It's February 3rd, How Are Your New Year's Resolutions Going?

Making New Years resolutions seems rather cliche' and I've certainly heard the statistics about how just 8% of people actually achieve their New Year's goals.

But, still, I typically can't resist.  I mean it is a clean slate, a new year, a world of possibilities!  And per my personality, I usually bite off more than I can easily chew.  And what is the harm anyway?  Failure may mean I still accomplished more than if I'd never had the goal to begin with.

Last year I set the goal to workout for at least 30 minutes at least 3 times per week.  Overall I achieved that.  Not every week was perfect, but there were even some weeks where I hit 4 times a week, so on average, I'm calling it a win.

And the best part is that the regular, consistent workouts are now a part of my routine, versus previous years when I might work-out every day for 30 days and then not at all for weeks.

On the heals of my 2014 success, I do believe overconfidence in my ability to implement change took over.  For 2015 I actually made TWO resolutions!  

And that's in addition to maintaining last year's exercise goal and, you know, raising 4 humans, caring for a crazy, furry, four-legged creature, working magic to feed everyone 3 meals a day, and various volunteer jobs!

This may not last until March which is why I'd like to go on the record now saying, surprisingly, I'm actually ON TRACK with these 2 goals!

So what are they?

#1 I've undertaken the goal to read through the Bible in a year.

I'm doing an ESV chronological version.  I've never read through the Bible in a year before.  I'm in an in-depth Bible study where we read books of the Bible in entirety, looking at each verse, so I've always thought I didn't have time for more Bible reading.  But, I liked the idea of covering the whole book, of knowing that I know the whole thing cover to cover or at least have lain eyes on it at least once in my life!  Then I heard that it would just take 15 minutes each day to achieve the goal of reading through the Bible in a year.  And I thought, "Anyone can make time for 15 minutes!  Right?"  Well, it's not easy, but I am only a day behind and for me that is a HUGE win!

#2  I've challenged myself to read more books this year, not just the Bible.  24 Books, to be exact. 

I used to love reading and then I became a mom and just took less and less time for it and then when I'd read something besides the Bible it was usually a parenting or adoption-related book.  While those books are great, they are usually not high on the enjoyment scale.  Then I read a novel in just a few days during our summer vacation and I loved it and determined to try to make more time for leisure reading.  So, I've finished 2 books but I have to confess they are books I started before the new year.  But, still, I'm totally couting them!  And, I have no shortage of books to read as I've totally overindulged and bought myself tons of books that I really want to read!

After I'd made the goal to read through the Bible in a year, I was going through built-up mail and realized we had gotten a 2015 calendar from Samaritan's Purse and it had it's own version of a Bible reading plan for each day of the calendar.  I gave the calendar to my 9 year old daughter because she wanted a 2015 calendar for her room.  But, the coolest part is that she is following that reading plan and attempting to read through the Bible in a year, too!!  AND she totally holds me accountable asking me, "How many days behind are you?" or "I'm caught up, are you caught up, Mom?!"

How are you doing on your resolutions?  Did you make any?

How To Organize Lego Instructions

I'm truly not too proud to admit when something isn't working.  And call it January, but I'm renewed in my mission to make my house work for me.  So, I've been assessing some things lately, things that could be better.

Last January (do you see a trend with the January?) I blogged about our newly created Lego storage solution, and I have to say, 12 months into the deal and the solution was mostly good.

I love the separate bins for all the Lego pieces.  A year ago I would have said and probably did say to my husband as he sat on the floor for forever with the children and sorted ALL! THE! LEGOS! that it wouldn't last, that the Legos would get mixed back up in a matter of weeks, certainly the color separation would not last A YEAR!  The It Feels Like Chaos Household could NEVER manage color sorted Legos!

I was wrong!  The color separation has lasted an entire year!  The kids actually DO put the Legos back into the right color tray.  Their dirty clothes in the hamper is an entirely different less successful story, but this?  Blue Legos with blue Legos, they will do!

