Well, it is officially Black Friday.  Thanksgiving is over and Christmas is around the corner.  This time of year can definitely be bittersweet.  If you savor every joyful moment and really “live in the NOW”, it is a wonderful, rewarding season and the holidays are great.  But if you put all your time and effort into decorating, planning, shopping, and cooking, and never really get to relax and enjoy it all, it can be quite depressing.  December 26th will get here, all the festivities will be over, the family has gone back home, you’re left with a giant mess to clean up, three bins of decor to put away, and ten pounds to work off!  It’s all about priorities.  What are your goals for the holidays?  Are you trying not to spend as much this year?  Do you have any community service projects planned to help the needy or reach out to another family in your life?  You have to think outside the box in order to get the most out of the holidays.  For me, I love spending time with our families.  I love watching my boys play with their aunts and uncles, I love our family traditions.  I enjoy do my regular household activities and chores with Christmas music in the background.  This year, I’m trying to let my boys take on more responsibility by allowing them to help me bake our Christmas goodies and deliver them to our neighbors.  I’m trying to teach them about humility and having a servant’s heart.  It is so easy for kids these days to be self-focused and self-centered.  “It’s All About ME!”  It drives me crazy when commercials come on while they’re watching cartoons and I hear them shouting out, “I WANT THAT TOY!  I WANT THAT CAR!  I WANT THAT GAME!”  I know that kids will be kids, but it really bothers me that they are so oblivious to other people and their needs.  We are working on that this year.  

Anyways, I digress.  I also love this time of year because it is like ending a short story.  The year is coming to a close, wrap up your loose ends and prepare to start over.  Set new goals; not like “new years resolutions”.  I don’t believe in those.  But set new goals or update the ones you already have.  For my husband and me, we’re on a severe debt diet.  We’re following Dave Ramsey’s plan and our debt snowball is gaining momentum.  So when January 1, 2009 gets here, we’ll update our debt snowball and see how things are coming along.  How about your health?  For me, I have about 30 pounds to lose before I want to get pregnant again.  I’d love to have our fourth and final baby in 2009, but I have no desire to be pregnant at the weight I’m at now.  However, I’m not waiting for January 2009 to get started on that goal.  We leave to go home tomorrow and I plan to start losing weight and getting healthy as soon as I get home!

Also, I’m looking forward to starting and exploring new things in our homeschooling.  January marks the start of the second half of the school year and we’re going to be making some changes and joining ranks with some friends of ours who have decided to homeschool starting in January.

Regardless of your goals or your life circumstances, it is up to you to determine how your holidays will pan out.  We always have the power to choose joy in our own life.  We’re having a very, very small Christmas this year.  We’re not doing gifts at all with my husbands side of the family and I am very excited about that.  We will all save money and our focus will be on the important things rather than who got what.  It takes a lot of stress off, thats for sure.  This time of year is supposed to be about love, generosity, thanksgiving, and joy.  Live your days with purpose.  Decide each morning that you’re going to choose joy.  Trust me, people will notice.

~audrey

Good grief this week went by fast!!  I’m overwhelmed with how much ‘stuff’ I have to do over the next five or six days before Thanksgiving.  Of course, I’ve already started my to-do lists that are full of cleaning, shopping, cooking, baking, traveling, working, but it really helps me to put it all down hour by hour on my planner.  I have a really great “homeschool planner and record keeper”.  It is made by Homeschool Inovations and I actually bought it on Ebay, but it was by far my biggest ‘can’t live without it’ item that I bought since  beginning homeschooling.  Anyways, my planner leaves room for all of MY things, in addition to lesson plans and schedules for the boys.  My goal for today is to write out the details of each day, tomorrow through Wednesday, so I don’t miss anything important, and hopefully I’ll find time to get ahead so I can just have some fun days with the boys before heading to my mom’s.  Of course, one of my favorite things about going out of town, is preparing my own house for our return.  I like to make sure the entire house is clean, there are fresh sheets on all the beds, the laundry is caught up, and everything smells good when we get back!  I actually like to have my house in this condition (or something close to it) every Friday so I can relax over the weekend, but that just ain’t happening today.  I’m going to take a break from the hussle and bussle and take the boys to see my mom.  Have a wonderful Friday, a relaxing weekend, and a productive Monday and Tuesday!

