17 Organization Tips

January 2nd, 2017

17-organization-tips

Today I’m going to share with you 17 organization tips that will help you to maintain an organized house:

Organization Tip #1: Get rid of as much stuff as possible. Make yourself a goal of filling up 10 boxes to take to Goodwill (or 3 boxes, or whatever).

organization-tips

Organization Tip #2: Use small open boxes to organize art supplies in a drawer.

organize-markers

Organization Tip #3: Changing your cupboard liner can give your cupboard a fresh new look.

cupboard-liner

Organization Tip #4: Making a list of to-do’s the night before will make you more productive the next day.

Organization Tip #5: Do the hardest thing on your list first. Then you will feel relieved and have energy to do the rest.

Organization Tip #6: I saw a shelf on a wall at a bed and breakfast last year, with large hooks underneath. I would love to put one in my bathroom to put towels and bathrobes on. (Great use of wall space!)

organized-robes

Organization Tip #7: Contain toys in bins. My newest bin is the nerf bin.

nerf-bin

Organization Tip #8: Instead of fumbling with mismatched food containers, get a set that stacks. It takes up way less space in your cupboard, and it looks neater in your refrigerator.

organize-with-tupperware

Organization Tip #9: Use a fishing tackle box to organize toys with small parts.

organize-with-tackle-box

Organization Tip #10: Eat protein in the morning. You will be a lot more productive with what you want to accomplish.

great-breakfast

Organization Tip #11: My husband likes collecting Wii games for the kids. Pretty soon Wii stuff was all over the living room. I decided to organize all the games and accessories in a drawer under the TV. You could also store it all in a basket beside the couch.

organizing-wii

Organization Tip #12: Roll up your jeans to fit more in your drawer. Find out more ways to organize your bedroom here.

roll-your-jeans

Organization Tip #13: Always look for furniture with built-in storage space. Find out how to organize a window seat here.

window-storage

Organization Tip #14: If you use something with small drawers for craft supplies, make sure that all your kids are above age 4. Otherwise the buttons (or whatever) will end up all over the floor. For younger children, I recommend a tackle box, which I show you in my “Organizing for a Fun Homeschool” video.

little-drawers

Organization Tip #15: If you place all the mittens and snow caps in a drawer from oldest to youngest in your family, everyone will be able to find theirs when heading out the door for some fun sledding.

mitten-drawer

Organization Tip #16: Go through your DVD’s and only keep the ones you absolutely love. Store the remaining ones in a drawer near the TV.

organize-DVDs

Organization Tip #17: My daughter loves a wooden tool caddie loaded with her favorite art supplies.

art-caddy

For more tips on organizing your house, check out my organization products.

10 Creative Uses for Wrapping Paper

December 2nd, 2016

creative-uses-for-wrapping-paper

Have you ever had extra wrapping paper that you don’t want to store? Or maybe you saved your used gift wrap because you were given a large present, and the paper really wasn’t wrinkled. (Growing up as a missionary kid, we re-used gift wrap all the time!)

Why not use that extra gift wrap in some creative ways?

10 Creative Uses for Wrapping Paper

  1. Cover a book or a journal.
  2. Wallpaper a doll house.
  3. Make a greeting card.
  4. Cover a checkbook box as a drawer divider.
  5. Create a fun pencil holder.
  6. Use it as a matting in a picture frame.
  7. Make a reusable gift box by wrapping a shoebox inside and out.
  8. Wrap the outside of a larger box to store toys, photos, or momentoes. Match the gift wrap to the topic. For sports trophies, choose sports gift wrap for the lid and box.
  9. Glue patterns of wrapping paper on a gift bag. Use patriotic paper for a star shape in the middle of the bag, or flower wrapping paper in the shape of a flower.
  10. Create clothing for a paper bag puppet. You can make changes of clothes with the different wrapping paper, and put tabs on the edges (like paper doll clothes) to keep the clothing on the puppet.

There you have it! 10 creative uses for all the extra wrapping paper scraps that are lying around. Can you think of any other unique ways to use gift wrap? Share your ideas in the comments!

Dolls Around the World

November 21st, 2016

dolls-around-the-world

A great geography project for kids to understand the cultures of different countries is to make dolls around the world. Why not have your kids look up the traditional costumes of several countries and sew or hot glue those costumes onto dolls?

You will want to collect lots of scraps of cloth. If you do this with a school or homeschool co-op, one child can sign up for each country, and you can have the child research the costume for that one country. Then they can write a speech or report to go with their doll, and present it on a geography day!

I had always wanted to do this project myself and never had the time. When I saw this homemade dolls around the world set at a resale shop, I was overjoyed that I could show my children the costumes of the different countries while decorating my homeschool room colorfully.

If you don’t want to buy so many dolls, you can make dolls out of toilet paper tubes. Just hot glue cloth and beautiful accessories on them, and you can have a less expensive version of the dolls around the world. When I was a teacher in the schools, I assigned a biography for each of my students, and they made a figure of the person beginning with a toilet paper tube. Most of the students’ figures came out gorgeous!

