The Great Organizational Challenge

So for anyone that knows me, they know I would honestly forget my head if it wasn’t attached. For years I have tried a trillion different things to help myself get organized and stay on top of my tasks. Unfortunately, very little has helped in my plight and each year gets busier and busier and I am further and further from being able to juggle all the balls that are thrown my way. It’s very common for me to end a week feeling like I have not accomplished everything I had intended to do. I think at times my children are lucky they get fed 3 times a day!

The beginning of the school year is usually when I tend to throw myself into panic mode and start searching for an answer to my never ending quest of organization. Last year I conquered keeping the kids organized in their daily routines. A week before school began I tore apart my kitchen and formed the ever popular COMMAND CENTER. Pinterest was a God-send for ideas on organizing this and making sure I didn’t miss anything.

Here’s what the command center entails:

I have 2 Rubbermaid drawer organizers that hold lunch boxes, water bottles, all of the non-refrigerated lunch items (crackers, pudding cups, fruit snacks, cookies, ect.), as well as plastic silverware and napkins. This afforded me the space needed in the kitchen to pack the main items in the lunch boxes and then leave it to the kids to pick their extras. Having all of this in one spot also meant I didn’t have open boxes of crackers left on the counter and cupboard doors sprawled open as the kids ran to the bus stop in the mornings.

I also have a large corkboard hanging on the wall. This is where we keep the calendar, school lunch calendar, classroom schedules and rules, permission slips, and other essential reminders brought home from school. This is the main hub of the command center. I work on the calendar at the end of the month to have it filled out for the next month. It contains practice dates for football, plays, gymnastics, and dance. It also has info on field trips, special days at school, doctor appointments, no school days, game days, lunch dates for me, and birthdays/holidays. I swear if the house were to burn down, I would run back into the flames to grab that calendar! It looks really nice right now, but it only takes about 2 weeks for the bulletin board to go from nice and tidy to tidal waves of paper, but its controlled chaos that I can handle.

Another very handy item that I added to the command center was a 3 pocket file holder. With 3 kids running through the house, dinner to be made, animals to be fed, homework to be done, extracurricular activities to get to, this is where the kids deposit their homework, permission slips, teacher’s notes, notes from the school, and graded papers, for me to check. Too many times in this craziness the kids would leave their homework on the kitchen table or counter only to have someone “accidentally” spill a large glass of red Kool-Aid on it. Or a permission slip would be left on a pile of junk mail that got tossed in the trash, or a note from the teacher that needed my signature just magically disappeared…. Doesn’t happen in your house?? Really?? Anyway, back to my reality…. Once things have calmed for me in the evening I sit down, check homework and the kids have settled enough that they will sit back down and do any corrections necessary. It also allows them to focus on the task at hand because we have quieted for the evening and they have the attention span to actually get organized themselves and make sure everything goes in the right place so nothing is left behind the next morning. This has saved me many, many trips to the school with forgotten permission slips and homework.

The final pieces of our Command Center are the 2 white boards. One is a calendar, one is just a small plain board that was meant for notes but has turned into my weekly grocery list. I don’t use the calendar as much as I first did because the corkboard is proving to be more useful. I think I may replace the white board calendar with a new corkboard for extra space…. Hmmmm….. I just considered that idea while writing this….. guess I have a new thing to write on my small white board! The small whiteboard is used constantly in our house. If I am cooking and notice we are running low or out of something I am able to jot it on the white board just across the kitchen. My old grocery shopping system consisted of either buying everything that looked good in the store and hoping we didn’t already have 2 of them at home, or using a flurry of Post-It notes and hoping I gathered them all before I walked out of the house. Now, my grocery list is conveniently placed right next to the door so I snap a pic with my phone on the way out and I have it with me without having to deal with any paper.

Now with the kids’ school organization out of the way, this years goal is to get their extracurricular schedules organized and get myself organized for keeping up with my home-based business, the farm, as well as bills, housekeeping and carpooling. Last year, I actually PAID some website for a chore list to keep me on task. Seriously, who pays for someone to give them chores to do? But, it worked! My house was spotless, meals were always on the table at a decent hour and bills were always paid on time. After my year was up on my chore list, I decided I would not spend that kind of money again, I could just keep consistent with my routine. NOPE. Things got crazier, I got busier, and the messes seemed to get bigger. So now, I am searching furiously for ideas to help me get back into the game. I’ve been doing lots of research and have a few things I would like to try. I am having minor surgery next week so that will give me a few down days to get going on some of my ideas and as they progress I will be sure to post!

