Camel humor.

Many folks think the Wednesday-dread is common only to those in a 9-5 job, but we all fall into this temptation of thinking that once we get over that mid-week hump, it is all downhill from there to the ultimate days of the weekend!

It is easy to face the work week with dread. For me, Sunday evenings would sometimes feel like that bracing moment just before you are ready to dive into very cold water. You tense up, wince, and just jump in. Get that shocking blast in the face over with and endure the challenging week ahead until the next weekend.

Well, I was getting ready to make to post on my Facebook page, rejoicing that the work week was half over, but then I realized I don’t want it to go quickly. I don’t want to be living from one weekend to another, just biding my time until Saturday and Sunday.

If we live that way, we are missing some of the sweetest life moments…mealtime, soccer games, and yes, washing dishes and doing laundry. Granted, those activities in themselves aren’t glamorous or celebrated, but they mean that we are doing life. We have food to eat, we have clothes to wash, we even have leisure time to take our children to sporting activities.

When I ask my kids what some of their greatest memories are, I get as many comments about those day-to-day activities as the vacations or weekend fun. They think back to those mundane moments just as fondly as those exciting ones. Why?

Because it is with the ordinary things that the extraordinary happens. An experience at a theme park only lasts a day or two. But the day-to-day memories with family are deeply anchored and cherished. An experience being a parent is a lifetime of joys. And even the sorrows and difficulties it brings make us get on our knees in prayer. They bring us closer to our God. I can truly say that being a wife, mother, and homeschooler has grown my prayer life. I know how good our Lord is, and how great His love is for me.

And I learned that by walking through the ordinary, not from a day at Disney World.

So don’t spend 5/7 of your life waiting for the weekend. Embrace the daily ordinary stuff and LIVE it!

The post What’s So Extraordinary about Wednesday? first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

There are just so many options. And as a mom, I want my children to have sweet memories of celebrating Christmas. Secretly, I would even like them to want to continue those traditions within their own households when they grow up. So I did whatever I could to make sure we scheduled (forced) our Christmas plans onto our calendar so we would be sure to create those warm Christmas memories.

My plans were sabotaged from the start.

One of our first Christmases included a joyful stomach virus which was shared with holiday cheer throughout the house. Stomach viruses aren’t Christmasy.

The following year, my beloved Christmas star for our tree-topper was crushed beyond recognition during a move. (Have you ever tried to glue 100s of shards of plastic together?)

Our one attempt at the “matching Christmas sweater” photo turned out OK, but then we had these matching Christmas sweaters for the children to wear the rest of the year. Now, we live in Florida, where the opportunities to wear sweaters are rare. Let’s just say that these garish things never wore out! I wasn’t about to buy more the next year. And my poor third son kept inheriting his older brothers’ sweaters each year as they grew out of them and he grew into them.

I could go on and on with tales of well-intentioned holiday plans that were dutifully messed up by the realities of life, but you get the idea…

Yet, as my children have gotten older, I have discovered something amazing. The traditions happened anyway. Some were traditions I had planned, such as reading the Advent story each week approaching Christmas day. But most…and I mean MOST…happened in spite of me. Last year, I wrote about the “Christmas Stocking Debacle” which took me by surprise.

You see, we can make lots and lots of plans, but the busy-ness of LIFE will often get in the way. Much as I want, I cannot control everything. So I have learned to be flexible. I started to pray before each Christmas season and ask the Lord what He wanted me to do. I stopped forcing things to happen just because I thought I should. And the memories were made.

We spend Christmas Eve with my husband’s side of the family each year. Well, one year, this Italian side of our family decided to make homemade ravioli for our dinner. It was such a success that we did it again the next year. And the next. Now that has become a Christmas Eve tradition that my children look forward to.

One year, during the drive home from Christmas dinner we stumbled upon a neighborhood that had beautiful Christmas lights. Driving around to see Christmas lights has become such a tradition that we now rent a big vehicle just so all of us can still be in the same car to “Ooh” and “Aah” together (We sold our old van a few years ago when everyone bought their own cars).

And there are many more.

So here are my recommendations for making the perfect traditions:

1. Don’t plan too much. It is OK to plan an annual Christmas photo or a day of cookie baking, but don’t go crazy with your expectations. Those photos may not turn out one year (been there) or you may have a child who develops gluten issues (been there, too). And too many plans actually create stress!
2. Aim for being together and looking for opportunities that present themselves. If you have a house full of sick ones, maybe this is a good time to begin a tradition of watching Christmas movies and eating soup and grilled cheese.
3. Be prepared for things you didn’t expect to become traditions to worm their way into your family’s history (refer back to my Christmas Stocking Debacle).
4. Maybe scale back on the amount or types of Christmas gifts you give. I can speak from experience that the stress of Christmas shopping and the expectations of everyone around you can squeeze the joy right out of this holiday if we let it. Perhaps use some of those cookies you made during your day of cookie baking to fill cheerful gift plates. A group invite to dinner (or dessert) with several families you were planning to host consolidates the events and increases the fun!

5. Make your goal to just BE with your family. Love them. Give extra hugs. Spend more time WITH them (not just in the same house as them) during this season where schedules have slowed down and school is out.

And don’t worry. The traditions will come. The sweet memories will be there. Just pray for flexibility and keep your eyes open to the opportunities around you.

Have a Merry Christmas with your family and friends!

~Sherri

The post Making Perfect Christmas Traditions with Your Family (List at end of post) first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

When my kids were younger and learning to do these chores, I remember biting my tongue when guests would use our bathroom.

The kids cleaned in there this week, not me.

