I have been very fortune over the last week to enjoy a very little work load and some much needed time off. I worked half days on Monday and Wednesday in addition to being completely on vacation Thursday- Sunday. I had planned this since early July but really wanted to keep it low key as we leave for our real vacation in less than a week.

I have been able to spend extra time with all three kids this week working on education stuff. I am so proud of the great reader that Kendall has become but I notice she is still working hard in Math. We have been working on learning money. I am hoping to use her spending money at the beach to continue this education. Lily is working ahead in Math, reviewing multiplication facts and is learning to keyboard. As an OT, keyboarding is what I consider a fundamental skill, however it is not taught at all in the public school system here so I am feeling the gap. Zach is officially a preschooler with one year before he will be starting Kindergarten. He is math minded but can only recognize numbers 1-5 and knows about half of his alphabet. My goal is for him to learn the entire alphabet prior to January so that Matt can teach him  to read as well.

I enjoyed a very low key birthday which involved three simple rules…1. No fighting 2. No whinnying and 3. No calorie counting.  We have eaten out twice today and I am totally guilty free with this!

The rest of the time I have been spending time reading, relaxing and at the same time preparing for the next month of full schedule.  We did go shopping in Winston and even spent several relaxing hours at the pool. I can definitely say this was a good break but a productive one as well.

I was inspired by this post. I actually had already decide on Thursday that we needed to rearrange/organize the office but after reading the post and seeing the difference, I decided that there were several areas of the house that also needed a little extra attention. So far, I have emptied the paper shredder twice and also thrown away several full bags of stuff. We have been able to reuse and repurpose many of the items, so the expense for this has been minimal $27 at this point!

In the office, we added 2 shelves to help eliminate some of the clutter on the desk top. I also purged the filing cabinet and moved some to a file box. All the office stuff now has a home in the office but it honestly does not feel any smaller.

My bathroom closet has also been reorganized…check it out…It is now offical
All the containers have been emptied out from other areas of the house. If you notice, I currently have 4 empty containers. My plan is to feel these with school supplies as they go on sale in the next several weeks. There is also a shelf that is above the one you see, I was able to remove all the “extra” food from my bedroom closet and place on this shelf.

I also was able to clean and organize my desk, in addition to cleaning out the storage cabinets above the desk. I still need to spend some additional time in these. My goal for this area is the end of the month.

There are two additional areas that still need some more organization. My goal is to complete at least one by next weekend. I have already started working in my closet and it feel bigger with all the items removed from the floor. I am planning to move some additional storage bins from the playroom so this will not be complete until after the playroom. I have also begun reorganizing the playroom. In fact, I am hoping to repurpose an entire shelving system from it.  Today, I started by moving all school supplies out of the playroom and into the stockpile clothes so this only leaves a few more items to move to free up the system.

I am very pleased with the progress but hope to keep the momentum going to finish this job.