MomAgenda

Matt, over at Unscrambled Eggs asked for some more information and pictures on these great planners. Yes, they are a great Christmas Gift. I have the All-In-One in Ocean Blue. Here is is:



















Here is an example of one of the pre-printed pages for phone and contact information. The best part is if you want you can pull these off the momAgenda website in .pdf. Type in your information, print and put in the page protector. Of course if you can just write on the ones that come with it too. I keep not only school and sports schedules in these pages but take out menus, coupons, grocery lists, phone numbers, birthdays, insurance information. All sorts of "stuff" I use all the time. It has helped me tame the paper clutter so easily.





Here is the calendar, big squares with room for each adult and kids schedules. They also have some fun and useful Holiday Printables on their website. If you want to see more of their great products click momAgenda or on the banner at the top of the post.

My New Favorite Thing

In my ongoing effort to get organized I thought I would share my new favorite tool. I received the All In One Folio from momAgenda. This thing is great, it has a calendar with big squares to right on, page protectors for school calendars, sports schedules, great preprinted phone lists, home information. It has it all. MomAgenda has all sorts of great planner products that combine great colors and style with real functionality. I have everything together in one place, no more searching for random post-it-notes and scraps of paper. Check out momAgenda for all your life-planning needs.

Sunday Stumble

My goal is to be organized..... (I can hear my mother laughing as she reads this.) So in that effort we focus on Organization this week:

Orgjunkie - my favorite.....

Virtually Organized - a close second.....

1-2-3 Get Organized - this woman makes sense, check her out

Organizing Bags - love these.

The Lazy Organizer - this is me....really I want to be her.

Enjoy and share your favorite site for organization!

Be Prepared

Hurricane Season begins on June 1st. On April 8th, Dr. Gray, the Hurricane Predictor updated his 2008 Hurricane Forecast. You can read it here. It is a real good thing to pick up if you have insomnia, but overall, Dr. Gray is "predicting" 15 named storms, 4 of those intense, with a 45% chance of a category 3-4 storm hitting Florida, somewhere. I am curious if Dr. Gray has ever been close in his predictions.

Regardless of his success in predicting storms, if there is one, there is a pretty good chance it will come our way and we better be ready. Now, I live between the ocean and the river so ready for me is putting the dog and kids in the car and heading north, but for most normal people(who are not huge chickens) there is a bigger plan to be made.

The National Weather Service has designated the week of May 25th as Hurricane Preparedness Week.

If you check out their website it will give you all sorts of information, what are the dangers and what you need to do to be prepared, hurricane tracking charts, historical information etc. Although it is scientific and not real exciting it has some excellent information.



This radar picture is of a hurricane approaching our coast, if that does not scream RUN I do not know what does. If you are the brave sort and decide to stay, please be prepared with the essentials you will need to ride out the storm, you could spend several days, even weeks without power. I, for one, do not function well without power, ever, I do not even go camping, ever, so check the list on the website and get the things you need, don't wait til the radar looks like this. You do not want to be fighting for that last bottle of water with all the other brave people who decide to ride it out.

Contests & Giveaways

Lori from Blogging with Cents is giving away four copies of the Fruitful Time Task Manager. It’s a To Do List software program to help you get organized by keeping track of your to do list. You can read more about it and enter this contest over at Lori’s blog here. Contest ends March 6th. Good luck!

We are getting company, full fledged, real live company. We don't get much company, the occasional family member drops by for a visit. But real-live, not related to me, need to clean the house company does not happen often.

So today involved a serious assessment of how badly I have let things go. Nothing is dirty mind you. I hate dirty, but boy do I have some clutter going on. Flylady would NOT be proud of me right now.

So I did what any other unprepared person would do. I went into total panic mode. Since I work best under pressure it is all good, the house is clean, the laundry is done, fresh sheets ready to go on the beds in the morning. I am so proud. EVERYTHING that was on my desk is now in a box in the closet. I am trying not to think about that. I am going to use DeClutter It on Sunday to fix that problem!

Wish me luck. I will photograph the results for you!

Ramblings

So I was feeling pretty sorry for myself today, again my house was a wreck, my laundry is three miles high, my vacuum quit working, I have to find a new stable for my horses, my 10 year old is in total brat mode, I cannot see the top of my desk.....shall I go on or do you have the picture? Well I get an email from my friend Annie over at Ann-Crabs, her dog was bit by another dog this weekend, she had to have a drain tube put in and is wearing one of those lampshade things on her head....this dog is a German Shorthair so no, she is not the calmest of animals, enter the lampshade....well, if that is not bad enough, her toddler screams in terror every time she sees this poor pooch. So unhappy, dog with a drain tube and a recovery collar and screaming toddler....yes, I happily cleaned my house, started the laundry, ordered me a new Dyson Vacuum off Overstock.com and generally went on with my day! Sorry Annie!


I love reading organizing and cleaning blogs from real people who do it without a staff of people (yes Martha I am talking about you)....

I was on one of my favorite blogs to day, OrgJunkie and she had some great tips from another blogger who is now becoming one of my favorites. Check out this plan for making a mail center, then check out her other stuff, it is pretty darn good.

Also some pretty good organizing tools on this site.




Happy Organized and Clean Monday to all!

Larry the Cable Guy

One of my goals is to be organized. Go ahead laugh, it is pretty funny. I want organized closets, cabinets, drawers. I want it all. I am not getting it. I am not sure it is possible for me to maintain organization. My children are just like me, a disaster, so we have three total disasters living under one very small roof.

