Letting Go

Lots of cleaning today... mostly the weekly stuff but the youngn's had each of their bins full of papers and well...garbage.  So, with assistance from MOM, they got those sorted into three piles~ keepers for their art binders, unfinished and trash.  (teaching them early, hopefully it works) 
After hard work, they were rewarded with ice cream cones!

Time to play~ here is where I had to let go.  They youngn's decided to have their first swim of the year (we are in a northern climate) and they chose the retention "pond."  
Fully clothed, they dove in (literally) and were soaked to the undies (as the youngest said, that is why I don't wear underware in the summer to Baptist Lake..they get wet) 
My first response (blush) wanted to be "I told you not to play in the water"  
But, after reflection~decided that they were having so much fun, who cares...let go!
I went inside, got the camcorder(battery dead) reached for the itouch and digitally taped their festivities...

Yes, many of you would have instantly thought of the fun, but for me, after years of parenting and a bit of PTSD, I have to pursue to LET GO and have fun!  
A successful day, if I do say so myself.
 

Onto the next phase

Conquered the paper dragon, however, there are still loose ends.

After filling an entire 30 gallon trash bag with shredded paper documents and a bag with recycled pages of various kinds, a huge dent has been made.

The next phase is taking what has been determined as "keepers" and scanning them 

into a digital system... this is the big mountain.  It took 2 hours to finally fix the configuration of my current printer/scanner... I still have to test it to see how viable it is to use as a document scanner. With many adoption documents that are two sided, time is of the essence.

One step at a time!

As a side note:  I have been a better Mom today!  And that, my friends~ is GREAT!  No yelling, gentle facial expressions... believe it or not, that is a struggle some days.

Signing off....

Paper-less in honor of EARTH DAY!

Yes... it has been brewing for a long time.  The piles of papers, filing cabinets, binders full of documents, homeschooling (more papers/books!) cookbooks... we keep so much for the  just-in-case ~ then the just-in-case never happens and the papers stay!
I have been researching for many months, looking at scanners, reading posts and other books on how to tackle this mountain that seems overwhelming and have come to this:

The rubber-meets-the-road TODAY and I am going to begin the CALL to ACTION for this process...

1.  Shred papers that have been waiting in the "shred" pile for all these months.
2. Go through this years bills/papers that have accumulated and sort in 3 piles
SCAN  SHRED  RECYCLE
3.  Process the shred and recycled papers that have accrued.
4.  Tackle one file drawer/folder at a time.  Step #3 will be implemented often.
5.  Begin assessing how much I will actually have to scan.  I want to purchase the Fujitsu Scansnap S1500 from  Amazon (great reviews) I need to be sure it is a necessary purchase for us and will probably visit and revisit the idea another 10 times!  This scanner scans front and back at the same time and 20-40ppm(depends on color/black and white)  How awesome is that!

This sounds simple.  Once I get to the point of actually scanning the documents, I will post more details of the how-to method.  Ideally, I anticipate gaining further contentment as the visual clutter will begin to vanish and the time to manage this area should shrink!