Now, the surfaces that I envisioned as building areas atop the Lego storage drawers and on the nearby table are really mostly used as display areas for all the random Lego creations my kids build and then cannot bear to take down EVER.  They seem to build on the floor and the table is always messy looking.  I would much rather the table be an open white space just ready and waiting for whatever creative thing they wanted to build that day and then take down so that the next day or for the next person that lovely white, open space was available.  And to be honest I'd love to see the clean, uncluttered table every time I walked into the playroom.  

But, that is not reality!

There is give and take here.  We have started working with the kids to clear off the table when it gets way too cluttered.  But also, they play with the random creations on the table that look like clutter to me.  So, I've learned to let it go a bit, my desire for the clear, white space.  They call it "Legoland" and now that the girls have their girl Legos all 4 of my kids have fun playing "Legoland" where they make up adventures and stories to act out with their Lego people and Lego buildings and Lego vehicles.

There was something that was not working at all, though, for any of us and it was the binder idea to store all the instruction booklets for the Lego creations.  It was a great idea in theory, but in the practice of our lives this happened:

The binder rings stopped meeting properly in the middle (4 kids will do that to the best of them) so pages kept coming partway out.  Also, some of the books would fall out of their protective sleeve if the binder were turned and held the wrong way and it was hard for the younger kids to get the books back in.

So, out with the old and in with the new!  This weekend I took all the instruction books out of their  protective sleeve binder pages 

where they were sorted by type of Lego 

and piled them all into one stack and put them into a plastic bin with a lid!

I slapped a label on that baby and slid it under the Lego play table.  DONE!

So simple that it made me smile!  So much easier for the kids to rummage through without fear of messing up a system and so much easier for them to put all the books back when they are done (or I refuse them dessert until they clean up their mess).

It reminds me of a question I ask myself often, "Why do I make things so hard?"  Really, usually, the simple solution is the best one!  Save yourselves the effort and go straight to the bin!


Find more Works for Me Wednesday here.
 

Sanity Saving Shelves!

I posted a long time ago about our new shoe/coat/backpack shelves.  But, I thought I'd give a little update because that post gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest.  You won't find a lot Pinterest-worthy here on this blog, but these shelves?  Really are awesome.

They may not look super stylish and I know a few commenters have sweetly suggested I could add some crown molding to make the shelves look built in, which sounds great to me, only way, way beyond the zone of my abilities!  But, these shelves really preserve the little bit of sanity I have left here mothering 4 children in the midst of the busy May-end-of-school-year season!

Here are the shelves as they look today (I cheated and took this while the kids were at school so they are not as cluttered without the backpacks.):

Remember the issue?  We needed a spot near the backdoor to house the things our 4 children needed each day for school and other activities.  We needed mudroom shelves!

But, alas, our house was built in the 1980s before builders realized that people like big laundry rooms!  So, our laundry room is exactly big enough for a washer and a dryer, nothing else!  My husband offered to hire someone to add on a mudroom to our house.  But, I am cheap and also don't prefer living in a construction zone for any amount of time, so we got creative.

We bought 4 Ikea narrow Billy bookcases, screwed them together, left off the middle shelf, and added hooks.  (We also attached the whole unit to the wall because I have no idea what age you stop worrying about your children climbing the furniture, but we are not there yet!)  And we put the shelving unit/mudroom lockers IN OUR BREAKFAST ROOM!  I know!  It's pretty crazy!  But, we don't actually use the room for breakfast because we eat all our meals at the only table big enough to hold all 6 of us -- the dining room one.  So the breakfast room is really more of a work/game/craft zone for the kids anyway.

You can find out more details about how we did the shelves and the 4 red canvas totes I made here.

Back to the shelves in action now 18 months after we got them:

From the top, the grey buckets were a cheap find at Target and they house things like winter gloves (that my kids need all of 2 days each year), swim goggles, ballet shoes and sunglasses.

Next shelf down are plain white boxes that perfectly hold 8.5 by 11 inch papers, so that's where my kids keep homework packets they are to work on over the course of several days before returning to school or instructions about projects, etc.  It's a work-in-progress type of box!  And when the kids remember to put their work in their box then it doesn't get colored on by a sibling or lost.