~audrey

I don’t know about you, but I always do a better job at something, or stick with a commitment longer, if I have accountability.  Whether it’s a workout partner, my husband, a weekly meeting with my best friend, accountability is always effective.  This goes with cleaning and organization as well.  I love www.Flylady.com.  Flylady is a free service offered online to help you get your household in order (mostly in regards to cleaning, but they do some financial stuff now too).  One of the best things about Flylady is they teach babysteps.  They’re motto is, “You are not behind, you’re just getting started!”  It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you feel like you’re years behind on your clutter control and cleaning, but if you look at it as a brand new challenge that you’re beginning today, then somehow, it seems more attainable.  Flylady sends you emails several times each day asking you how you are doing with your routine.  Have you done taken five minutes to drink your water and take your vitamins?  Have you taken 15 minutes to declutter a hotspot?  These are things you’d be held accountable on with Flylady.  If you’re interested, I encourage you to visit their site.  It is one of the best things I’ve ever done for my house.  Flylady teaches you how to make a household notebook (they call it a ‘control journal’).  I call mine a household notebook because mine is SO much more than just the stuff in their control journals.

Another example of the power of accountability is in my homeschooling.  I’ve really enjoyed our first year of homeschooling, but I’ve just gotten an extra boost because my best friend Ashley has informed me that she’ll be pulling her five year old out of his public school after Christmas and will finish out the year homeschooling.  That accountability and motivation is just what I need to give me that extra push to be more creative in my teaching, think outside the box, and also the promise of more ‘adult conversations’ with Ashley throughout the week since she won’t be working anymore!!    We’ve already started brain storming about how we’re going to do this together and make sure the boys get the most out of their kindergarten year at home.  We’re planning field trips, teaching rotations, art projects, sharing material and curriculum; I’m really excited! 

Everyone benefits from accountability.  What are the areas in your life in which you need the most accountability? 

~audrey

Although I consider myself organized and structured, I can be a procrastinator when it comes to things I don’t do on a regular basis.  My christmas cards are a perfect example of that.  Every year, I have the best intentions with regards to sending out christmas cards.  I always type up a letter on festive stationary, giving an update on our family and what all has gone on in our lives that year.  Sometimes I even order photo cards with a few pictures of the boys to include with our letter.  However, many years have gone by when I put all of that effort into our cards and letter and never even get them in the mail.  I don’t know why I do that!  I love the holidays.  I love sharing tidbits of our life with friends and family we don’t get to see often, yet I fall short on the delivery.

Well I decided this year would be different!  Yesterday (11/18) I typed our letter and ordered my photo cards.  All I have left to do is address the envelopes and stick them in the mail.  I plan to do that this week, and I will let you know when it’s done, so I can have some accountability!   

Another thing you can do to get ahead in the holiday season is to prepare your house for the decorating process.  Whatever room you put your tree in, make sure it is completely free of clutter.  If you take pieces of furniture out, go ahead and do that.  This is a great opportunity to do some deep cleaning; vacuum your baseboards, clean your ceiling fan, and dust your window sills.  When you pull out those decorations (for me, they’re in two rubbermaid bins in the garage), keep everything neat and organized.  Don’t just throw the empty ornament boxes back in the decor. box.  Keep everything tidy so it is easier for your to “undecorate” when it’s all over. 

Next is the gift giving process.  I cannot stress enough: plan, plan, plan!  You will be much less likely to overspend if you have a plan in place.  Just as you would not go to the grocery store to shop for a month without a list and menu, you never want to go out Christmas shopping without a plan and a list.  Better yet, give yourself a budget.  I don’t know what the exact statistics are, but Americans rack up TONS of debt over the holidays because we always end up getting the urge to overdo it.  Just when we think we’re finished, we see “just one more thing” that our child MUST have, or you add “just one more” friend or coworker to your gift list.  RESIST THAT URGE!  I start my Christmas list in January of each year!  As soon as I get a new planner for the year, I start a running list in the back as ideas come to me for specific people.  This really helps when November rolls around and I get a blank look on my face as I think about tackling my shopping. 