The Rain Barrels

For years now, Farmer Jon has wanted to create a rain water system. At first, it was going to be used as garden water or water should our electricity go out and the well didn’t work. But, as our little funny farm began growing he saw the potential for using the rain water to water all of the animals. I agreed that a rain barrel would be handy. I really didn’t think too hard about it because it seemed like an easy, cheap project that would potentially take him a couple of hours to complete and keep him busy for an afternoon. I should have known better. Let me introduce to you, Farmer Jon’s rain barrel system…..

That’s right, you are counting correctly. That’s 10 ‘food grade’ blue barrels all connected with PVC piping to create a rain water system capable of capturing 550 gallons of water. Now, when he put this up I assumed my husband had lost his mind but after the rain we have had and the amount of water our animals are drinking, I have deduced my husband is actually a genius. I haven’t had to carry bucket after bucket of water from the house out to the barn for a month now. It’s my own little slice of heaven. It has even filled Jr’s pool a few times!

I’ll give you a little recap of how Farmer Jon built this system. Believe me, it was quite a bit of trial and error to finally get a perfect system.

It started with building a stand. Which in itself was probably the most difficult part of the whole project. We live on this hill and NOTHING is flat so we have to account for that. Our first try just wasn’t beefy enough so after our first major rain we found it like this…..

Once we got the stand sturdy enough we laid the barrels on and began the measuring for the PVC. We needed to make sure each piece was measured perfectly to avoid and leaks.

We also realized we needed to have those handy little vent pipes at the top of each of the barrels. If we didn’t we quickly dealt with vapor lock and couldn’t get a drop of water out of those darn barrels.

The piping running up to the gutters was just a matter of creative thinking and lots of extra PVC elbows and connectors. It was mostly some trial and error to get it right.

We then covered the catch tubing with pantyhose. This keeps the debris and bugs from getting into the barrels and creating nasty water. Again, another genius idea from Farmer Jon.

The best part of this rain water system? We haven’t seen anyone with one like it. Farmer Jon spent many hours researching, reading, watching YouTube and thinking in order to come up with this idea. He would glean ideas from other people but then created this whole monster in his mind and was able to put it together and make it work. Seriously, I am one lucky woman to have such a handy man!

Welcome to the Crazy

I assume I need to start this blog with an introduction. I’m Amber. My clan and I live right outside a very small town in Minnesota. We live on a 10-acre hobby farm that has been passed down through my family for 3 generations. Our small brood consists of me, my husband Farmer Jon, and our three children (Asa is 12, Jerzy is 8, and Jon Jr is 3). That’s just the start…. We also have 2 dogs, 26 rabbits and nearly 200 chickens in our menagerie. Jon is an over-the-road truck driver and I am a work-from-home mom that sells Plexus. We are also beginning homesteaders. It’s Farmer Jon’s dream to, one day, live totally off the grid, I’d settle for being self-sustaining enough to survive an economic breakdown. We aren’t super preppers and I don’t see us ever being totally off the grid, but we do pretty well when it comes to using what resources we can gather here on our little farm to keep our family fed and cared for. Our grand idea for this blog is just to share our crazy world with others. We hope to inspire others to begin homesteading (or at least become more self sufficient) as well as use this as a tool to learn from others who have been in our shoes. There are lots of crazy antics in our household that will surely make you laugh and lots of great tips, tricks and info on homesteading, raising animals, being a truckers wife and running a crazy household like ours!

A little more about Farmer Jon and I. We have been married for 2 years. We are a perfect pair that balances each other out. Not to say we don’t drive each other crazy sometimes but all and all it’s a pretty good match. You will all be lucky enough to be introduced to Farmer Jon in videos we plan on uploading in future posts. You will see that we are a fun loving bunch who love a good laugh. In our household I am obviously the household management while he is the primary bread winner. My job is to make sure a roof stays over our head, food stays in our bellies, lights stay on, and the children survive each day. His job is to be gone for weeks and come home and finish (or start) a new project that he thought up while he was out on the open road. I think it is important for you to understand that my husband spends all his time on the road looking for new ideas and thinking of projects to do on his home time…… or things he wants me to do or try add to my already crazy days. It makes for interesting conversations each day while we recap our days. He has a few friends that so very kindly (insert major eye roll) help him with his ideas and give him plenty of material to expand on and drive me crazy. Between those friends and a 100GB data plan (so he has almost unlimited access to YouTube) the ideas flow from him like a waterfall. The key to being the wife of such a creative mind is to only listen with half an ear and NEVER EVER assume a project will go as planned or be as easy as he claims.