Getting Organized, One Day At A Time

My life is pretty chaotic between dance classes, soccer practices, church events, and birthday parties I'm lucky if I can remember what day it is. So for the last few weeks I have been trying to organize my life and I started with this......

It's our family command center. I'm obsessed with it and I can't begin to tell you how much of a life saver it has been. I need notes....everywhere.....to remind me of everything. I'm so forgetful and since I've had the kids I swear I have lost even more of my short term memory. So this was exactly what my chaos needed. The whole thing cost me about $25 including supplies to decorate the kids chore charts and I bought everything at Walmart and the dollar store. The first thing I got was the split cork/whiteboard  ($9.97) and the whiteboard calender  (also $9.97) Now, we have had chore charts for quite some time but like everything it was put on the back burner and forgot about. So I decided to revamp them and make it fun. I used 3 baking sheets from the Dollar store and I bought some foam letters and squares to cut the stars out. I already had a sheet of magnet that I cut and put on the back of the stars. And I bought the Family decal at the Dollar store also. 

I decided to try a point system in our house, if you get up and get dressed and ready for school without being told to get your shoes on 100 times ( let's face it, we all deal with that) then you get a point. At the end of the day if all of your chores are completed, you get another point. And if you do something without having to be told , ie: clean off the table, wipe off the counter , ect , then you get another point. You can also lose points, for not following directions or misbehaving. All we have to do is say we are taking away a point and they usually stop whatever they are doing at the time. So far I can say it has worked great! The kids are excited to do their chores and move their stars, they are eager to help around the house and they are even getting up and getting out the door in the morning without a fight. Not to mention the kids are starting to take on some responsibility, which is awesome.

Overall I can say this has been the best $25 spent, and my sanity is slowly coming back (yea right!)

I also made this magnetic behavior chart for my nephew. He's been having some trouble and I thought it would be helpful if he had some positive reinforcement. Everything I used for this came from the Dollar store as well. Like with the chore chart, I used the metal baking sheet and put stickers on the pieces of foam and added a magnet so they could be moved. Because let's face it, those printable sheets are time consuming. Oh and I used command strips to hang everything, those things are amazing!

Happy organizing!