Day #10 Laundry Challenge - 2 days and now it's DONE!

Our laundry area is in the garage so I I have one shelf and then I just use the top of the dryer to hold stuff. It wasn't too bad but I did need to clean out the overflowing lint trash can and see what exactly was on that shelf.




For the main part of the laundry challenge, I decided that the laundry should be DONE. We have an electric blanket that is hard to wash that I think has been out there for at least two winter seasons. We also have a high chair cover and a baby car seat cover that needed to be washed and my "baby" is two. So I had some miscellaneous catch up to do in addition to all this plus 3 more baskets upstairs.



Well I discovered that the shelf had brake oil that was here from when we bought the house. Umm..ew. There was other stuff that needed to go but mostly I just put it back neatly and wiped down the shelf and the tops of the washer/dryer. I also swept the laundry area floor.. Ooo aaa I can see the floor and before mentioned electric blanket is drying. Yea!



But here is the real accomplishment. ALL laundry put away in respective drawers. New towels and sheets on the beds for everyone. I get to re-claim my beautiful blue couch. And I have NINE empty laundry baskets. Ahh the sight of empty laundry baskets...Isn't it just gorgeous??


Time to kick my feet up and relax. Glad that we are only do half school this week. Today's challenge was the freezer which I decided was not a good thing to do while trash service is canceled so that will have to wait until later. I needed the extra time to do laundry anyway. :)

Day # 9 Toy Organization - Going from Ugh to Wow!

Day 9 on my organizational challenge is toy organization. I was going to put this off for as long as possible but since it was today's challenge, I decided to go ahead and plunge in. It took hours. See why...





So obviously in addition to an organizational problem, I also have a cleanliness problem. I admit that I am not as good as getting the kids to pick up as I should be. Part of the problem is that my solution to cleaning up the rest of the house is to gather up all their toys and dump them in their room without putting them away. Now that I have it cleaned up though. It's easier to keep it clean and I will also soon be rolling out a kids clean system involving their specific tasks written on craft sticks and me handing out the craft sticks to the kids to complete the task.

Here is after..What's that you see? I think other people call it a FLOOR. Who knew this room even had one! In corresponding order to the before pictures...



So where DID all those toys go? Well one of my secrets is that the closet in this room has a chain lock on the top. And Chris built shelves for the closet and there are many trucks, bins, hats, puzzles, etc that live in the closet and I have control over what comes out. I don't like a free for all on the toys. I have too many for that.




Organization FAIL..We got this under the bed storage unit. Seemed like a good idea at the time. There is all that space under the bed after all. But it's horrible. The dividers are weird and have a gap at the bottom and once you open the whole thing, it becomes like those bins (see before pic #1..I hate those too and put them in the other kid's room) where they just dump every toy. So because I can't get to the store to buy a shelving unit to hold a bunch of cutely labeled plastic boxes, this will have to do for now.



Stay Tuned...today's challenge was laundry organization to which I decided to take on as getting every single piece of laundry in the house done and put away including all the little quirky things that have been in the laundry room for months because I just haven't gotten a chance to deal with them (i.e. some curtains that need to be bleached and an electric blanket with annoying instructions). This challenge is going to take two days for me. So more tomorrow!

Day # 6 Get organized - Dresser drawers

I am obsessed with organization blogs. It's what I do when I am on much needed back breaks from the actual organizing. I wish I still knew which blog it was from but I had clicked through from a blog where I am doing my challenge and I don't remember which one it was. But I have brand new way of organizing the clothes in drawers and I love it! I started on my own drawers but no pictures of transformation there. I then moved onto Peter who has wayyy too many clothes stuffed into his drawers.

Here is the before picture of his pants drawers. And yet somehow I managed to get it closed every time. This isn't all his pants though. Sometimes I leave them on top of the dresser.



And this is the after of the pants drawer. The lady's secret trick..at least for shirts and I applied them to pants..is to fold them over one more time and put them side by side instead of on top of each other. So now they are nicely organized by style and the great thing about this method is I don't have to search through any other pants to find the one I want. I just grab what I want. The other great thing about this is when I am stuff more pants in, I squish them more rather than adding to the top where it causes the drawer to go all haywire and messed up. I did learn though that cords don't roll well so they are still folded the old way. This includes the laundry that needed to be put away so it is about 5 more pants than the before photo!



