Posted in Homemaking Secrets from My Dusty Shelves

I've had a busy week.  I wish you could tell at a glance how much work I've done. 

1.  Sunday, on the drive home from our trip I FINALLY completed crocheting a blanket that I started for my daughter about 2 years ago!  Woo Hoo!

2.  I wrote out a meal plan last summer.  I planned breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for 28 days.  I like using it, but for various reasons haven't been consistent with it.  I went back to it this week.  I updated it a bit -- replaced some meals that we didn't like with new ones, etc.  I shopped by the plan on Monday and we've been eating according to it all week.  I like this because it saves time often wasted trying to decide what to cook.  It also forces me to cook better food because I've already spent money on fresh produce, etc., and it has to be used before it goes bad.

3.  I started to switch our clothing for the season change last week.  This requires catching up on the dirty laundry in the basement and sorting the winter clothes by size into storage tubs.  I also bring in the summer clothes from the garage and wash everything before I put it back in our closets.  (You never know what critters may have burrowed through the boxes, plus the garage just has a "garage-y" smell that seems to linger in the clothes.)  I also like to keep a few off-season outfits out for each person because in Michigan, as they say, if you blink the weather will change!  Anyway, we went out of town for the weekend so I finished up the clothing shift this week.  It is a monumental task with 7 people in our family now.

4.  The binders I ordered came in so I spent 2 evenings sorting and filing the children's school papers.  I keep all their work.  It's a lot of paper, I know, but I'm not comfortable throwing it out.  Right now our homeschool laws in Michigan are very loose regarding records which is wonderful.  But I don't know that we'll always live here.  I don't know what I'll need and what I won't.  I'd love to do a portfolio for each year of school and greatly reduce what we save but that's another project for another day.

5.  I also cleaned off my desk.  It had become extremely embarrassing!  I have a desk in our dining area that I keep our school supplies in and I'm supposed to work at in the evenings, checking papers and preparing work for the next day.  Somehow I never seem to have the time to work there.  I get the children in bed, tidy up the house, and often collapse in exhaustion.  (Occassionally, I blog.  )  So the desk has become the drop-off point for my mail, completed school papers, books and magazines I want to read, notebooks, etc.  It was piled so high with stuff I wouldn't allow my children to go near it for fear everything would fall onto the floor.  So I spent the morning yesterday sorting, tossing, and filing so I can finally see my desktop again.  I threw out 2 bags of stuff.  Why did I keep it all in the first place?

These are all things that are not noticeable to someone who walks through my front door.  I know I've done a lot, but the work I've done is not obvious.  And while I was doing all this work, I've only been doing the bare minimum on the everyday jobs.  So my floor needs to be mopped something terrible and the laundry is piling up again.  The children's rooms are not up to par because I haven't kept on them to clean them.  To a visitor, it would look like I haven't been doing my job all week.  Isn't that the way of it?