Organize Yourself!

You don’t have to start out organized, but you do need to organize your home, growing in skills as the seasons demand. I’m still learning about this. Sometimes we’ll do an organizing project and I’ll think, why didn’t I thing of this years a go? Here’s a helpful hint: I remember being really frustrated one evening when Rick got home from work which prompted him to ask what I was frustrated about. I couldn’t put a finger on what exactly it was that had caused the frustration, just a lot of little things. Rick wisely suggested that the following day I make a list of all the things that frustrated me, which I gladly did. We discovered that some of them could be easily solved, like getting bookcases for all the books we have. What homeschooling family couldn’t use more bookcases? Another thing that is kind of unique for the size of our family was the issue of shoes. Now imagine you have 14 kids. Each one has a pair of church shoes, a pair of play shoes, a pair of go-to-town shoes, and of course a pair of sandals. That means you’re dealing with 56 pairs of shoes—where do you store those? We just have normal sized closet space. So, to remedy this HUGE frustration, Rick made a shelf in our entry way with 48 cubicles to accommodate all those shoes. What sounds like a little thing, made my life so much easier! We’ve made dividers in our closets to stack jeans so the stacks won’t topple over, and many other simple improvements that came from my frustration list.20It’s not like he gets to everything as soon as I put it on the list, but it’s a to-do-when-you-have-time list. It’s so helpful to me to know that he cares and that he’s going to make time to do it when he can.