“Have you begun the conversation?” Not have you had the talk.

We had a speaker,Mary Flo Riley come to our Mom’s meeting yesterday that scared the you know what out of me…
I encourage you to go to her site and listen to her talk.

Remember your child is as old as the oldest sibling in her class. SOOOOOOO SCARY!

It’s never too early to start talking to your kids about sex and instilling your values in them from a very young age.

-Develop your message:  “Sex is a gift from God for marriage” “Consider your future and your health: save sex for marriage” “Sex is like a plug. You touch you die.” Whatever your message is God, health, future, death… just be constant and be passionate about it.

-Decide how you are going to react to certain situations and questions. A smile and “I am so glad you asked that!” while you are freaking out on the inside.

-Start teaching your children the proper terms.

-When you are telling how a baby is made tell them the real story mechanically. Your children will be impressed with how much you know. And who do you want to learn the story from?

-When you tell them about reproduction you can open up a fruit and show them the seeds and talk about the seeds that babies are created with.

Our mantra will be: “Sex is a gift from God for marriage.” So one thing that we need to always answer questions with and start conversations with is “Husband and wife fit together in God’s design…. and continue.

This is a little all over the place because I was just posting my notes but GO TO HER WEBSITE!

oh oh oh oh also something really awesome she did…
She took her girls to a hotel for a weekend and did girly things. She drew out a time line that had 80 slits on it that represented their lives. They talked about all the things they had already done in the 8 years previous and what all that had accomplished etc. Then they talked about all of their hopes and dreams that they hoped to accomplish in the future. Then she highlighted from age 8 to 21 and said this is the next 10 years between now and when you become an adult…and you just kind of describe all that is going to be happening, puberity, emotionally changing, physically changing. And how this time period in their lives is such a SHORT TIME in the grand scheme of life. and how what you chose to do in this short time of your life can effect the rest of the your life and can effect all of your hopes and dreams of the future.

Getting Organized in The Home

My house maybe very umm out of sorts, but behind closed doors, in cabinets, and the filing system I use to store my files on my computer, I consider myself fairly organized. I’ll give you a few of the suggestions the speaker used today:

    • Naming your file folders for pictures as YEAR #MONTH MONTH NAME (2012 01 JANUARY)
    • Have a folder titled “Best of 2012” so that in 12 years when your child is graduating highschool and you want to make a memory book for them  you don’t have to search through all of the folders and you just have to look at the Best of
    • GO AHEAD AND DELETE BAD PICTURES AND PIC THE BEST OF THE 20 SHOTS YOU TOOK OF THE SAME SUBJECT AT THE SAME TIME
    • A tip from me: I have been scanning in all of the kid’s art projects so that I don’t have to keep them all
    • Store clothes that don’t fit anymore, stuff you only use anually, and things you never use in well organized and labeled plastic containers.
    • She brought up an awesome point (because she has 5 kids) that she has a checklist of things to pack for certain trips that she refers to every year and updates so she doesn’t have to reuse every time
    • Pick a certain place to put your keys and purse
    • Pick a certain place to open your mail and have a place where you put the things you will need to come back to and the things you don’t need to get to.
    • I have yearly clear bins that I put all of the little momentous such as birthday invitations, Christmas cards, movie stubs, etc and I am going to burn DVDs with all the pictures and videos of that year and put them in there that way I have a back up

For those of you that know me, you know I am very passionate about my digital scrapbooks. I use the site www.mixbook.com because it is very easy to use and has a lot of preset layouts, backgrounds, and stickers. How I stay organized:

  • I upload all of my pictures and videos off of my digital camera, video camera, and iphone to our external hard drive>Pictures By the Years>2012>2012 01 January that way I have ALL of the pictures in the same place.
  • Then I have a folder on my desktop entitled Name’s Folder>Mixbook>Week 1 January 1-7 and in that folder I put all of the appropriate pictures for that time period. I also include scanned pictures I have of Name’s crafts, cards we have received  tickets to events, etc and a word document where I keep track of things that I’d like to include in that time period.
  • So now that I have those pictures in that folder I can select my favorite pictures I’d like to include at that time or come back to it later.
  • Then I log into Mixbook and upload a week at a time and just place it on the page how I’d like to group it.
  • Now that I’m at the end of the year I’ve gone back through my Facebook to see if I have any important mile stones, funny quotes, or events that maybe I forgot my camera at and I am requesting pictures from my friends.
  • Next, when I have time I just log in and do the decorating and I’m in no rush and don’t feel scatterbrained because it’s all right there in front of me.

The only thing I hope for is a tablet that I can work on my scrapbook on! Come on iPad all I need is for you to run flash!