Friday, January 23, 2015

Calling for submissions for the February 2015 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Do It Yourself

We continue to be delighted with the inspiration and wisdom our Carnival of Natural Parenting participants share, and we hope you'll join us for the next carnival in February 2015! (Check out January, December 2014, November, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, February, January, and a summary of all our 2013 posts, 2012 posts, and 2011 posts if you missed any.)

Your co-hosts are Lauren at Hobo Mama and Dionna at Code Name: Mama.

Here are the submission details for February 2015:

Theme: Do It Yourself: Teach us how to do something with your best tutorial – on anything. Reflect on how hard it is to get things done with kids, or how inspiring it is to include them in projects. Let's get something done this month!

Deadline: Tuesday, February 3. Fill out the webform (at the link or at the bottom) and email your submission to us by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time: CarNatPar {at} NaturalParentsNetwork.com

Carnival date: Tuesday, February 10. Before you post, we will send you an email with a little blurb in html to paste into your submission that will introduce the carnival. You will publish your post on February 10 and email us the link if you haven't done so already. Once everyone's posts are published by noon Eastern time, we will send out a finalized list of all the participants' links to generate lots of link love for your site! We'll include full instructions in the email we send before the posting date.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A place for everything and everything in its place



Hobo Mama wants you to know she's a professional blogger! Look at how professional she's being!


Welcome to the January 2015 Carnival of Natural Parenting: Household Chores

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants have shared stories, tips, and tricks on tackling household chores. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.





Wouldn't it be nice to be able to tidy up easily, because everything had a dedicated place to stow neatly away?

This is the dream we have for our small space, and it's one we're slowly (slooowly) achieving. As a consequence, this post is still somewhat in the "do as I say, not as I do" category, so fair warning. But we're getting there!

If you don't have a lot of space (like us), or if you have a lot of stuff (like we have had), or if you just plain have more stuff than room for it (like many) — and assuming acquiring substantially more space isn't a viable option at the moment — you'll breathe more easily if you reconfigure your stuff to fit your space.


Save your energy

Having a place for everything means — hard truth here — having less stuff than absolutely fits. In other words, don't cram your space; get rid of things instead.

Back when feng shui was "in," I read a bit about it. I know, I know — ancient Chinese wisdom as a fad! My heartfelt apologies to anyone who's an expert and a believer. But it was quite popular a few years back in Western home decorating, so I was curious what feng shui was all about. I didn't embrace the concept of energy as a mystic force, but I did take away a huge lesson in psychology. To wit: Clutter steals energy.