Lost & Found....The Sequel

You might be wondering how my Lost and Found box turned out.

Well, it worked!  And it's still working.

After my box filled up, one Saturday I told the kids it was Clean-out-the-Lost-and-Found-Box Day.

If their items were not claimed and paid for, then they would be donated to Goodwill.

I dumped the box in the middle of the floor and each Fish Stick made their pile of belongings (apparently there were items they weren't ready to pay for but items they didn't want to get rid of).

I made a list of the amount of money they owed to reclaim their things.

Then they were given the option to pay up or work it off.

Some kids opted to pay....the ones who actually have money and don't allow it to burn holes in their pockets.

Others wanted (or needed) to work it off.

I pulled out my trusted Home Management Notebook and pulled up the Paid Chores pages.

I ended up having my garage pressure washed, cleaned and organized and my Lost and Found box emptied all in one Saturday.  Everyone was happy.  Well, maybe not everyone was happy but I was happy and all Fish Sticks have since been TONS better about keeping their personal belongings picked up!  My Lost and Found box has never been so full again.

It's working....try it!!

Paid Chore List

Clean Garage!

Call Me Mean

I am a broken record.

I tell my kids this but that means nothing to them in the age that they are growing up in.

My Disney Peter Pan record had a big scratch right when the Indians captured Wendy.
"And a band of indians....
And a band of indians....
And a band of indians.....
And a band of indians...."

Over and over until we knocked the needle a bit to get past the scratch.

I don't know if they will ever understand that analogy but I find myself repeating myself over and over.

Pick up your clothes off the floor.

Put your shoes in the mudroom bench.

Who left their socks scattered in the kitchen?

Put your school folder in your backpack.

Don't forget to clear off your cereal bowl.

I drive myself crazy so I'm SURE I drive my kids crazy.

I know what my problem is.  Say it once.  Expect obedience.  Punish disobedience.  Obedience the 2nd time is disobedience.  It sounds so simple, but for me....well, I must be hard-headed or just extremely merciful which is coming back to bite me.

I'm the queen of new systems to maintain order in my home.  Charts.  Stickers.  Reward systems.  Prizes.  Praise.  Ask the Fish Sticks.  (Rolling of the eyes...."Mom's got a new chart, everyone.")  They are fleeting and it's because of me.  I just can't seem to keep them all up.  OR they lose their motivation with my Fish Sticks.
 
So what's new in the Fish House?  The Lost and Found Box.  New Rule:  Every night after kids are tucked away, I pick up the house....all over....bedrooms included.  Anything OUT OF ITS PLACE gets put into my Lost and Found Box.  No daily reminders.  No repeated directions.  No mercy.  I'm not nagging.  I'm not aggravated.  Just a happy sweep of the house at 8:30.

So how do they redeem their prized possessions that they neglected to put where they belong?  They have a choice:  pay 25 cents per item (that would be 50 cents for a pair of shoes) OR do a chore that is equivalent to 25 cents (I keep a list of pay-worthy chores in my home management notebook.).

This is week 2.  I think 95% of the things you see in this box were collected on Days 1-4.  I think that means its working.

Call me mean, but the needle has been pushed off "And the band of indians...." and I think I've become sweeter because of it.  And what's better than a sweet Mama.....with a picked up house?  :)

Lost and Found Box

More Meal Plans

I know August is almost over and I'm just now posting our meal plan, but I wanted to show you what I did this summer.  I have loved my meal calendar so much!  I wanted to add recipe cards to the system that are tried and true that I use over and over.  It led me to the site, where I have shared before, that has a monthly meal plan for Aldi grocery store, another one for Aldi in the fall and a last one of all Crock Pot meals.  I cut and pasted from the www.momadvice.com site and put into a document.  I made small cards for my calendar for each meal, using the guides that the web site gives for side dishes.  I tried my best to color code them based on the cardstock I had.  It didn't take me too long and I'm so glad I did it. 

For August I planned for us to eat 1 week from each new menu.  I left a week open for leftovers, breakfasts meals and meals on the run.  These are tried and true recipes that my family has loved for years.  It was well worth the effort.

