Welcome back to my weekly installment of “Organizing Myself to Health”.

This week was all about water. Water, water, water. I was really happy with my progress for the most part. My worst day was Friday when I took my kids on a day trip to a local artsy attraction about an hour from my house. It is called Terra Studios and it is this fun little art experience in the middle of the woods. It was H-O-T here in Arkansas and I was wearing my baby (totally new thing for me), so he and I were sort of melted and plastered together.

(Find me on Instagram for more photos like this: user @maryorganizes)

All that and I forgot to bring water for me, baby, and my three girls! Oops! Luckily my friend brought enough to share, but it wasn’t enough to guzzle like I needed. I learned that I need to plan for when I’m going to be away from home.

It was pretty easy to get my water when I was at home. The first day I tried tick marks on the calendar, but I never remembered to keep track of making the marks whenever I refilled my cup. So, on day two I tried another way. I filled up 4 glasses of water, and then when I drank them all up, I refilled them all. My goal is to get the four finished off sometime around 2-ish in the afternoon, and then the rest finish off pretty easy with the rest of the afternoon and dinner time.

One of the reasons my Four-Glasses-System works is because I pass through my kitchen so many times a day and the glasses are right there staring at me! (I love my blue cups! They all look different because they are hand-blown with etching in the side. Aren’t they so pretty?) This same thing is true when we are organizing, ensuring the proximity of things is so important! Are the towels not making it into the hamper? *Where* is the hamper? It should be near where the towels will be used. When we organize our homes, we put things near where we use them and make it easier on ourselves! Here is a little “proximity” tip for you:

******Organizing Tip******

Put your hand soap refill bottle in your bathroom cleaning bucket. Make refilling soap bottles a part of your bathroom cleaning routine. Easy, Easy!

*******************************

The results of the week: The scale hasn’t budged with my new water intake, but I wasn’t expecting dramatic results with only one change. I’m okay with slow results. I know I’m laying the foundation right now for a healthy future and that is enough for me right now.

~~~~~

Week 3′s challenge -

7 hours of sleep. Totally easier said than done around here, but there are things I could do on my part to get more sleep.

Will you join me, whether you struggle with weight, disorganization, or something else? Subscribe to get the emails so you get all my updates. I’d love your support on this. I am hoping that making my struggle public will give me the extra push I need to make a real and permanent change.

Another blogger has joined me! I’m so excited to be on this journey WITH others! Check out Kim’s progress on her blog My Heart and Yours. (And thank you everyone for your continued support – this is a long road ahead!)

Fully hydrated,

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I seriously enjoyed browsing through all the projects and posts linked up this week. Thank you so much! I hope you found lots of great organizing ideas! One thing is for sure, I have never organized two people’s homes in the same way, which is why I’m always looking for more inspiration.

Here are my favorites from last week! Click on the picture to visit each site! Thanks to each of these awesome bloggers for the great ideas.

~~

If you would, please:

**Share organizing, homemaking, home decor, inspiring, and funny blog posts.**

**Put a link back to my blog on your site.**

**Like me on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.**

**Please don’t link posts you’ve shared with us before.**

Feel free to use this happy linky party button.

*By participating in this linky party, you agree to let me use a photo from your post if I decide to feature your project on this blog or my Facebook page.

Helping you get and stay organized,

Share your links below! Party open Monday night 8 pm CST through midnight on Friday. Be sure to check back next week to see if you were featured!

Do you wish you had more time? What if I told you there was a way of stream-lining some of your responsibilities and creating more time in your week? Your work as a Household Manager (which sometimes feels like a secretarial position) can feel all-consuming.

~~~Where do the kids go and when? Has that bill been paid? Did we send Grandma a birthday card? When is the last time we changed the filters? How can I find anything in my wallet/purse when it is so messy? Did we save any money this week? What should we do for Izzy’s birthday party? What preparations do I need to make to get ready for family pictures? Are the kids up to date on everything? Have we returned the library books? Did I pay that bill? What is coming up at school? At church? And more? And more? And other stuff???~~~

My life is very full. I really cannot imagine functioning if I was doing all that I do while trying to keep these thoughts circulating in my head. Why don’t I have to stress about it or worry about it constantly?

Five Words: My Weekly Home Management Session.

Once a week, I make an appointment with myself (Wednesdays for me), and I work through a checklist that helps me take care of things that need to happen. And if I can’t do something right then, I assign it a time to get done. Since I keep this appointment with myself on a weekly basis, the amount to do is not overwhelming. I imagine it would get overwhelming if I skipped a whole bunch of weeks and tried to cram it all into an hour. Or if I tried to do a little bit here and a little bit there, I’m pretty sure that would make my brain feel everywhere.