Next, is the shelf with the red totes that I made.  The black chalkboard label has each child's name written in chalk-ink but I smeared the names out for displaying on the blog.  However, the very visible names has made it so our 4 year old little girl can now write the names of her brothers and sister.  Even while she was at preschool today she made a note for her sister and because she's seen her name so often was able to pretty correctly imitate the letters all on her own!  The totes hold random treasures the kids want to keep but I'd rather toss, like party favors, prizes from school, etc!

Then there are the hooks for backpacks, jackets, and hats.  And then the shoe shelves -- obviously my girls have more shoes than the boys!

These shelves definitely work for us!  The kids can nearly always find what they need and we are not tripping over 8 different shoes each afternoon.  Although, I do still have to remind the kids of the shelf when the shoes somehow land 6 inches AWAY from the shelf!  I usually tell them their shoes are crying, "Please put us on the shelf!  We are not where we belong!"

Find more Works for Me Wednesday here.

Stuff Overload!

Several months ago we renewed our membership during a trip to the zoo, and a couple weeks later my husband was reading the mail and said, "If we'd renewed our zoo membership with this offer we could have saved $10.00 and gotten a free backpack."

My response?

"I would pay $10.00 not to get the free backpack!"

Because that's the point we've gotten to, folks.  There is so much stuff coming into this house on a daily basis that I can't even shovel it out fast enough before more comes in (not to mention the difficulty getting the numerous packratish people who live in this house to agree to part with anything)!  And we had too much to begin with!

The longer I manage my home and the more children I have, the more I've realized, LESS REALLY IS MORE!  Less is better.

My 4 children can have 28 coloring/workbooks or they can have 4.  

Let me tell you what happens when you have 28.  They overflow the drawer so you give it all another drawer (by cramming the contents of that drawer somewhere else that is already overflowing with stuff), the children strew the activity books all around and have to be reminded often to put them away, the books will stick around for months, years even, with a handful of pages colored/completed.

Or you can have 4, 1 for each child.  The workbooks easily fit into 1 drawer.  There are only 4 books to scatter and the children are more likely to put them away because hello?  THIS IS MY ONLY COLORING BOOK, I'd better take care of it!  And the entire book gets filled up/used and can then be thrown away and replaced with another!

Really, it is so obvious I have no idea why I've had so much trouble with this concept!  And this is also why I'm blogging about this topic because I'm hoping to preserve this wisdom for my children and they can start off as grown-ups better than I did.

But, it happens pretty innocently and only in hindsight can you see that the clutter is a result of millions of daily decisions (or lack of decisions).

For example, a couple years ago when at the end of the year the school secretary stopped me in the halls and offered to give me many free unused workbooks, I wish I'd thanked her, loaded them into my car and driven them directly to a shelter or children's clinic or somewhere besides thinking, "This is great, these will keep my kids keep busy over the summer!"  And then stacking them in my under-the-stairs closet where they sat for TWO YEARS as clutter!

We are a family of 6 people and 1 dog living in 2576 square feet.  That ought to be doable.  Certainly compared to the majority of the world, our house is huge!  But if we don't stay on top of our stuff, it is going to take over the house and squeeze out all hope of peaceful life! I do not want a bigger house.  I want less stuff in the house we already have!

With that rant and background out of the way, let me say simply, I've been cleaning out. . .

for the past 5 years since we moved in here 6 years ago!  But, really, truly in earnest this time!  With a "nearly everything has got to go" mindset.

I'm at the point now a few weeks into this mission where I've lost count of the bags and boxes we've donated, the bags we've thrown away, yet there is still too much!  It's frustrating.  Last week I went through bins and bins of baby and toddler clothes we'd saved for hand-me-downs.  Only I saved way too much!  "We could clothe an entire orphanage of kids!"  I exclaimed over and over to my husband as I sat amid piles and piles of clothes. (Note to my younger self: When a house has a separate storage room it is not really a positive thing.  The storage room will just allow you to put off dealing with your stuff.  You'll casually move things out to the storage room and create a clutter mess that will eventually have to be dealt with.)

I sorted and sorted - to sell, trash (spit-up stains multiply in storage!), to donate, to keep.

