Keeping It All Together
When I enter my kitchen, my refrigerator is immediately on my left.
Filling up the entire side of my fridge, is my life. I can stand back, with my back against the wall, and see the entire year laid out in front of me. I see upcoming birthdays, doctor appointments, days of my husband’s flight home (YAY!), days school gets out, days I need to bake bread for the church bazaar — whatever is coming up is right there. I use colored permanent markers because my sons learned early on that the dry erase and then the wet erase markers could come off. That didn’t really go over very well.
Above the calendar, I keep the doctor’s number, the dentist’s number, and the school’s number.
Off to the side is anything important – like Kaylee’s Toby Mac Winter Jam tickets.
If it’s something I need to do, deliver a child to, or know about, it’s on my calendar.
I would, seriously, be lost without it.
The only reason I have an academic calendar that starts in July is because we moved into our house in July. The only reason it’s decorated with all of these stickers is because I have to stare at it all year, so why not make it pretty?
I buy it in June. I watch the calendar all spring and hold off buying one. Then I hit the scrapbooking aisle and look for just the right stickers – month-by-month stickers and season-by-season stickers and holiday-by-holiday stickers. When I get home, I take my purse calendar (that contains all of the same information in a less beautiful medium) and a printed copy of the coming school year’s calendar and mark all of the birthdays, holidays, days off from school, and anniversaries. When I’m done, I have a brand-new-fresh calendar and I wait and wait for the first of July when I can hang it up and start the new year.
If I make my calendar in June to start in July, why am I telling you this now? Because December is looming. And December ends this calendar year. And most of you need new calendars. They make calendars like this from January through December, too.
This is an investment initially – financially and in time. But oh how it’s worth it to look at the year in a glance. And how fun to see the year fill up in permanent markers, to be able to look back and see how your year went and what happened and when it happened. As exciting as a new calendar is to put up, it’s almost sad to take the old one down again.
Hallee
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Again, Hallee, another fantastic idea! I have one of those “Mom Organizer” calendars and it is *okay*. Since us moms are inundated with important days, months out at times, I don’t like thumbing from one month to the next. This is awesome! I have all the scrapping embellishments and such, but where does one get a calendar like this? Office Max, Staples, and the like? I haven’t ever seen one this big. May I ask, how much something like this is? I may have to get one when I’m out for Black Friday. Thanks momma! :)
I buy mine at Office Depot. There’s a wall calendar display with different kinds – this is “At-A-Glance” brand. I THINK it’s $20. Yep – I just looked it up on their website. It’s $20 and change. The other side is the year in landscape orientation — that’s what the picture is here: http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/767005/AT-A-GLANCE-Reversible-Erasable-Wall/
Brilliant idea!
this is brilliant. i have a small month calendar – but dislike that i can’t put events for the upcoming month when i make an appointment or family is coming …. definitely looking into one :) thanks!
I would be lost without my calendar. But I put everything in Outlook, being the geek that I am. LOL! Plus this way I can “share” all the appointments with Erin so he has them, too.
Wow! With that schedule, how do you find time to post so often? Funny about the dry erase markers. I got a chuckle out of that, I bet your boys did too!
Oh – that’s easy. I am currently up at 12:28 and my alarm will go off at 4:30.
Seriously, though, I type pretty fast. I get up at 4:30, and one or two mornings a week I put off my fiction writing and just pound out blog posts. My schedule allows for me to be at the computer chatting with my husband for a couple of hours a day, and often while I’m doing that, I enter recipes.
If you could figure out some way to save those and maybe bind them, they would be something really wonderful for the children someday. It would be a wonderful way to look back at their mom’s life.