Daily Calendar & Organization Chart for Kids

If you look beyond the kiddie art projects on our pantry door you will find 

our new Kiddie Calendar and Daily Chart. 

With my heading back to work this fall and my girls having two different child care providers, plus Mckenna in preschool, dance and swimming, I wanted to make sure we had a visual calendar system to keep the kids organized and knowing where they were headed. 

I browsed Pinterest and looked around Wal-Mart and Target for a couple of weeks trying to figure out what would be the best system. 

This is what I came up with:

I bought a magnetic/dry erase calendar week at Target along with these metal magnetic strips.

 

For the calendar piece, I crated 1 inch square picture cards for our different activities. I printed them on card stock and attached small round adhesive magnets. 

The calendar flows Monday-Sunday so I am able to simply put the magnets on their designated days.. ie. Wednesday we go to Kate's house for childcare & Mckenna has preschool.

Below the calendar is a simple metal/magnet strip which holds similar picture cards designating the tasks Mckenna needs to complete in the morning for her "getting ready" routine. These are simple tasks, but they keep her focused on getting things done without much nagging from me. All I have to say is "what comes next on  your list". 

Her cards include: Watch TV (if she's up early enough), Get Dressed, Hair Done, Brush Teeth, Go Potty, and Shoes/Coat On. 

In the top picture (and one below) you can see a second magnetic strip to the left. This one houses picture cards we are not using or ones Mckenna has completed on her morning list.

 Full view... 

We add our daily work from school, art projects and other crafts to 

the top of the door to showcase all we do!

 

While there are many different ideas out there to try, this one is working out pretty well for us. Mckenna can be easily involved in it and it takes 15-20 seconds to set up. Quick & Simple!

Creating Play Places

We are fortunate enough to have the room in our house to have designated spaces for the girls' toys and play items. We have a "playroom" in our loft upstairs. I have transformed our entire upstairs, the loft, hallways, and walls into different play areas for both girls. 

I have found that Mckenna plays really well when her toys are organized and "staged" 

It sounds kind of silly to say that I "stage" her toys, but what I mean by that is that I have created various little play areas for her within the playroom. Creating play areas seem to help her focus her play, cuts down on the cries of "where is this piece/toy", and gives the playroom a bit more structure. 

So today's post is all about our play areas....

The most popular play spot is the dress-up area. We have TONS of dress-up clothes, however I only have 4-5 dresses out at a time. 

1. That is all that fit on the pegs. 

2. She seems to wear the same one over and over again. 

3. They all end up on the floor if they are all out. 

She is welcome to any of them at any time, but just has to ask for me to get out the others. 

I store them in the guest room closet.

In order to create this area I  bought and painted a wood peg hook rack at Michaels and painted it and glammed it up with princess decor. I screwed it into the wall. I added the Princess vinyl, a floor length mirror, and Voila... dress up area. The mirror is "glammed" up with scrapbooking stickers. The white bin is home to crowns, glass slippers and wands. We have TONS of dress-up accessories. The rest are in a basket in Mckenna's room. (Norah likes to dump them and I don't like to pick them up.)

Next to the dress up area is the Princess Castle tent (Where Norah likes to hide.)

Every princess needs a castle to play in. 

Moving along to the next play area... the kitchen/house area.

I love our play kitchen. I did WAY too much research before buying it. But it was worth it. 

The far little right piece of black counter is a seating area. It has a little stool that goes there. 

(The stool is probably in Mckenna's room, so she can climb to reach something.)

The green bins house all of our play food, dishes, pots and pans and tea party accessories. 

The bins have labels on them, but I need some new labels. They are hard to read and now to Mckenna is able to read some basic site words, they need to be clearer to read. We will be working on those site words then! Ha! 

 Norah loves playing with the kitchen! She likes to open and close the doors, walking along it and putting toys inside. It's cute because they "cook" together!

(We have a little grill set that is currently in a different play area. Sometimes I add it to this area so that they have a seating area too. Right now with the baby toys it just makes it too crowded.)

I created this "doll house" area after Christmas when Mckenna got this Cinderella Castle. She LOVES to play with it. She loves little figurines and has a whole cast of characters in the castle at all times. (I laugh when I see Captain Hook, Ursala, and Raja (from Aladdin) all hanging out together in Cinderella's Castle.)

She also loves the Melissa and Doug Wooden Castle that is on the floor on the right side. She mixes and matches the characters between the different houses.

Norah is starting to take an interest in Little People. She plays with the farm, the little house and castle. She likes to copy Big Sis!

The blue and pink bins house storage for our Little People, Princess Barbies, Mr. Potato Head and friends.... and our collection of Me Readers.

