More Unexpected Organizing- School Papers

I am working on another unexpected organizing project- school papers.  It has nothing to do with school starting next month.  Or the fact that I totally procrastinated on making any sort of attempt at keeping the kids papers in order.  No it all has to do with a certain little boy who remains below the fifth percentile in height.  This cute little guy....





The next picture may help explain things a little more.  The boy to the left of Jeffrey is 2 days older than him.  His mother and I are good friends and grew up together.  We had the same oby and it was cool that the boys were in the nursery together!  The little boy to the right of Jeffrey is actually 6 weeks YOUNGER than Jeff. He doesn't turn 10 until mid August. He is really big for his age whereas the boy on the left is average.  So when I took Jeff for his annual check up, we decided to get a bone x-ray again to see what his bone age is compared to his age.  We've been doing this periodically since he was 5 and up till now it's just been a wait and see if he has a growth spurt since his bone age has been 3 yrs behind his true age.



We have been asked to have him be seen by an endocrinologist to make sure there is no other underlying reason for him being so small.  We never expected our children to be super tall as Jeff and are short ourselves, but we do want to make sure he will be a decent height.  And now the doctors feel it's time to move to the next phase of checking his hormones.

So what does this have to do with school papers?  

Well, the endocrinologist wants all his medical records, important baby milestones (when he talked, walked, potty trained) and school records of height and weight.  That requires report cards.  Which requires me to find his school papers.  Which requires me to search the dozen areas that I've been stashing their papers. 

Pre school and Kindergarten at the Christian school were easy to find because I dumped them in a drawer in the attic dresser.  Bad thing about it was that I thought it would be safe to keep a lot of the hand made items - you know pasta necklaces and cheerio art- since it was in the attic in a drawer.  Except that bugs found their way to said drawer and ate away at his masterpieces.  And there were some new family members that set up their home there in the cotton ball Santa crafts.  YUCK!  It was reminiscent of The Bearded Iris recent post on a delicious protein packed rice recipe.  YUM!  Except she took photos and I just carefully dumped them in the trash hoping my husband wouldn't see.

This made me realize that I need to go through all their papers and organize them better.  And since his doctor's appointment is on Wednesday, I will need to do this fast!   

I haven't decided how I want to store them.  Some bloggers put their kid's papers in hanging file boxes  and some keep them in lidded boxes.  I like both ideas.  Another thing is to make books of their artwork.  I did that with Paige's Kindergarten artwork when Oprah was giving away free photo books.  It turned out ok.  I didn't do a good job taking pictures of her items and some things got cropped funny on the pages.  So I may try that again.

Hopefully, at least I will gather everything into one area and weed out all the papers that really don't need to be saved.  So like my office desk, I am off to start working on organizing something that's long overdue but now I'm forced eager to tackle!  If anyone has any cool ideas for storing these wonderful papers that I'm sure I'll be the only one glad I saved, please leave comment and link to your site!

What have we been up too

Baseball and softball.

Jeff bunted a lot as a lefty hitter and fast runner

I still can't tell how Paige could see with her helmet

Both my kids love playing and we really enjoy going to the games.  Not much gets done from May to July in our house, but we spend so much time with friends it's all worth it.  We don't do travel ball although Paige is thinking of joining a fast pitch league that does some local travel- nothing that would require over night stays or anything like that.  Some of our friends do have kids on travel ball and financially we could never do it. 

Things have winded down now and we will have a break until fall ball starts. My son does not want to play football which is ok by us.  And this year Paige made the 7th grade cheerleading squad so her games are during the week and shouldn't interfere with their ball games.

So even though I've been working part time for the past 2 months, most of my days and nights have been hanging out with my family.  I miss blogging and my house is suffering the most, but it was time more than well spent.

And speaking of baseball-- what the heck call was that for the Pirates?  I've seen some bad calls at my kid's games, but seriously Blue.  The Pirates have finally come around after the past 18-19yrs of losing season's and bad management.  Too lose in 19 innings on a call that was clearly wrong is just a shame.  What a way to lose.

Office Desk

This is a long overdue post, well, any post I write now is long overdue.  We just won the All Star Championship game last night and as you can imagine we've been busy with practices and games. 

But back to the worse room in our house.  My office.  I've probably written more posts about this room than any other room in the house.  I clean it and then destroy it almost immediately.  It's just that room in our house where we throw things to deal with later.  Except later rarely comes. 

Luckily, when we purchased our new computer weeks ago, Jeff had to remove all the clutter on the desk top to undo cords.  That allowed me to see how nice the desk is with out all the junk.



Total view of desktop





As you can tell by my monitor, I was reading Flylady emails



Closeups of desktops- little room for anything- haha see my spring cleaning check list- still not done!



Bulletin board- oh by the way the before picture was taken in March!!!



It's pretty easy to see that there was no room for anything on the desk.  You could barely move the mouse around let alone write something on a scrap of paper.

Cleaning off the top of the desk was easy since the whole right side was bare thanks to Jeff.  I just had to remove all the crap from the left.  Including the purple bin which contained all the extra Christmas photo cards from the past 4 years and junk that I would just throw in there - again to deal with later.  Sensing a theme in my life.  PROCRASTINATION.

I did not replace anything except what was truly needed. A pen holder and a pad of paper.  I wanted to take off the glass top and clean it but it weighs a ton and Jeff was no where to be found.  Next time he's around it won't take much to clear all the stuff off and take it off.  Well, I always say that but it's never as easy as I think something's going to be!

