In a grand attempt to organize our lives and house, I have started working on a family binder. Using Microsoft Publisher (my favorite design tool), I made several sections and even some forms. Several of the checklists and forms came from other websites, which I found on Tip Junkie. The photo checklists for various holidays and seasons are from Simple As That, an awesome design/photography/scrapbooking/family blog. If you like the photo checklists, please go to Simple As That and follow her blog. The birthstone birds chart is from Trillistrations, another charming design site. All of the other forms and lists I made myself. So here it is! Click on the picture below to download the binder sections and the forms I mentioned above.
The sections in this binder are:
- Title Page- To be used as a cover page or insert
- Emergency Info- Includes a blank page for family emergency plans (which everyone from the CDC to FEMA, and the Red Cross to Sesame Street insist all families need to have), as well as two pages for important phone numbers.
- Sitting Instructions- In this section, insert any written instructions for house sitters, pet sitters, and baby sitters. This way, you won't have to wrack your brain every time you brief the fill-in-the-blank sitter.
- Maintenance- You can put your favorite cleaning checklists in this section, as well as your appliance manuals, car maintenance records, and anything else maintenance related.
- Annual Goals- This is a place for lists of any goals for your family or home. I plan on keeping the lists of goals from one year to the next, to see what we've accomplished.
- Important Dates & Holidays- I've included a lot of goodies here! Trillistrations' birthstone-coded list and Simple As That's photo-op checklists (of which I cannot get enough).
- Wish Lists- I've included some wish list forms. One for the house (tools, curtains, matching plates, etc.) and one for individual family members, which you can print multiple times to match the size of your family.
- Menus- For your favorite meals, so that making regular menus might be a little easier. The menu pages are from Ollibird.
- Restaurants- I plan on using a combination of pockets and business card pages to hold the menus and numbers of our favorite restaurants.
So that's it! I have no idea if this will be effective in keeping me organized long term, but I'm hoping it'll help. Feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think. I haven't tried embedding documents on here yet, so let me know if it doesn't work. It was big enough that I had to go through a third party document hosting service. Once again, please let me know if it's hard to use or generally obnoxious to you, and I'll try to find some other way to do this.