Week 7 Project - Kitchen Drawers

This week's project is organizing the kitchen drawers. After 3 trips to the Container Store (the first two because I didn't measure properly) I finally have our junk drawers under control. Thanks to some pegs I found at Meijer, my cleaning closet is all organized too. It already had the peg board, I just didn't have enough pegs. Anyway, here is the before and after.

After the first trip to the Container Store was unsuccessful I dumped most of the stuff in the second drawer and put stuff we needed most in the top drawer (not sure why I put the cigar in there).

I got some mesh wire separators at the Container Store and this how it looks now. So much better and easier, and I only removed a few things that didn't belong.

I also found some pegs at Meijer so decided to tackle our cleaning closet.

Before

And now after

Everything has a peg, and nothing is in the way of getting to anything else.  For some reason I had two Swiffers, so I brought one upstairs for quick bathroom cleans. So much easier.  It almost makes me want to clean (almost).

Since I was at the Container Store I also got some bins for our coat closet too, so have already started working on that, even though that's next week's project.

He Doesn't Like Real Food Unless It's Chocolate

Can't say that I blame him. I've often said that pretty much anything tastes better with chocolate or cheese on it. Seriously, think about it.

Anyway, a little progress report first. Last night I put some more Cheerio dust in my son's yobaby. He saw me do it, said he would eat, but then refused once I put it in front of him. This morning I gave it to him again, he still wouldn't eat it. I told him he couldn't go to his drop off class (which he loooves) without eating this first, still refused. So no class this morning. I worked on taxes and around 1045 he finally agreed to eat it. Again he said it was fine and couldn't taste it.

His therapist came around 1130 and I told her all of this. She said to keep doing it, and as he gets used to it thicken the consistency with blended oatmeal. She also said that kids shouldn't eat the same thing more than once every 2 days. Too hard to do at this point since there are so few things he will eat, but the idea is if the kid likes oatmeal, don't give the kid oatmeal every day for breakfast unless you change it up - either with mix-ins or even adding food coloring or sprinkles. After the usual warmups, we went to the kitchen for the food play.

She had asked me to buy Fruit Loops (my daughters were really shocked to see those come out of my grocery bags), and the small fudge stripe cookies. We did a lot of the same exercises as last week but this time with the fruit loops instead of Cheerios. Licking them, resting them on our tongue, putting them on dental floss and moving them with our tongue. She also asked him to nibble a little bit of the Fruit Loop. He got scared when he got crumbs in his mouth, gagged and started to cry and asked us to take it out of his mouth. We calmed him down but said no we wouldn't take them out of his mouth. He must have swallowed the pieces because he never actually spit them out. After getting him to do it again but biting off less we moved on to the fudge stripes. This time she had him scrape the chocolate off with his teeth. He was wary at first but once he realized that it tasted good, he did it with ease. He actually did a lot today, I think because he prefers the sweet foods to the salty (as do I, although the Fruit Loops were way too sweet).

Tonight after dinner I asked him to show the rest of the family what we did today with the fudge stripes. He sat in his chair licking that cookie til all the chocolate was off and the cookie part was all mushy. He had to have swallowed some of the cookie, but refused to bite it. We'll work on that more tomorrow.

Week 6 Project

We're meeting with our accountant this week to prepare our tax returns, so this week's project is to get all our stuff in order. I like to do them as early as possible as we have always gotten a refund, and call me greedy but I want my money.

We've received all the documents we needed - W2, bank interest statements etc.
I got all our bank statements organized today and have gone through them to identify any checks that would be deductible.  Not many but we have a couple.
I've gone through my receipt folder and we have quite a few repair expenses on my husband's car, some basic office supply stuff, and a few charitable contributions (both goods and $).
I've downloaded the AMEX summary to find any deductible items on there.

Tonight I need to figure out the cost of my husband's car insurance for the year and our total cost for our second phone line and internet access, since those also qualify as business expenses. I need to figure out the value of the goods we donated. Once I have all that I can put it all in my usual spreadsheet to give to our accountant when we meet.  It makes it so much easier to review everything with her this way, and then we can use more of the meeting to discuss bigger questions of our finances for this year, like making sure we adjust our withholdings correctly to make sure we maximize my husband's earnings to take care of our short fall.