Getting April in order

The beginning of a new month means getting all of our lives in order. Shannon showed you how she gets a new month started in March, so now I am showing you our craziness. She has 3 jobs, I have 3 kids, so our planning looks a bit different.
I have my AMAZING life planner that Shannon designed for me. We took a ton of inspiration from the web and she made it fit my life! I love it and use it daily. I always say, steal my purse, leave my planner.

I start every day checking out my planner. I double triple check it on Sunday nights so I know what is going on for the week.

My planner has our meal planner built in. It is the boxes at the bottom of each of the days. I just could not maintain two different planner for meal planning, and I do ours by the week. So on Sunday night when we are planning for the week, Tim and I meal plan. Easy meals for days he works late, the kids have practice, that kind of thing, bigger meals on weekends so we can have leftovers for lunches. We also get input from the kids. What have they been craving? If they help create the meal plan and the meal, they are more likely to eat it!

I also make a monthly calendar for Tim. He has no need for daily plans. He does want to know what all we have planned, dance, ball practice, concerts, fun stuff like that. So I started making him a beautiful monthly calendar. He doesn't care that it is beautiful, but I sure do. :)

I also have a work-out calendar. This has not been working well. I am "training" for a 5K but I haven't ran in weeks. Boo. This month Shannon created a Bikini Body Challenge for us. So I printed that bad boy out. I am going to do my best, but I make no promises. I need to focus on my running, but I'm going to try to fit this guy in too! The best thing is it can all be done at home, with no equipment. She also snuck in a shower challenge, which I already forgot to do. So, I will get it in before bed.

Finally I have a blog planner. It really deserves a whole post, but for now you get a snap shot. I usually post Tuesday and Thursday, Shannon usually posts Monday and Wednesday and Friday is always High Five for Friday! I also have tons of fun planning pages. I use them to plan out things I want to blog about, then I decide when I can get them done, photographed and blogged about. Right now, I have little idea about when things are going, but lots of ideas.

Just for fun, I thought I would throw out the Bikini Body Challenge and an Awesome April Arms challenge as freebies. There is still plenty of time for you to catch up!

What does your beginning of the month or week planning look like? Are you more like Shannon balancing work schedules, or like me balancing kids schedules?

my first washi tape experience

I finally joined the washi bandwagon, and I must admit-I love it! I wasn't too sure about the whole thing but when I spotted a package on sale at Target I decided that it was time to try it out. I made a blog planner for myself a while ago and it was all pretty and bound and then had these boring, blank, lame white labels. I knew this was the perfect place to try out my washi tape. I figured if it went well, that was great and I could show people, and well if it didn't, not too many people were going to be seeing my blog planner up close and personal.

 I gathered the few supplies that I needed--my blog planner, scissors, washi tape, and my trusty label maker.

It was much simpler than I excepted (although I'm not sure why I thought putting tape on labels was going to be like challenging or something?) All I had to do was cut the pieces to size and stick them on. I considered throwing them on there in a random order, but my OCD brain couldn't handle that.  So here they are after the first step was completed. So far, so good.

The next step was to make the labels to go onto my tabs. Perhaps the hardest part was trying to decide what words to put on there. Dumb, I know. But I wanted the tab to sort of reflect what was on the header but there was clearly not enough space, so I just have very vague and generic tabs. Which works out fine. 

Because of my dark colors, you can sort of see where the clear label is, and isn't. But you don't really notice unless you are inspecting them. If I were to do it over again, I might just label them with a sharpie. But that would require me to write pretty and we all know that I would end up re-doing it like 17 times and that would just not be good for anyone. 

So now that I am totally committed to this whole washi thing, I will totally snag up the other colors when they go on sale again at Target :)

What other wonderful uses are out there for washi tape? What projects have you used it for? I'm sure there are so many other great ideas out there that I haven't even dreamed of!!

blog planner

Niki and I have been looking for a blog planner for a while now. We struggled because we write the blog together but we live a little over an hour apart. But we are both a little old school, and like to actually write things down. (this also explains our obsession with planners) So my sister found this blog planner from confessions of a home schooler, so now we each have one of these cuties.

We had considered making one, but being new to this blogging thing, we weren't sure where to start. Then we found this planner that Erica had made, and it was cute and even better it was free. So printed them out and I popped mine in a binder similar to the one I am using for my home management binder.

Here's a peak inside...

I also keep stats from our etsy store in my blog binder

I keep weekly/monthly stats...

and customer orders...

Anyone else have blog planners or planning methods they want to share?? leave a comment!

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