What you ask does Larry the Cable Guy have to do with this? He is here, in my house, right now. He is attempting to fix the cable in my Master Bedroom, so he went in my son's room and saw the cable strung across the floor and said let me fix this too, then he opened the closet. To say I am mortified is an understatement.

You know it is bad when you are embarassed by the cable man seeing the inside of your closets. I will probably never see this man again,(thank god)but I still cannot look him in the eye. He knows my secret. My house is a mess. I am not organized. I never will be. I am sure he is going to his next job, who is probably my neighbor and tell them, you should see the mess down the street.....I have to get organized.

Home Organization & Cleaning

Here are some great websites for organizing and cleaning your home:

Organized Home

Life Organizers

Do It yourself Network

And the mac daddy of them all ` Flylady

Remember you can do it all in one day. Take it in small steps or you will set yourself up for frustration and failure!

Holiday Organization

Throughout the year I follow the Flylady principles. This makes is fairly easy to roll into the holidays. But this year we moved, I have a garage full of stuff, a storage unit, closets that are not organized on it goes....

So I started today organizing one thing at a time. I thought I would do the kitchen today, HA, did not happen,I realized quickly I had to take it in pieces. I did the pantry. Just the pantry.

1. Remove everything, clean the shelves and doors inside and out
2. Discard anything that has expired
3. If you have not used it in a reasonable amount of time, toss it.
4. Put like items together, canned good, snacks, pasta, condiments, etc.

Now I can find everything, my kids can find the snacks, it is clean and neat. A few minutes a week to keep it that way, and to put things away properly after a trip to the grocery store will keep you together.

Flylady would be proud...now on to the refrigerator....

Fantastic Friday

Where has the week gone??

Soccer games, horseback riding lessons, school, homework, soccer games, horseback riding lessons, visits with the grandparents...oh yea and work. What a week!!!

Busy lives are great, but organization is key to keeping up with it. Using a calendar and keeping up with it is key to keeping any life straight. I recently got Amy Knapp's Family Organizer to try and keep family life a little straighter, so far it is working, it has some great features, and is a perfect size for my purse, I take it everywhere and make notes whenever I need to. Check it out on calendars.com

Enjoy the weekend, it should be gorgeous here in paradise!

Laundry Monster

I looked around my house this morning and realized I was in the clutches of the laundry monster, there is a load in the dryer that I have fluffed about 6 times, a load in the washer that needs to be rewashed, an unfolded load on my bed, a folded load on my daughters bed and dresser and there was a folded load on my son's dresser that he finally put away himself in desperation.

I have always tried to do what most professional organizers tell you, a load a day will keep the laundry monster away, I work from home, WHY is this a problem. I have been doing a load a day, just not every day and it has caught up with me.

So now instead of working I am obsessing about this situation and have to go get it completely done. Ridiculous!

Calendar

Do you use a calendar? For any successful work at home career, business or even just everyday family life a good calendar is a must have.

I use Microsoft Outlook Calendar for my work and family events.It is simple I can print out a weekly or a monthly view and everything is in one place.

There are a number of great interactive calendar programs out there right now and they are free to make them even better:

Google Calendar
Yahoo Calendar
Bravenet Calendar

There are a huge number of calendars you can download and pay for but the free ones work just as well.

A calendar is only as good as how we use it. I take a look at mine every Sunday night to see what I have coming up that week, school pictures, work appointments, calls I need to make, doctor visits anything that week.

I make every attempt to add things immediately as they come up. I have a little basket on my desk, I put appointment cards in there, I clear out the kids backpack every day when they get home and place any school events, meetings etc. that needs to be on the calendar in this basket. At the end of the day when the kids are in bed I go thru the basket and add all these things, then I throw away the paper. Less clutter more organization.

The more organized, the less stress!

Stumble

I love Saturday, kids sleep in, I clean. My friend Vickie says I was born wiping the counter off. (I am sure my mother would argue that) So, I cleaned up, did laundry, opened a few boxes, closed them up as I had nowhere to put the stuff.

Once the kids got up we traipsed off to the beach before the tide got too high, waves were big, I made the kids swim in front of the lifeguard, I am such an "uncool" Mom. Oh well, they may live to see their next birthday because of my not so coolness.

I had some time this afternoon to do some surfing around (on the web, not in the ocean) and wanted to share what I found. I frequent another blog that I love...Work at Home Mom Revolution
I don't know this blogger but I think she has some great information, she works at home and if you read since the beginning you can get some great info on working at home. I will share my work at home thing in a future post.

Anyway, she had some interesting things she found from StumbleUpon this is a cool site, you put in your interests and click Stumble, I hit some great stuff today.

I wanted to share so...here goes.If you are a runner, a biker or a walker this site is awesome. Running Map you put in your address, it comes up and you can drag any route you want, it gives you the mileage and you can move it around, save it, print it whatever. Is used it today to map the route to the bus stop (which is over a quarter mile by the way), the route I walk every day and a bunch of other interesting things. Check it out!

Another one I found interesting. eHow it tells you how to do anything, I mean you can learn how to change windshield wiper blades all the way to cooking a souffle. It is incredible.

And for the cleaner in all of us...Vickie this is you....here is Clean & Green
there are some great cleaning remedies that will not damage the environment using alot of everyday household things you already have.

And this one I like also How To Get Rid Of Things this will help you get rid of everything from cigarette smoke smell to trick or treaters. If only they had a chapter on ex-husbands......

Anyway check these out and enjoy the rest of the weekend!