I thought I'd finished all the boy clothes and then I went outside and found 3 more bins -- NOOOOOOO!

The trouble with these cleaning out/organizing projects is that there really is no time for them amid the laundry, cooking, cleaning, parenting, driving kids places, etc. that needs to go on every day.  But, I'm trying to plow through that and "make time".

I haven't had the soundness of mind to take "before" pictures, most of my organizing projects have been heat of the moment I-can't-take-this-messy-drawer-one-more-second kind of episodes.  But, I need to savor in some of the results, the "after" pictures:

An organized drawer!

Look!  I can see my sewing table again!  Notice how there have been no sewing projects featured here in a very long time?  That's because my table was piled with fabric/half finished projects/to-do mending.  And really who can work with that?  So, I just didn't!  Funny how this clear space gives me the will again!

 

And some organized stacks of pretty fabric really helps, too!  These were pitifully folded and wadded and crammed in before.  By the way, I'm not allowing myself to buy any more fabric until I've used up nearly all I have -- whoa this is hard when there's so much cute fabric out there on the Internet!

There's progress.  Slow, imperfect progress.  But, progress none the less!

Find more Tackle it Tuesday here and Works for Me Wednesday here. 

How to Store Legos?

I've been asking that question or some variation on it for years now.

"What do you do with your kids' Legos?!!"

"How do you keep all those tiny, colored bricks from contaminating the entire house?"

"What about those fancy/expensive lego kits, you know where you build a police station or Anakin's Star Wars jet fighter?  Once built do you leave them set up to play with?  What about younger siblings breaking them?  If you take them apart, do you store the lego pieces for that set separately or just throw all the legos in with all the others for free and creative building?"

You see, my questions were plentiful!  I polled many people and found out that most people I know say they also want Lego help or are not "Lego people" or just build the sets one time and then mix all the pieces into a big bin/bucket after it's broken.

I tried out for a while saving the sets before they got broken and the pieces scattered and kept them in ziploc bags along with the instructions.  The problem was they never got rebuilt and my boys just dreamed of different lego sets they wanted.

I tried leaving the cool sets set up to play with, but we had to keep them on a high shelf to avoid the youngest child breaking them.  This led to them only collecting dust on the high shelf and the shelf becoming overcrowded.

I began lobbying my boys and my husband (who is also apparently not too old to be really into Legos) to just keep 2 or 3 sets up and then break them all down and mix all the pieces together to be played with creatively building anything their minds could dream up.

They would only go for this idea on the condition that the Legos be sorted in some way so that they could follow the directions and pick out the needed pieces to build some of their beloved sets if they so desired.

Sorted.  Well, now we are speaking the same language!

This is what we came up with over the Christmas break:

An organized Lego storage solution, complete with a top for lego play/display!

Thank you Ikea!  That is the Trofast line of furniture.  I know I've seen the idea to glue Lego building plates to the top, but for now my guys are enjoying the versatility of just the tabletop.

The top is too cluttered looking for me, so let's just focus on the bins organized by color.  That's where I tell my eyes to look when I walk into the playroom and then no matter the chaos in the house I can tell myself, "See, there is SOME ORDER in this home!"

You have no idea how long the sorting took my husband!  

Really I was kind of bemoaning all the time and energy we spent on Legos of all things.  But today my oldest son had a playdate and seeing two 9 year old boys happily playing there at our new lego station for an hour rather than with some technology devise made it seem worth it!

And the instruction manuals?

Binders!

With clear pocket inserts!

My new favorite past time?  Picking one color and building something entirely out of that color!  I wish I'd taken a picture of my cool, modern all blue house before I let the kids break it apart! 


Linking up with New Nostalgia Anti-Procrastination Tuesday and Works for Me Wednesday 

How to Display Christmas Cards

The Christmas cards have started to come in and I just love it! (We even got ours out over the past couple days - amazing!  But, the price is that my house is messy and I'm tired!)  I have been using the same card display system for the past 4 years and it still works great; the whole family likes seeing the photos of friends and family hanging in our house!  Here's what I do:
 
Repost from November 3, 2009:

I love displaying the Christmas cards that we get, especially since so many of our friends have little kids and send cards with pictures. It is really fun to have all the cards up in the house, marvel at how much all the kids have grown and changed, and just enjoy all the cute little faces!