Oh, and they were the ones who messed it up in the first place.

It was a struggle to balance the feelings of realizing that our life with little ones included some beautiful messes, wanting our house somewhat sanitized for guests, and being frustrated at looking at all those dust bunnies under the couch taunting me.

This week I am traveling to Atlanta to speak at the Teach Them Diligently Convention. One of my workshops is titled, “Homeschooling and Homemaking: From Misorganzation to Miss Organization.”

One section of the workshop deals with trying to get a handle on these areas that can be hard to stay on top of. I call these cleaning issues Detail Cleaning, because we don’t necessarily need to do them each week, but if we never do them, we’ll have deep, dark corners of our home that make us shudder as we walk by.

The idea behind this chart is to divide your house into eight sections. Your house sections will look a little different from mine, depending on your house configuration and what chores are more important to you. You may want to include one for a large back porch or a garage. You may not have a room dedicated as a school room, but you might want to include a long hallway, foyer, and storage closets.

Once you have your divisions, then all you need to do is dedicate 30-45 minutes in your week for detail cleaning. I do mine on Friday mornings. So on my calendar, every Friday morning at 10:00 has Detail Clean. Now how do I know where to clean? I look at my chart. The first Friday, I will clean areas in my kitchen. I pull things off the counters and clean behind them. Gone are those crumbly toast crumbs! I pull out the step ladder and wipe down the top of the fridge. I clean the kitchen window and wipe down the vent hood over our stove with grease cleaner.

The next Friday I will tackle detail cleaning in the master bedroom, getting the ceiling fan, using the vacuum hose to get under the bed, wiping down our blinds, and other detail areas I don’t get to each week.

You see, these are areas that we just can’t tackle during the regular weekly cleaning. It also gives us a chance to hit those areas that our kids might not be covering while doing their chores. And if we designate a time to do them, we can be sure eventually they will be covered. In fact, if we follow the chart, these areas will be cleaned every other month! And without us having to overfill our schedules. Just 30 minutes a week!

Now let’s say you have a field trip planned one Friday. That’s OK. I find that if I have something on my calendar, then I will make a point to move it to another spot in my schedule so I am sure to do it. If it isn’t on my calendar at all, I never seem to get it done. So look for a small space of time Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning. And if you just can’t get to it that week, just push that detail cleaning area to the next Friday, and you’re good to go.

It is so important that we intentionally take time to plan. If we don’t, the unimportant things will easily fill our days. This is one way I have found to get a small handle on some areas where I have felt out of control.

The post An Unbelievably Simple Plan for Cleaning Success first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

Yes, it builds skills and teaches them a good work ethic, but it also helps me out!

Well, one of the problems we have had is identifying whose clothing item belongs to whom. (Sorry, after 21 years of teaching grammar to my kids, I just have to use the “who” and “whom” correctly – it sounds so formal, and you guys know I am not a very formal person!)

Anyway…I had read about so many strategies to remember who gets which clothing item: sewing on colored tags (lots of work), sticking with certain wardrobe colors for each child (not happening), different brands for each child (DEFINITELY not happening), just make mental note as to who gets what (Now you’re just being crazy!).

None of these methods seemed doable to me. We have three boys and a girl. When the oldest outgrew something, it went straight into the drawer of the next boy, then the next, and so on. And when the youngest boy outgrew his clothes, I am not ashamed to say that some of those items ended up in our daughter’s drawers (maybe with some lace added).

I was not about to sew and re-sew different colored ribbon tags, and I knew my mind couldn’t keep track of which child had which shirt, so I needed an easy, inexpensive method of marking their clothes in a way that I could alter the markings as the items passed down from child to child.

Enter my secret weapon:

Yes, a simple Sharpie marker. I mark a single black dot on the tags of my oldest son’s clothes (even the toes of the socks). Then when an item gets passed down to the next child, I add a second dot. The third child has three dots on his tags, and the fourth child has four dots. No re-sewing or elaborate buying plans necessary!

I keep another marker in the laundry room to re-mark any tags that become faded, but that is all I do. No step-by-step program. No expensive materials. Just dots on the tags. And if my third son gets a new shirt for a birthday or Christmas, I just put three dots straight onto the tag. Everyone will know it is his. For shirts that have no tags, I try to find a hidden spot on the inside seams (unless it’s a white shirt). And that’s it. It takes care of 99% of our problems.

No more comments like, “You are wearing my shirt again!” or “Mom, all my shorts are missing!”

So with the sorting out of the way, we can get down to business and defeat the Huns finish folding the laundry.

I hope this is helpful to you – or at least a bit entertaining. Have a great day!

The post An Easy Way to Mark and Identify Hand-Me-Downs first appeared on Sherri Seligson.

Well, you get the picture. That’s why I like to hang clothes whenever I can.

But sweaters are difficult to hang because the hangars leave dents in the shoulders, causing the sweaters to become misshaped. You put them on, and you have these little sweater-dents.

This new method of hanging sweaters makes me so happy, because it gets rid of the sweater-dent plague and keeps bulky sweaters from taking up precious drawer space. Win-win!

So here is how you do it:

Lay the sweater on a table. Then fold it in half lengthwise.

Place the hangar so that the hook is in the armpit space and one hangar arm crosses over the sweater arm while the other hangar arm crosses over the body of the sweater (a picture is worth a thousand words…).

Fold the sweater arm and body over the arms of the hangar.

Then hang up and enjoy the organization beauty!

This makes me so happy! I hope you try it out and free up some drawer space. Lovely!

The post Organization Tip – Hanging Sweaters first appeared on Sherri Seligson.