Next is the baby doll area. This is one of two doll areas in our house. The other is in Mckenna's Room. Here we have a little nook with the doll beds, high chair and the strollers. Most of these pieces get moved out and around when the girls are playing with them. Food from the kitchen also gets brought over for the babies to eat. 

I try to keep a basket or bucket of all the doll accessories (bottles, bibs, etc) on the TV stand back behind the high chair. It's usually dumped out and on the floor!

A few months back I hung this shelf to house stuffed animals. It is a wood crate from Michaels that I spray painted blue. The stuffed animals don't seem to get played with a lot, however they do get thrown around everywhere. Makes. Me. Crazy!

Right now this collection of baby toys and books is right in front of the TV. These get moved around a lot between my room, Norah's room and the playroom. We have more, but these are her favorites right now. Do you have the ball popper?? It is LOUD!

View of the room looking from the top of the stairs.

View from outside the Master Bedroom

TV area

This is the opposite side of the upstairs. The door on the left is the kids bathroom and the one on the right is the guest room. The tree is made of felt and has apples for apple picking. The hopscotch rug comes and goes. Sometimes Mckenna is into it and sometimes I am tired of flattening it out!

View across from by the apple tree

The middle door is our Master Bedroom. The door on the right is Norah's room.

Just last week I wrote about transforming my front hall closet into a toy storage closet for the downstairs. While our upstairs playroom has the "play areas" I keep some toys downstairs. The downstairs activities are art related, puzzles, board games, and some play food activities.

This is our little art station/play table where we do our downstairs activities. 

Most of them involve/need a table.

Thank you for visiting and reading about the different play places we have in our house.

I have written several other posts that involve play activities for our house. 

Please click on the links below to be directed to them!!


Mckenna's Market - Our play store/market!
Painted Pizza Pans - Magnetic Art Boards
Doc Mckenna - Our Vet Clinic
Closet Toy Storage
Playroom Post 1 - The Beginning
Playroom Updates
Art Supply Storage
For the Kids - Posts I have written that are fun things/about kids



Linking Up
 I Heart Naptime
Skip to My Lou
Sugar Aunts 
Flamingo Toes 
No Time for Flash Cards
Real Coake
The 36th Avenue

Closet Toy Storage

Meet my little girl. 

She is in a "I'm going to destroy everything" phase. 

It's a phase, right?!

Back in the fall we created this fun little Art/Game/Play area for Mckenna. 

 You can read more about this fun area HERE 

This play area worked GREAT until about a month ago... 

Destroyer became mobile!!

She can now open the drawers, pull the games off the shelves and eats the pieces to EVERY toy on them. I am going crazy cleaning up construction paper, puzzles pieces and Legos 100 times per day!

Something had to change!

So, as you can see, we needed a solution that helped our 3 year old still have access to the toys she plays with and keeps our 11 month old's little sticky fingers off of them!

Enter the front hall closet.
We have a pretty good sized hall closet that is used for lots of storage... not really too many coats!
Well, coats when guests come over, but our coats are back in the coat area in the den where we enter/exit through the garage (see HERE thought that's an old picture)

So I began to empty the closet and find new homes for its contents.
I didn't take an initial picture...but here is what you can see.

BEFORE

Yes golf clubs... no the baby isn't kept in the closet. 

(she's just into all of the new "toys")

Hmm...

AFTER

I moved the bookshelf into the closet. It houses the fun board games, Melissa and Doug food toys, a basket of wooden dress up dolls, and a bin of Duplo Legos. 

Sitting on top is a Rice Box, a Cake Mix Box and a few random items that are better 

served higher up!

On the right side is a Rubbermaid drawer set which houses construction paper, coloring books, puzzles and play-doh.. 

Hanging on the coat hangers are the different holiday decor pieces for my front door. I need to get some new 3M hooks for the wall on the right. The wall runs at an angle so

Back to the right behind the Rubbermaid bin are a couple of folding chairs. I moved the rest to the basement, along with table leaves and runner rugs we are not using right now. 

Coats got moved up to my Master Closet (it's big). 

Golf clubs back to the garage... the Vacuum is still homeless! 

But I figure it can go in here or in the Den.

This is our solution for now. Who needs a hall closet in the summer?! And hopefully if we want it back come October/November Norah will no longer be destroying!

I decided late day to do this project, so bear with my "great" iPhone pictures of the project.

It needed to get done ASAP and my camera was charging.

Bow Holders x 3

Bows, Bows and MORE Bows! 

That about sums up what it is like to have 2 little girls (and a bow crazy mama!)