My Weekly H.M. Session Checklist:

• Inbox: You MUST read more about this in my post Taming the Paper Trail of Clutter (or How to Effectively Use an Inbox)!!!!! This is the crux of the H.M. Session system working. Your brain cannot fully relax with piles of paper all over the place.
• Household Checklist: This post is coming, but for now I’ll summarize. The household checklist is full of home-maintenance things like when I last changed the filters, reminders to unplug all the hoses before winter, reminders to clean lots of random places in our homes, and other things that need to happen for home maintenance, but I don’t feel like carrying any of it around in my brain. Every week I look over the list to see if anything needs to happen within the next week or if I need to plan ahead for anything else. I don’t usually do these things right that second (unless I can), but add them to my to do list for that week.
• Birthday, Holiday, & Event Planning: Any holidays or birthdays coming up? I check my calendar looking ahead and make plans and send birthday cards. (I have a printable coming up about birthday party planning too! So much useful stuff in the works!)
• Clean Out Wallet & Purse: Pretty self-explanatory. This is pretty easy when done often. My mom has always done this every single night. so sometimes I feel rebellious only doing it once a week.
• Set $ Aside: We operate on a cash-ish budget, so this is the day I’ll set money aside for things coming up.
• Plan Menu &Grocery List: I’ll do my shopping over the next few days, but I like having that list ready to go. (Of course I have a simplified way of doing this, better subscribe and stick around to find out!)

That’s it. Pretty easy. I think it takes longer to write about some of these things than it actually takes to do them. But Whoa!! What a difference an hour (or less) a week can make on the whole rest of the week! This is what organizing is about: streamlining and efficiency with the *boring parts of life so that we can use the bulk of our time on what really matters. (*Boring to most people, but not to me!)

Happy Living!

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~~In other news, if I ever had a shop on this site, I’d sell cute little pads of paper with this checklist on each page. Maybe I’ll think more about that next Wednesday. ~~

Once upon a time there was this bachelor who lived in a bachelor pad. He had a full-size freezer for frozen pizzas and burritos and a dorm-size fridge for drinks and condiments. He had a TV entertainment center the size of Walmart and instead of having that mammoth beast against the wall to ground it, he pulled it out from the wall to get the perfect viewing angle from the couch. To hide the cords and mess at the back of the entertainment center, he took a door off of a bedroom closet and leaned it against the large gap between the wall and the entertainment center. He had already established a career and worked hard, but when he wasn’t working he played just as hard. He was on an adult men’s soccer team and played every pickup game of every sport. He slept when he wanted and lived how he wanted.

And then he met me. And we decided to get married and start a family. His bachelor pad quickly morphed into a family home with two cribs in the room next to ours and that ghastly giant entertainment center was vacated from the premises. The twins came into our lives and changed everything. This bachelor traded out his manly, care-free life to a life with a lot of expectation and responsibility. One of the reasons I feel so lucky is that he has always told me that he lived those bachelor days waiting and hoping for the day he could trade it in for the life he always wanted as a husband and father.

A husband and father like that deserves to be celebrated. This year, the theme of our gifts is boys will be boys. The girls and I had some fun shopping for Matt.

The girls got him a new basketball, volleyball and football. Yes, they are all youth-sized (my suggestion to the girls), because these are for Daddy-Daughter time. My hubby works some pretty long hours and when we had children, he gave up most of his hobby time to be around for his kids. He only has an hour or two in the evening with the kids before they go to bed, and he spends it hands-on with them. Now they are getting old enough that he can start to teach them those hobbies of long ago. A dad like that deserves some fun new equipment.

Cougar got his daddy the set of Star Wars movies. My girls are scared of most G-rated movies, so Matt’s hope of enjoying this kind of movie with any of his kids rests in Cougars hands. Really, I can’t believe we didn’t already own this. I think that is only another testament to what a selfless provider Matt is for our family. I can’t remember the last time he bought anything for himself. Really, I think it has been a few years at least. And if you know my husband, you know that Walmart tag on the movie will make him happy for a few reasons. (wink, wink)

One of my gifts to Matt represents one of our fun date nights when we watched Les Mis together and then spent the next few hours re-watching our favorite scenes and singing along. It is one of those movies we agreed we needed to own! And if you don’t think Les Mis is manly, remember, Wolverine is a main character!