But until last year I didn't have a system I really liked for displaying the cards. But then I figured out this system to hang the cards onto 2 doors we have between our living room and breakfast room that we leave open all the time. I bought cheap over-the-door plastic hooks, tied thick ribbon I had on hand around the hook, made a bow and left a long tail hanging down. Then as I got cards in the mail I simply stapled them down the length of the ribbons.
It was so easy to put up initially, easy to add to as more cards came in, not to mention cheap! And we enjoyed looking at it so much it was the last Christmas decoration to come down (possibly even waiting until early February)!

Find more Works for Me Wednesday tips here.

Easier Mornings

We are about to start back to school and with it comes the crazier schedule.

One thing that really helps us get the kids out the door easier in the mornings before school is having a set of kid toothbrushes in our half-bath that is right by our backdoor.  

The kids have toothbrushes in their bathroom upstairs, but sending them back up after breakfast to brush was a recipe for disaster as they'd get distracted playing and we couldn't really monitor who had brushed and who hadn't.  Having a 2nd set of toothbrushes downstairs means all four kids for sure get their teeth brushed before school and we can get them out the door with a bit less hassle!

This one little tip really helps save my sanity!

Do you have any tips for easier mornings?

Find more Works for Me Wednesday here.

Organizing Toys in a Boy's Room

I don't know what your experience is with your sons and daughters but around here my children can equally create messes.  In fact, they are all four GIFTED in the area of mess making.  But, my girls are far better at cleaning up the messes than my boys.  My boys are capable of moving the mess, but not really putting things away where they go. 

So, we came up with an organizational system in the boy room that is really simple.  There are 2 large white plastic bins/drawers (we got ours from Ikea for cheap) that slide under the bed (since the room is carpeted they slide super easily).  They house all the loose toys that live in the boy room.  And it doesn't even matter which toys go in which bin!  When the boys need to clean their room they just throw all the toys in and slide those babies back under the bed, put dirty clothes in the laundry bin and books on the shelf and the room is clean!

I'm not saying this system means their room is clean all the time, because it's NOT, or that they do not still sometimes act like it's too hard to clean up their room, but things are WAY better than before we started the under-the-bed-bin system!

Find more Works for Me Wednesday here.

Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday!

I promise I'm not to going complain about how busy the week was and whine about wanting summer to get here so we can quit running around like crazy people!  But, I will admit that we've had hot dogs for dinner not once, but twice this week!  Y'all, I never make hot dogs (okay maybe 3 or 4 times a year), typically opting for something more healthy to cook for my family, but all four my kids love them and they are so easy to boil and just put onto buns!  Yeah, it was that kind of week.

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I usually make my kids take their sheets off their beds and bring them to the laundry room when I wash sheets, but this week the kids were so busy, I stripped the beds myself one day while the two older, top-bunk sleeping kids were at school.  

When I crawled up onto my 6-year-old daughter's top bunk, I was totally overwhelmed with the amount of stuff up there!  I've never seen an episode of the TV show Hoaders, but I've heard friends talk about it enough to fear my daughter could be a candidate for the show!

I stuck everything in a laundry basket and am going to make her go through it all this weekend, I already broke the news to her that she just could not keep that much stuff in her bed!

The stuff filled up the entire basket and overflowed onto the floor!  Many stuffed animals, several dolls, 10 to 20 books, a frog beach ball, a foam rocket-launcher she got from treasure at school, various bead jewelry pieces she made with our bead kit, paper bag puppets she made last week, a snow globe, and on and on it goes!

 Peeling off the top layer so you can see a bit underneath:

I suspect what is really going on here has a little something to do with that 6-year-old's desire to keep these things away from a certain 3-year-old little sister she shares a room with.  A 3-year-old I don't allow up on the top bunk!

But, that 6-year-old does have a fairly good sized "treasure box" I've allowed her to keep some prized possessions in and I don't let her little sister get in that box!  The treasure box is overflowing, so I think it's time for another discussion about cleaning-out.  Maybe I can even throw in a little Bible verse about storing up our treasures in heaven rather than on earth (Matt 6:19-20)!  Wish me luck with this intervention!