Looking at all these dolls makes me want to travel the world!

The Sin of Lust: MK Perspective

November 18th, 2016

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Lust is always described in Scripture as sin, yet we accept it in our churches as normal. We don’t even bother to fight against the lusts of the flesh any more (1 John 2:16), and we have believed the lie that we are slaves to our lusts. Eerily, Scripture says that only unbelievers are slaves to their lusts.

“All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.” Ephesians 2:3 NIV

“Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” Colossians 3:5 NIV

So what exactly is lust? Lust is a selfish greed, an excessive wanting of something to gratify oneself. Bible Study Tools describes it as “a strong craving or desire, often of a sexual nature. Though used relatively infrequently (twenty-nine times) in Scripture, a common theme can be seen running through its occurrences. The word is never used in a positive context; rather, it is always seen in a negative light, relating primarily either to a strong desire for sexual immorality or idolatrous worship.”

Scripture says that sexual sin is worse than any other sin because it’s desecrating the temple of the Holy Spirit. “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” 1 Corinthians 6:18-20

You become what you look at. This nation provides so much wickedness. We have been inoculated with worse and worse immorality through television: things that were once considered crimes are embraced by Christians. Our hearts are filthy. This is why we are bored. The world has provided an addictive continuous stream of wickedness to look at, and we have gradually become more and more wicked.

Pornography trains men to harm women. It has led to thousands of rapes and brutalities. It has fueled more and more perversions and greed that lead to excruciating sexual pain. If God calls something an abomination when committed against a man, it is also an abomination when committed against women and children. May we not be a nation of Christian Pharisees that excuse brutalities because of loopholes that the atrocities are not forbidden word-for-word in Scripture, and so they are not sin. This is a demonic doctrine, and it flies in the face of God’s purity and holiness.

The Pharisees in the days of Jesus would rape young boys and claim that it wasn’t sin because the Bible doesn’t say word-for-word that you can’t commit an excruciating, de-humanizing act against children. They said that the Bible forbade only sodomy against another man. So if a boy was younger than 20 years old, he could be brutalized. The Pharisees also brutalized their own precious wives in the same way. I heard a sermon where all these facts were backed up with documentation, and the following day, the video had been taken down. The prince of the power of the air who rules this world took it off the internet.

I know of seven Christian women who have been damaged by their Christian husbands through sodomy. 100% of them said it was physically excruciating, it felt like a serrated knife, and their anus hurt for days, even when lubrication had been applied beforehand. If done over a period of time, the women had permanent damage to their rectum, with poo leaking out and having to wipe 20 times after going to the bathroom. Furthermore, the women felt like pieces of garbage, completely desecrated human beings.

In the same way that all humans know there is a God (Romans 1:21), all humans know there are sexual actions that ought not to be done, that degrade the bodies of others, and that grieve the heart of God. (“God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.” Romans 1:28) Everyone, the first time they thought of sodomy, knew that it was wrong. They felt weird inside, and their conscience was pricked. But they suppressed the truth in unrighteousness because their deeds were evil (Romans 1:18). We have been handed over to our lusts by God: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.” (Romans 1:24 ESV) We have reached Romans 1 as a nation, and Christian men are as just as evil as the world.

Twice in Scripture we see the sexually depraved imploding of a nation: in Sodom and Gomorrah and in the tribe of Benjamin at the end of the book of Judges. Because no one wants to be on the receiving end of sodomy, the sodomites (ALL the men of the nation) actively raped all newcomers. For the Benjamites, the sodomites sexually damaged a woman until she was dead. God rightly strikes sodomites dead with fire and brimstone. ALL sodomites are violent because the action of sodomy is a violent act, even if men are taking turns enduring it so that they can have a turn (gay marriage).

If God says that men taking turns damaging each other’s anuses is an abomination, how much more does God abhor Christian men who damage their own wives who they vowed before God to protect? They have broken a vow to God and they have destroyed their wives. May God bring His full judgment down on their heads.

God, wake up our nation to sexual purity, to a marriage bed that is delightful to BOTH the wife and husband, and where both are loved and not physically damaged. Guard the eyes of the people of our nation against the pornographic sites that train us to do evil and abandon You. Cleanse our hearts and our hands, and cause us to seek holiness instead of our own gratification. In the name of Jesus, who shed His blood and endured all hell to set us free from sin, Amen!

This is the third in a series of “Indictments Against the Sins of America.”

  1. The Sin of Entitlement
  2. The Sin of Boredom
  3. The Sin of Lust (this post)

Here are more posts I’ve written about the sins of our nation. Some of the posts are ways that I have personally battled and overcome these sins:

  1. The Sin of Gluttony
  2. The Sin of Ingratitude
  3. The Sin of Anger
  4. The Sin of Coveteousness
  5. The Sin of Pride

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