Labor Day weekend ahead! School bells are ringing, football fills the airwaves and September looms. Will the holidays be far behind?

Sure, you're dreaming of the perfect Christmas--then you open your eyes to reality. Looking around the house, it's hard to imagine how to cut the clutter, manage fall cleaning and prepare for Christmas all at once.

How will you bring the current state of domestic chaos into holiday readiness: clean, organized, prepared?

It's time to kick off the Houseworks Holiday Plan at sister site Organized Christmas!

Working week by week, we'll deep-clean, declutter, and prepare for the holiday season in small, sustainable bites.

Along the way, we'll create a personalized Christmas planner to simplify the holidays--and online HHP communities provide motivation, inspiration and fun.

The fun starts Sunday, August 31! Will you be ready?

Get The Houseworks Holiday Plan

Print Free Christmas Planner Pages

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Morning Madness! Only the pre-dinner "Arsenic Hour" comes close in the "Calgon, take me away!" category. Bathroom fights, soggy cereal, and the ever-present, "Mommy! I can't find my . . . !"

Getting the family out the door in the morning can make any parent want to pull the bedclothes up and hide. One small concept can go a long way to taming the morning beast: the family Launch Pad. Just as a spaceship must have a dedicated structure to support liftoff, so family members need a Launch Pad to stabilize them as they blast out the door.

What is a Launch Pad? It's a dedicated space for each family member:

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Who says printable menu planners need to be boring? Not creative craft blogger FutureGirl!

Her wonderful printable menu planner is a whimsical solution to "What's for dinner?"--and better still, she share the wealth with free printable versions in color, black-and-white, and half-size.

If back-to-school means new emphasis on menu planning in your organized home, check out this clever--and creative--printable:

Printable Menu Planner

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Once-a-month cooking. Frozen assets. OAMC. Meal assembly. Whatever you call it, cooking many meals in a single session banks home-cooked meals--and precious family time--for busy home managers.

What's not to like about freezer cooking? Economies of scale speed cooking chores. Buying in bulk saves money. Home preparation fosters good nutrition. New options like "meal assembly franchises" help home cooks build frozen assets quickly.

Whether you cook once and eat for a month, sneak up on freezer cooking, or fill the freezer fast from the meal preparation storefront, get ready to feed the family--fast!

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In my years as worker, mother and home manager, I have experienced a full range of life’s little organizational challenges.

I have run a business from a home shared with two tiny children and moved cross-country (and back). I've merged two cluttered households into one small city apartment, and lived for eighteen happy years with a card-carrying packrat husband.

Home schooling a child beat them all hands-down, organizationally speaking.

How do I count the clutter? The books. The papers. The biology experiments on the kitchen window. The adult-sized child sprawled on the floor, reading. The record-keeping. College admissions and testing and letters from the correspondence school.

Homeschool families, like Tolstoy's happy ones, are all alike: drowning in a sea of clutter! Whatever the organization arena--time, space, money, computer access—-homeschool families have it worse. They have more stuff, less time, more distractions, less money, more chores and less space than just about anybody else. How do you get organized for homeschool?

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Gearing up for back to school? Grab a free Back to School Guide from MarthaStewart.com!

This colorful multi-page article offers tips and ideas for school-day fun, including free printables to organize school lunches, decorate notebooks and spiff up lunch sacks.

Offered in .PDF format, you'll need the free Adobe Reader to view and print.

Ready? Get organized for back to school:

Free Printable Back To School Guide

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Kids using planners? I can hear the confused grumbling now. Well, isn't that just the latest Yuppie parent affectation!

Wrong! Teachers, parents and homeschool families know that training kids to the planner habit makes for successful students. School districts throughout the USA issue planners to pupils and integrate planner use into the school day. Homeschool families use planners to track and organize lessons, chores and activities, while techno-hip high school kids tote electronic organizers as a status accessories.

A student planner is only a tool. How do you teach a child to use one? It's a bit much to expect a 7-year-old to pore over a complicated biz-speak guide to time management and put the method to work independently.

Try these tips to teach kids the planner habit:

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Move over, summer--a new school year is coming!

With the start of school, families face new organization challenges.

School bells ring--and so do early-morning alarm clocks. Shorter autumn days bring a hectic round of sports, activities and events, and calendars fill with cryptic notes.

Can the holidays be far behind?

Get organized now for the best school year ever!

Use these ideas to prepare your home and family for the busy days ahead:

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Ah, summer! Baseball and sunshine, lemonade stands ... and back to school?

Yep. Summer or not, it's time to think about shopping for back to school.

Hang onto your wallets! With the rise of "back to school" as a two-month marketing exercise for retailers, coupled with cash-strapped school districts which have pushed more of the supply burden onto students' families, it can be a tough job to get the kids outfitted without breaking the bank.

