This week was the boys’ school Christmas Carol Service. It was a very moving service held in the Cathedral and a fitting end to several busy days of Christmas activity at school.

I am looking forward to the holidays. It has been a long and busy term and I think we all need a few weeks of rest and family time. And I am particularly looking forward to not having to do the gruelling daily school run!

As I stood in our beautiful Cathedral, Matthew was many miles away in a cold parish church at the funeral of one of his best friends, our son’s Godfather.

This holiday period, if there is someone you know who is on their own or if you know someone who is struggling with something – anything – please reach out to them and let them know that they are not alone.

This week the Friday Club Seasonal Carnival is about Christmas/Holiday traditions and Christmas planning – do you have Christmas or Holiday traditions/ how do you get organised for Christmas/what do you like or dislike about Christmas/post a favourite Christmas recipe or your favourite Christmas picture/what have your children done at school for Christmas – share your plans, traditions, tips or coping strategies.

Please join in! Everyone is welcome, whether you are an established blogger or a newbie and especially if you have not taken part before.

Here’s what to do:

• Write a post about Christmas/Holiday traditions.
• Publish your post anytime before noon on Tuesday 20th December.
• When it is published, email the url of the post (the permalink) to me at fridayclub (AT) notesfromhome (DOT) com before noon (UK time – GMT) on Tuesday 20th. That’s it!
• Over the Christmas period I will publish the carnival and you will get a link back from me when the carnival goes live. I would really appreciate it if you would link to this post in your post so that others can take part if they want to .
• What is not allowed: anything off-topic, sponsored posts, product review posts, competitions/giveaways, sexual content (!), posts not written by personal bloggers or anything libellous or hurtful.

You can take your post in any direction: submissions can be serious, humorous, helpful or anything in between! It can be short and to-the-point or a long essay if you feel so inclined! Be as creative as you like and enjoy writing something that fits on your own blog.

Looking forward to reading your posts!

Here’s the code for the badge if you want to use it

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And for anyone who missed it, here’s the first post about The Friday Club Carnivals.

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Sorry for the long absence. If you follow my Facebook page you may know that I have been unwell recently, suffering vertigo and dizziness for several weeks now. It became so bad at one point that I had to stop driving – which made life pretty tricky given that two of my children go to school thirty minutes away by car and we live in the middle of nowhere! Thank goodness for very kind neighbours, family and friends.

I had an MRI scan (claustrophobia anyone?) which thankfully has come back clear so now I am waiting for vestibular function tests to assess whether there is an inner ear problem which is affecting my balance. For something relatively minor (inner ear) it has had a profound impact on my life, causing the room to spin, me to stagger around and to have trouble driving and trouble with sensory overload (lots of traffic, lights or noise sends me reeling) and has left me feeling quite nauseous much of the time.

And it has just gone on and on.

The last few days of last week have been slightly better so I am hoping that my brain is starting to adapt a little to the constant sense of motion or, even better, that the inner ear problem is improving.

So, not the most cheery post ever! I am coping but much of my time is spent resting, I am homeschooling a bit because only one of my children goes to a school which we can walk to and I am keeping a smile on my face.

I would love to hear how you all are, I have missed writing here and spending time on Twitter and Facebook but being on the computer makes the dizziness worse. So please leave a little comment letting me know how you are and I look forward to being able to update you with more positive news next time I hope!

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This summer we put our house up for sale. It would have gone on the market in the spring but for one thing: the clutter in every part of the house.

We are squeezed in to a house much too small for our big family and, as a result, it is already crowded. I’m not a hoarder, in fact quite the opposite, I would love to live in a beautifully minimalist house where we don’t own much and everything we do own has a place to be stored away out of sight. But I also hate throwing anything away that I believe might be useful one day (the environmentalist in me) and so there were plenty of items that I was keeping ‘just in case’. Add those to an already crowded living environment and four busy children who never seem to put anything away and I would look around at our house and think we have no chance of selling it looking like this.

So there was that.

And then we had some removal quotes done.

Nothing focuses your mind more on decluttering than the thought of having to pay to have the things you don’t really need, or particularly want, moved from one home to another.

