Istagram super-moms make it all look so easy. Their recipes are a work of art, their DIY projects look effortless and inexpensive. Their fitted sheets are folded perfectly square and their children are spotless.

That’s not me. Nope nope nope. But I do try to get organized (though staying that way is the bigger challenge), I do love to cook (although my culinary expertise is more often a failed experiment), I love to cut corners to save a dollar here and there, and I love to laugh along the way.

So join me in rejoicing in our imperfections as parents while learning a thing or two through our mistakes along the way!

The Art Bucket

Our crayons, markers, pencils and other miscellaneous art supplies have been a jumbled mess in an old Christmas popcorn tin for years. Drawers? Nah, that’s too fancy. Today was the day I finally got sick of reaching in for a single colored pencil and bringing my arm back out covered with multicolored waxy guck.

After dumping it all out (very satisfying), I sorted it into piles. Who know we had so many pencils! There was also an absurd amount of broken crayons. Time to give that crayons melting awesome-mom hack a try. It worked… pretty much.

I sorted the pieces in similarly colored groups into paper muffin cups.

The cups went into an old muffin tray and I placed them in the oven at 200 degrees for about ten minutes – honestly it could have been a little longer; at the time I was also chasing my son around trying to get him to focus on his homework.

After cooling for twenty minutes the disks were still slightly warm but cooled enough to remove from the cups. They did not stick to the paper cups but there was a waxy residue so I would not want to place them in a bag together.

I stacked them each in their own new paper muffin cup on top of each other.

Only using one paper cup did not stop the wax from seeping through to the pan. In the future I would use two or three cups per disk to avoid this. Cleaning muffin pans is a drag.

Everything is organized in neat bags and now placed back into our fabulous Christmas popcorn tin/art bucket as it should be. My son is very excited to use the blue disk to color the sky on his book week poster. All in all it took me about an hour, including breaks to help with school work and clean up after. That’ll do.