The Year I Will Get Organized

I like to think of myself as an organized person, but getting organized and staying organized takes time and dedication and I don’t always spend enough time on it.  I have set myself the goal of become more organized this year.  When I come across something that takes extra time every time I do it because of lack of organization I am going to make the time to fix it.  When sometime small irritates me every time I deal with it, I am going to try to address that.  Here are some things I have done so far this year.

I love Lego.  We must have about a hundred sets.  Over the years we build the sets; they were played with; they fell apart; the pieces got mixed in with other sets; no one played with them anymore.  Trystan, Owen and I have decided to take on what we estimate to be a year long project to sort the Lego into some semblance of order that will allow us to build things in a reasonable amount of time.  We have four Ikea Gimse underbed storage boxes, which are 65x65x19 centimeters, and are full of Lego.  We have decided to spend 30 minutes at a time several times a week to get it sorted.  Once it is sorted, then we can build the sets.  Then, hopefully, since the children are older, when we are done playing with the set, we can bag it up with all the pieces and instructions for future use, rather than it ending up in a giant unsorted box again.

When I took my Christmas tree down, I labelled boxes that were unlabelled, created some new divided storage (using the box from a 700 gram Toberone I ate over the holidays) and put in all in one place on shelves in the basement.

The kids never seem to put the phones back on the charging station.  They leave them on the floor, under things, behind things, etc.  I have even found one missing for months between the mattress and box spring in Megan’s room.  I am forever pushing the locate button to find a phone.  However, when I do that, all five phones alert, even the ones on their charging stations and I find it hard to tell where the missing ones are.  It is possible to just have one phone alert, but I never know which phone is missing.  So I downloaded the manual (64 pages long) to my iPad and figured out how to name the phones.  Now when one is missing I can just make that one alert.  A small irritation, but it’s still nice to know I won’t suffer from the irritation of hearing all five phones alert anymore.  It will still irritate me that the kids don’t put the phone back, but that’s a harder issue to solve.

Two of my children pick their scabs and can keep them going for months on end.  In order to get it under control I have to put bandages on all the scabs and keep them there until they heal.  The bandages are constantly falling off, then the scab gets picked again.  I spend a fortune on bandages.  While the name brand ones are sometimes better than the generic, they fall off too.  Especially, from the hands.

These Elastoplast bandages are a good size for small scabs, however, they often won’t stick even straight out of the box, let alone after hand washing or pulling on socks over them.  On their own, they are a terrible product.

I decided to research what the stickiest bandages were and buy those, but in my research I came across Compound Tincture de Benzoin on a sailor’s blog.  He wrote that he discovered that this substance would keep bandages on when he was sailing even when they got wet.   I asked for it at the pharmacy.  They didn’t have any, but could special order it for me.  I order 50ml which cost me about $8, not much more than a box of bandages. 

You apply it with a cotton swab where the adhesive part of the bandage will go, briefly let it dry and then apply the bandage.   Here are three on Owen’s hand, one of which is in a very awkward spot on his finger.

It worked!  They stayed on for a couple days.  Now a couple weeks later his hands have finally almost healed after months of lack of progress.  I wholeheartedly recommend this product if you have ever been frustrated with bandages falling off.

Another irritation addressed.

I hope to carry on through the year as I have started.  Perhaps by the end of the year I will have addressed all those little daily irritations and will save enough time looking for things that aren’t where they should be to spend more time on the things that matter.