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Organizing Tips

How To Prepare Your Home For The Holidays

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Filed Under: Christmas & New Year, Living, Organizing For The Holidays & Gift Guides

Prepare your home for the holidays with these decluttering, organizing, and early prep tips.

As the holidays draw near, so do all of the “things” that come with them. From decorations to gifts, the holidays bring some major “stuff” into our homes. To prepare your home for the holidays, the best way to keep the clutter out of your home during the season is to declutter, purge, and organize before it arrives.

Here are our best tips on how to prepare your home for the holidays so you can avoid clutter and overwhelm in your space.

Preparing Your Home For The Holidays. These stress-free ways to get your home ready for the holidays will show you how to get in the holiday spirit without the overwhelm.
Preparing Your Home For The Holidays.

1. Start By Letting Go

When it comes to preparing your home for the holidays, the first thing you absolutely must do is purge and declutter. Be relentless when it comes to decluttering!

Move through your home and declutter each room and space at a time. Once you have purged what doesn’t serve you anymore, you can begin organizing and designating spots for any gifts that will come in.

 

 

2. Deep Clean Early

No one wants to deep clean those forgotten spaces that are in our homes in the middle of the holiday rush when guests are coming the next day.

Hit those forgotten spots of your home with a good, deep clean well before the holidays arrive. This way, you can simply do a quick freshen as the holidays near. Imagine the time and energy you will save!

 

 

3. Start Preparing Your Kitchen Now

One of the rooms that get the most action in our homes around the holidays is the kitchen. Start preparing your kitchen before the parties and house guests arrive. You’ll want to go through and lean out and restock your pantry, check on your service ware, and stock the bar.

It’s also a great idea to stock your fridge and pantry with some self-serve snacks and treats that guests can easily get for themselves. Keep some frozen prepared appetizers and pre-made puff pastries in your freezer for last minute, on the fly desserts.

 

 

4. Consider Guest Spaces

If you are lucky enough to have a dedicated room or rooms for guests, prepare those well ahead of time.

If you have a dual space, say an office that doubles as a guest space, think of how you can change this over temporarily to focus more on serving guests for the holiday season.

If you live in a small apartment or home with no extra rooms, think of how you will put any guests up in your home (pull out sofas, etc) and make sure you have plenty of blankets and linens ready. If your space is simply too small to accommodate guests, think about nearby hotels or friends or family that may be able to offer up a room or host your guests.

 

 

5. Set The Mood

Bringing the holiday spirit into your home doesn’t mean you need a million decorations in every room. What really sets a holiday festive mood can be simple and uncluttered.

Prepare your home for the holidays with intentionally and thoughtfully placed candles, scents, cozy blankets, and pillows, warm fires, good music, a festive cocktail, and tasty snacks. Stock up on these items and have them at the ready for any impromptu guests or holiday parties.

 

 

Conclusion

Getting your home ready for the holidays doesn’t have to be overwhelming. If you get a head start, declutter and organize, make room for the gifts, deep clean early, prepare guests spaces, and set the mood throughout your home you will have a jump start.

What is your favorite part of getting ready for the holidays? Let’s share in the comments!

5 Steps To Mentally Prepare For The Holiday Season

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Filed Under: Christmas & New Year, Living, Organizing For The Holidays & Gift Guides

Mentally Prepare For The Holiday Season With These Mindset Tips And Strategies.

Back to school season is well underway and we are starting to think about the Fall and Winter Holidays. Now is the perfect time to mentally prepare for the holiday season.

Whether we are excited for (or haunted by!) retail stores being three months early for everything, we may be starting to plan, and have some anxiety around, the approaching holiday season.

This week continues our month-long delve into avoiding overwhelm during seasonal transitions and holidays in your home, your work, and personal life.

Today we are going to talk about preventing holiday overwhelm in our own lives by preparing our mindset and our routines for these busy times.

Get into a stress-free and easy mindset this holiday season with these tips.

