Day 12...and 13

Okay, so maybe I was a little ambitious with the EVERY day thing. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Today I'm going to talk about kids and school. Every day last year my kids came home from school and suddenly my house (which may or may not look lovely before they get there) suddenly looked like a tornado just came through it. I worked and worked to find a solution before my youngest two started school. This is what I came up with.

First of all, I put hooks in the living room for their backpacks. I tried having everything in their rooms, but it just doesn't work. They come in and drop everything still. I now have a place for everything that they need to drop when they come in the door. The hooks were a good start. I found a cute little shelf with hooks under it at my local craft store and painted it with the colors of my living room. There are 4 hooks and 4 kids...this is really important.

For those of you cringing about your decor, remember the backpacks on the floor or everything you have to say to your kids, "pick that up and put it in your room!" all the time. I don't do that.

Also there's the clipboard. Anything that needs a parent signature to return to the teachers gets put on the clipboard. If it doesn't get on the clipboard, it doesn't get signed. My kids don't get in trouble, so these are mostly reading logs and that kind of thing.

Papers that are being cleaned out of backpacks go into a box for me to go through and decide what I'm keeping. I like Clever Container's Document boxes for this because they are small...so I don't let the job get too big before taking care of it.

All this stuff goes on the shelf. Sometimes it gets overwhelmed, but it's not spread all over my house so no one knows where things went.

Bonus tip:

Okay, it was really the tip from yesterday: many cultures practice taking their shoes off as they come in the house. This is awesome for organization as well. My family does this out of the desire to be barefoot more than the clean house or cultural practice. What do you do with the shoes? Do you have a neat place for them? My girls have Clever Pockets on the outside of their door to keep their shoes in. Why the outside of their door? I can look over and see how many there are and know what needs to be found before morning...plus they see it as they open their door so it reminds them without my having to say anything. My husband and I have little baskets for our shoes in the living room. He and I mostly wear one pair of shoes each throughout the week so this is practical for us...plus I'm lazy and don't want to take the time to go to my room every time I take off my shoes.