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