cut it in half so it would fit on the wall.
We do our table time(math, copy work, handwriting) upstairs around our kitchen table. We read our Five in a Row book on the couch upstairs as well. All of my curricula is right next to my computer. I have a big bookcase where I have all of the books we read, the curriculum we use and a file cabinet for both kids.

Here is our Five in a Row shelf, with all of the books and manuals. I'm only missing three books... Andy and the Circus, Henry the Castaway and The Giraffe that Walked to Paris(I found a sub for this one though).

I hope you enjoyed taking a look at our school room, even though school happens all over the house!

Home Improvements

This past holiday weekend was "work on stuff that still needs to be done outside" weekend!
We really needed to get the area around our shed done, too many weeds and not enough room to more around there. I wish I would had taken a before pic, I didn't but here's an after pic!

Week Off

We are taking a week off from school this week. After everything that happened last week(sick son, sick husband, homeschooling a teenager, looking after neighbor kids) my house looked like a tornado went through it! I've been doing house work all week, (I'm taking a little break today) vacuuming carpets full of germs, washing clothes and sheets full of germs and later in the week mopping floors full of germs. That way when Nina and Grandpa come over for Easter they will NOT get sick!

Random Thoughts

The Christmas pageant went really well. We had so many parents come to the play the Church was full! and the funny thing is it only lasted about 15 minutes. I bought enough cookies and we had enough of everything for everybody.
Today we had our last Ladies Bible study of the year, we'll start again sometime in January, we all went out to eat to this little place called Gracie's. It was really good!!! I'll have to take Dh there sometime.
We are celebrating Christmas with the kids this Sartuday, we'll be having pernil and arroz con gandules for dinner! I can't wait!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've been a little busy the last two weeks, between jury duty(I didn't get picked!), school, piano practice, church, getting all the Christmas' gifts(I try to have everything ready before Thanksgiving weekend, have you ever been to the Mall after black Friday?... it's crazy!!) and of course Thanksgiving. We also went to see the movie Twilight! it was very good!

Last week we did a Johnny Appleseed lapbook, it was pretty basic but the kids really enjoyed it.
We have two more lessons to go and we'll be done with Math U See Primer. We are starting Alpha in January. We are moving right along with reading made easy, A6 is doing excellent with that!

This past summer when I was planning the first half of the school year I had schedule this week off from school. But we started having so much fun doing lapbooks that I decided to do school for two days this week so the kids could do a Thanksgiving lapbook, I got greedy!
Turns out we really needed to have this whole week off. When we got up this morning nobody wanted to talk about school, starting with me. We did read The Night Before Thanksgiving and The Thanksgiving Door but our heart was not really in it. So I made an executive decision and school is canceled for the whole week as originally planned.

Last year we had a six weeks on one week off type of schedule, I thought we would continue that this year but we were having so much fun lapbooking that we just kept going. Now it is time for a much needed break. After this week we have two more weeks of school then three weeks off!!!
This will probably be my last post for this week, we are going to Grandmas for Thanksgiving.
Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Wild Horses Of Sweetbriar

This week we are rowing The Wild Horses of Sweetbriar. Based on a true story, this is a girl's touching recollection of the unusually severe winter of 1903, which she spent on a small island near Nantucket.

Geography: Nantucket, what is an island?, isolation: pros & cons.
Language arts: copy work
Science: weathering, erosion

A6 had a fever Sunday and Monday morning, we did all our schooling on the couch:) I tried not to make her think too much, but she really enjoyed the story and was able to talk about the book. By midday she was feeling much better. She even did copy work on her own! The fever never returned, but she is coughing a little.
We didn't get to go to the pumpkin patch last Saturday, but we are going with the COOP kids next Friday as a field trip.

Easter

I hope you all had a great Easter. We sure did! Between Good Friday Camp and the Easter egg hunt we had a great time. I'll be posting lots of pics soon. Today I'm cleaning all of Easter away:)
I'm also doing some lesson planning that I didn't get to do last week.
I'm very tempted to take the next three days off to do just that and start school on Thursday.