Now that school is in full swing, our schedule is looking a bit crazy.  Beginning next week we will have a cross country meet every Monday, a middle school football game every Thursday and a high school football game every Friday.  That means 3 days a week we will either eat really late dinners or dinners that I need to pack on the go - otherwise we could have some huge eating-out expenses.  I'm hoping to go through my recipe files and find great recipes that I could pack for the games.  I plan on making a list of these recipes and then filing them together for On-The-Go menus.  It requires that I stay on top of my game, but it's essential to get us through the  next 10 weeks....until wrestling & basketball.  :)

Recipe cards

August  meal plan

Keeping It Running Smoothly

I bought this calendar at Walmart for our schedule. My daughter came up with a color coding system and I love it. Now all the Fish Sticks know what we are doing and when. Along with my meal planning calendar, I'm hoping to keep our crazy, big family running as smoothly as possible. 

Menu Calendar

I pinned this amazing-looking Meal Planning Calendar on Pinterest.  I checked out the website thoroughly and decided to give it a shot.  I purchased almost all of the supplies for myself at Walmart.  I spent $35 to purchase the card stock printed off for the above Menu Calendar.  When it arrived, my girls and I had a good time together cutting all 100 recipe cards, punching holes in them, reinforcing the holes and putting them in rings.  We then cut out all the numbers and catagories and put magnets on the back.  We stuck circular magnets on the backs of the plastic gems.  It made a big mess but was a fun activity to share together.

The author hangs her calendar on the wall and hangs all 11 categories of recipes on the thumb tacks at the bottom of the calendar.  I think I've decided to keep mine in my office area and keep the cards in a box or Ziploc.

Because I had already planned our March menu and shopped for the groceries, I just wrote in the meals with the dry erase marker for this month.  Next month, I plan to use the calendar with its recipes.  It's a simple process and I look forward to trying out the recipes and method.  I'm hoping it will simplify things for us and maybe even save some in grocery money.  I'll let you know how it goes.  The site actually allows you to copy all of her recipes for free off of her site and tells you exactly how to make your own.  She also sells them completed and partially complete.

The same site offers a lunch menu calendar.  I was curious to see what types of things she offers for packed lunches.  I purchased the PDF file for only $5.  I printed them on cardstock from Walmart and put them together just like the above calendar.  She has some super ideas but making a different lunch for 5 days doesn't seem simple or feasible (budget-wise), especially since some of them involve more cooking.  I'm happy to have the recipes though and think I will use some, just not using the daily system that the author does.  I found all the recipes to be nutritious and simple after flipping through them.

Stay tuned for the update.

Google Calendars

I am always looking for things to make life easier.

I was a huge Daytimer fan back in the early 90's.  Loved all the colored dividers, fancy pens, cute rulers that act as a bookmark and papers for lists and schedules.

In 2000 I remember moving up to my first Palm.  I was hooked.  The stylus pen was high tech and once I learned the Palm letters, I was hooked.

With all the advanced technology, just when I think that I have got the perfect system, something new and better comes out.  I'm not one to camp out at Best Buy the night before the new Microsoft comes out.  On the contrary, I'm usually the last one to switch from my old and good system to the new and better system.  But it does seem that once I try the latest, it's not long before I get hooked.

I was so upset when My Man bought me a Blackberry a few years ago.  It just meant I had to read an instruction manual and that is one of my least favorite things to do.  So he gave me a bullet point lesson and I learned to love my Blackberry.  Last January he switched my Blackberry for an iPhone and even though I whined and cried about it at first, I wonder now how I ever got along without it.

So I just thought I would chat a bit in several posts about technology things that I love, that help my home run smoothly and make life easier.  I would love to hear from you what works, so please comment.  I just might try out your suggestion sometime next year.  HA!

About 9 years ago we opened up our first gmail account.  I ignored the bar at the top of my gmail screen for many years before actually figuring out what all google had to offer me. I think that a few years ago, my sister (who is major high tech) mentioned google calendars.  Well, I was happy with my Microsoft Outlook calendar so I just disregarded what she had to say.  Then my Microsoft started messing up and when that happened, I missed a few appointments, forgot a few birthdays and pretty much lost my brain for a time.  I called her up and she introduced me to google calendars.  Because I am sometimes unwilling to change overnight, I just stuck with one calendar.  Then my kids started to go outside of our home to school, adding multiple things on my calendar each week. 

