Things I like - February

1) Secrets of an Organized Mom

 

I consider myself a pretty organized person.  I stay up on my filing, picture organizing and rarely misplace things around the house (the most common is my phone since that doesn't have a designated spot).  Then I read this book and got reallllly excited to reorganize our whole house.  Barbara Reich is a professional organizer and, from reading her book, sounds like the most organized person ever.  I was a bit in awe.  And a little jealous that she gets paid to organize for other people!  That sounds like an awesome job.

She went through each room of a house with ideas for purging, cleaning, and organizing it all.  I especially appreciated her purging tips since that's what I'm working on right now and sometimes I feel I need permission to get rid of certain things.  I was also impressed with all she's trained her kids to do.  I wish I could say I wrote this book.  Before I even finished I ordered it from half.com so I can reread when I need more inspiration.

The only downside was that this was not the best book to read right before bed.  I'd get so excited about cleaning I had trouble falling asleep.  Twice last week I found myself doing major sorting and cleaning when I should have been working out.  This book was hugely inspirational. 

2) The Olympics

Really, who doesn't like the Olympics?  We set the DVR to record all the NBC coverage and then watch what interests us (most things) and skip the boring parts.  It's a lot.  I've decided that summer has bigger headline events (like gymnastics & swimming) but overall, winter has more events worth watching.  Pretty much everything is interesting because it involves ice and snow and crazy things I would never do. (For the record, Matt picked Shooting as the Winter Olympic event he would most likely do and I picked Bobsled.)   I was really impressed with the Slope Style Snowboarding over the weekend, the air and tricks they do amazed me every single time. 

3) Threshold milk crate baskets

Organizing Luke's toys has been an evolving project. I wrote in October how most of his toys were stored under the redone bench in my office and that was working fine.  The problem was my scrapbooks and keeping Luke away from them.

This is an old picture (back when they could all fit on that one shelf) but this is where scrapbooks have resided for many years. However, Luke liked to pull the spines off which annoyed me a lot.  We talked about a lot of different plans but finally ended up moving the bulk of my scrapbooks to the baskets under the bench and bought 2 of these baskets for Luke's toys which are now on the bottom shelf of that bookshelf.  I really like how the basket look and they are very sturdy.  Most of Luke's smaller (not choking hazard small, things like rattles) are in these.  It's worked great because he can pull the basket out on his own and it makes clean-up really easy because toys are just thrown back in.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

I have been semi-stalking Cartwheel and sales, waiting for these to go on sale so I can buy another size for my office organizing project.  And I mean checking Cartwheel at least once a day and looking at them every time in the in the store. 

(These are, shocker, from Target.  Here's a link.)

4) The Impossible

This movie had been on my "to watch" list for quite awhile and we came across it at the library recently.  I got Matt to watch it with me and we both really enjoyed it.  It's the "based on a true story" of a family who was in Thailand for the tsunami 10 years ago.   Drowning is kinda a big fear of mine so the water scenes were a little intense but the whole story was so moving and incredible.  I also cried at one point.  Made me think how I would react in a similar situation (probably a lot of crying and/or screaming).  Really good story of family.  (warning, there are 1 or 2 brief boob shots in the midst of everything, just fyi.  It is rated PG-13.)  Watch it and be amazed.  And a little appalled at how horrific it was.  But more amazed that anyone could survive it at all. 

5) I Heart Organizing blog


I know I just did a post about my favorite blogs to follow but now I have another.  In the midst of my massive reorganizing/purging spree of the past few weeks I came across this one and am kinda hooked.  I love seeing pretty and organized spaces.  Pretty much the more organized things I see the more motivated I am to keep moving on my own projects.  That's pretty helpful on days I just want to sit in my sweats while Luke plays.