The boys have been begging. I finally said yes. 

We finally pulled out all of our clothes and did the great switch from winter to summer clothes (leaving some sweats and jeans and sweatshirts in the closet just in case because packing all the warm clothes away is a sure way to make it snow).

Here’s what happens at our house:

I clean out and organize the boys’ closets twice a year. In the meantime…we receive boxes and bags of hand-me-downs. When this occurs…do I carefully sort and organize the clothing we receive? 

Nope. I throw them into the back of a closet until unti the next biannual closet clean-out.

Why, you ask? Because I’m lazy like that. Because our clothing bins are in the attic making them hard to get to. Because we don’t need the clothes yet. Because I don’t want to. Because the clothes we receive are likely not to fit anyone yet anyway. And because organizing clothing twice a year for four growing boys is plenty for me.

This is what my camera captured when I turned on the flash then stuck
it into the back of the closet. That pile was several feet high.

We pulled it all out and it looked like this.

I asked Matt to bring our clothing containers down from the attic and the boys started pulling out all of their favorite shirts…and talking at once…and asking me loud questions like “will this shirt fit me this year?” and “oh can I have this one?”. Malachi was crawling all over me and into my well ordered piles and into the containers. It was a fun organizational moment.  The kind that makes me want to not let them help me. But…I know they love helping me with this job, so I kept myself from screaming for Calgon to take me far, far away and let them go a little nuts for a while. 

Two days and several hours later…the bottom of the closet is storing only sleeping bags. (Someone needs to take a broom to that floor.)

The clothing bins are now ready to go live in the attic again until the next time I feel like we need a little family insanity.

And…I was able to take a very full container of clothes to the clothing giveaway at church we hosted over the weekend.

What’s it like at your house when you sort through clothes during the changes of seasons? Have any closets that you need to clean out? (My boys would be happy to come and help you.)

You can go visit Tammy’s Recipes for more “Pile Clean Up” motivation.

I thought I’d take some time to answer some of your questions from this post. 

What curriculum do I use for Language Arts?

We don’t use one single curriculum for our entire Language Arts program. For spelling, we use Spelling Power. For Phonics we use Explode the Code. For handwriting we are currently using Handwriting Without Tears, but for cursive we use Getty Dubay Italic Handwriting. (Asa doesn’t work out of a handwriting book anymore. His handwriting is better than mine now, and he just practices it when he does normal writing assignments or writes thank you notes, etc.)  As for grammar, I decided to try my own thing this year and it is working pretty well. I’ll write a whole post about it sometime for you. (One in which you is welcome to check for grammatical errors.)  :)

What do I do for exercise and when do I do it?

I LOVE to exercise…about as much as I LOVE to walk around a shopping mall for eight hours in high heels. (I don’t own any high heels.) 

Exercise is not my favorite activity. I’d rather clean toilets. But, I know it’s good for me…so when I do discipline myself enough to exercise (and when my lungs are cooperating and allowing me to breathe like a normal person) my favorite way to exercise is on a rebounder (mini trampoline). We have one in our “game room” and I pull it down sometimes and “jog” on it after I’ve worked on the computer in the afternoons before I start dinner. Sometimes. 

I enjoy taking brisk walks too, but I really, really like the rebounder. It hurts the least of all exercise I’ve ever done….and I like doing things that don’t hurt. I’m weird like that. (Or perhaps I’m just a wimp.)

Plus, I’ve heard that the rebounder is a very healthy way to make your body work well and get rid of toxins. You can read more about that here.

I wish I could tell you that I exercise on my rebounder regularly, but I don’t. Shame on me. Feel free to leave me a guilt trip in the comments section. Does it count that I move 100 miles an hour during the day and that while the boys were learning to sew I ran constantly from boy to boy re-threading their needles? 

When do I clean?

Thankfully, I clean more regularly than I exercise. In fact, I usually work up a sweat while I clean, so I think we can call it exercise. Yes, let’s do that.

We try to reserve Friday mornings for cleaning. The boys are old enough now to really help and I’m so, so happy about that. We also try to do a “pick-up” of the house in the evenings, but seriously, by Friday morning the house looks pretty scary. 

I’m trying to figure out a better routine…and some better discplines for the boys regarding putting their stuff away when they’re done playing with it. After Christmas, I’m going to try some new things to try to keep the house organized and clean for longer than a few short hours. If/when they work, I’ll let you know. 

Okay…there you go…some answers to some of your questions. What do you do to get exercise and when do you clean? And seriously, don’t you think they are one in the same? 

As I began writing a post to explain our usual daily schedule to you…I realized that first I should write a post with a few details about our lifestyle so that our schedule, especially the homeschooling part, will make more sense to you. 

See, there’s this little thing called flexibility that, while it doesn’t come easy to me, I have learned to embrace, enjoy and cherish. Flexibility is one of the biggest blessings of homeschooling  (not to mention the fact that I can smooch my kids’ cheeks WHENEVER I want to ALL DAY LONG…). I’ve decided that learning to be flexible just makes things so much simpler. I do not like to be uptight…but oh, can I get uptight. I’m working on it.

So, we have a schedule on paper, sort of…and it makes our life go more smoothly when we work to follow it. And we get a lot of work done when we follow it. And most days we are able to follow it, mostly. But we rarely, if ever, follow it to the letter.

