The Clutter Diet Blog

Organize Your Happy Campers

It's time for summer camps again... and you, the parents, will be packing for a week! I have been astonished how much time it takes to gather the supplies, label everything, and pack it up as instructed (in the right trunk that is the right size they specify!). My kids did not go this year, but previously they have gone to two-week camps that required a lot of stuff. Here are my tips for organized camp packing:

• Set up a staging area for putting this all together. For us, it was the dining room. Be prepared to feel like it's out-of-sorts for a while until they leave. You need room for footlocker trunks, an ironing board, and a flat surface like a table to sort things into piles easily.
• Camps require everything to be labeled, so buy iron-on labels. Here is a resource I have used successfully:  http://www.irononmdlabels.com/ They have rounded corners and the product works very well. (just try pulling those things off later-- whew!)
• Label dark items with metallic Sharpie® markers. Things like navy blue footlocker trunks and black shower sandals can be hard to label, and the silver metallic writing shows up great.
• Use color-coding for more than one kid. We had one color for the towels and sheets and blankets for each of our sons.
• Consider buying the linens you need. It was worth it to me to buy new (cheap!) towels and sheets, one color for each kid, because those would be the "camp towels" year after year, and we could tell them apart from our normal household linens quickly and easily. Your child will also be able to identify his/her stuff very easily at a glance in a crowded cabin. After camp was over, they were then already labeled for next year, and we just kept them in the trunks and they were ready to go. We bought two extra towels and washcloths than they needed, since it was likely they would get lost from year to year (we were right about that).
• Use Rub-A-Dub laundry markers for labeling clothing if you don't have the iron-on labels. I love these and use them around the house all the time.

Get those kiddos off to camp and then take advantage of some peace and quiet! Enjoy!

Tired of Toy Clutter? Rent Instead of Buying!

This very enterprising mom in Houston created a new business that people are calling the "Netflix for kids." It's at www.babyplays.com. In just the same way that you can rent movies and even handbags online now, you can sign up for a monthly subscription plan for either 4 or 6 toys to be mailed to you. Your kids play with them and you mail them back at any UPS Store location (without additional shipping fees!). You can keep them for a while since, like Netflix, there are no late fees.

What a great way to declutter the playroom-- just ship 'em back! And kids get a great rotation of new toys instead of accumulating a large collection over time. Brilliant!

Got Messy Teenagers?

Our Clutter Diet member message boards have been discussing organizing with teenagers lately. Since I have two teenage boys of my own, I got inspired to write this article, "Six Critical Factors You Must Understand to Organize with Teens."

It's not just about the academics of teaching kids organizing concepts. I have identified these six factors that are essential for understanding the dynamics of the problem:

• Importance
• Ownership
• Perspective
• Congruence
• Consistency
• Acceptance

Since this article is part of our paid member content, you will only be able to read this article temporarily while we feature it on our public home page... I will leave it up there for a while, but after it's taken off as a home page feature, this link will require you to log in as a Clutter Diet member. Click here to read the article on the Clutter Diet site. UPDATE 3/3/08: This article has now been removed as a feature article from our home page. If you'd like to read it, you can join our site as a member here for less than the price of just one ticket to the movies! http://www.clutterdiet.com/signup.php

Get the Lead Out!

This week I traveled to Philadelphia to tape a news segment for NBC 10 on how to go through your children's toys and organize them in light of the recent lead paint toy recalls. It's the perfect time to organize your toys because it's just before the holiday season, and you can make room for the incoming gifts... and you absolutely need to get the recalled items out of your house.

People are shocked when they find out how many of these very recent and popular toys that are recalled. My own cutie pie twin nephews were playing often with the Baby Einstein cloth cubes, and the child who was in the television story with me had two of the Thomas the Tank Engine trains and several of the Sesame Street toys. Please visit the Consumer Product Safety Commission website at www.cpsc.gov to review the list and GET THE LEAD OUT of your toybox! You can sign up there for e-mail alerts to find out when new things are added to the list. The National Safety Council says there is no such thing as any safe level of lead exposure.