This year in particular, we’ve informed our kids that they will be getting one gift each from Mommy and Daddy, and two or three gifts from each set of grandparents.  You may be thinking that is a little harsh, but the last two Christmases in our family have been absolutely rediculous.  Our boys got so many gifts last year, they were just tossing stuff aside as soon as they opened it.  They didn’t care who it was from, and some gifts they even said, “I didn’t want this, can I have the next present?”  YEAH.  That infuriated my husband and me!  We want our kids to know the real meaning of Christmas and the reason we celebrate.  We’re tired of Christmas circling around the opening of presents and what time dinner starts.  Thus, we are attempting to simplify the selfish parts and emphasize the true meaning of Christmas. 

I encourage you to do as much as you can to get ahead on the things that have stressed you out in the past.  Make your desserts ahead and put them in the freezer, wrap your gifts as soon as you buy them.  Send you Christmas cards out the week after Thanksgiving.  All of these things will add up to quality time you can spend with your family rather than rushing around to get everything done.  Enjoy the holiday season for what it is.  A time to be thankful, generous, worshipful, and joyful.  Notice I didn’t include ‘stressed’! 

~audrey

As I’ve said before, I love Mondays.  There is just something relaxing and refreshing about a new week.  My parents took my older two boys from Thursday until Sunday of last week.  As always, they had a wonderful time and we were glad to get them back and spend time with them last night.  Joshua, my five year old, had been complaining of an ear ache while at my parents’.  They assumed it was probably a result of being out in the cold all weekend (they had a neighborhood block party and my dad took the boys hunting).  Joshua was in pretty good spirits last night and I had him lie down on the couch with sweet oil in his ear for about 30 minutes.  Thats an old remedy I got from my mother-in-law.  Well, Joshua woke up sometime in the middle of the night (I didn’t even look at the clock) because he had to go to the bathroom, but didn’t make it in time.  When he came to tell me he had peed on the bathroom floor, he was burning up with a fever.  I’m a firm believer that fevers are our bodies way of fighting off what doesn’t belong, so I only give medicine for fevers when my child is really uncomfortable, hurting, or the fever reaches 105 (believe it or not, we’ve had fevers at or above 105 three or four times).  Anyways, Joshua being sick changes the course of our day.  We normally have a relaxing morning on Mondays.  The boys eat breakfast, watch cartoons and play out back while I do housework, then Joshua goes to piano lessons at 11:00.  After piano, we run errands and go home to have lunch.  The day flies by after that.  Very rarely do I have a day of nothingness.  What is a day of ‘nothingness’, you might ask?  I would consider that a day when I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have a big to-do list, I may not even leave the house, and I would likely spend most of the day just chilling out with my kids.  You would think that a stay-at-home mom would have days like this quite often, but for me, that is just not the case.  However, I am going to make a conscious choice to have a day of nothingness today.  I really missed my boys while they were gone, and I even “let the house go” a little because I went to Atlanta on Saturday and didn’t get back until late.  We need a day of true rest.  I still plan to change all the bed sheets and do the dishes in the kitchen, but everything else that I would normally do on a Monday will wait until the boys go to bed tonight, or maybe even tomorrow.  As much as I love cleaning and having my house in order, I recognize the importance of letting it all go in order to do the truly important things, such as spending quality time with my children.  It is so important for us as women, to set the mood in our house.  The old saying, “If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”, is completely true.  If I choose joy when I open my eyes in the morning, if I make a conscious decision to ‘count it all joy’, as we’re instructed to do in James 1:2, then 9 times out of 10, we have a great day in our home.  I don’t always feel happy and joyful, but so much of that is a matter of my heart.  My pastor recently said, “It’s much easier to act your way into a feeling than it is to feel your way into an action.”  I will never have a joyful spirit if I simply sit back and continue to yell at the kids, fuss about my husband, and whine about the budget.  I can, however, be thankful that I have three beautiful healthy children, a loving husband that treasures his role in our home, and enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table.  Have you ever noticed that the poorest people you know are sometimes the happiest?  Or how about the opposite, when the wealthiest people you know are also the most unhappy?  It is a matter of the heart.  Are you choosing to dwell on the little things that you may or may not have the power to change, or are you choosing to acknowledge all the blessings in your life and choose joy and thanksgiving?  I challenge you to expect to have a GREAT week, regardless of what you have planned or what you expect might happen.  Choose joy!  Remind yourself of all the things you are thankful for.  Purpose to have a great week and a merry heart.  

Have a BLESSED week!