How to Mentally Prepare for the Holiday Season with These Simple Strategies. The holidays are right around the corner. Find out how to mentally prepare for the holiday season with these strategies and tips!
How to Mentally Prepare for the Holiday Season with These Simple Strategies.

1. Don’t Create Unrealistic Expectations For The Holiday Season

This is probably one of the most significant sources of holiday stress.

As the holidays get closer, we start having all these fantastic ideas, sometimes creating completely unrealistic expectations of ourselves, our budget, and our time.

Take the time to check in on your holiday goals and see what’s realistic for your time and budget and then plan from there. You will end up closer to your vision if you start from a place of what’s possible.

 

 

2. Don’t Compare

It is so true that comparison is the thief of joy.

As tempting as it is, don’t compare or set standards for your holidays based on what someone else is doing. Do what the right fit for you and your family is, and you will have a much more relaxed holiday for it.

 

 

3. Set a Realistic Budget And Stick To It

One of the most significant sources of stress during and after the holidays is because we overspend. Set a budget for yourself and your holiday spending well before the holidays arrive. Include travel and hosting costs along with your gift spending.

Consider starting a dedicated savings account just for holiday spending. Being able to see what you have and where it is going will help you curb financial overwhelm.

Start an account in the Spring, and you will have a nice chunk of money by the time the holidays roll around.

 

 

4. Stick To A Routine

Sticking to a routine is one of the best ways to protect ourselves against stress and overwhelm during the holidays.

Creating a plan that lets you know what is coming up each day is the best way to defeat any chaos that may arise during your day.

When something unexpected happens, remember that you can take care of it and take comfort that your routine will be waiting for you afterward.

 

 

5. Check-In With Yourself

Throughout the holiday season, take a few moments each day and at the start of each new week to check in with yourself. Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed? If the answer is yes, ask yourself why.

What can be adjusted or removed from your schedule or a to-do list that can relieve this? Can any tasks be delegated?

Adjust your routine and habits accordingly until you find your sweet spot.

Taking note of how you feel regularly can save you from a mega meltdown that makes it hard to climb out from under.

 

 

Conclusion

The holidays can be stressful for many reasons, including financial stress, unrealistic expectations, and packed calendars.

Implementing these tips on how to prepare your mindset for the holidays now will help you to avoid overwhelm and enjoy yourself and your friends and family this holiday season.

How to Avoid Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions And Holidays

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Filed Under: Fall & Thanksgiving, Living

Avoiding Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions

Fall brings with it, along with pumpkin spice everything, a start of many shifting seasonal transitions. First, it’s back to school, weather changes, then thanksgiving, and then Christmas and the Winter Holidays. All of these transitions bring with them the potential for major overwhelm in your home and life and on a personal level.

Over the next month, we will be talking about how to stay focused on the different areas of your life: home, work, and self.

How to Avoid Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions And Holidays
How to Avoid Overwhelm During Seasonal Transitions And Holidays

Here are some ways to skip overwhelm during the busy seasonal changes and holidays:

1. Prioritize Sleep

Sleep seems to be the first thing to be sacrificed to the busyness that the holidays bring into our lives.

Making sleep a priority is more natural when it becomes a habit. Set up a routine for yourself that allows you to get the sleep you need (for most people that is 7-8 hours) each night. Whether that means making a routine that allows for a later alarm or an earlier bedtime if you make sleep a priority you will feel a world of difference.

 

2. Eat Healthy Foods

Another one we surely all know is essential; a proper diet is crucial to being our best selves. It is also key to staying well and reducing stress. But all the delicious holiday food can throw us off track and creating a menu, meal planning, and meal prep can become a challenge.

Still, let’s try to plan for healthy meals as they are the best ways to adhere to a healthy diet- for you and your family. Prepping ahead also reduces chaos around mealtimes and packing lunches, so it is a win-win.

 

 

3. Stick To a Routine

One of the fastest ways to slide into overwhelm is to lose track of your daily routine. Our daily routines anchor us and allow us to feel more relaxed. Our brains like to know what’s coming next.