Between Mckenna and Norah's rooms we have 3 bow holders. 

They are all full. We could probably use another one!
(Don't tell Jim)

I have made all three of the bow holders we have and all three are different. 

There are so many different ones out there that you can purchase, but they are SO easy to make!

Here are three different ideas to inspire you!

Bow Holder #1

This first one is in Norah's room. 

This bow holder happened on a whim! I had bought 2 of these unfinished frames from Michaels and wasn't sure what I was going to do with them. 

I painted this one a metallic silver paint (craft paint from Martha Stewart found at Michaels) and then I hot glued three strands of purple ribbon to the back of it. 

HOW EASY IS THAT?!

I hang everything in my house with these !

The opening on this frame measures just over 11x14.

To see the rest of Norah's room click HERE

Click HERE to see what I did with the other frame! 

Bow Holder #2

I made this bow holder back for Mckenna's 2nd Christmas (2010). 

It was the first one I made. 

I still really like how it turned out.

First I found a wood plaque at Michaels. They have so many different shapes and sizes to pick from. 

I knew I wanted something large, so I went with this one. It's probably about 15-16 inches long.

I painted the wood white with basic white craft paint. 

I found these fun chip board letters at Hobby Lobby. They are a simple cardboard type material, but are covered in a glossy coating. I just hot glued them onto the sign!

I then bought a coordinating thick ribbon and, yep, you guessed it! I hot glued it right on!

HERE is the rest of her room!

BOW HOLDER #3

This one was the easiest of them all! 

No painting! No extra accessories! Easy!

I bought a white letter M from Hobby Lobby. 

I hot glued a thin (1 inch) hot pink ribbon to the back of it on either leg of the letter. 

Done!

You could paint the letter if you wanted to coordinate with the colors in your room. I liked the white. We have a lot of color going on in the room already!
 

Thanks for visiting to see all of our different bow holders. 

I apologize for the icky iPhone pictures. My camera battery was dead from the holiday weekend.

I was not paid by Michaels or Hobby Lobby to write this post. I love both stores and happily and willingly shop at both of them... way too much!

LINKING UP
Six Sister Stuff 
Flamingo Toes
Sugar Aunts
I Heart Naptime
Homemaker on a Dime
Skip to My Lou 
Today's Creative Blog
The Real Coake 
Delicate Construction
Fingerprints on the Fridge 
A Bowl Full of Lemons 
Polka Dots on Parade 
Sugar and Dots 
Someday Crafts

Mock Scrapbooks

For the longest time I have been trying to decide what to do with all of the formal pictures that I have of Mckenna and Norah after I am "done" with them. By done I mean, they are no longer being displayed around the house in frames. I have had them in boxes, but they were all unorganized and it bothered me that I was spending lots of money on prints and then throwing them in a box. 

So back in January I decided that I was going to "scrapbook" just the bigger pictures... 8x10's and 5x7's, so they were preserved, kept nice and had a home. Well, come March and I was still procrastinating on this project because I just dreaded doing it. 

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE scrapbooks and have made several back in my college days. However, they take so much time... time I just don't want to put towards them. So, I turned to my trusty Facebook friends to help me out. My friend Carrie gave me such a great idea that I hopped right on it! 

I created these "Mock" Scrapbooks and I LOVE THEM!!! 

They were easy, cheap and FAST!
Perfect!! 

Here was Carrie's idea... she created photo albums out of binders, page protectors and card stock. She slid the pictures in the page protectors (no adhesive) and used the card stock to give it a more finished look. For the 5x7's she used the little sticky corner mounts to hold the pictures in place. 

THAT'S IT!!

So here's what I did:

I found two cute 3 ring binders

Picked up some Acid Free Sheet Protectors (they cost a little bit more but will preserve better in the long run.) Also, some white card stock. You could use any color, but I will tell you why I chose white!

Yes, that's Norah's little hand "helping" me out!

Trusty little corner mounts

So here are all my pictures... in bins, separated by kid...

I suggest organizing the pictures in chronological order before starting if you want the binder to go in chronological order. It just makes it easier.

I started by filling some of the sheet protectors with the card stock and loading them into the binder.

Next I just started sliding the pictures into the sheet protectors. My pictures were already organized, so it went super fast! 

That's my sweet Mckenna as a 1 day old little peanut!

These are the corner mounts out of the package. All you do is stick the triangle into the corner of the picture and its sticky on the back.

Here's the corner mount on the picture... they make them in different colors. I just chose clear... well, really the clear was just the cheapest and I didn't care what color they were!

This is a 5x7 picture mounted with the corner mounts.

