Well, I bought the girls their Christmas dresses

I know, I am trying to be frugal, and not spend any unnecessary money, but this was a SERIOUSLY good deal. We went to this warehouse discount store (not SAM's or Costco - it is a local/more overstock kind of store) and they had things from Sears that were 80% off. The dresses were beautiful, and they were originally $65 each, and I ended up spending $27 total for both. Was it a need? No. Was it something that I was likely going to buy at some point in the next two months? Probably. Are they much prettier than the onces that I would have ended up with? Probably. When it gets closer to the holidays, I'll put a picture of the dresses up.

Tonight is my planning night. I have a system that involves binders and file folders and a journal and a calendar. I've pieced it together from a couple of different blogs and tweaked it to make it work for me. I think that the "tweaking to make it work for you" is the key in making an organizational system work. I'll post about my home management binders more specifically in my next post. But anyway, I'll spend tonight putting activities on the calendar that have come in during the last week, reviewing things that are already on the calendar, planning next week's lesson plans for preschool and Flower, decided on any other optional activities that we want to do next week, filing paperwork, returning e-mails, etc. I have found that if I don't limit planning to one night that it leaks into every night, and it doesn't all make it to the calendar, and I just don't use my planning time as well if I spread it out over the week.

Of course, I'm talking about doing my planning, and being all organized about it, and I didn't get dinner prep done this afternoon, so it is 5:30 and I still need to decide what we are going to eat. I didn't want you to think that I had it all together. I rarely have it all together. Every once is awhile, I'll have a little part of it together. But never all of it.