There is possibly no time that a solid routine is more important that during seasonal changes like back to school, Summer break, or the Fall and Winter holidays. Sit down with your routine at the start of each season and see where it needs adjusting to create a routine that works for your life in these times.

 

 

4. Plan For The Unexpected

As hard as we try to stick to a routine and plan our days, we should always make room in our schedules and our minds for the unexpected. The best way to do this is to leave plenty of breathing room in your routine.

When you pack every minute of your day full, there is no room for things that pop up.

Try looking at your daily to-do list each morning and picking three items as your top priorities. If you have these completed, you won’t feel so disrupted when the unexpected happens, and you must take care of something unexpected.

 

 

5. Learn To Say No

My last tip is mastering the art of saying no. We are trained to believe that saying no to commitments is negative and brings with it a sense of guilt. Well, if you get rid of one thing from your life, let it be this notion!

Learning how to say no will make you feel lighter, more relaxed, and more present for yourself and your family daily. The golden rule for implementing this is if it’s not a heck yes, it’s a heck no!

 

Implementing these habits now will help you to avoid overwhelm and maintain balance in your life at home and at work during the sometimes chaotic seasonal and holiday changes that will be creeping up on us before we know it.

4 Easy Steps to Prepare Great School Lunches From Home

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Filed Under: Back-to-School Season, Organizing

Get Organized for Back-to-School Season

There is nothing worse than running late in the morning and then desperately trying to figure out something you can put in your children’s lunch boxes. If you find yourself flustered or end up buying school lunch because packing it seems like too much of a hassle, take a look at the tips below. They will help you get organized so fixing lunches becomes quick and easy.

No more stressing or paying for expensive and unhealthy school lunches. Follow these steps to get organized and send lunches your child love. :-)

1. Start With A List And Go Shopping

Start by sitting down with your kids and come up with a list of lunches they like. This could include sandwiches and wraps, or even homemade launch-able, but it doesn’t have to stop there. If you add a thermos to the mix, you can suddenly pack reheated leftovers, homemade soup, and the likes. The key is to find lunch foods and snacks that your kids will eat that are also easy to pack.

Make sure you have appropriate containers, and then head to the grocery store to pick up everything you need for the week. Don’t forget about snacks and drinks as needed. The list should make this much easier. Once you have created a menu with several different lunch ideas your kids like and will actually eat, you can simply rotate through them and make the ingredients part of your weekly shopping trips.

2. Prep What You Can As Soon As You Get Home

When you get home from the store, keep lunch foods out and see what you can do to prep things ahead of time. Instead of putting that bag of grapes away, go ahead and wash and store them in little bags you can grab and toss in the lunch box. The same goes for things like carrots and even salads. Slice cheese as needed and

Instead of putting that bag of grapes away, go ahead and wash and store them in little bags you can grab and toss in the lunch box. The same goes for things like carrots and even salads. Slice cheese as needed and

Some items can’t be prepared ahead, like sliced cheese but for the most part, you can prep much of the snacks as soon as you get home.

3. Pack Lunches The Night Before

Mornings are busy and not always the perfect time to have to worry about packing lunches. Try making them the night before. Try packing them after dinner at night. Get the kids involved and have them help with lunch prep and clean-up after. You can store cold items in the fridge and have everything else sitting in the lunch box ready to go. It won’t take you long to get into a rhythm of preparing lunches while you’re cleaning up after dinner. You’ll appreciate this new habit in the mornings when all you need to do is grab a couple of things from the fridge and toss them in the lunch boxes.

4. Get In The Habit Of Cleaning Lunch Boxes As Soon As The Kids Get Home

To make lunch prep even easier, get the kids into the habit of cleaning out their lunch box as soon as they get back from school. Even the youngest can help with this. Have them toss any uneaten food and bring the containers to the sink to be washed. Older children can easily clean their own containers, while you’ll probably have to do the washing for your youngest. Having everything clean and ready to go will make it easier to pack the new lunches later on in the day.