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Have I ever mentioned how many times each day I hear one of my kids say, "Mom or Mommy"?  I've never really counted, but it's gotta be close to eleventy-billion!  Typically I love it, I mean it is such a blessing to get to be their Mommy, but sometimes (like when 3 or 4 of them are saying it at the same time from different regions of the house), it kinda can drive me nuts!  So, this week when Little Girl made up a song with the Lyrics, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," just to sing for fun, I was less than enthused.  Does it make me a bad person if I suggested to her that maybe the song, "Doggy, Doggy, Doggy, Doggy" would be a better one to sing?  Probably.  Yes, I feel sure the answer to that question is "yes".

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Happy Friday, Friends! 

Find more Finer Things Friday and  Friday Fragments.

4 Weeks of Having 4 Kids

This past Saturday marked 4 weeks since we got home with our new daughter from Ethiopia.

We survived 4 weeks of having 4 kids!!!!

A couple things became very quickly apparent to us in life with 4 kids.

First thought, just a few days in:  we need color coded cups!

You know, each kid is assigned a color and that's their cup for the day.

Okay, our kids actually get 2 cups each per day, 1 for milk (that they drink at all 3 meals) and 1 for water (which also doubles as the very occasional cup of diluted juice, gets rinsed and used again as the water cup).

Why?

Because the dishes!  Oh my!  When each kid was using 4 or 5 cups per day times 4 kids -- well, you really don't have to do the math to know that = too much to deal with!

So, I bought a little set of plastic cups (Nuby BPA Free 4 Pack Fun Drinking Cups, 9 Ounce ) and now child #1 = green, child #2 = purple, child #3 = blue, and child #4 = pink.

Feel free to wager on which child looses their cup 1st.  My money's on green.

Second thought was:  we have too many toys!

Turns out, the more kids I have the less STUFF I want in my house!

The toys were overtaking the place.

And it's not that child #4 brought with her suitcases full of toys, she actually came with nothing, it's just that life with 4 kids made the excess of toys we already had too much.

The downstairs we could keep fairly presentable, but the upstairs with the kid rooms and playroom just couldn't stay clean with 4 kids getting out our multitude of toys and scattering them around.  We would work hard to clean up and then in just minutes it would be disaster again.  

During a moment last week where I was trying to open a closet to get out clothes for a kid, while 4 kids were all simultaneously calling "Mom!" for various reasons, and there was a pile of random toys in front of the closet door keeping it from opening, I decided something had to be done.  I told my husband Friday night, we had to tackle the toy situation before the weekend was over or I was going to go crazy.

I launched a quick PR campaign with the kids to get them on board, started referring to it as "The BIG clean-out," you know to generate some buzz and excitement.  It kinda worked.

Then we got distracted Sat. morning when we decided it would be more fun to go the zoo, but we rallied Sat. afternoon after the 8 year old's basketball game and made some real progress!

We cleaned out a ton, moved some toys with a lot of little pieces up high where they can only be played with under supervised conditions rather than scattered at will, took down a train table the kids don't use much any more except to junk up, saved all the trains, track pieces, and train buildings in a 3 drawer unit, and you know what?  My 4 year old has had the best time building train tracks on the open floor the past couple of days -- no edges of the table to encumber him any longer!

And I'm loving the open, empty space!  

It allows me to breathe again.  

To be able to sit down and play with my kids without being stressed over the mess I see around me!

To have conquered some of the chaos, instead of letting it overtake us, makes me think maybe we can do this 4 kid thing.  Maybe.


We'll see what the next 4 weeks brings!

Reforming a Pack Rat Child

In preparation for the new bunk beds and dresser arriving for our girl room, we moved the old furniture out of the room.

My 6 year old daughter slept in the guest room during the change-over but loved the emptiness of her room. She was thrilled to sit in the middle of the wide open floor space with a few books and declare it her "reading room"!

