Summer's First...Craft.

My kids know that the beginning of summer means one sure thing...Mom will surely manufacture a new chore chart and reward system, and come up with some cutesy paper crafted schedule. We all know it will only work for the first half of the summer, at which point we'll go out of town and everything will fall apart when we get back...

But this year - I have been empowered by Pinterest, which has showed me that the whole "family command center" thing is awesome for the entire year AND quite possibly a little bit trendy. Well, trendy in Pinterestland, which is about as trendy as I ever get. 

In honor of kicking off a Pinterest-inspired, organized summer, I give you: Part One of the Family Command Center. Us crafty people all know that nothing is official until you've created something to commemorate it, so - Organization, meet crafty calendar board.

I made this little beaut for approximately $2 and 30 minutes- yay me! 

The parts:

Frame with plexiglass: 25 cents at a thrift store

1 piece of blue cardstock: 25 cents in a huge multi-pack

Simple Stories elements: approximately $1.50 worth from a huge multi-pack

As I've talked about before, Simple Stories is awesome - each set (this is the Year-o-graphy set) comes with 12x12 double sided cardstock (the calendar page above was one of these) plus tons of cut-apart journaling cards of all different sizes (all the other pieces above) and stickers. I literally just cut stuff apart and glued it onto the cardboard in the frame. I added a few stickers and word strips and ALL DONE! My kind of project - thrifty and crafty!

 We use a dry-erase pen to write in all the necessary info:

Now we have the months' calendar, the day's activity/schedule, shopping lists, long term to-do list, garden weeding list (we cross of each item as we do it each week) and reminders...all in one place! It's right next to the chore chart (I will show you later...), so everyone sees it. 

I'd like to think everyone in the family frequently looks at it because its so cute, but I suspect they take a look hoping they'll see "eat ice cream" or "go to Disneyland" magically appear on it... eh, maybe I should  add little surprises on it from time to time. I'll start with "Make a Pinterest-inspired menu board"...