Home

They say “home is where the heart is” and I guess that is true to a certain degree, but what if your heart has many levels and cannot stick to one particular “home.” When people ask me where my home is, I have difficulty responding. Is it my hometown where I grew up and have most of my memories; where most of my family that I love still lives? Or is it the town I currently live in, that I have loved almost as far back as I can remember, where I made a conscious decision to move and call home? Then again is your home where your license says your address is, where you have most of your stuff, or where you spend the most time? Or is the place where you plan on living and want to call home your real home?

I could very easily call six different places my home using these categorizations.

On the one hand I have Miami, FL. My hometown. All of my childhood and young adulthood friends still live there. Most of my memories take place there. And sometimes when I dream, the dreams still take place in Miami ( I guess I haven’t been living in my new home long enough). When I am talking to people, sometimes I still refer to Miami as home like, “Back home, we….” or “I don’t know if I’ll be able to make it back home for Christmas.”

But now I live in Greenville, SC. Greenville is a place I visited often as a kid and I have always loved this town like no other. Moving to Greenville was a conscious choice because I WANTED this to be my home. Not because of where I ended up being born or where my parents moved me to, or because a job forced me to relocate. I chose Greenville. I love Greenville.

And here where I live in Greenville, people always ask where I live, but technically I live in two places. Half of my stuff at my aunts where I go once or twice a week for family time and to pick up my mail and the other half of my stuff at my boyfriends house where I sleep and eat and do most of my work. And now we are building a new house which I already feel is my home because I know it will have all of my stuff in it and I am helping to make decisions about design because I will be living there presumably for quite a while. I can already imagine my own space and how things will be in my kitchen. In my own first home.

What the front of my new house will look like

The layout for the new house.

The bonus room on top of the garage for the new house.

And of course there is where I spend most of time. That would be my classroom. I could probably live in my classroom if I had to. I love it that much. And I spend enough time there that it must seem that I do live there sometimes. Now I know why kids always assume that their teachers live at the school and are so shocked when they find out differently.

My behavior chart

Computer Station and some Science stuff!

My Math Bulletin Board

My classroom library and Reading Bulletin Board

So I don’t know that you can say home is one place necessarily. I think home is a mix of all the different places that have special places in your heart.

10 Etsy Shops for Plannerds

I like to support small and personal businesses ad Etsy is a great way to purchase products directly from craftspeople. Here are a few of my favorited shops in no specific order.

1. DIY Fish (great planner inserts for ring bound and doris of all sizes)
2. Growing Up Goddess (printable planner inserts for ring bound and doris but you can also purchase already made notebooks that she makes with WONDERFUL paper)
3. Dingbat Industries (order notebooks in bulk for very cheap)
4. PapergeekMY (stationery supply heaven)
5. Onica Hanby (beautiful handmade leather doris and folders)
6. Plum Paper Designs (an excellent planner)
7. Planner Decorator (sticker heaven)
8. Divine Elements Design (beautiful customizable planners and decorating supplies)
9. VeiledCrane (fabric doris for the cruelty conscious mind)
10. FoxyDori (this is actually what I wanted to call my doris that I was going to start making till I found out it was taken)

I Write Because…

I have always loved writing. I started writing when I was really young. My first grade teacher even gave me a certificate at the end of the year that said “Most Likely to be a Writer.” I remember getting my first diary in first grade. Santa brought it wrapped in festive paper. It was a pink Tweetybird book with pink pages and a lock and key. I fell in love with writing down every single minutiae thought that popped into my head.

I have kept every diary I have had (this is about two notebooks a year) since the first grade. I have always found it interesting to look back on what my younger self used to think and see how I have grown as a person. Around sixth grade I decided I wanted to be an actress and that someday people would want to know my every thought so I should make sure they were recorded. Around tenth grade I found writings of my family members and thought it was so interesting to take a peek into their heads and see what they were really thinking.

You never really know someone till you read some of the things they write they think no one will ever see.

I decided that I should keep my recording going, not because one day I would be famous and my every thought would be published, but because then a niece or nephew or a future child of mine would one day find them and really get to know me and feel the way I did when I came across those journals: like I wasn’t quite so alone, like somebody understood me.

I started blogging in high school because I thought it would be interesting to see what happened when I put my ideas and pictures out into the world. You never know what kind of reaction you will get. Also, it didn’t feel like exposing myself because there is a certain amount of anonymity when you face the world through a computer screen. Later on in college I started blogging about the things that interested me.

Now, I am writing this blog because I want to share my planning experiences and how planning helps me be better person on a daily basis. It is one of my obsessions and one of the way I control my obsessions is by writing about them.

So now I journal privately to work out the things in my life that I cannot understand, to ramble about the things I’m pretty sure no one else wants to hear about but I just have to tell to someone, to record what has happened in my life good or bad, and I blog publicly to share about my crazy obsession with anyone that it will help and anyone who shares the obsession.

I write because I can and because it keeps me sane and happy, but I also write because I hope it will let people understand who I am.