The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

A decluttered kitchen is one of the first projects to undertake when minimizing and simplifying your home life. If you’ve ever wondered how to organize your life, you’ve probably thought of your cluttered kitchen. A decluttered kitchen helps with an organized, prepared life.So let’s take a look at the steps to achieving the goal of a decluttered kitchen.

You know I love lists. And I also love books. So what could be better than a list of books?How about a list of my books?I won’t try to convince you that you need to catalog your books, because you probably don’t. But having a catalog of the books on my own shelves is something inherently appealing to me, and it might be to you, too.

I know it seems overwhelming.I know even just planning dinner sometimes seems overwhelming.But, seriously, who wants to wake up and decide in the pre-coffee fog what to feed the troops for breakfast?It has to be decided ahead of time.

We homeschool without a schoolroom. Like many homeschoolers, the kitchen table is where much of our work happens. We use our kitchen table, we use our dining room table, we use our couch, and we make due with the space we have.I could write up a great-sounding post about why we don’t have a school room on principle. Something about school blending in with real life and not being contained in a separate box.But the truth is that I’d rather have a playroom than a schoolroom, a place for the toddlers and preschoolers to freely set up a block city complete with railroad tracks, a place for the air hockey table we inherited, a place for the computers that are used both for work and for play. And our house layout doesn’t have the space for both a playroom and a schoolroom.

I think taking the kids with me on my grocery excursions is a valuable thing to do. However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t exhausting. But, my kids are homeschooled, and they do need to get out just as much as I do. Plus, they are homeschooled, so they think going to the grocery store is a grand day out. Plus, I am a homeschooler, so I think it counts as a field trip and “real life learning.”

The real trick about having a tidy or organized house is for everything to have a home. Things without homes are clutter. Things with homes can be put away, leaving space for life to happen. Mid-day, the house might look chaotic, but by evening, if everything has a place to go, it can look decently in order again.

Ack! No milk! Off to the grocery store!Was there something else you needed? There was, wasn’t there? What was it? Oh, look, this is on sale. That isn’t, but I think I need some. Might as well wander down this aisle to shortcut to the other side.Oops – walked straight past the pasta, and we definitely need some of that.How many grocery store trips feel like a random grab-bag and confused wandering? It happens to us all, but if feeding our people and keeping the shelves stocked is an important part of our service – and it is – then we need some better strategies for making the most of our grocery trips.

Mystie: That’s fun. So this season, season 8 of the Simply Convivial podcast is going to be about organizing homeschool stuff. So I thought we’d just have a brief conversation about how stuff gets organized in our homes. I think it’s easy when you say “organized” to start thinking of the magazines or the Pinterest where organized means everything looks really pretty and looking pretty is nice especially if you’re a personality who’s good at that but I’m not. Really, being organized is about having a home for things and knowing where things go. So everything has a place so that then you can put it away because it has a place. So we’re going to talk about some of the ways that we give stuff homes in our homeschools. Virginia Lee, what kind of homes do you have in your homeschool?Virginia Lee: Well, I guess one of my biggest things is that I’m not a big stuff person so if I have the stuff in my house it has to have a home and if I can’t find a home for it, it probably means I don’t need it. So I guess that’s one of the biggest ways I look at stuff. In fact my kids give me a hard time, “Don’t throw this away, we’re going to put this here so mom can’t throw it away!” But the other big thing of what I think of when I’m going to organize stuff is I need it to be practical. I’m not very good, like you said, I’m not one of those personalities where everything is pretty and maybe always pleasing to the eye but with the way our crew works is that it needs to be practical, it needs to be sturdy, and it needs to be in places where we can actually use it.Mystie: Right. I think that’s key. Because we have a basement so I could reserve a shelf in the basement and put things away on the shelf downstairs where they’d be out of the way but if they’re too much out of the way I’ll end up not actually using them.Virginia Lee: Yes, we are the same way. We do school in all different locations in our home and so we don’t use a schoolroom, that doesn’t really work well for our crew. So, for instance, we do Morning Time in our living room and I have a bookshelf in our living room and one of the shelves in that bookshelf is reserved for all of our Morning Time books and that shelf is placed right where I sit to do Morning Time normally and then our piano is in our living room as well and the piano bench has a … you can lift the top up … and so that’s where we store all of our Morning Time binders. So that works really well for us. They’re out of the way where little hands could reach them or mess them up but they’re very accessible and it’s something that we already had that we could use, I didn’t have to go buy something else, which I always love that, rather save the money to books. And then for some of our other stuff (we live in a tri-level) so we definitely have different things on each level of our home. So we have one of our levels has those shelves from Ikea that are sort of more like cubbies.

We’ve done grocery shopping a couple of different ways and I think you’re right it really does depend do you have a baby, do you have older kids going with you, you know, that kind of thing. For awhile we used to, at the bulk store that we have, you can put in online orders so you can just get online, choose every single thing you want, and place the order, and you do have to be prepared because you can’t do it the day you want to pick it up, I mean, you have to do it at least the day before, they need a day to get it and process it but what we used to do is I would stick that order in on Saturday because dad was home and so that allowed me a chunk of time to get online and have complete thoughts without interruptions, get that put in, and then we’d go to church on Sunday and then when church was out the bulk store was sort of near our church so we’d just go as a whole family over there, then we’d check in at the little kiosk and they’d bring our order out in carts, and they would have to go gather frozen or refrigeratable stuff but since we were all together we would often time get a slice of pizza, then we’d have lots of helpers to load and unload but we didn’t have to do any of the shopping and so it really cut down on the amount of time, my sanity

We recite mottos during our Morning Time.I think the first place I encountered the idea was when listening to ACCS teacher training audio (back before there were CiRCE conferences or podcasts). The elementary classes of Logos School, at least back in the old days, had mottos they recited daily that then the teacher could call to mind when they were relevant.As a family, we already had a few little sayings – ways to keep a frequent command familiar, memorable, and pithy.Over the years I’ve collected mottos, adding to and subtracting from our repertoire, but finally settling down on a select few for this year.This year, these mottos are behind the daily tab of our binder, and most days we go over them quickly. We alternate this selection with a selection of pithy Shakespearean proverbs each term.