Try these school shopping tips to save money, time and your sanity when shopping for back to school:

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Getting organized! For many, that phrase is synonymous with "Buy Me!" Savvy retailers know that Get Organized Fever breaks out at predictable intervals, and tailor ad campaigns to capitalize on the desire to create an organized home. Too often, CEO hears the cry, "But I can't afford to get organized!"

No doubt about it, there are many marvelous products on the market to help achieve better home and personal organization. But getting organized doesn't necessarily require spending money.

Try these tips to get organized without becoming a spendthrift:

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Here at OrganizedHome.Com, the e-mails arrive every week: "Help! I'm drowning in clutter and don't know where to begin!" Whether it's due to poor habits, a packrat spouse, or an advanced case of affluenza, too many home managers struggle under the burden of household clutter.

Clutter can clog the smooth workings of any home, imposing heavy costs on the household. Each day, time is lost searching for missing keys, phones or permission slips. A cluttered desk plays Hide The Credit Card Statement, yielding up the bill only after late fees are invoked. Belongings lost to clutter must be replaced, with the original surfacing just as soon as the replacement enters the house. Gotcha!

Time to declutter! But when you're peering over piles, mounds and stacks of stuff, it's hard to know where to begin and what to do.

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Ready for an organized school year? Beef up your household notebook with these free printable back-to-school templates from Microsoft.com.

Parents will enjoy templates for academic calendars, whle teachers and homeschool families will appreciate gradebook forms, flash cards, supply lists and permission slips.

Since these templates are shared in various Microsoft formats, check version information before downloading:

Printable Back To School Planner Pages

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Here at OrganizedHome.Com, we love 3-ring binders. That's why we adore this travel tip for families with children: use free printables to create a kid's activity binder before traveling.

Use these links to print free coloring pages, word games, puzzles and activity sheets. Assemble a binder for each child, and add a zipper bag containing crayons, markers, pencils and game tokens to keep the kids amused for hours of peaceful drive time.

Find free printables for kids at these Web sites:

KidsDomain.com Printables

PBSKids.org Games, Stories and Coloring Pages

TheKidzPage.com Coloring Pages

FamilyFun.com Printables

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Summer's here: it's time to take to the road!

Summer vacation travel can be enriching, enjoyable and exciting--but only if you're organized. The family that fails to plan for summer travel can end up frazzled, frustrated and longing for the quiet comfort of home.

This year, get ready! We've assembled OrganizedHome.Com's best, easiest tips to organize summer vacation travel. Bon voyage!

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They're here!

Tumbling from the school bus, fresh from Field Day, with papers and projects and petrified sandwiches spilling in their wake: your children. It's summertime, and the living is easy.

Yeah, right.

Summer vacation is wonderful, no doubt about it. Damp heads and wet bathing suits, backyard tents and fireflies in canning jars. "Look, Mom!" rings out a hundred times a day, from the top of the pool slide to the bug-dotted bottom of an upturned rock.

Here comes the Kool-Aid Mom! She's all sweet smile and tidy clothes, calling cheerful children from the corners of the yard with a bell-like voice and tray of sweating, jewel-toned glasses.

Then there's the second day of summer vacation.

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Who can imagine summer without summer food? Steaming corn-on-the-cob, each kernel bursting with sweet flavor. Burgers and barbecue. Ice cream sundaes. The crisp red smile of a watermelon wedge, dripping with sweet juice.

There's a darker side to summer meals. Food budgets groan under the strain of substituting quick-cook steaks and chicken breasts for thrifty stove-top casseroles. Ravenous children make the refrigerator door thump-thump-thump like a dog's tail. Catch-as-catch-can mealtimes, eaten on the run, substitute convenience for nutritional value. What's a summer cook to do?

With creative meal planning strategies, summer doesn't have to bust the food budget, toss nutrition to the winds, or reduce the family chef to a melted, quivering puddle reminiscent of the Wicked Witch of the West. Try these suggestions for simpler, saner, cooler and more nutritious summer meals:

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Summer's here, hot, high and sweaty. Vacations beckon. The garden takes on a life of its own.

Busy families don't have much time for home chores these months. School's out, travel's in and it's easy to let life slide on the home front.

Still, summer will run more smoothly if you keep tabs on these important areas in the Summer Cleaning Chore Checklist.

Our checklist list tackles hot-weather issues, summer health and safety:

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Smart cookies know that getting organized doesn't have to break the bank. That's why we were delighted to see this article from BHG.com:
Dollar Store Closets

You'll find tips to use Dollar Store finds to organize closets for kids and for adults. Colorful, fun and cheap!

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