~audrey

I’ve been desperately needing to go to the grocery store for over a week now.  Our dinners were getting dersperate and  breakfast was consisting of hot chocolate and a granola bar (not the healthy kind!).  My household notebook is very organized and allows for easy meal planning.  But the process takes a little time.  First, I take inventory of everything (food related) in my kitchen.  This includes the fridge, freezer, cabinets, pantry, and where ever else I have to hide stuff to keep the kids from eating it all at once.  Once I’ve made a list, I try to see what meals I can put together based on that list.  I usually start adding things to my grocery list from there.  I go down my “Master Grocery List” and see what basic, everyday things I am out of (that is an exteremly helpful list to have).  Then I pull out my “Master Dinner Menu”.  This list consists of about thirty of our favorite, relatively inexpensive and easy dinner choices.  I usually compare my “final menu” (I shop every two weeks, so there will be 10-14 dinner meals on my list) to my food inventory in order to keep from buying things I already have.  Then of course I have to add breakfast items to the list.  Lunch is pretty easy for my little family.  Although I have three little boys, they are easy and don’t eat all that much right now (I’m brutally aware of how much that will change over the next several years!), and my husband almost always has leftovers he can take to work.  If your family isn’t in the habit of eating leftovers, I highly encourage you to start!  It saves a ton of money on lunch items and you don’t waste perfectly good food that you took the time to prepare in the first place.  Okay.  Now my grocery list is complete.  I don’t know about you, but grocery shopping isn’t really at the top of my list of favorite things to do…especially if I have one or all of my children in tow!!  In order to minimize my backtracking time (you know, the time you spend going back to the same aisle 15 times because you keep forgetting something!?), I sit down with my final grocery list and I rewrite it in the order I will find it in the store.  Now, you may be thinking I’m crazy right now, but hear me out.  You probably go to the same grocery store every time, right?  You’d be surprised how well you know the aisles.  For example, in my store of choice, I walk right into the produce department, the bakery, and the deli.  Next aisle has bread, coffee, condiments, etc.  Then I’m faced with the meat (beef, pork, chicken, seafood)… See!  If you make your list according to where you will find it in the store, you don’t have to keep scanning over your entire list every few steps you take for fear you are going to forget something.  I only had the baby with me, because the big boys are with my parents this weekend.  As soon as we walked in the store, I went to the cookie aisle, grabbed a box of vanilla wafers, opened them, and handed them to Owen.  He was happy from then on.  First, he ate as many as he wanted, then he got a kick out of shoving them in MY mouth everytime I put anything in the cart, and once I was full and began refusing his feeding, he began dropping them on the floor one at a time, allowing store security to follow the trail of cookies and lock me away for letting my child make such a mess.  But guess what??  I DON’T CARE!  I’m extatic to say, it took me less than an hour to buy almost three weeks worth of groceries!  I also had to run to the other side of the store for tea lights.  My shopping trip was a success and I made it home in time to unpack and head out to my in-laws’ for dinner.  I encourage you to try this method…maybe not the cookie thing, but definitely the ordered list.  Let me know if you feel like it saved you time.

~audrey

I’ve had a few people ask me how to organize loose photos.  There are several options and they all depend on how much time and money you have for the project as to which one you will want to use.  It also depends on whether your photos are scanned (on your computer or a disc), or whether they are printed (with no scanned copy).  For my mom’s photos, all of them were before the age of digital cameras, so they were all loose.  It takes a lot of time to scan photos onto your computer, so if you have a large amount of pictures to organize, I would not suggest trying to scan them all.  However, if you do have your photos on your computer or can get them there, my suggestion would be to put them in photo books.  There are so many options available from cheap to pricey, pocket size to wedding album size, many color choices, themes, etc.  Here are two of my favorite places to create photo books online:

http://myphotopipe.com/photobooks.php

http://photomax.com

When creating a photo book, you can insert text on each page or captions under each photo, which is a very convenient alternative to scrapbook journaling which takes a lot of time and a steady hand.  One of my favorite things I’ve ever done with my boys’ pictures was when I wrote a story about them used their pictures (in a photo book) to illustrate the story.  I gave the books as Christmas gifts that year to most of our family members and it was a huge hit.  Since then, I’ve had every intention of writing a new story every year and making that one of my traditions at Christmas…that has yet to happen again!  Another good idea with regards to photo books, is to create them for specific events.  I now make a photobook for each of my boys every year on their birthday.   Kind of like a year book for that year in their life.  Oh yes, I used to be the “Great Scrapbooking Mom” with tons of embellishments, beautiful paper, stickers, cool tools, and great scrapbooks…but times have changed, my days seem to have shortened over the last five years, and I’ve resorted to simpler, more cost effective ways.

