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I have always considered myself a "neat freak", but if you'd see my home right now, you wouldn't believe me. How did I come to live like this? Between keeping up with my hubby and 2 kids, my full time job, and my many other life activities, my life is in a state of chaos!
In January, I took a teaching position at Southeast Technical Institute. I love the job, itself, but I also love that I have the summer off! So, I say, what better time to get myself organized? I can't, of course, spend money while doing so, though. Along with my desire to keep things neat and tidy is my obsessive compulsive desire to do so while still saving a buck.
So...here is one of the things I will be doing to get organized for FREE:
I'm putting together a Family Organizer. Its a binder filled with all of my family's important information (calendars, birthdays, addresses, menu planner, grocery lists, doctor's names/phone numbers, etc.). Here are a couple of FREE sites that I have printed documents from:
Mommy Tracked: Menu planner, weekly family calendar, to-do lists, etc (very cute, too!!)
SampleWords: Address book, bill organizer, gift list, fitness log, etc.
Birthday Reminder
Check them out, and consider starting your own family organizer. I'm hoping that this one "book" will jump-start this process for me. The biggest hurdle I have to overcome during this "phase' of my plan is meal planning. We have never planned our meals...I'm looking forward to avoiding the long "what do you want for dinner"...."I don't know, what do you want" conversation. It will also help us save money by using up our leftovers and allowing us to cook with products for which we can use coupons...
Have you done meal planning? I'd love to hear your insight and stories. What worked best for you? What didn't work. Share it below in the "comments" so we can all learn from you!!
As far as the meal planning thing, we have a cookbook that kinda does it for you. It's called Healthy Calendar Diabetic Cookbook (it was recommended to me when I was pregnant). It sets the year up by weeks and has about 5 meals for each week. At the beginning of the week there's a grocery list for the whole week, which is really convenient. And since it's a diabetic cookbook the meals are relatively healthy. The biggest downfall is that occasionally the ingredients on their shopping list are either hard to find or kinda expensive and I've had to look through the recipes to see if we really need that ingredient or not. All in all, we've liked it (although I haven't used it lately because I lent the book to a friend).
ReplyDeleteAs a college student with minimal freezer and pantry space I have to plan out my meals. I sit down with my cookbooks on Sunday and plan out several meals for the week and figure in when I'll eat leftovers. By planning meals I can use ingredients more wisely, like a whole head of cabbage instead of just half. It also helps me from going out to eat because I ran out of time during the week.
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