Julie Surprise: Laundry Basket Tip

I recently read somewhere online about a Mom who has all of her kids do their own laundry, even the really young ones. They all have their own basket and are responsible for washing and folding and putting away their own clothes.

Because I have a stacked washer/dryer I'm not sure that requiring them to climb up in order to reach the dryer makes a lot of sense for us right now, but I have been trying to figure out ways to give my girls more responsibilities and it occurred to me that in my Mom's house, all seven of us kids had our own laundry basket; where my Mom, or whoever was doing the laundry, would put our clothes for us to take upstairs and put away.  Granted, I think some of us just left the clothes there and only came to pull something out when the closet was looking bare, but for those who lived upstairs it was a convenient way to transport newly washed clothing easily.

At any rate, I have six of these bright green laundry baskets that I bought on sale at Smith's a few years ago (when they were on sale for $0.99 each!) they've been useful for sorting different colored loads, but I've found that I do tend to wash all my girls clothes together without separating the colors much, (they're mostly either pastel colors or hot pink anyway) so I realized maybe I should designate a couple of these baskets for my girls to have for their own. Also, since I've been trying to get them to help with putting away laundry for a while now, I thought maybe this new idea would add some novelty to something they tend to find rather dull.

Then the question became, how do I designate the baskets? My mom wrote our names on ours with a sharpie, but I kind of wanted it to be easier to see at a glance.
Suddenly it came to me! I realized that all I needed to do was thread a different pretty ribbon through the mesh in order to personalize the baskets for each girl. Yay!

 Interestingly enough, I already had a few ribbons that even matched the shade of green of the baskets. 
My four year old goes by the nickname Kitty, and she loves anything Hello Kitty, she even has some Hello Kitty clothing in her wardrobe, so it seemed pretty obvious which ribbon should be on her basket.

My older daughter, Lillian, is seven now and a bit more serious. She doesn't like Hello Kitty anymore because that's for babies, ya know? So I figured she would be fine with a shimmery, sheer, floral ribbon. Besides, she prefers to go by 'Lily' so something with flowers seemed appropriate.

So there you have it! A simple way to designate and personalize laundry baskets!
Hope this made you day a little brighter!

Organizing Drink Mixes

I just thought I'd post up here some things I did recently to reduce clutter and reuse empty containers around my kitchen.

May you be inspired.

First of all, I bought some Hot cocoa mix in bulk almost 2 years ago for a big movie project my husband and I were doing, and hardly any of it got used for that. We have since brought it to multiple parties in the hopes of using it up, but the fact remains that I've been frustrated by these little individual serving packets for a long time now. They don't stack neatly, and they fall all over the cupboard. (And we're finding it hard to want to use them much when we seem to get at least two Stephens canisters every holiday season as gifts . . . I tend to favor the flavored cocoas!) Anyway, a while ago my husband just put all these packets into a grocery bag and put them on a shelf.

Lovely.

Needless to say, this has been an ongoing issue with how neat my kitchen feels for me.

On the other hand, I recently went through a big jar of peanut butter and felt the need to wash out the container rather than throwing it away. My mom used to reuse these jars all the time when I was a kid, and I was pretty determined to find a good use for it. (I bet you can see where this is going, huh?)

This is what I came up with . . . I filled the jar with as many cocoa packets as I possibly could; taking care to measure exactly how much one packet contains. Then I typed up a label and directions on my computer and printed it then I simply cut it out taped it on to the jar.

Tada!
Now all that cocoa fits nicely in my cupboard. Surprisingly, I still had a few packets left after this, but they were manageable. I rubber banded them together and tucked them in the back of the cupboard behind the big jar.

My husband is a big fan of drinks. Especially drink mixes. I guess it's just how he was raised. My mom always rather discouraged too much drinking of "Sugar Water" as she so deftly called it. But Jake's parents have had Kool Aid and the like pretty much at every meal even to this day.

Anyway, to appease him, we have a few of these colorful packets laying around the house, along with some fruit flavored teas. These latter ones did have a box at one point, but my toddler destroyed it. Thus, I also had these drink packets cluttering up my cupboard, but as they are of different flavors, brands and quantities I obviously couldn't do here what I'd just done for the cocoa. So I did this.
This was one of those mayonnaise containers with a flip top. All the packets fit nicely into it and it fits nicely onto a shelf.

Yay for organization!