All About Our Family Book

If you are anything like me you have to know what your child is learning this week in homeschool, what you are making for dinner, who you have to call about serving in the preschool ministry this weekend, when your sister in law's birthday is, what your grocery list is, what you have to bring for your child's soccer party, what to buy your husband for your anniversary, what chapter you were supposed to be reading in that book for small group, what day you have to transplant your cucumber seedlings to the ground, if there is enough money in the checking account to pay that bill that is due tomorrow, and what book you are reading for book club all at a moment's notice.

And, if you are anything like me this information gets all jumbled in your head. I am only twenty eight years old. I shouldn't be having senior moments but keeping track of everything mentally is just a daunting task. All of this brings me to the question that I asked about a year ago, "Is there an app for that?" The short answer is yes! The long answer is there are 72 apps for that, one for each area of your life, and then one more so you can list all your passwords in one place, because obviously you cannot remember 72 passwords and you surely don't want someone who finds your phone to know your son's soccer schedule, your checking account balance, and when you are ovulating so you have to use 72 different passwords.

I tried, stubbornly, for more than six months to switch my note-taking, planner loving brain, to an electronic put everything in my iPad, and sync it with iCloud brain. It just didn't work. If you can do everything electronically, praise for the Lord for that. But if you are like me, and a stay at home mom (or a working mom) and you need to have a ton of information available to you at a moment's notice, you might just need a family book.

Chances are you have had something like this at one time or another. I think I tried several different versions before I found one I like but I think I have finally come up with a system that works well for me so I would like to share it with you.

Honestly, I would be lost without my book. It has everything in it. Actually, it's exact contents are:

A Week at a Glance

Monthly Goals

Meals Prepared Sheet

Family Information Sheet

Homeschool Information

Homeschool Plans and Notes

Homeschool Ideas

Milestone Church Information

Password Log

Meal Planning Sheets

Wish Lists

Christmas Gift Log

Weekly Schedule

Important Dates

Calendar

Extra Goal Sheets

Check Out Log

Projects To Do

Things to Do and See

Summer Bucket List

Blog Ideas

Writing Goals

Reading Log

Book Club List

Library List

Emergency Preparedness Informatin

Evacuation Sheet

Stockpile List

Household Chores

Laundry Information

Home Maintenance Log

Home Repairs List

Home Improvement Ideas

Home Inventory List

Media Log

Vehicle Maintenance Log

Monthly Budget

Finance Checklist

Financial Tracker

Childcare Information and Forms

I included most of these files for your use. The ones I didn't included were:

The family information sheet. On this page I have all of our family's pertinent information (everything from SSN to serious allergies to health insurance information) but it wouldn't be hard to replicate one for you family book.

I also did not include my homeschool notes and plans. This information is more pertinent to my son's education an wouldn't necessarily be applicable to anyone else's family. But whether your family homeschools or attends traditional school I would suggest you keep all important information here, everything from curriculum plan to school calendar to developmental checklist to room rosters can go here.

      The other three things that I didn't include were my family preparedness pages which include our emergency preparedness information (what I still have to do, prepare, and acquire for us to be prepared in an emergency), our evacuation sheet, which is just the list of things we would grab if we ever had to leave unexpectedly (like if there was a wildfire or flood coming our way) and lastly our stockpile list. Since my family and your family probably don't eat all the same foods our grocery stockpile list probably wouldn't do you much good. 

(But if you guys would like me to do a blog on what we are doing to prepare I would and I might included those things in that blog if you were interested.)


I also did not include my childcare or church forms because I am not sure those would really be applicable to anyone other than me. 


In addition to all this I also keep a monthly calendar that I can pull out of the binder and take with me if I need to, like if I am going to a leadership meeting at church or something; and a regular pocket folder to house little extras, for example right now it has the boys summer reading club forms in it. 

(Now, it is at this point that I must admit that I have been working on this particular post for almost a month now. The problem is that Blogger won't let me upload Word documents to my blog and Google Docs changed the format of my documents so they were ugly but I think I have figured out a solution.)

With this link you should be able to get ahold of the documents I used in my family book, well most of them at least. Now, they are in Microsoft Word, so if you don't have the program I am not sure how you access them (remember that I am not very technologically savvy). Also, the fonts that I used to create these documents with are Idol Wild, Sketch Block, and Czaristite. I downloaded them free of the interent (I have no idea which sight but I always start with Google.) I would download before opening the document so that the formatting doesn't get all funky.

Hope this helps and enjoy your organizing!

If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions I would love to hear them! Leave me a comment below!