I called my sis.

Did you know that you can create multiple calendars, naming them all different things and even share specific calendars with other people?  It's wonderful!!!  Now I'm hooked on google calendars and I have stunted my short term memory so badly by using google calendars that if one day I am without them, I would quickly be put into the Stupid Club.  It's become my brain.

Here are some of my calendars that I have:  Cassie (just anything on there without a specific category), School, Church, Sports, and Celebrations.  When I get the Fish Sticks' game schedules or practice schedules, they go on the Sports calendar and I share the calendar with the grandparents in case they want to come cheer the Fish Sticks on.  I have put all family birthdays and anniversaries into my Celebrations calendar with reminders scheduled to give me time to buy gifts and send cards.  I have made them repeat themselves yearly so I never have to put them in again.  The school events from the school newsletter quickly go into the School calendar and any social outings of my own, play dates, doctor appointments, etc. go on my personal calendar.  I can hide any or all of the calendars and only show the ones I want to see.  I even remind myself to give the dogs and cat their heartworm meds at the beginning of each month.

I have this synced to my iPhone so it's with me and I can add on the go.  Our doctors don't even need to call to remind me of our visit.  My alarm let's me know.

If you don't have a gmail account but want to try google calendars, it's easy to sign up for one.  Make it your junk email account if you want and give the calendars a try.  Don't be as slow as I was to catch on to a good thing.

Announcement Board

 I am a calendar girl.  In my family growing up we all had a Daytimer book - filled with every bit of information we might ever need to record and recall.  We all relied on our books so much that we nick-named them our "Brain."  (My Man says I have stunted my short term memory by training myself to have to write everything down.)  Once paper started becoming outdated, we all tried moving our Brains into a handheld Palm.  It was a painful move to make and many of us didn't last with it but went right back to our paper Brains.

Over the years I had changed and tweeked my Brain.  One day I plan on sharing with you my Home Management notebook.  I am a big fan of Google calendar and I'll save that one for another post too.  And My Man got me an iPhone for Christmas and I'm wondering what I ever did without it.  But sometimes when you are managing a house full of kids, it's best to just write something out and post it.

So Sunday nights are my nights for organizing our week for all to see.  It's the announcement board of the home.  I write our schedule out on a great little wipe-off board I found at Dollar Tree.  I just copy it off my Google calendar so my son can see when his baseball games are and his orthodontist appointment, my daughter can remember her speech therapy and they all won't wake up this coming Friday a.m. dressed in their school uniforms because they forgot that it's the first day of spring break.

Then I write out our menu for the week.  This is always subject to change at my discretion, but it's a general outline of what I might be fixing.

The Fish Sticks just like to see what the plan is for the week and I find that it helps me also in getting glances throughout the day just in case I'm not on top of my iPhone reminders or Google calendar.

Houses just run better when there's order.

Freezer Inventory

 I hesitate writing this blog post because some of you might make the false conclusion that I am OCD and I promise you, I am not.  I do like order and I do strive to be organized.  I also am not a perfectionist....here's the BUT....but, I am the manager of 8 people and I do have a total of 4 refridgerator/freezers so I realized recently that it's important for my own sanity to know what those bottomless, frozen pits contain.

SO, I took everything out of them, tried to organize them someway (like meat on one shelf, veggies on another, etc.) and then wrote out an inventory for each one.  The 2 in the laundry room I taped to the door.  The one in the basement and the one in my kitchen I keep in my Home Management notebook.  I wrote them in pencil so I can easily add tallies and erase them.

 The benefits of doing this is that it helps me tremendously in meal planning.  It also helps me not keep things in my freezer for eternity until there is more frost on them than food. 

Before I do my monthly meal plans, I can quickly scan the freezer inventory lists and can see if I need to buy more pork or if I have lots of squash from this summer's garden that I need to use up.  I know this will also help me when I begin to plant the garden next month.  I can gauge how much vegetables we have eaten since last summer's garden so I won't over plant any particular vegetable.  Speaking of, anyone want any frozen yellow squash or zucchini??  I'd love to erase some of those tallies!  :)