If your photos are already printed and are loose, there are still a few good options available that don’t involve scanning all of your pictures onto a computer.  The easiest way would certainly be to put all of them (or as much as possible) into one large photo album of some sort.  This is a link to the Lillian Vernon website where they have a really great ‘fold out photo case’ that holds 400 photos!  You could easily type up a title card to slide into the top of each row in order to label where the photos are from or who is in them.

http://www.lillianvernon.com/catalog/product_display.jsp?searchParam=LV&pdId=1821&addOn=886&categoryId=&catTree=&clearance=&sid=eas

There are endless designs and styles of photo albums out there in almost every store you can think of.  Just remember to only use “acid free” photo albums so you can preserve your photos as safely as possible.

The final, most time consuming, and potentially most expensive method, would be scrapbooking.  After I had my first son, we were living in Atlanta.  We had a really great scrapbook store near our house called Scrap Happy.  I could spend hours in that little store.  I always gave myself a $20 budget per visit.  I’d bring all of my photos with me so I could find coordinating paper, stickers, embellishments, etc.  Then I’d go home, put Joshua to bed, and scrapbook for hours on end.  It is very rewarding to look back at those scrapbooks now.  But the reality is, even stay-at-home-moms don’t typically have time to do this regularly.  And the sadest part is, the further and further you fall behind, the more guilt you feel as each child’s memories begin to pile up in some drawer or closet (thus developing more clutter!).  If you have the time and resources it takes to be a scrapbooker, more power to you!  Otherwise, I’d encourage you to use one of the other methods I listed.

Last, but certainly not least, please allow yourself to throw away pictures.  If you have a sleeve of pictures that you got developed and there are some “nonsense” pictures in there (you know the ones…blurry, no one is looking at the camera, a shot of someone’s back side) just throw those away!  You will feel so much better about having your favorite shots preserved in an organized way, then to hang onto every single picture you’ve ever taken, but have them tucked away, unlovingly, in some drawer or closet.

Maybe this will be one of your New Year’s resolutions…”Organize My Photos”.  It’s a fun project and you and your kids will be so glad you did it when they are grown, married, and have kids of their own and want to compare their old baby pictures with your new grandchild.    That’s a staggering thought for me. 

Happy Organizing!

~audrey

P.S.  If you have a particular topic you’d like me to address, please contact me via email or comment on one of my posts, and I’d be happy to give it a shot!

I’ve been reading a book called “Sheparding a Child’s Heart”, by Tedd Tripp.  It’s all about getting to the heart issues behind your children’s actions, words, behavior, etc.  The book has really helped me examine the heart issues in different areas of my own life as well.  I don’t know if you realize this, but there are heart issues behind the clutter and disorder in our lives (I know, you didn’t really want to know that!).  The first thing I address when helping someone get organized is how they got to the point of disorganization in the first place.  More times than not, they got to the point of no return gradually.  Carelessness, distractions, busyness, fear.  You can make your own list of reasons.  The point is, we need to address the heart issues that got us to the point of being disorganized.  Maybe you’ve been messy or disorganized your entire life.  If that is the case, you may want to contact me!   But most likely, you’ve got some things already running through your mind that helped you along your jouney to chaos within your home and your life.  For me, some of my reasons were busyness.  I stayed so busy over the last few years that there were seasons in which I had no spare time whatsoever to spend on “me” or my own house.  I had to rearrange my priorities many, many times.  Another reason for me was fear.  At one point I had 19 storage bins in my garage.  Most of them had clothes in them.  There were a few for paint supplies, Christmas decorations, crafts, sewing, and toys, but most of them were clothing.  I had an entire wardrobe in three different sizes for summer AND winter!  I was so afraid to get rid of those size 6 bins because “what if I finally get down to that size again!? I won’t have anything to wear if I give them away!”  Do you know that the last time I wore that size was five years ago.  By golly, if I get back in a size six again, I’ll deserve a NEW size six wardrobe.  I was holding onto those clothes out of fear and I was holding onto ‘the old me’.  I’m a completely different person now than when I wore those ittly bitty clothes five years ago.  I have three kids now, I’ve moved four times, my husband went back to school, graduated, has a great job now, and we bought a new house.  Needless to say, I gave the clothes to a skinny friend who could use them.    When I finally rearranged my priorities, made time for myself and my own household, I was able to get organized a little bit at a time and that had the biggest payoff of all.  Sure, you could hire me to come to your house and do ALL the hard work for you, but the best and most important part of the process is putting your own sweat and tears into getting your life the way you want it.  Sorting through years of memories and deciding what is worth keeping and what is worth letting go of.  We make new memories everyday, but holding onto things that you should really be letting go of can completely hinder where you’re going in life and how you get there.  I encourage you to examine the issues in your life that may have led or enabled you to get to your personal point of disorder or chaos.  It’s not as hard as you think to start letting go.

