Simplify your School Year

We have a week to go before the kids go back to school. In some ways I'll be spending this week trying to hold on to the last remnants of summer. In other ways I am craving a return to our routine. I've been running the kids around all over the place this summer. Part of the reason is to give them a fun and enriching summer, but honestly it's mostly to keep them occupied because Ken and I both work full-time.

This school year will be an interesting one for sure! We are going to have a kid in elementary school, one starting at a new middle school, and the oldest starting high school. I've already had a taste of the juggle that will be involved with the registration appointments we had last week. It's a fairly small school system, so you'd think they could coordinate things a little better, but NOPE!

I know it's going to be a lot to keep track of, so I'm setting myself up for success by trying to be really organized before we even get started. And when I saw our August theme for Blog With Friends was "Simplify Your Life," I knew exactly what to do.

In years past I've created some other ways to stay organized during the school year: a pencil can for Frances, a binder with all the important information in it, and a cubby system to keep all the stuff organized. This year, however, what we really need is a way to keep all the important dates organized in an easy to see place.

I've used an online calendar app called Cozi for a while now. It's great because Ken and I can both see it on our phones or computers and it syncs automatically. We have now reached the point where the kids need to see what's going on, but don't have ready access to smart phones to check on things.

While we were at Staples doing some school supply shopping, my eyes were drawn to a big dry erase calendar. I chose one that had space next to the calendar to write in, as well as a cork board underneath. I picked up a few other supplies and an idea was born.

I put the calendar in the foyer so it's easy to see as we leave the house. I wrote out the dates for August by checking the Cozi calendar as well as all those stray papers that have been getting sent home lately. Each kid picked out a color scheme and I labeled their events with magnets in that color. I also found some "cubicle clips" that have pins in the back to stick to the cork board and a clip in the front to hold papers. The cubicle clips and the magnets come in the same colors, so each kid can tell at a glance which things pertain to them.

The day after I put this up on the wall and showed it to the kids, Frances came home from her camp and clipped something to my clip underneath the calendar. "What's that?" I asked her. "It's a paper you need to sign for tomorrow," she replied. SUCCESS!!

Need some other ideas for how to simplify your life? Check these out!

Karen of Baking In A Tornado has Skillet Cordon Bleu Dinner. Start with a packaged rice mix, add leftover chicken, ham and vegetables for a quick and simple dinner in no time.

Dawn from Spatulas On Parade presents Parmesan Ranch Chicken. Simple easy recipe that doesn’t complicate our busy lives

Tamara from Part-time working Hockey Mom shows us her KEEP - DONATE - TOSS Buckets. Declutter areas of your house by using the tried and tested method that she calls keep, donate or toss.

Lydia from Cluttered Genius has a Simple (On-a-budget) Laundry Room Update. The house is from the turn of the 20th century, but the decor doesn’t have to be. An easy and on-a-budget update that even *I* could manage!

Jules of The Bergham Chronicles listsEasy Ways to Keep Your Family Organized and on Track. A list of ways to keep your family running like a well oiled machine, especially during busy times.

After-School Storage Solutions

Hi, my name is Rabia and I have mud room envy. I see them in pictures all over the place. People have these nice entry ways where they can store all kinds of stuff from coats and hats, to boots and book bags. We have no such luxury at our house. The front door opens directly into the chaos of the living room.

I've been increasingly frustrated with the disorder in the living room this year. The kids have more stuff that they need on a regular basis: three backpacks, a violin, two soccer bags, a ballet bag, two lunch boxes, and at this time of the year assorted coats, gloves and hats. It's too much stuff and we had no where to put it. It all ended up getting tossed in a pile next to the couch.

I often hear that saying "a place for everything and everything in it's place" and it drives me nuts. Then I realized that the problem wasn't "everything in it's place" the problem was "a place for everything." With the correct problem in mind, I set out to solve it.

The kids are used to lockers and cubbies for storing their things at school, so I built on that and bought some more storage cubes. We have some already in the dining room to corral the toys, so I figured it would work for school stuff as well. Ken and I went out and bought a 3 x 3 set at Big Lots one weekend and hauled them home. I didn't buy any of the canvas boxes because I knew we wouldn't be using them for this project.

I put the cubes together and then turned them upside down. The place I had in mind for their home is right in front of a closet. We don't use the closet on a daily basis, but we do get in there from time to time, so I put felt squares on the bottom on the cubes. Now, if we need access to the closet, we can slide the cubes sideways on the hardwood floor.