There was only one solution and that was a radical declutter and sorting of our possessions.

We have gone further than that too and stored a whole lot of things that we want to keep but don’t need for the duration of our house sale, some in the garage in case I need to access them and some in self-storage. These items have been in storage now for a few months and with the exception of my SAD light (I packed it in the height of summer, not remembering that we might not actually have moved by the time winter comes) and a few children’s board games we haven’t really missed anything.

So for many weeks over the summer while the children were at school I went through every part of the house deciding what would be kept in the house, what would be stored, what could be given to charity and what would be recycled. If I wasn’t sure about an item I used the criteria ‘do I want to pay to move this?’ and it was surprisingly easy to de-clutter!

So I packed boxes for storage

and I packed store items in the garage

I sorted many many items for recycling

Little boys had fun on some of the rubbish while we worked

and then we hired a skip to get rid of everything else we didn’t need. It was a six foot skip and we filled it to the brim!

That’s a scary amount of stuff we didn’t need that we were keeping in our house.

I don’t know if all skip companies are required to do it anyway, but the company I chose recycled everything they could from the skip so I was able to feel reasonably confident that we weren’t making too much of a contribution to landfill. Still, that was a lot of rubbish to say goodbye to and I felt a little guilty. And also quite a bit relieved, because it is a surprisingly good feeling to get rid of so much stuff you realise you don’t actually need.

Now we have a policy of one-in, one-out – if we have to buy something new, we try to get rid of whatever it is replacing – I don’t just store it with a vague plan that we might use it somewhere else one day. We don’t automatically keep boxes for the boys to use for craft activities, I bin them unless I have a definite activity in mind. There are always new boxes in the not-too-distant-future, at least while their feet keep on growing and growing like they do.

I donated all the baby clothes I was keeping ‘just in case’. That was hard .

We also decided to make the study (which in reality was a junk storage room) into a bedroom. Now there is nowhere just to dump things that I will deal with when I have a minute. Instead I have to make a minute to deal with the item right there and then. It’s harder that way but stops the clutter piling up. This is what our storage room now looks like:

I can’t find a picture of what it looked like before which is probably just as well as I’d probably be too embarrassed to post it here.

One of the best tips for selling a house is to put all your stuff away but it’s hard work to have to do that every time you have a viewing when you have four small children underfoot. So now we have specific places for items we use every day and my dream of living a minimalist life is getting a little nearer! It also makes cleaning so much easier (which means I’m much more likely to do it) and the sense of peace I get when I look around at my clean and clutter-free house is wonderful:

In addition to the usual cupboards and toy storage, I have three items of furniture that I couldn’t live without because they are great for storage: my beloved apothecary chest (also coveted by others) which, because it has lots of small drawers, is great for storing things you want to keep but don’t know quite where to put.

I also have my work chest which is the old set of drawers in the hallway in the picture above where I store all my paperwork, school books, pens, folders and items I need to hand every day. There are trays for paperwork in, a file for filed papers, drawers for everything else.

I also have a Go Shelf which is a cubby storage shelf unit in the hallway where I put everything that needs to go out of the house at some point, so letters to be posted, birthday gifts to be taken to parties, mobile phones, shopping lists and all sorts of paraphernalia can go here and I’m never hunting around for stuff right before I have to go out.

I’m so much happier with the way things are now and I feel more inclined to keep the house clutter-free.

How do you deal with clutter?

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Welcome to the Friday Club Carnival, a weekly carnival held here. Sorry for the delay in publishing but it’s here now: this week’s Carnival is all about dealing with clutter and here are the other entries in this carnival, please click through and read these great posts:

Lasso The Moon posts Take 100 things off your house’s waistline.

Kooky Girl Blog posts Ironing and Clutter and Stuff.

Jennifer’s Little World posts Dealing with clutter in the home.

Living it Little posts De-clutter or die.

Inside The Wendy House posts Clutter.

Midlife Singlemum posts Clutter: A Straight Exchange.

Green and Tidy posts Five ways to have a clutter-free Christmas.

