It's true!

**In just 15 minutes each day for 5 days, you can have your homeschool wrapped up** and put away so it doesn't hang over your head for the whole summer.

Get Your Homeschool Ready for Summer in 15 Minutes!

May 15, 2017

Is the thought of cleaning up the school year and organizing your homeschool killing the joyful headiness of a looming carefree summer?

Then let's attack this bite by bite! Printable checklist included below.

Day One:

Gather all texts finished for this year and either box them up to save for another student, toss, sell online or a curriculum fair, or put in a bag to donate.

Day Two:

Deal with the trash that has accumulated in your school area this year. Have a kid who needs to expend energy with some hard muscle work? Hand them the trash bag to take to the curb!

Day Three:

With the extra stuff gone and the trash dealt with, it's time to sort through and organize the art supplies, paper, pencils, tape, glue, etc. If you have a little extra time, make an inventory of what you need to replace because those school supplies sales are right around the corner!

Day Four:

Do you have toys, puzzles, and games that need sorting, too? Now's the time. List them on Facebook, give them away, or store them in a tub or cabinet to be taken out when the cold weather arrives again.

Day Five:

If your house is like mine, there are scuff marks on the walls and baseboards, and even the hard wood floor. In fact, one of my early summer projects is to remove a white sofa slipcover and try to remove the black dry erase marker my brain-injured kiddo put there. Grab the bottle of cleaning stuff, rags, a mop, etc. and set those kids to helping with the tabletops, cupboard doors, floors, and light switches, too!

Voila! In 15 minutes each day for 5 days, you have the school year behind you. Doesn't that feel great? Now go pour yourself something cold and enjoy your well-deserved time off!

Print your free checklist here!

Summer Clean in 15 Minutes Checklist

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How to Write Your Own Story, Part 3 of 5

May 8, 2017

Welcome back!

In part one of How to Write Your Own Story, we talked about who our audience is. In part two, we discussed passion. Now on to part three!

3.

Grab every moment you can.

You are an author. Do you believe it? Until you consider yourself a professional — whether or not you make money doing this job — you won't carve out the time to write what you know needs to be written.

It was difficult for me to call myself an author, even after a decade of blogging that brought me some side income. I wasn't writing for money and always had ministry as the goal, and somehow in my mind, that limited the legitimacy of what I was doing. Once I started to call myself an author, I could give myself permission to work on the projects I had bobbing around in my head,

So what will you require, author? A quiet house? A retreat? A half hour while waiting for your kids in their piano lessons, a coffee shop with earbuds in? What about a laptop? A stash of favorite pens? Graph paper?

Whenever you can and whatever you need, grab it. You are a legitimate author with a story to tell, an audience of the highest importance, and a passion to put it on paper!

How to Write Your Own Story, Part 2 of 5

May 5, 2017

Hi again, writing friend. You have a story to tell, and that story is important. Remember that.

In part one of this series, I wrote about the fact that when we are given a story, we are then tasked to write for an audience of One. The One. If we think about that One audience as we sit down to type out the words, we can focus on what really matters.

2.

What God is laying on your heart is the most important thing to write.

What’s the ministry you have?

For me, the burning passion is to see other believers free from the bondage of religious behavior and hope shifting. It doesn't just permeate the narrow community in which we dwelled throughout the time period covered in Lost & Found; it's insidious, and exactly what the enemy likes to see us wrap ourselves all up in. Idolatry = bondage, and Jesus + nothing = freedom. See? I'm passionately mentioning my passion in a post about your passion!

I can talk about my passion anywhere. Is your passionate topic like that for you, too? If so, you've got to get that down on paper or onto your computer! The combination of God letting you know that He has something for you to write and the passion you have for that topic is an unbeatable brew of God's goodness.