Stick to these tips and it won’t take you long to get into an efficient lunch packing routine that will make it a snap. Don’t forget to get the kids involved and put them in charge of much of the preparations. Not only will this make your life easier, in the long run, but it will also give them a sense of ownership over their lunch.

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Organizing For Back To School!

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Filed Under: Back-to-School Season, Kids, Organizing

Preparing an Information Central For The New School Year

Preparing an Information Central For The New School Year. The how-to and what you need to stay organized this school year.

As the last days of summer bring school vacations to an end, it’s time to prepare to get back to school and to minimize stress, expenses, and the waste of time, it is essential to get organized. If you have kids, here are just a few things that will come up on your to-do list in the upcoming weeks:

  • School supplies shopping
  • Do you need new shoes and clothes for the kids?
  • Do you need to take care of arrangements for before & after school?
  • Do you need to pack the pantry with food for lunches?
  • Do you need to replace the gear for sports? Are your kids trying new sports this season?
  • Does your child need a tutor or homework help on an ongoing basis?

To simplify and get everything done before the kids step foot on the bus again, let’s get you organized. To start, you can download the Back to School planner.

The first thing I do to stay organized for the school year is to prepare my calendar on the Home Management Binder where I keep all school/sports/classes related materials and communication as well as a monthly calendar that I update every month or when new events come up.

 

Preparing an Information Central For The New School Year
Preparing an Information Central For The New School Year

 

In my back to school binder, I created a section for each child and under their names, I create sub-sections with their specific activities, like this:

  • Child Name on a page to create the subsection
  • School Communication –  I include in this section their school address, phone numbers, names for the Principal, Secretary, Nurse, Librarian, and particular teachers
  • X Grade – Teacher name, email and phone number. I also learned to include the room mom’s phone number and email. 😉
  • Roster – One plastic sleeve will hold the directory of the class and on the back a list of their friends and moms names and phone numbers for play-dates.
  • Class Schedule or blocks, depending on your school.
  • Field Trips
  • Sports (one divider for each sport they are enrolled in)
    • Here I print on the computer a page where I enter the name of the sport on the top of the page,
    • the coach, phone number and email address for the coach,
    • location of the practice
    • with a bright color, I print the date and times of practices, games, and other important dates.
  • Other Extra-Curriculum Activities – I do the same thing I do for the Sports section for Choir, Band, and Music classes
  • I also include friends and moms names, as well as moms I share car-pooling duties.

For this binder, I use a sturdy and large binder from Staples like the one in the photo.

Preparing an Information Central For The New School Year

 

I include poly envelopes to hold the small papers as well as regular binder dividers with pockets. I make the labels with a label maker, so they don’t fall – you can write with a Sharpie, but it may still come off after so much handling.

Teaching Your Kids to Get Organized

Until last school year I kept all papers and invites on my calendar, but I wanted to start getting the boys involved and taking responsibility for their activities and schedules, of course under our supervision, so I needed to “de-centralize” the information, but I kept thinking “how?”.

One of my organizing clients has a huge pin board in her kitchen, and she uses it beautifully to display her children’s artwork and invitations they receive. I borrowed her idea and decided to do the same and purchased this one from Pottery Barn and I use it in my home office where I can see all the activities, school papers and some precious rewards and art the kids bring home.

This board is from Pottery Barn and it’s really large so that it will accommodate all our information, cards that arrive, invitations and when the Holiday Season comes (not too far!) we’ll have a great spot to display all the artwork as well.

 

Organize school and sports calendars on a pin board, like this one from Pottery Barn to create an information central and stay organized.

 

Addie and I will have to share our driving duties this upcoming season, and that’s another important part of keeping a shared calendar both online and on the pinboard.

As I’m always on the go I use calendars both on paper (at home) and in electronic form on my phone. It may sound too much, but after I had shown up at dental appointments on the wrong MONTH, I decided it was worth it. A benefit of the electronic calendar is also that I can share with “guests” and I can invite Addie on the days he’ll be driving one of the boys.