When the kids came in and saw the cubbies, I didn't even need to explain anything to them. They knew right away which column was theirs and what stuff to put in each square. They decided the top square was for coats and hats, the middle square for lunch boxes and extra-curricular items, and the bottom cube for backpacks.

Now instead of a pile of junk next to my couch, I have a stack of junk a much more organized looking collection of school things. The kids have been happy to put their stuff away and I haven't had to nag very much at all. I think we were all frustrated with the previous lack of storage solutions.

How do you contain the school things at your house? Do you have a mud room? Does it have mud in it??

Tips for Organizing Evergreen Content

I've been blogging for almost seven years now and in that time I've learned a few things. My focus has changed slightly and my audience has grown. There are things that I wrote way back in the beginning that are best not looked at closely now. Some people advise going back and cleaning up old posts so that they meet current standards. I prefer to think of them as part of my blog's time capsule. I'm not ashamed of posts I wrote way back when. On the other hand, I would not necessarily promote them in order to get a new set of eyes on them.

Some blog posts (mine or otherwise) have a short shelf-life. Posts about giveaways (especially monetary giveaways with no product review attached) are like that. Not that I'm qualified to write one, but a post about fashion is relevant for a much shorter amount of time than others might be.  Certain posts, by their nature, are time-sensitive. They serve a purpose for a certain time and then their usefulness drops off. There is nothing wrong with those kinds of posts. A political post, pointing out the pros and cons of a certain candidate is highly applicable--during that election year. That's the kind of post that lots of people should read! After the election, however, its relevance dwindles.

There are some posts, however, that have real staying power. Posts that you could read tomorrow, next week, next month, or even next year and still glean pertinent information from. These posts are considered evergreen because, like an evergreen tree, they stay alive all year round.

I've written posts that would be considered evergreen. I get hits on them out of the blue when someone does a Google search or finds a pin on Pinterest referencing that page. There are certain times of the year that I can expect older posts to start popping up in my analytics again. And up until recently, I have been pretty passive about this whole process.

However, I believe that there is a way to be much more purposeful about promoting evergreen content so that things I've written in the past can come back out of the archives and dance in the light again! It just takes some organization.

First sort your evergreen posts from the rest

Not everything you write needs to be evergreen. It's perfectly fine to write a piece on fashion, politics, celebrity news, etc. Lots of people read those kinds of posts. They can bring in great traffic and if you have a steady source of new information then you should have regular readers coming back all the time.

A post that is evergreen, however, can be written once and promoted indefinitely. They usually fall into these categories:

• recipes (seasonal recipes as well as more year-round recipes)
• craft projects (usually tied to a holiday or time of year)
• holidays (think Halloween, Christmas, Father's Day, etc)
• calendar-related observances (back to school time, going to the beach)
• parenting issues (new baby advice, surviving the toddler years, how to talk to you teen about...)
• weather occurrences (hurricane preparedness, fire safety, snowbound survival tips for families)

Organize your evergreen content

Depending on a number of factors including your blogging platform and your personality, you'll need to find a way to organize these posts so that you can find them quickly when you need them. You can use tags or labels embedded in your post to help you, as well as a spreadsheet or notebook with tabs.
Think about how your reader would use the information you have: Is its relevance related to a certain month? A certain holiday? A certain news-worthy event? 

My recipe tab organized in Excel

Promote and cross promote your content

Once you've got your posts organized, you need to remember to use them. When you plan out your blogging calendar for the month, take some time to look back at other things you've written that are still relevant for this time period. You can refer to them in new posts, but you can also call attention to them individually.  In October, you can begin to promote your posts about Halloween, fall-themed recipes, or breast cancer awareness. The first cold, rainy day of October is a good time to Tweet out a link to your "rainy-day activities" post.

Even if you write the post with spring thunderstorms in mind, it can still be relevant in the fall. I wrote a post called DIY Sugar Scrub in May close to Mother's Day, but it works equally well for a Christmas gift or an end of the year teacher gift. Think outside the box with how useful your archives can be!

• Spring weather and fall weather can be very similar in many ways, so food and recipe ideas can go in either season
• Vacation posts work well for the summer, but lots of families travel (or entertain guests) over the winter holidays
• Lots of handmade Christmas gifts work just as well at Mother's Day, Father's Day or the end of the school year.

Some of your readers may have been around since the very beginning, but you are also gaining new readers all the time, as well as new followers on various social media platforms.  Plus, with the way Facebook presents information to readers, there's a good chance that many of your followers will not have read a specific post from last year. Go ahead and re-pin it, share it on Twitter or Facebook and bring in a new audience for a seasoned post!

What are your strategies for bring new life to old posts? Do you have good luck with highlighting blasts from the past?