And the rest of Matt’s Father’s Day gifts are just things he needed (shirts and shoes not pictured). Matt is practical down to his core, so in all honesty, he prefers things like clothes, socks, and shoes for gifts. “If you are going to spend money on me, might as well be things I need.” (Luckily he understands I don’t feel the same about my gifts.) I’m so grateful for my down-to-earth husband who keeps things grounded around here.

~~~

On Sunday, the children and I will be making Matt his favorite treat of all time: No Bake Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars. I’ve never added the recommended ‘decoration’ on top of the bars, but I might for this special occasion.

No Bake Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars by Lizzy Early of Your Cup of Cake

Other than some fun gifts, a delicious desert, and some steaks grilled for dinner, our Sunday will be like most Sundays: full of church and family time.

And to my Matty: I have a great life because of you. Thank you for giving up that bachelor life long ago and for taking a chance on me. Who knew we’d end up with the four best kids on the planet? Well, we always did suspect they’d be awesome. Happy Father’s Day.

Love,

~~~And in other news, the girls thought I should get Matt a new car for Father’s Day. They don’t understand “budgets” yet.~~~

Welcome back to my 2nd installment of “Organizing Myself to Health”, where I will discuss my experiences from week #1.

I’m going to be honest with you, I can’t believe I started this series. After I hit publish last week, I promptly went to my pantry and had a big handful of M&M’s, I was so freaked out that I confessed my health struggles to all of you. I woke up the next morning hoping it was all a dream. Then the supportive comments on the blog, Facebook comments, and even emails started pouring in, and I started to realize that making my struggle public was the best thing I could have done for myself.

My week wasn’t magically perfect, filled only with celery and water, but I have officially started my journey, and that is a really good thing.

One comment on Facebook from Liza M. stood out to me: “Just read your e-mail regarding the correlation between health and organization. Your assessing is a GREAT start. As with any habit, we have to give ourselves some time to master the habit. Perhaps you’ve seen the studies on how changing one habit at a time gives you an 85% chance of success, but changing 2 habits at a time decreases your success to 30% and 3+ habits goes down to 5%!!! Focus on one (maybe choosing a better choice for your late night snacking) and do that for two weeks. Once you have a habit down, it’s much easier to move on to the next habit. Just like organizing!”