Now it's so easy to work at the computer.  And relaxing.

Bulletin board actually has more on it and after shot was taken in June

Now we can move the mouse around so much easier



Nice clean work space




Now to save up money for a new chair


The rest of the office is a wreck.  My file cabinet has stayed clean and hopefully the desk will too.  My goal this week is to gather all our junk and have a yard sale this weekend.  I don't think we have anything going on.  Famous last words!!

Time Experiment

There are days when I go to work and pretty much stare at the clock on my computer.  If it is a particularly slow day it seems as though time stops. And all I can think about is how much I could be getting done at home.

Sunday night I decided to block out my day by hours.  I made a chart from 7 am to 9pm.  I figured I would assign certain tasks during each hour.  In theory I could accomplish 14 tasks on Monday.  Yah, in theory.

In reality, I slept until 9:00am.  I couldn't sleep Sunday night- probably from all the anticipated excitement of all the things I would get done!  Haha!  While I did get up at 7 am, I let the dog out and put some clothes in the wash, I crawled back to bed.  Technically I did get 2 things done, so it wasn't a total loss.

Because the we were expecting temperatures to reach the high 80's, I decided to tackle the attic.  It was still cool enough outside and the attic was cool.  From 9:30 to 10:30 am, I got a ton of things out of the storage area and boxed up for a yard sale.  Or else it's all going to Salvation Army.  I condensed most of my husband's cross country items into 4 large boxes for him to sort through.  But it was starting to get really warm up there and I had to pick up my son at 11 am so I figured it was a good break time.

When we got home, I needed to relax a little.  My son decided he wanted to go through some things to put in the yard sale and I helped him reach some things in his closet to go through.  I headed back up to the attic around 11:30 am to start bringing down boxes.  It was super hot up there and I knew I was done working up there for a while.  I brought down a large pile of sheets and stray clothes that the kids left up there and got them in the wash.

My husband and Paige came home from cross country practice around 12:15 and so I kind of got sidetracked with them.  We had lunch and I cleaned up the kitchen.  My son wanted to go to his friend's house and while my husband took him, I stayed home with Paige.  That was around 1:30.  I vacuumed and dusted the living room, dining room, and staircase.  It took about an hour since I moved all the chairs in the dining room and my staircase is so big. 

After that, I was done.  I wanted to keep cleaning and organizing, but I couldn't. I got lazy.  Bored.  Tired.  I kept looking at my time sheet and thinking that I could get at least 6 more things done (it was around 3 pm by this time).  I kept thinking about how when I am at work time stops.  How I imagine all the million things that I could get done at home.  Yet when I am at home, time flies.  And it's as though nothing gets done.  I want to be on a regimented schedule, but don't like to be constrained at the the same time.

I wasted time on the computer and did laundry.  Around 5:30 Jeff and I started dinner.  My son was still at his friend's house.  My daughter had a friend over and I took them to get ice cream.  After she left, we went to pick up my son around 7:30pm.  On our way home, he saw another friend and went over his house and my husband went to work out.  It was around 8 pm and I thought that I could squeeze a few more things in before I went to bed. 

I loaded my car with cardboard recycling to drop off after work today and I cleaned my office desk.  I am doing a separate post on that! 

So while I would love to say that I efficiently worked every hour yesterday, I cannot.  But it wasn't a total loss.  My attic and office are much better.  My downstairs got cleaned and I have clean sheets ready for weekend guests.  I also realize that sometimes it's unrealistic to expect to work like a robot all day.  I have unrealistic expectations of my ability to manage my time.  I have to admit that I like to putz around throughout my day.  I like to have lazy day moments where I look at a magazine or just sit outside and hang out with my cat.  My to do list will still be there for tomorrow.  I can still try to use my time efficiently so that I don't waste my entire day.  Balance is all that I am looking to achieve.   

So in Love..

Our new computer is awesome!  I am still restoring our files - it was actually done but then I panicked and did a restore again to be sure we got everything.  So I have to wait a little longer before I can backup everything and then add new photos.

Unfortunately, this caused a disaster in my office!  The new tower is bigger than the old one and Jeff had to move things around on our shelves.  Which meant that things were dumped on the floor and now it's chaos. 

But so far, the computer is so fast and I'm curious to see how quickly it downloads pics.  It should be restored by this afternoon and maybe I can get pictures and get back to posting. 

So happy we spent money we didn't have!!

Fourth of July Gift

Friday was my son's 10th Birthday. I didn't get to post a birthday wish as I was backing up pictures on my slow computer.  I hadn't checked my back up in a while and for some reason Carbonite wasn't automatically backing up.  Only bad thing was that it took hours to back up all the pictures that I had been downloading lately.  And I really needed to get this done since we bought a new computer!

While we were out buying my son an ipod touch for his birthday, we picked up a new computer tower and new telephones too!  Both were badly needed and greatly appreciated.  I am hoping that tonight we get the computer hooked up so I can move pictures off my camera.  It's completely full from baseball and birthday parties.  Plus I have so much to update on this blog.  I have been posting these quick updates from work just so my few readers don't think I've completely abandoned them!  I just can't add photos from anywhere but the main computer and I like to have pictures with each post to make it more interesting.

But I need to get back to work.  Happy Belated Birthday Post Jeffrey!  Can't believe you are ten.  I hope you had fun this week with all the parties and baseball games.  Mommy and Daddy (and even Paige) love you sooooo much!!