Packing and organizing for back to college... still

I am still buried in packing bins (plastic boxes from Walmart), Ikea Bags, and Space saver bags.  My daughter asked me to help her organize her belongings, but at the same time, she is also calling me anal retentive. The good news is with careful packing, unpacking becomes a breeze as the items are organized intuitively and can just be slid into drawers or set in it's appropriate place.

This is all of the hanging clothes I am sending
out... less than half from last years amount,
even though she has twice the closet space.

The hardest part is preventing her from bringing all of her clothing to college.  So I insisted on X number of pants, shirts, dresses, skirts, etc... enough clothes to last 3 weeks, which is plenty if you do laundry twice a month.  I put each type of clothing in either a dress bag, or rolled it military style and put it in a space bag, then in a bin (all the non hanging clothes fit in one bin!)

Then there are the bins for all the other stuff.

• One for stationary, books, and crafts. 
• One for organizers, hooks, cords, and tools needed to set up the room
• One for shoes... (there are also shopping bags for boots)

Then there are a couple of drawer storage units:

Steals, deals, and splurges and packing insanity for my college kids

Barely two more weeks with the kiddos, then back to college.

By this time two weeks from now I will be driving home from dropping off child number 2 to college.  I thought it would be easier to have 2 kids in the same city for drop off and pick up purposes, but it really isn't working out that way.  He goes back on Friday, and she on Sunday, and we have to do two round trip drives due to volume of items, lack of rental truck availability and schedules that don't mesh.  Oh well.  That's how it goes.

All my back to school shopping is done.  I really should have given them money and let them buy their own notebooks, and textbooks, and clothing, but they are still rank amateurs when it comes to finding bargains.  They try, bless their hearts, but they don't have the patience or fortitude to to stretch a dime in the way I do.  They also don't know when it is better to just pay full price for item, and

Looking back: My kids' perspective

I posed the following question to each of my kids:

Now that you are done homeschooling what do you think of it?

My son, age 20 said, "I love that I was homeschooled, but if I knew then what I know now, I may have requested private school for high school".  He felt that he would have had an easier transition time into college if he was forced to have a more stringent time in high school, both socially and academically.  He added however, "at the time, you couldn't have gotten me to go to any formal school though, so I don't know how that would have worked".  I will add here that elementary school was traumatic and he still hadn't gotten over it by the time he started 9th grade.

My daughter, age 18 said, "I am glad that I was homeschooled, but it is not for everyone.  I believe it was best for me though and what I needed".  She added, "I feel like every homeschooler should have some kind of community though, like a high school program (co-op, hybrid program, arts program) that they stick with the entire time so they have pretty much the same friend group year in and year out.  Otherwise the only friends I would have had would have been my mother, my mother, my mother, my brother, and my mother."  She has a lot of homeschooling friends and feels the ones that are happier were a part of a bigger group.  I will add that she is the child that the schools wanted on Ritalin and we instead chose to homeschool her. She had never had ADHD medication, and has been allowed to mature into and cope with her hyperactivity (she was never had the other symptoms) rather than be drugged out of it.

From my point of view, I would have made a few tweaks here and there knowing now what I know then, but at the end of the day, I am proud and glad we homeschooled, and wouldn't trade the relationship with my kids for anything!

I can use some help promoting my other blog

So, while I was homeschooling, I also worked from home as content writer for numerous websites.  When the economy went bad several things happened:

1st: Web writing became popular and I noticed a glut of new available writers began to lower the amount of money I could make on my articles.

2nd: The writing on the web became bad. All the new writers in the market resulted in quite a lot of poorly written articles.

3rd: The web revolted.  Good in particular thought up PANDA which resulted in "Content Mills" as they were called being being penalized.

This all resulted in a long slow decent of the industry.

It seems the final foot has fallen, and Yahoo has closed Yahoo Content Network and Yahoo Voices.

The good news is that they returned my 1800+ articles to me.  They didn't have to, but they did. (I've been writing for them since 2006.) So here's where I could use some help.  I am creating a blog/website to feature all of my best articles. I am letting the duds die!  (When you write that many articles, you regret a few.) In time I plan to add other writers, ... just a few, don't want to anger Google! But for now, I need readers for my articles to get them back in circulation!  Take a peek, and if you like what you see, please share it.

Thank you.