Last year I wrote about my quest to find a calendar system big enough for my large family. You can read about that post here.
The original calendar system worked pretty good. We had a desk calendar on the freezer door held up by magnets and I used color coded sharpies to write in each kids’ calendar item.
The problem was all these flyers, etc were pinned on top of the calendar with other magnets. Also — the sharpie pens were on the other side of the kitchen, and – I had no place to put down the papers I was holding with dates I needed to add to the calendar while I was in front of the refrigerator/freezer that displayed the calendar.
So…I perused Pinterest, then office supply stores and finally by accident, found our new calendar at Hobby Lobby.
It’s one of those white board calendars you have to write in the dates and it had a white wooden frame. I ended up spray painting the frame to a dark bronze color to make it stand out against the light colored wall I ended up putting it on. We happened to have wall space above the counter in the kitchen where I kept the pens and scissors and notepads. It seemed to be waiting for the new calendar to fill its space, so there it went.
I’ve replaced the sharpie pens with colored dry erase markers. At the start of each month my “homework” is to get the calendar updated for the current month from the various papers that come home. We now have one magnet labeled “today” that we move daily to indicate the current day for the kids to keep up. The mess of flyers and invitations, etc are scanned into Evernote if I may want to reference later, then loosely filed in a decorative box below the calendar so we can grab the info when the date arrives and toss it afterwards.
This system so far has worked well. All I need to update the calendar is in one place. It’s in a prominent spot so hubby, babysitter, kids and I know of anything important for the day. And I don’t need to keep a paper calendar around or buy a new one at the end of the school year. We’ll see if we need a “take 3” for this topic/post in a few months.
About Us
We have five children including 2 sets of twins. Currently ages 7,7,5,2,2. That’s 2 fraternal twin girls, a single boy, followed by 2 identical twin girls. Life After 5 – kids that is, has definitely changed.