After stopping to add the little corner mounts, I decided to try things a little different. I started sliding the pictures I wanted to go on the page into the sleeve and then came back to mounting. 

This saved a lot of time. While, I haven't finished adding all the mounts, I did get all the pictures added to the album, which to me was more important. I figure I can sit on the couch watching TV and add mounts slowly but surely!

This is Mckenna's book... from birth to Christmas. She needs a new binder. Oops! And these were just mostly professional pictures or 8x10 pictures of pictures I have taken. Yikes!

I am so happy I finally have this accomplished! Such a great feeling and another thing to scratch off the list! 

Here is what I love about this project:

1. It was cheap. 

2. It was quick.
3. It was easy.
4. It required NO glue... my pictures are not stuck in place (the corner mounts don't have glue touching the pictures)

5. I can easily remove my pictures and put them back in without disrupting anything. This is great because I can change my mind and put them back in a frame, or put them into another display or album and won't chance ripping them!

6. Everything in this project can be reused. Since I didn't use an adhesive, the paper, page protectors and binders can all be reused in the future, if I wanted. I chose white paper for this fact. I love to have and use white card stock, so I just bought something I can use for multiple purposes. This would also be great if I ever did get these pictures into a real scrapbook. But honestly, I don't think I will. I love this option and its so much more cost/time efficient!

 Oh and I don't mind the terrible pictures. I was taking them in our Den at night. The lighting is terrible... and taking them on my iPhone didn't help!

LINKING UP:

The 36th Avenue
The Real Coake
Fireflies and Jellybeans
The Trendy Treehouse
Polka Dots on Parade
Southern Lovely
Sugar and Dots
Tip Junkie
Skip to My Lou
Under the Table and Dreaming
Flamingo Toes
A Bowl Full of Lemons
 No Time for Flash Cards
I Heart Naptime -Sundae Scoop
Six Sister Stuff
Sugar Aunts
Mama to 4 Blessings
Delicate Construction
Someday Crafts

Fabulous Friday Finds

I love the internet! 

Yes, there I said it! I love the fun things you can find! Things to cook, create, read, and learn! 

Here are 3 Fabulous Friday Finds for this week!!!

I seriously love this organizer!!
Perfect for office supplies, kids art supplies, make up brushes... LOVE!

 

FIND IT HERE on I Love Doing All Things Crafty

Super cute little cupcake stands...
These may just have to make an appearance at Norah's 1st birthday party in May!

 

FIND IT HERE at Crafts Unleashed

Can't wait to print these off tonight to work with Mckenna tomorrow!

 

FIND IT HERE at Over the Big Moon

  

Loving these finds!!! Check back next week to see what else I find!!!

Clean It: Kitchen Drawer Organization Revisited

Today I am linking up with the Dog Days of Winter post through Jennifer's Blog! 
This weeks post is on "Clean/Organize It"

Last month I spent some time organizing our kitchen drawers...
Here is what I did!

Original Post

Today I tackled a little project that I have been wanting and waiting to tackle for awhile! 

It has been on my "To Do" list... so happy to scratch it off!

We are lucky to have a lot of cabinets and drawers in our kitchen... enough so that we have the typical "junk drawer" of pens, pencils, tape, etc., as well as a drawer for all of our chargers, cameras and cords and one for some random tools and household items we use frequently. 

Both of these drawers were in COMPLETE disarray (and making me CRAZY as a result)!

Forgot the real before picture of the "tool" drawer... 

but these are its contents emptied onto the counter. Yep! Crazy! 

I had organized the batteries in our house earlier in the day... some were in this drawer, some were in a storage container in the den... I never knew what we had and had bought several kinds without realizing we had some. I hate it when I buy something we don't need!

Megan at Honey We're Home had just posted about organizing batteries in her media center... 

I stole her idea!! LOVE IT!!

Much better looking!! I shuffled some of the batteries around from the above picture to accomodate a few screwdrivers and some pliers that we keep in the house! 

I love that little level!! I use it constantly when hanging up pictures!!!

Next I tackled the cord and camera drawer...

BEFORE

AFTER

This drawer was a bit easier because everything was technically all there to organize... 

you see all those bags were in the drawer already... we just didn't return the cords to them! Nice!! 

Each charger cord or camera connection cord is in its own little baggie and is labeled with a sharpie!

External hard drives are in the back left corner with camera manuals under them. 

Small digital cameras in the front corner...  

Random memory cards and photo accessories in the front basket!

So happy to have it all organized... now Jim won't be able to find a thing... but I will!!

LINKING UP: 

A Bowl Full of Lemons

The 36th Avenue

I Heart Naptime - Sundae Scoop