I could not agree more, Liza! For all the people who told me they are in this with me, I want to know what you think about this approach? This process will not be quick, but I think that makes it better. The reason is clarified when I consider it in organizing terms.

~~~Many people living in a disorganized mess dream of that TV crew coming in and cleaning it all up for them and redecorating while they are at it. Really, though, the disorganization is theirs to own and clean up mess by mess. Along the path of cleaning up and organizing their homes and their lives, they learn the skills required to maintain a clean and organized home. The same goes for me and my journey to greater health. My extra pounds are mine to own and clean up ounce by ounce. The slow and steady journey to being fit and healthy will teach me the skills I need to maintain that lifestyle. Crash diets and quick fixes are not the answer for me.~~~

Week 1: Assess the Damage

• I weighed myself and Matt took the crazy pictures, and I took the measurements. Will I show them to you? Maybe. I’m not ready yet. I know, I know, I’m a wimp, but I am a human wimp.
• The numbers were all terrifying. I mean terrifying!!!
• I’ve noticed a few things about some of my bad eating habits. I eat when I’m tired and since I’m staying up late working on this blog and my business, getting up with a baby in the night, and keeping up with my four kids during the day; I’m pretty much always tired. Food gives me that little burst of energy I need to just keep going. I need to brainstorm around this. Any ideas for getting little bursts of energy that don’t involve eating? Or do you just eat certain things that are better for you?

If you are following along with me, the change I am working on this week is to be consistent with drinking lots of water. I am going to drink 8 glasses of water a day. 

Will you join me, whether you struggle with weight, disorganization, or something else? Subscribe to get the emails so you get all my updates. I’d love your support on this. I am hoping that making my struggle public will give me the extra push I need to make a real and permanent change.

Ignoring the M&M’s in my pantry,

Please don’t forget to subscribe to get my posts as emails (top of the sidebar!) and join me on Facebook!

I’m so impressed with all of the projects and posts that linked up this week. Thank you so much! I hope you found lots of great organizing ideas! One thing is for sure, I have never organized two people’s homes in the same way, which is why I’m always looking for more inspiration.

Here are my favorites from last week! Click on the picture to visit each site! Thanks to each of these awesome bloggers for the great ideas.

~~

If you would, please:

**Share organizing, homemaking, home decor, inspiring, and funny blog posts.**

**Put a link back to my blog on your site.**

**Like me on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.**

**Please don’t link posts you’ve shared with us before.**

Feel free to use this happy linky party button.

*By participating in this linky party, you agree to let me use a photo from your post if I decide to feature your project on this blog or my Facebook page.

Helping you get and stay organized,

Share your links below! Party open Monday night 8 pm CST through midnight on Friday. Be sure to check back next week to see if you were featured!

If you feel like stacks of paper are taking over your life, you are not alone. If I were to walk into your home, would I find paper filling up many of your flat surfaces? Where does the paper come from? Most of it comes from outside our homes (excepting preschoolers art work) and we carry it in with us.  Picture yourself walking into your house with this paper, maybe just a few pieces of paper or a few envelopes at a time — mail, receipts, school papers, flyers. Where are you setting it down? The papers you deposit in random locations along your way into your home is what I like to call The Paper Trail. Those few papers here and there add up really fast over time and suddenly your counters overflow with it! It ends up hanging around because you don’t know what to do with it or you don’t have the time right away to deal with it.

***What I do***    All paper that comes into my house gets immediately quick-sorted and the trash goes into the recycle bin. Then I look to see if something needs to get taken care of immediately or before my next scheduled Home Management session (explained below). It is actually rare that something has to be done right that second. Excepting the immediately urgent, EVERYTHING goes in my inbox and I move onto other things. If I am too busy to even look through it, I’ll just put it right in my inbox. Worst case, I miss something for ‘right now’, but the consistent best case is that my counters don’t get clogged up with all the excess.

My inbox system works ONLY because once a week I have what I call a Home Management session. You can read all that I do in my Home Management Session HERE, but basically I set aside time every week (make an appointment with myself) to take care of the secretary-like work necessary to making a home run smoothly. One of the things I accomplish during this time every week is to go through my inbox.

Right away, I –

• pay bills
• RSVP to any events
• add events to my calendar, noting details in the calendar, so I can recycle the invite or flyer immediately
• send replies to notes and cards
• file anything that needs to be kept (PLEASE save yourself a ton of stress and read my post about managing your home office files!!!)
• shred things that needs to be shredded
• in the case of kids field trip forms and such, I fill all those out and prepare the envelopes to return to school
• add things to my to do list that can’t be handled immediately (i.e. – buy a birthday gift for Anna’s party)
• Kids artwork … definitely deserves a post of its own, but to summarize, now is the time I take a photo of the art and recycle while keeping the extra special ones in my kids memory boxes.

*You can imagine that my recycling stack is enormous every week, because I try to get rid of every paper after it has served its usefulness.

 You may think that this system sounds like it takes a lot of time, but really it saves you so much time! At some time or another, you are going to end up dealing with all of this. When you pay all your bills at once, you save so much time, because you are in the mode, you have all your stuff out and you can just go for it and be done. When you sit down to knock out your inbox once a week, it goes really fast and you have the peace of knowing you are caught up on everything and not forgetting anything important.

The amazing thing about this system is the FREEDOM you feel all week when you don’t have to think about paper! Imagine that!

CAUTION: If you are not consistent, you will stop trusting yourself. When you stop trusting that you’ll actually get to the inbox, you start modifying the system and it doesn’t work as well. You’ll start making piles of “really important things” or things you “really don’t want to forget about”. Hello – that is what the inbox is all about! And if you start this modified system, you go right back to having piles of paper all over the place. My consistent Home Management session is THE ONLY REASON my inbox works and doesn’t become an overflowing mess. If you miss a week, move on and get back to it as soon as possible!

Pick a time and stick to it. Simple.

{Today’s post is like a can of worms, because now I need to write a bunch of new posts about Storing Kids Artwork and Memory Boxes. Don’t forget to check out the post about Home Management Sessions, because it could really change your life. Also, it almost seems like “how to get rid of all the current stacks so you can start fresh with the maintenance mode” would be a great topic too. So much to say and only so much time to write each week! Remember how I have those four little kids? lol. Good things come to those who wait!}

I’ve helped so many people tame their paper trail. Most of my clients and most people I know, need help with this. So, be one of the few people who knows how to Tame The Paper Trail and properly use an inbox. Man, I love writing about this stuff. I hope this system really helps you!

Happy trails to you!

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~~~And in other news, today I took my kids to a doctors appointment and the memory of today’s appointment will became a permanent traumatic memory for each of them. Totally earned my mom-title today.~~~