Who Teaches Whom posts Clutter.

Live Otherwise posts Decluttering – a dream.

Multiple Mummy posts Clutter or Memories?

Freckles Family posts De-cluttering – My new hobby.

Mymumdom posts Clutter.

Kate on Thin Ice posts Reflections on Clutter.

Here Come The Girls posts How to clutter your home.

Thank you to to all these lovely bloggers for taking part and for their patience in the carnival being published this time!

Have you subscribed yet? Get free updates via email .

Download our High Frequency Words printable (Preschool/Elementary – suitable for learning to read at Age 4-5 and for learning to spell at Age 5-7).

You can see all our homeschooling/learning printables here.

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Over the summer the children had plenty of downtime, time just to play, unwind, relax and be kids.

Unfortunately one of my children decided that he would use one morning of this lovely free time, when the sun was shining and he could have been out playing football, making dens or otherwise causing trouble outside, to give himself a haircut.

When the children were little I was pretty good about keeping the scissors hidden. But then the older ones get older, they reach the semi-responsible tween years and you think they can be trusted.

Rookie Tween Parent* Lesson number one: you’re a Rookie Tween Parent and so far you’re not very good at this.

He was aiming for an emo like many of the boys round here sport and at first glance you might think he didn’t do too bad a job – combed over to one side as the fashion dictates.

In fact, it really wasn’t too bad a job because for two days I vaguely noticed something was different about him but I didn’t give it a further thought. It was only when I was helping him brush his teeth that I realised with horror what he had done.

Rookie Tween Parent Lesson number two: if something looks wrong, IT PROBABLY IS.

When I realised what he had done, like a horror movie I couldn’t unsee it. How did I not notice what he had done?

Rookie Tween Parent Lesson number three: mothers need to be not just present, but observant. And by that I mean a little bit more observant than me.

Thank goodness his hair is short. And I could cut his hair to make his hack job look not too obvious. No-one need know he ever did it and more importantly no-one need know my failings as a parent.

Oh, hang on…..

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Hands up if your child has cut their own hair!

* Parent of a Tween, obviously, not an actual Tween Parent

The carnival has now been published: Dealing with clutter: decluttering, home organization, storage solutions and tips.

This week the Friday Club Home Carnival is about dealing with clutter in the home. Are you drowning in clutter? Do you browse online for storage solutions that will transform your life [no? just me then ] Or are you super-organized? Is your house a shrine to minimalism? Share your tips or hopes about dealing with clutter, keeping your home organized and storage solutions for items in your house.

Please join in! Everyone is welcome, whether you are an established blogger or a newbie and especially if you have not taken part before.

Here’s what to do:

• Write a post about dealing with clutter in the home.
• Publish your post anytime before noon on Friday 30th September.
• When it is published, email the url of the post (the permalink) to me at fridayclub (AT) notesfromhome (DOT) com before noon (UK time – BST) on Friday 30th. That’s it!
• On Friday evening I will publish the carnival and you will get a link back from me when the carnival goes live. I would really appreciate it if you would link to this post in your post so that others can take part if they want to.
• What is not allowed: anything off-topic, sponsored posts, product review posts, competitions/giveaways, sexual content (!), posts not written by personal bloggers or anything libellous or hurtful.

You can take your post in any direction: submissions can be serious, humorous, helpful or anything in between! It can be short and to-the-point or a long essay if you feel so inclined! Be as creative as you like and enjoy writing something that fits on your own blog.

Looking forward to reading your posts!

Please share this post on Twitter, I appreciate your support!

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Here’s the code for the badge if you want to use it

<div align="center"><a href="http://notesfromhome.com/"><img src="http://i1098.photobucket.com/albums/g376/ella818/The-Friday-Club-badge.gif" title="Friday Club" alt="Friday Club" width="125" height="125" style="border:none;"></a></div>

And for anyone who missed it, here’s the first post about The Friday Club Carnivals.

********

You can keep up to date with The Friday Club announcements by subscribing via email or subscribing to the NotesFromHome RSS feed. If you have questions about how it works just give me a shout.