This same daughter is a pack rat by nature (confession: she comes from 2 packrat parents but we are getting better and learning life is better with less stuff) and in recent months her room had become too crammed full of stuff. I've been telling her once we re-do the room, we are going to have less in there on purpose and it will be better. She'd get very uneasy about just which things we were going to get rid of. I told her we'd decide together.

So, I couldn't help pointing out to her how nice her room was when it was empty!

Today, I gave her a basket I'd moved out of her room, one she had stuffed full of tons of junk (treasures!) and a trash bag and told her to go through it.

I quickly noticed her "keep" pile was a lot bigger than her "trash" pile and decided she needed some parameters. I gave her a clear plastic box and told her "If it can fit in here, you can keep it."

I left her to her sorting.

When she called out that she was finished, I should not have been surprised to go find the box completely filled to the brim.

Have you ever seen such a box of junk?!!!

But, as she demonstrated, it closes!

And can be tucked away out of sight under the new bed!

Now I just have to hold her to the rule, "Any new treasures have to fit in this box, too, and if they don't fit you have to get rid of something else to make room to keep them."

If we build it, she will come

About four years ago when my 3rd child started walking and wearing actual shoes, it became very clear very quickly that we needed a system for managing the shoes or we'd never actually get out of the house with 6 feet in shoes (10 including our own feet)! So we got the shoe shelf/locker system I blogged about here going in our breakfast room (our laundry room is too tiny to be a mudroom but the good news is that our family is too big to use our breakfast room for it's intended purpose so we eat all our meals in the dining room, leaving the breakfast room free to be a mudroom in addition to a homework and arts & crafts center) and it worked beautifully!!! Really it has been a sanity saver!



But there were only 3 locker sections and we will hopefully have 4 children living in our home pretty soon, so a new system was needed. Also, we really liked that the hooks were low in our old shelf when we got it because our preschool-aged kids could reach to hang up their own coats, but fast-forward 4 years and now my 8 year old's jackets are nearly too long to comfortably fit.

I didn't want to spend a ton of money so at first I tried talking my husband into building one from Ana White's plans (Have you ever been to that website? I wish I was good with woodworking because oh the things I'd build!), but I couldn't sell him on that idea. (He had all kinds of logical reasons it wasn't a good idea, but really I think he just didn't want to.) So, I went back to brainstorming, our adoption slowed down, and it wasn't a high priority project. But, just as things picked up with us becoming a 4 kid family, and outgrowing our shoe shelf, I came across this blog post on The Polkadot Chair and I thought it was brilliant!

So, we headed to the Ikea (not coincidentally on the weekend kids ate free in the cafe) and bought 4 of the narrow Billy bookcases. We came home, my husband and I built 1 shelf and then my husband and my 8 year old built the other 3 shelves and it turns out the 8 year old is old enough to be a real helper for these types of projects, now (I've finally been replaced as the Ikea furniture co-builder around here! I gleefully turn over that title!). We left out the middle shelf during the building to have hanging space for coats (in the instructions the middle shelf seems important but our shelves worked fine without it). Then my husband screwed the shelves together so all 4 became 1 unit. We adjusted the height of all the interior shelves where we wanted them to best accommodate shoes & backpacks, secured the whole thing to the wall (this is a very important step 'cause you never know which crazy kid is going to climb the thing and wouldn't want it toppling over on them!), and then my husband drilled holes for the hooks and screwed them in. The Polkadot Chair put her hooks into the back of the shelf by adding some plywood reinforcement to the flimsy backing material, but we thought that sounded too hard and our old shelf had the hooks in the sides so that seemed fine to us. It worked great and actually allowed us to put hooks on both sides so there is double the hanging space in each locker. And we hung one side's hooks of each locker down a bit lower and the other side higher so we can accommodate both preschooler height and 3rd grader sized jackets!

I love how it turned out! So functional!

I searched the Internet for buckets/baskets that I liked to hold random kid stuff in the shelves, but I couldn't find anything I liked for less than $20 each (multiplied times 4 kids = $80 = too much!). I did, however, find sewing tutorials to make my own fabric buckets! The project definitely seemed out of my league, but I was excited to try.

