Raise your hand if you were there in 2008 when I started ye olde blog, known then as SiouxsiesMusings. My first post was bright and shiny with enthusiasm about the decluttering process I was going to undertake. Haha back then I thought it was a “one and done” kind of deal. I crack myself up.

I think some of my pre-baby nesting instincts got a little sidetracked because there really wasn’t time once the children train gathered speed. So I’m getting around to it now.

Kepler has an IEP (Individual Education Plan) for school and has had one each year since he started preschool in January 2009. The first IEP was about eight pages long and the documents increased in size each year so by now I have a couple thousand pages of these documents. Or maybe a thousand. Five hundred. A bunch. Today it was “get the IEPs organized” day.

Julie Morgenstern, in her book Organizing from the Inside Out, says that Americans spend a mind-blowing 9,000,000 hours every day looking for misplaced items. How she came up with that number I do not know, but that’s a big number!

And at the end of the day, the pages are in order, the other supplemental documents are in order and all are divided with labeled dividers. I now have a bag full of pages that were duplicates for one reason or another and are no longer clogging up the files.

So yay me. But it occurred to me that the decluttering and the resulting satisfaction are mostly a solitary experience. I know what a huge difference I made today but no one else does! I’m sharing the pictures of the pile I got rid of and the happy end result.

Best part of the accomplishment is I now have this year’s IEP and this year’s ETR (Evaluation Team Report) at my fingertips so I can stay abreast of the goals we are working on, instead of looking at them several years later and musing, “Huh.”

Wishing you this kind of order in your life,

Siouxs