How is the first week of 2012 going for everyone? I have spending a lot of my free time getting organized and prepped for the year ahead! We have a ton of projects on our to do list {including our big basement reno} so I really feel the need to start the year out on the right foot.

So, what have I been doing?

1) Meal preparation and planning!
One of the biggest downfalls for us during the Christmas holiday was lack of meal planning. I know, I know…how can that be when I have a weekly meal planning post?! Honestly, I just got a little overwhelmed and didn’t follow my own plan.
So, my solution to that was to have more back-up meals in case life gets crazy again. I spent New Year’s Eve in the kitchen cooking and freezing a ton of meals for this purpose. I get asked a lot about what resources I use for this so I thought I would share a few here. I have a few books


in addition to websites that I frequent such as My Recipes and Skinny Taste.

[The Paperless Blog]

2) Purge the paper!
I go through all of our papers and get rid of anything that we don’t need and ensure anything that we do need is filed in its proper place.

If it hasn’t been worn in a year, it goes into the Goodwill or Consignment box. All the remaining items get sorted and put away. For example, I sort my closet by pants/tops/dresses and then by color within those categories. The kids, though, get their clothes hung in outfits. I use color coded hangers for them for a little fun in their closet.

[Flick River]

4) Tackle the Toys!
Yeah, I definitely wish our playroom looked like that on a regular basis!  I do try to reduce the size of our toy collection and make it more organized any chance I get.  The addition of new Christmas toys makes the New Year a perfect time to work on that task.  All the “extra” toys go to Goodwill or get boxed up for the semi-annual consignment sale.
The remaining toys get assigned a zone within the playroom based on who it belongs to and what it is.  All the little toys (hello, Polly Pockets!) get individual storage containers like these

The larger items either go in the drawers under the play table or in larger baskets .
We also keep two baskets like these

in the family room for easy toy storage.  They just slide right on the shelf under each of our side tables.

[Western Michigan]

5) Check the calendar!
Keeping everything straight for all the people in our household can be tough. We all have Google calendars that link into our phones (obviously H and E don’t fill their out their own) but I need a physical calendar too. The physical calendar is a place where I can write out our meals for the week, plan out my blog posts and keep every one’s upcoming appointments too!  I also do one big once over on our calendars to make sure all our important dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.) didn’t get lost.

So, how do you prep for the new year? Any big organizational projects you tackle?