Unless you're sending your children off to sleep-away camp for the entire summer, you may be worrying right now about what you're going to do to keep the "I'm bored!" chanting to a minimum when your kids are out of school. Day camps and swimming lessons can keep them entertained for a number of hours, but you will still be faced with many evenings and weekends full of warm weather and kids who want to take advantage of their free time.

To stay ahead of the game, consider making a Summer Fun Kit. The purpose of the Summer Fun Kit is to have a book with a seemingly endless supply of ideas for summer fun. You'll need to do some brainstorming and decide how much you want to spend on possible activities, but it doesn't require much work after these decisions have been made.

To set up a Kit, you will need plastic sheet protectors, paper, and a three ring notebook. You can either print ideas on the top of each page with your computer's printer, or you can write them with a magic marker. Whatever is the easiest for you, go with that idea. You want to keep the majority of the page blank, however, so that your kids can write about when they completed the activity and provide pictures and reviews in the blank space. You'll want to use the sheet protectors so that you can put tickets and passes in the pages ahead of time and the kids can put mementos into the pages after an activity is completed. (For example, if you have a local pool, you can keep the pool passes in the sheet protector so you don't lose them.) At the end of the summer, your children will have a book full of memories and you'll have notes on what worked and didn't work when you're making plans for next summer.

Except for planned vacations or theater productions, I would avoid scheduling when an activity takes place. This will leave the choosing up to your children and give them some control over their summer.

Here are more than 15 ideas to get you started:

• Picnic in the park
• See a movie on the big screen
• Family bike ride to [X]
• Sleepover at grandma's
• Trip to local children's museum
• Afternoon at the zoo
• Painting piggy banks at the pottery center
• Trip to the amusement park
• Watch favorite movie at home complete with popcorn and soda
• Create a sidewalk chalk art gallery
• Rainy day board game tournament
• Morning hike to [X]
• Build sand castles at the beach
• Paddle boats at the lake
• Rainy day living room maze building
• Create a puppet show
• Family talent contest

Being organized and prepared with a Summer Fun Kit will reduce your stress and help keep your kids entertained. Please add more ideas in the comments section so that everyone can have the best Kits possible!

I may have told you this already, but my husband and I recently took on a second property abroad. No, we're not rich -- we just live as simple as possible, own only one car, arranged things so that we can both work from home nearly full-time (sharing the same office!), and have gone from visiting Starbucks once a day to twice a month. We also decided to wait on having pets and children (a huge sacrifice) until we could realize our dream of living between two countries. Oh yes, this shows dedication to a budget!

Our goals to get back to the motherland have stayed strong since we married nearly 7 years ago. My husband was raised in Germany and relocated here to the states when he was in his late 20's to marry me. And together we vowed that one day we'd live between America and Germany and this year that dream has come true, as of April 1st to be exact. It feels really good to be where I stand today because a year ago I was still wondering how in the world we were going to pull it off and was beginning to feel like it would never happen. I was getting tired of putting a hold on my life. I want pets. I want kids. But now, things are looking up.

What's the point of this post? I need your advice this time around. We leave the states in August and will stay in our new place until the end of the year but currently the new digs have zero furnishings. We don't even have kitchen appliances or cabinetry because German apartments don't come equipped with them in most cases. The apartment was just gut renovated so the hardest part is over, now it's time to wallpaper, install lighting (5 pendants to be exact) and to get everything we need to maintain a home there. I've never done this before -- starting from scratch. How does one even begin?

So currently I'm devising a plan. I'm trying to figure out how to pull everything together from the floor up. From towels to toilet brushes, shower curtains to a sofa, I need it all and I pretty much to purchase a bulk of it when I arrive there in August. I just don't want to make expensive mistakes, buy for the sake of having, and in the end I've furnished my home but it's pretty much all from IKEA.

Have you ever moved into a home with nearly nothing but the shirt on your back? Any tips for me? I can't bring much with me in my luggage when I go over, so I'm starting at zero. What things should I consider taking with me? I'm thinking of prints from Etsy (lightweight, easy to frame as art) and personal items like photos to keep me grounded so my place feels personal a little quicker. And of course DVDs and CDs. It's odd moving to a new country when I'll only be living their part-time, but extremely exciting. I'm up for the challenge.

Any tips on how to start your life from scratch in a new land? Any expats out there living abroad? How do you get started from square one?