Next week will be the last week of summer camp for the kids, and we’ll take “tourist days” in San Diego! We have some nice things planned, and I want to make the end of the summer relaxing, fun and filled with good loving memories of a time that won’t come back.

I hope you are having a fabulous summer and that this post helps you gear up for a new school year confident that all is under control. If you need any help, send me questions on the comment section below, and I’ll be happy to answer.

What are you doing to get organized for back to school? Do you have a tip you’d like to share? Leave your comments below!

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Back To School Saving Tips

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Filed Under: Back-to-School Season, Kids, Organizing

From School Supplies to Clothing, Organize & Save

back to school shopping tips

FREE BACK TO SCHOOL PLANNER
 

It’s that time of year again – time to get the kids ready for school! Let’s check some back to school saving tips to get the school year started without breaking the bank!

Back to school season is just as fun for moms as it is for the little ones. A new grade, back-pack, outfits, everything is so exciting! But, it’s even more enjoyable for the moms that can get turn this big expense into a more manageable one by shopping smartly for back to school time!

With three growing boys with very different likes and personalities I also find myself with the challenge of trying to make the most out of our dollars when shopping. Here are some back to school saving tips:

Make Use of Your $1.00 Store!

Did you know that dollar stores in your area may actually accept coupons on their already discounted merchandise? The most notable dollar retailer that accepts coupons is Dollar General. However, by checking the FAQ of your local dollar store’s website, you’ll be made aware of their coupon policy.

If you have a $1 coupon off an item that you’re going to purchase at the dollar store, you’re going to score the item for free! Thankfully, if you have coupons for a large quantity of items you need, you may be able to score half, or even more, of your back to school shopping deals for nothing but a few cents in tax.

Thrift Stores

Thrift shopping is often frowned upon because the items are secondhand, and you might fear that they may be dirty and germy. However, a quick wash in the laundry will do the trick for most used clothing items. Thrift stores, such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army, often run tag sales. Sometimes all items with pink tags are priced 50% off, or items with red tags are priced under $3.50.

These items can include jeans, brand name suits, and shoes, among other things. Sometimes, you can score a big part of a secondhand closet for very little money! Professional organizer Lori Marrero always highlights her Goodwill findings on her organizing videos.

Stockpiling Coupons

If you have three kids or more, it makes sense to consider stockpiling coupons for school supplies as soon as you can. A little trick that many coupon moms like to use is stockpiling coupons for the essentials by purchasing the newspaper, printing online and requesting that coupons be directly mailed to their mailbox.

Stores like Staples will also give you a 15% discount on school supplies card on purchases over a certain amount. I just got mine 2 weeks ago!

By the end of the summer, the coupon moms that stockpile coupons often find reduced deals because the items have been on the shelf for most of the summer. Often times, many items end up being free or pleasantly cheap.

Shopping a Year Early

When you go back to school shopping, it may be tempting to simply shop a few weeks before the semester begins, like most parents. But, if you purchase items, such as binders, pieces of clothing, pencil holders, etc. just a few weeks after school has begun, just about everything in the store will be marked down considerably.

I keep a small section of our office-supplies cabinet dedicated to school supplies that are “evergreen”, like pencils, erasers, binder dividers and ruled paper. These are items that will be in perfect condition a year from now and if I get them for a good price at any given time of the year, I’ll stock up.

To further your savings, sign up for email newsletters of all of your favorite stores. The boys’ favorites come from family friendly sites like Land’s End, Gap and Boden so I keep an eye on their sales and as soon as I receive the email with for the sales time I shop the items I know the boys will wear over and over again. Stores like JCPenney or Kohl’s send out quarterly coupons for 10% to 15% off of all of their merchandise, including their sales items.

There are so many ways to save on back to school shopping for your family. What are your favorite back-to-school saving tips?
Looking forward to having your children’s activities planned and organized? Download the planner below!