~audrey

There’s nothing quite like a little encouragement to give you a boost and help you go that extra mile.  This morning, I went to my usual Wednesday morning spinning class at 5:30am.  I had gotten up extra early in order to go to the grocery store before my class.  I also caved and bought some iced coffee while I was there.  It’s going to be a long day (with no nap in sight), so I figured I deserved a treat.    As I was adjusting my bike and warming up, my instructor told me that his wife loves my blog and has been very inspired (I love you Jenny!)  That completely made my day!  As I was talking with an old friend last night, I simply told her that the reason I do all of this (cleaning, organizing, consulting) is because I LOVE it.  I love the instant gratification.  I love how much simpler it makes my life.  I love the encouragement I get from my husband when he comes home to a clean house and dinner on the table.  But most of all, I LOVE that not everyone thinks like I do, but most everyone can benefit from my help!  I came to the realization that most people do not like cleaning.  Most people hate the thought of spending a day cleaning out and organizing their closets, and that is where I come in!  Whether you need a nudge in the right direction, a little help to get started, or you need me by your side to the end of your project, I want to help!  The purpose of my blog is to encourage and build you up!  If you are inspired by the tidbits of my life that I include in my blog, let me know!  I’m so encouraged to know that even though I don’t have a gigantic number of clients at this moment, I’m still touching lives and encouraging readers (mostly women I’m assuming) to embrace their role in their home and make the very best of it!  Getting organized makes life so much easier.  My mother has asked me to tackle every closet in her house while I’m there for Thanksgiving vacation.  I’ve also organized an entire hope chest (and lifetime) of free floating photos from her house.  I’ll be returning those in a labeled photo album and organized in chronological order. 

I’m starting a monthly challenge by having readers send me pictures of a current organizational challenge in their home/life.  I’ll help you get started with a plan on how to get your particular space organized, and then you can send me the after picture and I’ll post them on my website.  In fact, from now until January 1, 2009, I will come to your house for FREE and help all of my local friends with any organizational challenge you don’t feel you can tackle on your own.  Just for fun!  Just because I love you guys and I want to make your life easier!  Email the photos of your challenging space to audrey@madetoorganize.com.

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

~audrey

I love Mondays.  The only place I have to go on Mondays is piano lessons at 11am.  The rest of the day is all mine.  Mondays are a chance to start over.  Regardless of how last week turned out, this week has the potential for greatness.  The things I do on Mondays lay the foundation for where my week will go.  For example:  Every Monday I change our sheets, take inventory of all the food in the house, plan my menu, make a grocery list, complete any laundry from the weekend, and do a general cleaning of the whole house (nothing detailed, just the basics).  Of course my Mondays include lists of many kinds; to-do lists, grocery lists, lesson plans, and errands to be run.  This is your chance to set some goals for the week.  Don’t be unrealistic, but do challenge yourself.  For example, last week was the beginning of November.  Therefore, my goals for November included working out three mornings a week at 5am and quitting coffee (I know, it’s crazy!).  So far, so good!  I weened myself from the coffee last week and now I haven’t had any since Friday.  I think I’m finally over the headaches and can make it through my day without a nap.  I worked out four days last week and then the family went for a two hour bike ride on Saturday.  That was a great start for me.  Now it is Monday again.  I worked out this morning and now I need to get off the computer and get started on the rest of my lists!  Be productive.  Set your timer!  Write everything down.  It is very rewarding to sit down in the evening and be able to look at everything you accomplished that day.  Especially if you’re a stay at home mom and your husband wonders what you do all day…as if you actually have free time!  Have a Marvelous Monday!!

~audrey