And here is the after of the shirts drawer. You can see I still have more space for even more shirts. Peter (age 3) also thought this was very cool because he got to look at all the designs of his shirt before he picked out the trucks one that he wanted to wear that day.


Stay tuned...I think tomorrow is under the kitchen sink day! Or maybe the pantry..I need to see what I am going to eat for the rest of the snow days since I didn't go to the store. :)

Day # 4 & 8 Get organized - Coat Closet/Linen closest

I am doing an organization challenge over at A bowl full of lemons.

Day 7 was the linen closet and Day 8 was the coat closet. I don't own a coat closest but we do have a junk closet that shares space with some clothes and shelves that contain our linens. We have a linen closet but we don't use it because of the cats. :( So I decided to tackle this closet today and I was surprised that it didn't take me as long as I thought. That's because practically everything I touch is getting thrown into a box for goodwill. So far for 2011, I am up to 8 boxes.

The Before picture of the junk portion



The Before picture of the linen closet portion


The after portion..probably could still stand to purge some hangers but still it's an improvement!






And the after of the linen closet. I purged a lot of linens but mostly I just re-folded a bunch of them. My only complaint is that it's really hard to fold mattress covers and king sized sheets and make them look pretty. But it's the linen closet after all so who cares!

A Saviour for our sins

Andrew was talking to Peter one day about Heaven and I asked him who was going to Heaven and he said "I am". And I asked him why and he told me it was because he prayed to God that he believed in Him. I further questioned to see what he believed him about and he said "that He is the Saviour from our sins." Apparently he did this several weeks ago while he was playing at the kitchen table. He didn't say but I assume it was a conversation he had with God while playing legos. We talked for quite awhile and he seems to truly understand that Christ was God's son that died on the cross for us for our sins. Since he prayed to God about believing in Him, he has started praying by himself. We still have our family prayer time too but I am so happy that he feels comfortable with praying to God by himself when ever he feels like it.

A few years back, Barrett taught a parenting class and encouraged us to not use the phrase "ask Jesus in your heart" when we are talking about salvation to our kids. That stuck with me and I have never said those words to Andrew and I am so glad because it was such a sweet sweet moment when he told us that he believed that Jesus was the Saviour for our sins. Chris and I look forward to disciplining our sweet Andrew to develop his own relationship with Christ as his Lord and Saviour.

Luke 2:11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.

Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God

John 14:6 Jesus answered "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 3:16-17 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Why I love GCA and why we aren't using it next year

As many of you know, Andrew's Kindergarten this year is GCA - Georgia Cyber Academy. It is using the nationally renowned home school curriculum, K12 but it is administered by a state charter school, GCA. Reasons for picking it in the first place are 1) It's free. They send me all the materials and it uses a curriculum that we have a high opinion of. Buying K12 privately would cost $238 a subject so about $1200 a year for all and 2) I wanted to have structure my first year to get the hang of it. I homeschooled pre-K but it was just a one or two days a week when I felt like it thing and I was all over the place with curriculum since I didn't have a formal curriculum for any of it. It felt very disorganized and I thought that if I didn't do GCA then I would never get organized and I would hardly ever do school.

So I am not doing GCA next year and people assume that means that I don't like it. Not true. I like it a lot. I don't like it enough to give my control to be able to do my own thing though. It is time consuming and comprehensive. To do GCA correctly and well, I have had to give up on a lot of my own things that I wish I could be doing right now. But for the most part, I don't mind doing GCA. And Andrew really enjoys it too. I even had hesitations about switching because Andrew likes it so much that I thought that choosing something else would be less fun and I still want Andrew to have fun. I will be more than happy to talk to anyone that is interested in GCA about it. Even if you don't have a school age child yet, catch me this year and I can show you the curriculum and sample lessons.

