Musicuentos is on Pinterest!

I’ve avoided Pinterest for a long, long time (ahem, I recognize that’s amusing considering it’s only existed for 4 years) for one simple reason: I just don’t have the time.  I don’t have time to add one more social media platform to my life.  Sure, I’d love to get involved in every new twist and trick out there, but that’s not my reality.  Reality is that as I wander my world with my three kids under 5, I hear this all the time:

Boy, you have your hands full!

You have no idea.  Well, maybe some of you do.  Martina Bex for sure does.  But my answer is always the same, a smile (sometimes forced, I have to admit) and preaching to myself as much as to them:

Who wants empty hands, though?

That hands-full comment is only slightly more common than another:

I don’t know how you do it.

I’ve got an answer for that one, too:

I don’t have a choice.

On a serious note, I know I do have a choice, and recent events in Florida have shown us that sometimes overwhelming darkness in life leads people to make terrible choices.  Around my house, though, by God’s grace alone, so far we’ve chosen to walk through another day, and usually we choose thriving over surviving.

Sometimes I chronicle my life by the most influential sentences people have spoken to me.  When my dad said, “Let’s try this homeschooling thing.”  When my husband said, “You should start a blog.”  When Thomas Sauer asked, “What are you using Twitter for?”  When Diego Ojeda asked, “Do you want to help us start this Twitter chat for language teachers?”  Most recently, when my friend Joyce said, “Have you heard of FlyLady?”  She was trying to help me any way she could from a thousand miles away, and boy did she.   As I slowly make some sense of organizing my life, this FlyLady thing has offered one particular piece of advice that is changing my world:

You can do anything for 15 minutes.

That’s it.  How simple is that?  One of the things that keeps me from doing things like organizing my daughter’s 3-year-old preschool notebook with all the handprint reindeer and similar keepsakes, like posting the photos of my kids on Google+ for my parents, or even writing a blog post, is that I know I’m going to get sucked in and suddenly it will be an hour later and I’ll be kicking myself that now there’s not enough time to make the dinner I’d planned and what are we going to do?  But FlyLady told me, you can do anything for 15 minutes.  Set the timer, and when it goes off, then stop.  ABSOLUTELY STOP.  So I did.  I set my online stopwatch and I have a list of things I can spend 15 minutes on today: journaling, organizing photos, answering emails, blogging, developing a resource, working on the podcast, and so on.  I don’t always get to them.  But I get to some of them.  And it amazes me how much I can accomplish doing something for 15 minutes a day, especially in contrast to doing nothing for weeks because I can’t get myself psychologically ready to tackle something I know is going to take me an hour and a half.  Sound familiar?  Try the 15-minute solution and see if it works for you!

Anyway, I decided to broaden the principle to Pinterest.  I can’t sit and sift through Pinterest boards.  I can’t click on every idea I see and save it and think about how I’m going to use it tomorrow. But one pin?  I can do one pin!  Some days I don’t. Some days I do two.  But I try to keep myself to one pin a day.  After a while, I guess we’ll see what will become of it!

Follow Musicuentos on Pinterest and here in the comment section, will you let me know where I can find you on Pinterest?  15 minutes with your pins could help me on my journey to be a better teacher – or cook, or whatever!