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 had some girlfriends over for lunch yesterday and I realized something.  MOST people are not nearly as organized as I am.  And I don’t mean that in a bad way.  Looking at my girlfriends, I would never know that they are or aren’t organized.  It’s simply the responses that I get when they see how organized I AM that I realize I am not the norm.  For example, one of them was looking at my dry erase board in the kitchen that lists our dinner menu for the week.  For me, that is simply a reminder of what I can make with the groceries I have.  If I didn’t post that in plain site for myself, I would be frazzled every afternoon, wondering what I’d make for supper.  Another example is my “household notebook”.  I proceeded to show my girlfriends my household notebook and my “master lists”.  I have a master list for packing, groceries/shopping, dinner options, and lunch options.  This is simply an easy way to cut time out of the things I do on a normal basis.  A great deal of planning goes into packing for a household of five to go away for a weekend…or even a day!  BUT, I can save a GREAT deal of time by printing my “Master Packing List” and simply going down the checklist.  Remember, I still have to make sure that all the necessary items are clean, the suitcases are down, the baby items are up-to-date with the age of the baby, my house gets cleaned before I leave…you get the picture.  But the time I save not having to make that list over and over is invaluable to me.

Another example of the order in my life is my cleaning schedule.  Thanks to Flylady, my house is always 20-30 minutes away from being ready for company.  That means, I maintain the cleanliness and tidiness of my home well enough, so if someone calls and wants to “drop by” in about thirty minutes, it doesn’t throw me into a state of panic.  It also means that I don’t have to spend an entire week or even a few days cleaning for a weekend dinner party or get together in my home.  A lot of that has to do with the fact that my house is not cluttered.  To me, when the house is cluttered, it doesn’t matter how clean it is, it just doesn’t feel good.  One of my girlfriends that was over yesterday commented on how uncluttered my house, especially my living room, is.  I don’t really realize it because I’m here every single day and have to pick up the same messes of clothes, dishes, and toys day in and day out, but it was good to know that it doesn’t look cluttered to an ‘outsider’.

Laundry will be my last example.  I have a four section laundry sorter in my garage/laundry room.  Kids clothes, adult clothes, linens, and whites.  When one section gets large enough to make a full load, I do it.  Occassionally I’ll spend the better part of a day on laundry, just so I can skip a few days of doing a load here and a load there.  And keeping it sorted makes the putting away part much easier.

Please don’t misunderstand me.  My entire life is not completely orderly and organized.  There are PLENTY of areas that need improvement.  For example, I wish I was more organized and disciplined with my childrens’ homeschooling.  I need to spend more time blogging and working on my business.  I don’t keep my finances as up-to-date as I ought to/need to!   Sometimes I’ll go two or three weeks without recording anything in my checkbook or balancing it!  I always have a running tally in my head that keeps me from getting in trouble, but I really need to be more precise.  My husband would say that my car needs more attention.  I love my luxurious minivan but sometimes I’ll go six or seven thousand miles between oil changes and that is BAD!   I’ll be driving this vehicle until the wheels fall off and I really need to take better care of it.  And finally, my master bedroom!  No matter how clean and uncluttered the rest of my house is, I can never seem to conquer the master bedroom.  I have excess magazines, unmatched socks, clean/dirty clothes in baskets, it’s endless.  I think I will work on that tomorrow!  I’ll let you know how it turns out!  I’d love to hear about the areas in YOUR life that are the most organized or need the most improvement!  Please comment and let me know your style of order.

~audrey