We are going to focus on math and reading for the next few weeks and since the weather is getting nicer we'll have lots of nature study trips and crafts.
For music we are doing Vivaldi The Four Seasons, Spring my favorite!
Check back soon for pics.

What we are doing in March Part II

We had a busy week. Since we were sick the week before some things didn't get done, so this past week I've been playing catch up. We just finally got all the laundry done and put away.
The warmer it gets the more we want to be outside! Library day was wonderful as well.
We just got all these books about Easter and egg hunts, I'm still looking for St Patty's day one.
COOP went really well, I can't believe we only have 2 more Fridays of it. The kids are really going to miss it. We've been talking about having a Park day for the kids after COOP is done.
I would love to do something like that!




This week we are rowing The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Since next week is Holy Week we are going to have it "off". Which means we are going to be doing Easter activities and we'll keep reading Easter books just for fun!!! It's funny, we seem to do so much better when we are doing school things "for fun". A6 is really getting there as far as reading. I had this book schedule for last week but A6 wanted to do another one instead. So last week we read Albert. It has to do with Cardinals building a nest on Albert's hand. She loved it and even read a little bit from it.

We are done with HWT Letters and Numbers for Me. I asked A6 if she wanted to start the next one, My Printing Book right away or wait till Aug and she chose to wait. She gets to do writing everyday anyways, so we can wait! Her writing is getting much better as well. She flips some of her letters and numbers but I've been told that's normal.

I've been thinking about music lessons, specifically piano lessons. I found this site KinderBach, which other Moms that I know are using and I really like it. I like the fact that you can get away with using just a keyboard to teach piano. A6 has a huge keyboard she got for XMas.
She can learn the basics then when she is older and wants to continue we'll pay for actual lessons.
I guess eventually we'll have to buy a real piano... that's what tax refunds are for!!
I've heard over and over again how learning how to play a music instrument helps kids do so much better academically. Also learning a foreign language! Thank God we don't have to pay anybody to teach her that!!

X3 is doing good, still has a bit of a runny nose, he is using the potty all the time now!!!!! He refuses to wear pull ups to go anywhere, only to go to bed.

The kids are looking forward to Nina and Granpa coming for Easter!

The Patchwork Quilt

This week we are rowing The Patchwork Quilt. I haven't read the book, but I'm hoping it has something to do with making quilts! A6 has a quilting class this semester so I thought it would be fun to read books that have to do with making quilts!

It's been a busy week for me, X3 just started potty training which means I have to watch him like a hawk all day. I think he has the hang of it now, but if I don't remind him to go he gets there a little too late if you know what I mean.

This week is Club Week. Dh and I've been getting some stuff done for the kickoff of Club Week. Making display boards, digital presentations, baking cookies plus this week we are having our Valentine's Day Club party. Lots of baking for that as well.

I've been doing a lot of housekeeping as well. Going through every closet, getting rid of stuff we no longer need. I think it has something to do with this new book I got a few weeks ago.
Two words...Martha Stewart, two more words... homekeeping handbook!!
I am no Martha lover but this book is great! It has a lot of great tips. Who knew that you should never use fabric softener when washing towels?!? She goes room by room with tips on cleaning, simplifying and organizing. More practical than fancy she has really great ideas. Cleaning the house is so much easier and yes enjoyable when you have the right tools for the job!
The book is over 750 pages, so there's a lot of info but it's very easy to follow. I like that the pictures in the book are all black and white. There's something old fashion about that.
Like I said, I'm no Martha but I'll take anything that will help me keep my home running smoother and more efficient.

House Cleaning Day

Today is our day off. We have a four day school week and Wednesday is our day off, well off for the kids. This is my day to do laundry, vacuum, clean the bathroom... you get the idea. I like having this break in the middle of the week, A5 seems to like it as well. She knows that after two days of school we have a day off. Of course once the kids are older I'll start to enjoy this day more!!