Sometimes Daddy needs us to do something for him. Sometimes we have a headache. Sometimes there’s someone who needs a meal taken to them. Sometimes we need to read some extra chapters of History today, knowing that tomorrow we’ll have to be out the door by 10:30 and we won’t have time to read. Sometimes  we are feeling creative and just get out the paint. Sometimes we have a gajillion apples waiting to be made into applesauce all over the kitchen…

Yeah, it’s called life. And my kids are learning about it.

And Matt and I want it to be that way. We feel like their education happens around the clock…not just when the school books are out. And we’re trying to help our kids understand that too. We want them to understand that they’re learning when we make lists together to organize our camping trip. (Yes, it’s important for me to teach my kids early in life to make lists!!)  We want them to understand that when they’re helping mommy cook, they are learning. And even when they’re playing with legos…they are learning. 

Just wanted to talk about that a little bit before I go into our daily schedule explanation in a future post.

And I also feel like I need to confess this to you…. (yikes, this is kind of hard)

I often see a person’s daily schedule and it says something like “Get up at 6 am…read Bible”. I think that’s so great that people have their Bible reading time scheduled into their day like that…first thing in the morning. 

Yeah, I don’t have that. I don’t have Bible reading time scheduled into my day. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m taking that flexibility thing too far? Everyday is a little different around here depending on what we need to get up and do…or depending on how late we had to stay up the night before. I don’t have a set time that I get up in the morning. (I despise alarm clocks.)  I get up when I get up (usually between 6:30-8:00). And I’m thankful for that flexibility (oh, so thankful). 

I do wake up talking to my Father and spend most of the day visiting with him right up until I fall asleep each night. But since I don’t have Bible reading time scheduled directly into my day…some days it doesn’t happen. And some days it does. (And most days I read it to my kids…and we work on memorizing scripture…I guess I kinda forgot about that part…but I’m talking about my personal time in the Word.)

So, I guess I felt like I needed to tell you that. Because when you see my schedule, you won’t see “Personal Bible Reading” time scheduled in there. When I began writing out my schedule, I realized that. I am working on it.  And I’m really working on it with my kids so that they establish a good routine of daily Bible reading early in life.

Thank you for providing safety for me to be real with you. I’d love to hear what works for you in this area. Please do share how and when you manage quiet Bible study time. 

I used to be BIG into list making. I had to have every detail of my day written out in order to feel organized. I loved scratching finished items off my list. And if it wasn’t on my list, but I did it anyway, I’d quickly write it on my list, then immediately scratch it off my list. Weird, I know. 

Somewhere in the span of having four kids…I stopped making so many lists. Funny, isn’t it, that now when I need to be even more organized…I have fewer lists. I guess it’s because most days I hardly have time to find a pen, much less make a list with it once I’ve found it. Somehow I’ve stayed organized anyway (mostly) (and except for my storage room) without my detailed lists. I guess all the lists are just somewhere in my head floating around all the time, because now it seems I’m just thinking hard all the time about all that needs to be done and what I’ll do next and who can help and who’s turn it is and what’s going on in the evening and what’s going on tomorrow and whether or not I have enough flour ground for the breakfast muffins and…

Please, would someone just hand me a pen!

Okay, really…I’ve got it all under control. Really.

And, let me interrupt this regularly scheduled program with a little detail about my organizational abilities. While I am quite organized in the way I plan and in the way I execute my plans, like with menu planning and school planning and schedule planning…and I’m able to get A LOT done in a day as a result…and everyone always tells me how organized I am…and it’s true…

I’m not altogether organized when it comes to having my sock drawer alphabetized and my cleaning supplies in rainbow color order. If you were to come into my house right this very minute and walk upstairs (carefully so as to not trip over any tinker toys) into my bedroom, you would see that I made the bed this morning, sort of, and only so that I could throw five loads of clean laundry onto it so that they could be folded. But they aren’t folded yet (because I’m blogging, for Pete’s sake…priorities, people). And if you went into my storage room (after you signed a waiver stating that you wouldn’t sue us if you injured yourself as you tried to walk through)…you would see that I’m not great about having everything in cute little bins with labels like Organizing Junkie, whom I think is the coolest. Oh, I wish I was that good, but I’m not. My organizational skills don’t go that far. So, while I’m pretty organized…I’m not always organized, you know?

Now, back to the regularly scheduled program…which just happens to be about scheduled programs. Or just schedules.  Our schedule.

Several of you have asked how I am able to get everything done while I homeschool and cook healthy meals and go to soccer games and chase four boys and all that other stuff we all have to do in a day. So I finally was able to fit it into my schedule to work on telling you about our schedule. Coming up, I’ll share with you about our daily schedule, our school schedule, and whatever other schedule I can schedule in to tell you about.  (If I keep writing the word schedule in this post all clever like, it’s just not gonna be funny anymore. Kinda like when one of your kids tells you the same joke 47 times during breakfast and you can only fake laugh for the first 26 times, then you’ve gotta start telling the kid to please, please learn a new joke.) 

Knock knock? Who’s there? Schedule. Schedule who?  Schedule really be impressed that I thought of this joke all by myself.

Get it? Schedule is supposed to sound like “bet you’ll”…get it?

Yeah, okay, I should really go up and fold that laundry… :)  Alright, I’m on it.

But first, I’ve gotta know…do you make lists? Are you an organized person? How do you stay organized?