Cozi Saved My Homemaking from Certain Disaster!

My super-amazing new friend Nicci Anna (Neech-ee-On-uh) who homeschools 5 boys excitedly told us about Cozi one day at our Play & Pray group.  She showed us how she had her whole life accessible on her touch phone.  She even talked about how FlyLady and Cozi had formed a partnership so that you could link your housekeeping chores onto your Cozi schedule.

I was intrigued, but not sure if it would work for me or not.  I don't have a cell phone, so I didn't know how it would work for me to digi-tize my schedule.  I've given it a month and I'm here to say that....

....I LOVE COZI!!!!  It has truly been the biggest help for me this fall in staying on course with homeschooling and raising 4 children.

Cozi is free and  has lots of options for you depending on whether you want to link it with other online calendars, such as FlyLady's cleaning schedule, etc.  I love that it remembers your schedule so that you aren't having to fill in the blanks every week with the same ol' stuff.  For example, I took my personal chore chart and entered things into the master schedule like: clean the van on the first day of each month, water plants every other Tuesday, pay bills on the 10th of each month, write to grandparents, etc.  It remembers these things and automatically brings them up when it's time.  Maybe this isn't so exciting to all of you if you've been doing this for years, but this non-techie is impressed with my first computerized schedule!  I love that it automatically color-codes the schedule for each person in your family.  I love that you can have it automatically send your husband and yourself a weekly e-mail reminder of the upcoming week's schedule.  I love that you can make grocery lists and menu plans on it and then print them out before you head to the store.  I love sending my hubby little notes from my Cozi page saying, "So-and-so called for you" or "Your wife is having a rough day--you might want to bring home some dark chocolate!"  Cozi even has a journal feature which I use to jot down baby milestones and funny things the kids' say.  You can choose to have your journal routinely e-mailed to relatives or uploaded to your fb page if you want to!

I even put my homeschool lesson plans on Cozi so my whole life is all in one place.  When I get up in the morning, I have my game plan, and that makes things a lot easier.  I always struggle to stay on top of written planners or to keep track of paper lists with lesson plans, but because I'm in the habit of checking my e-mail throughout the day, checking my Cozi page is a snap.  I leave my page up on the screen throughout the day and have it set so that my Cozi page always comes up when I click Internet Explorer.

I have to agree with Nicci, just being able to put all the details of motherhood, ministry and life-in-general down frees your brain to forget it.  I'm now remembering all the stuff that so easily fell by the wayside with a written schedule.  My brain feels less tired because I release those details the minute they are entered onto the calendar.  Have I become a slave to the schedule?  Absolutely not!  I still procrastinate on some chores I should be doing or choose to bump a chore to tomorrow that I just can't get to today.  I still have lots of flex with my schedule, and I see the FlyLady zones as suggestions, not imperatives. 

If I want to carry my schedule with me I can quickly print off the weekly or monthly chart.  I'm constantly talking about preparation on this blog, and how essential it is to motherhood, and this wonderful and free tool called Cozi is keeping me prepared and focused during this stage of life!

(And I'm in no way getting paid to promote Cozi!)

"Mom, Where Are My Shoes???"

With 3 small children in a large house, shoes can disappear quickly.

We have one child, particularly, who can NEVER find his shoes.

I was so excited when someone gave us this pretty wooden bench, which fits in our entryway and found that it solves our shoe problems nicely.

The kids are told to keep all their shoes in this one spot.  No more stuffing them under beds, in bedroom closets, or random places throughout the living room.  If I see shoes discarded by the door or laying about in the schoolroom they immediately have to carry them down to the shoe bench.  This is the "central shoe spot" and when it's time to go somewhere, we all head down to the entryway and they grab a pair before heading out the door.

We have a lot of extra shoes thanks to good yard sale finds, hand-me-downs from everyone we know at church and from one sibling to the other.  Here, in the guest room closet where I store larger-sized clothing for the kids, I keep the Shoes-To-Grow-Into.  When a child's shoes begin to feel to too tight, we go "shopping" in the closet for a new pair or two. 

Laundry Room Magic

Our laundry room still wouldn't be called a pretty place, but if you had seen it two months ago you would say it is looking amazing these days!  I think we got at least 2 dump loads of filth and garbage out of this room alone.  And the window that was sooooo caked with dirt and cobwebs that you couldn't even see outside is now sparkling clean and I can keep an eye on the kids playing in the yard while I'm folding laundry.

This is the right side of the laundry room. 

Yay for having a deep freeze again for my freezer cooking endeavors!

My drying rack gets used for delicate items and this is also where I hang my ziploc bags with clothespins for drying.  Potatoes go in the tater box and recyclables in the garbage bin. 

After reading this amazing book and being inspired by the super-organized Duggar family's idea of a family closet, I got to thinking that I should try to make a "family closet" in our laundry room. I also enjoyed this vlog from Stephanie on her family closet.

There was a shelf already in this room that wasn't being used, which was a perfect place to start.
 

I got a bunch of washtubs from the Dollar Tree to hold the kids' clothes.  As they grow, their clothing will be too big to fit in these small tubs, but hopefully by then they will also learn to fold and put away their own clothing, eliminating the need for all of their clothes to be in the family closet.

Since Josiah and I have a very nice master bedroom closet upstairs, our "family closet" is just for the 3 little kids downstairs, all of whom have had trouble with scattering clean clothing about their rooms, and have had a hard time keeping their closets and clothing tubs orderly. I was also letting the clean laundry pile up too high on the folding table because of that extra effort required to get the clothing to the appropriate bedroom.  I don't mind washing or folding laundry, it's putting it away that I hate!

I have one basket for Katrielle's stuff, which is just a holding pen for it until it is taken upstairs to her dresser in our bedroom.  Each child has a sock bin and an undie bin, there is a swimsuit box where all the kids' swimsuits are kept, and the boys each have a shirts and pants box.  Ali's main clothing boxes are under the folding table and contain skirts, shorts, and pants in one, and shirts in another.  Sweatshirts, dresses, church clothing, etc. hang in their closets in their bedrooms.

Now that all of the kids' regular clothing is in one spot, it is soooo much easier for me to keep on top of the laundry and keep it put away where it belongs.  And it is UNBELIEVABLE how much cleaner their bedrooms are as a result!  It saves me so much time and energy not having to run piles to different rooms and not having to rewash clean clothes that were thrown in the hamper by kids who just assumed they were dirty because they were on the floor.  Now Jer doesn't have to ask if he has any clean underwear (because Mama hasn't gotten around to putting it away in his room) and we don't have to dig through piles and baskets to find clean socks.  Getting the boys dressed each morning is a snap as everything is in one place and Daddy doesn't have to be confused over which socks belong to which boy (since the tubs are now labeled with names).  The kids' laundry is quickly sorted as it goes straight from the dryer, to the table, to the bins.  Pajamas still go in the kids' rooms; Ali has a hanging closet organizer that holds hers and each of the boys have a shallow plastic tub under their beds filled with pajamas (which...like undies...I don't fold =).

The left side of the laundry room.  A shelf near the door holds my iron, dustbuster, laundry soap, Oxiclean, a Stray Socks box, and cleaning rags.  God provided this wonderful washer and dryer set for $200  for us this summer when I happened to mention in front of someone at a yard sale that we were looking for a set.   They work great!

In the future I hope to have Josiah install a hanging bar above the washer and dryer that can be used for hanging dresses and blouses immediately after they are pulled from the dryer.  We will probably also do a lot more cleaning and some painting and freshening up down here, but at least for now, it's a very functional room for our family!