Here is the press release that we put out with some tips on how to approach this and how to organize the toys while you are at it. Please forward this information to someone you care about who may have small children! I am really upset about this problem as I think there are thousands of busy parents out there who think "this can't happen to me."

Bored with Disorganized Board Games?

We see a lot of homes with stacks of board game clutter... broken game boxes, pieces scattered around or missing, and other problems like mixed up money.  I was just playing Monopoly this weekend with my kids and was inspired to tell you about some of the ways we organize board games...

Sometimes all you need to make things easier is a simple Sharpie® marker. This photo shows one of the little things that my family does.  In the Monopoly rules it tells how many of each denomination of money is required to set up for play (2-50s, 6-20s, 5-10s, etc.).  So we just wrote that number in Sharpie marker on the banking compartments as shown here, so setting up is faster.  When we have a game that uses a big box of cards, like trivia questions, we always mark one side of the box with a Sharpie marker to say "DRAW HERE." That way you don't get confused between games about which end of the box you're playing from.

When we are organizing for clients, we always have a roll of clear packing tape with us, and we use this often to repair crushed board game boxes.  Resealable zipper bags are great also for keeping sets of pieces together-- the "snack size" are just perfect for tokens and little Life-game "children and spouse" pieces, etc.  And the humble rubber band is always useful for holding together stacks of cards.  If your box is crushed beyond use, there are these great products called Game Savers that are plastic replacements for your board game boxes, better-designed to hold the pieces properly and be more durable.

What are your favorite board game fixes?  And favorite games?  Ours are Apples-to-Apples, Balderdash, and Hoopla. Our Clutter Diet members can join in the discussion on our message boards. Enjoy!

Babyproof Your Marriage!

Today I had the pleasure of having lunch with Cathy O'Neill, one of the authors of Babyproofing Your Marriage.  It's a fascinating subject-- what happens to a couple once children enter the picture?  Sadly, so many marriages split up because they cannot handle the changes that occur. 

One of the things that occurred to me was that division of labor in a household can be a huge issue when kids come along (number 2 on the top 3 concerns for women on their site is "He just doesn't get it!" about how much workload there is).  We have in the members' area of our Clutter Diet site our Household Systems and Routines Workbook that can really help facilitate a discussion of ownership of all of the things it takes to run the home.  I guess I did not think about how we could potentially help save someone's marriage with this workbook!  But I think it could!

Visit Cathy's site and check out their book-- it is a very valuable guidebook to navigating these issues and dilemmas.  What could you do today to strengthen your relationship as a couple?  Maybe getting organized can help!

BLINK and It's Gone...

For busy moms, keeping your car organized and clean is a huge challenge.  You get the constant trash from soccer snacks, the spilled Skittles, the ketchup stains on the seats, and the handprints on the windows.  You take your car to get washed and the next day it's trashed once again!

I am intrigued by this new line of products designed to solve all of this-- they are called "Blink."  They have cleaning wipes for the windows ("Cleaners"), stain remover wipes ("Lifters"), trash bags ("Tossers"), spill absorbing cloths ("Grabbers"), and mesh tote bags ("Totes").  All of these are dispensed from small, easy to accommodate containers that can clip onto your seat back pockets or be easily stowed away.  Next trip to Target I am going to check them out in person and see if I like them.  Apparently they are selling them at all of the major discount stores.

My boys are now pre-teen age and they STILL get handprints all over the windows.  I am kind of jazzed about the window cleaning wipes.  And I do love the idea that if a drink spilled, you would have something to quickly mop it up.

This is really more about cleaning than organizing, but I think that my fellow mom readers of this blog will totally appreciate this!  I think the tote bags are a great idea to have around if you need a quick way to group a bunch of loose toys or shoes, etc., but I do wish I understood why this is better than a plastic grocery bag.  Those are free and they wad up into very small little bundles that you can also keep handy in your car.  Blink people, any comments?