But here's how I finally was able to sum it up. GCA is a provider of high quality educational information. I didn't feel like I could define my child's educational goals with it because I was going to blindly accept their curriculum each year sight unseen. I can tweak a little..skip lessons here and there, go to the library for extra materials, look on the internet for extra projects. But for the most part, I don't need nor have the time to do these things. So even though it's great, I want to be able to do my own thing.

My own thing does involve someone else's curriculum though. We are going to follow the model of the Well Trained Mind. It's a 4 year rotation of time periods. In 1st grade, we are doing the Ancients. This will come into play again in 5th grade. They have a lot of different recommended books for the different subjects. We will use some of them and not use some of them. A lot of relies heavily on getting additional material from the library which I love. They have some real dud non-fiction books on their shelves but for the most part, I love library supplements. Regarding the fun stuff, I am going to miss the aspect of some lessons being online. I like online stuff and Andrew does too so I will probably supplement with educational computer games. But I did find out that I will have plenty of projects to do with History and Science and that is the kind of stuff that Andrew adores so as long as projects are involved, I don't think he will care what curriculum it is.

More on the specifics of what we are doing 1st Grade soon. We are starting to order from Amazon and it is hard when things arrive to not go ahead and start doing them. Must-finish-Kindergarten-GCA. Repeat..

The Grouchy Ladybug lapbook

Today we did not other school work but to make a lapbook for The Grouchy Ladybug. Lately I have been a justifiable slacker. I have a back condition and am waiting patiently for 2 weeks to fly by so I can have back surgery. I have learned a couple of things during this time. 1) My over ambition school schedule is not going to work right now and 2) any ambition at all is being squashed out by the effects of pain medicine. So I have had to come up with plan B. So plan B has been to do as much as I can and not fall behind (in the school's mind) on subjects.

Today I did something completely unprecedented...I skipped all my GCA work and did something completely different. And it was FUN and Andrew loved it. I was over at http://www.homeschoolshare.com (one of my faves) and noticed that they had a lapbook study on The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle. We happen to have the book from the library and I happened to be up way earlier than the kids so I went to work on cutting. Lapbooks at his age involve a whole lot of cutting for the parent because even if I gave him a little bit, there is no way that he could do it. Lapbooks at his age can also be very busy workish. But it was educational too. Example of what a lapbook looks like.

So here are the contents of our lapbook. It didn't really have any creative elements of my own. I pretty much just printed and cut out most of the ideas found here.

Outside flaps - I had him copy The Grouchy Ladybug in his best HWT effort. He did good. He also colored a picture of a lady bug. He wanted to color it half red/half orange.

Left flap - Counting with the Grouchy Lady Bug. I see no where in the book where it counts at all but ours has this accordion style number thing that counts by 5 which is something Andrew did in Math last week. It also had the suggested Bible verse of Ephesians 4:32 - Be kind to one another - since the premise of the book is a grouchy lady bug who won't share and goes to pick a fight with everyone.

Center section - A turn wheel for L is for..ladybug, lemon, leaf, lion. This was fun busy work. Andrew likes things that turns with brads. I had him paste the pictures of the item next to the word. The bottom half had the most time consuming thing ever. It was a flap book that goes from 6 AM to 6 PM just like the actual book and Andrew had to draw the time on the clock, paste the animal of the story on the right time, then paste the name of the animal on. It was good for Time (current Math subject) and animal identification. And good for general fun as Andrew had fun reviewing the book and then pasting all day long. Nothing is more fun than an all day glue stick.

Right flap - Parts of a ladybug - matchbox thing where Andrew pasted the parts of a ladybug onto a picture of a ladybug. More busy work. We can't find it but we also did a little book called Follow Directions and it gave instructions on adding details onto 4 ladybugs and then writing totals for all of them. Useful multiplication intro. 4 lady bugs, 3 spots on each, 12 spots total. Woo.

This took all day. I was completely unstressed by the fact that we didn't do any "real" school. Andrew had a blast and would lapbook every day if I let him. I am thinking maybe a lapbook a week spread across the days probably wouldn't interfere with our actual school work too much so we will work that out in the future. Today felt like Kindergarten. Easy, laid back, just went with the flow...