I ordered Amy Butler Lotus fabric in cherry from Etsy.com (make sure when looking for fabric there you search on "supplies" rather than the default "homemade" which will just find things made out of the fabric). That fabric I used for the outside, for the lining I cut up a vinyl tablecloth I bought on sale at TJ Maxx for $2.00, of course when I bought it I had no idea what I'd use it for, just knew you can't even buy waterproof material that cheap! And now if anything nasty gets inside the bucket I can wipe it clean.

I also saw the idea somewhere I don't now remember to use chalkboard fabric (oh the genius of the person who invented chalkboard fabric!) for the labels -- that way in case we decide to change a child's name we can just erase the old and write the new. Kidding! But the chalk labels are easier than monogramming since I don't have a monogram machine. Plus I like the look of the chalk labels and I have a chalk pen that writes a bit brighter than typical chalk and doesn't erase as easily but can be erased with a wet rag. The kids' names are written on the labels, I just took the picture before writing the names since I don't like to put their names out here on the blog.

I combined this Internet tutorial with this one to get my instructions to make the fabric buckets. And then I wanted my own specific measurements so I tailored the instructions for what size I wanted, but I figured out halfway through my first bucket I'd made a terrible mistake in my geometry calculations! Thankfully, I was able to fix it and I'd only cut out my material for the 1 bucket so far, so the mistake could be corrected for the other 3 buckets. And that wasn't the only instance I had to use my seem ripper in this process but through trial and error I was able to do them and I'm really surprised at how good they turned out! It was a fun project and I'm so glad to get rid of the plastic beach buckets we used in the old shelf, I never liked those!

So, never mind that we don't have her bed set up yet, we have a place for our new little girl to put her shoes and really that's most important right? NOW can she come home?


Find more Works for Me Wednesday here.

Laundry Math

Maybe I've been checking a few too many of my 2nd grader's math word problems, but here's the way a load of laundry went one day last week:

27 socks from 3 different kids I attempt to match up.

I successfully made 11 pairs.

How many socks were left without a mate?

Answer = 5

Matches are on top sorted by child, and socks missing their mates are on the bottom.

My children take their socks off all over the house and car. I find them stuck down inside shoes, under the bed, under our shoe shelf, and occasionally in my purse!

So the odds of both socks making it into the dirty clothes, through the washer, out of the dryer, and ready to be paired with their mate is not very high these days.

And I didn't think about it when I bought these socks, probably because it was August and my kids had not worn socks in 3 months, so I had blissfully forgotten what it was like to wash socks times 3 children, but why, oh why, are each pair of socks in the packages I bought slightly different?!!!

And if they are the same on top (you know the part that sticks out of the shoe) can I match a sock with 2 sharks to a sock with many sharks?

Before my perfectionistic ways would not allow that kind of thinking, but now?

As a reformed perfectionist thanks to the daily refining God has allowed through mothering 3 children?

Well now, I'm really, really close to calling that a match!

And these socks:

Same size, basically same on top, just different stripe pattern on the foot part (which has the sole purpose of driving me insane) = match!!!

The current system is that the lonely socks are put in the drawer with the matched up ones where they can anxiously await their match, perhaps in a few days (or weeks) when the car, under-bed, backpack, etc. is cleaned out!

I really wish I could remember which blogger it was that I read her tip a year or so ago that she only buys one size and style of kid socks for her many children so matching them up is a breeze, because I love the idea in theory, but in practice? My kids are only 2 years apart from each other and 4 years & 3 months from oldest to youngest, but they encompass 3 different sizes of socks! And if I put a too big sock on one of them it's inevitable that I hear whines about the wrinkles inside their shoes, and a too small sock, well the heel doesn't fall in the right spot and that just doesn't work! So, I'd like to ask how she gets around the size issue or if she's found a magic kind of one-size-truly-fits-all-sock!

So, what do you think?

Life on earth is too short, just get close and call it a match.

or

Your mothering skills will be seriously scrutinized when/if your kid takes his shoes off at a friend's house and the mismatched socks will serve as proof of your lazy home-making; matching socks = an orderly life.

or

Do you have another way of handling the sock chaos?

Find more Wordful Wednesday and Works for Me Wednesday here.