(image taken by holly becker)

Baby showers can be fun, especially for first time parents who are bubbling with excitement. Here are some tips for throwing a shower that doesn't leave the parents-to-be overwhelmed with clutter.

1. Create a practical and focused theme:

• Dynamite Diapers! Encourage guests to bring cloth or disposable diapers in many sizes so that the new parents will be exploding with diapers. Since diapers are consumable, guests will be helping the expecting couple save money on very useful products.


• Little Librarian. Encourage guests to bring their favorite book from their childhood to stock the child's bookshelf. This limits the range of gifts to books, and so the parents will quickly be able to store the presents.


• Charitable Caring. If the happy couple are already parents, they may decide that receiving more stuff is unnecessary. In these cases, guests can be encouraged to bring a present to help a local hospital or women's shelter. This is a terrific option for parents traveling overseas for an international adoption to provide toys and goods for children in the orphanage who have yet to be adopted.

2. Encourage the new parents to create a gift registry. Yes, some people view this as extremely tacky. However, the new parents are not benefitted by receiving twelve diaper pails. In the last few weeks of a woman's pregnancy, the last thing she probably wants to do is go and stand in lines to return items at three different children's supply stores. Registries can be stress relieving for the buyer, too, since the gift giver knows that the parents want the gift.

3. If you're hosting the baby shower, find a way to ask guests if they're okay with a thank you card amnesty for the new parents. Receiving thank you cards feels good, I admit. If all of the guests are okay with it, though, letting the new parents off the hook for thank you cards is a great gift for these stressed individuals.

4. Ask the parents-to-be if they really want a shower. They may instead prefer a wine and cheese party at their favorite vineyard or a meet-the-baby reception a month after the child is brought home. An afternoon at the spa for a woman who can barely see her toes is also a good choice. Just because everyone else is having a baby shower may not mean that it's the preferred choice for the guests of honor.

5. If you're attending a baby shower without a theme or a gift registry, remember that you can't go wrong by:

• Providing a gift receipt
• Providing something consumable

Image by Formula Z/S

When you hire a vendor or service provider, the first conversation you have with this person is about the scope of the project. You discuss what you want, when you want it completed, how much it's going to cost, and what steps will be taken to get the results you desire.

These standard practices, however, rarely get applied to our personal lives. We make general statements about things we want (Travel more! Clear out the garage! Stop showing up late to work!) and then stop short of doing any actual planning or taking steps to achieve our goals. The worst part is then we feel guilty about not living up to our potential.

Stop feeling guilty and simply apply skills you already use in your business relationships to your personal life. Take on your next organization goal as if it were a project you were hiring out to a service provider or vendor. Here's how to do it:

1. Set aside the necessary time and envision your entire project. Decide exactly what you want and your motivation for change. Maybe you want a garage clear enough that you can park your car inside of it, and you want it so that your children can play basketball in the driveway. Be sure that your goals are specific and that your reasons are sincere. If your project scope is too broad, you'll lose direction, and if your reasons are insincere, you'll lose motivation. Draw diagrams if you need to, just be sure that you can see the final product.

2. Identify barriers to success and how you will overcome these barriers. Are you dependent on good weather to complete your task? Are there emotional issues that should be discussed first with other members of your house about the stuff? Are you lacking motivation to actually complete the project? Every project has potential pitfalls -- what are yours?

3. Identify resources you will need to complete your project. Will you need boxes for items to take to a local charity? Will you need a trash dumpster brought on site? Will you need to rent a truck? Will you need subcontractors (your spouse and children) to help you? Will you need shelving units to store what you choose to keep or new paint for the walls once the stuff is removed?

4. List every step and its next action for the full project. If you don't know how you will accomplish your goal, you won't achieve it. It will be tempting to jump head first into the work, but you need to avoid that temptation and make a solid plan. Constantly keep your vision for the project in mind as you're working.

5. Set a realistic timeline for all of the work involved in the project. If you know that you can't focus for more than an hour, keep that in mind as you're setting your timeline. Three weeks or even three months isn't too long if it means that your goal will be achieved when you're finished.

Once your project planning is complete, hire yourself to do the work! You're the best one for the job.

Have you tried visioning in other areas of your life, or with organization? I'd love to hear about your successful efforts in the comments!

Photo by James Baigrie.