God's provision in the little things

I've been working hard as you've seen on de-cluttering and re-organizing our home, especially our school stuff.  We're planning to start school in about three weeks and I want to be all organized for the year before that happens.  I've got the curriculum bought.  I've got the children.  I've got a table and a few seats.  But if I can't find the curriculum it's not going to do much good.  Also finding a way to organize each week/days stuff where Princess can't get into and destroy it presents a challenge too with our limited space.

I've looked into workboxes and I LOVE the idea but the space thing presents an issue.  So I looked around online in the blogosphere to see other workbox "translations".  I found a few that I thought were great.  I bought a couple dozen ice cube bins intending to use those as our workboxes (I have NO idea what I was thinking, I don't have the shelfspace for that).  So as of late I've been thinking and the other day one of the kids was playing with a small plastic file box I have that I kept our papers organized in - bills and such.  They were lifting this clear lid on the top that opened to a tray space for things like pens, paperclips etc.  It hit me then that this would be perfect!  One box per boy.  Their pencils, scissors, crayons, glue sticks, etc. will fit in the top tray and I can file in the whole week's worth of school work inside the box.  LOVE! 

I had another dilemma.  We're using Confessions of a Homeschooler's letter of the week curriculum and well the storage solution I thought I had didn't work for this because accordion files only open out so much and these activities became quite thick.  So I realized I would need two more file boxes to store the LOTW activities.  Well the file boxes are 10.00 each and as previously mentioned I prefer to be frugal.  So I checked the price on amazon and I could get a 4pack for 36.00.  Woot a 4.00 savings!  But we went out yard saling and thrift store shopping yesterday.  I was hoping to find a few of these file boxes that other people had decided they no longer needed.

Salvation Army didn't have any but they had some AWESOME children's books and a book sale going on for .29 a book and buy 1 get 1 free so basically 2 books for .29.  I got an oversized Jack and the Beanstalk that came with flashcards and a cd of the story.

I think this though was my favorite book find:  A copy of the classic Peter Pan

But I was also tickled by finding this copy of a McGraw Hill reader book:

I also got a few other fun books, easy readers for Howler to work with through the year, a few Golden Books, and we also got a few board games.

Anyway back to the story, alas no file boxes.  So we headed over to Goodwill.  I found a copy of Madeline here though it wasn't AS good of a deal I picked it up anyway because it's one of our FIAR books for the coming school year (we may just go ahead and start with it lol).  I searched around but no file boxes.  But back in the furniture section I found a slightly dented black two drawer file cabinet.  In the bottom drawer it had a whole bunch of hanging files in great condition.  For 3.99 we bought it and it fits not only my LOTW stuff but I was able to move our family files into the bottom drawer of it freeing up the file box we already owned.  So for this year we only need one more file box.  At 10.00 plus the 3.99 for the filing cabinet we saved a little more than 30.00.  Sometimes I marvel at the small ways that God provides for us.  I'm so thrilled and happy and thankful.

Have a blessed Sunday everyone!