adulting like a boss - organizing important paperwork FTW

I'm adulting like a boss today.

I went through alllll of our old medical paperwork and found the addresses of all the practitioners we've had since we left St. Louis, so I can request copies of our medical records. I have what I could get from St. Louis, but nothing from anywhere else we've lived.

And I did it because I need a new social security card. So I needed to find my birth certificate.

Somehow while I was looking for it, I decided I needed to make an emergency/house/RV binder for all of our important papers -  because we won't have a bog old file cabinet in the RV, and I need to keep all the important stuff close. I found some cool tutorials about making emergency/home binders I had previously pinned on Pinterest:

The Emergency Preparedness Red File, which has a very useful printable checklist for which documents to include, plus photos. I had to laugh at the one CD of photos they had in their book, since at my son's tender age of 10, I just filled a box with DVDs of our collective photos. But I will include a CD or DVD of photos of the inventory of our home, and the items that are important to us should there ever bee a need for insurance purposes.

I also liked Creating a Grab and Go Binder, which has the number 23 (skiddoo!) in the title, PLUS has links to some ID kits for kids and pets, which is kind of cool.

And this must be the most organized person on the planet, and if by the grace of the Universe I could manage even a fourth of the organizational skill this person has, I would be delighted. Just look at this: Home Organization 101 - Week 4, The Office. You will either feel incredibly hopeful that you, too, can have this picture perfect life, or vastly inferior. I'm somewhere in between, but it sure is nice to see what it might be like if I could accomplish it. Anyway, scroll down to the binders part - that's what I'm really referring to.

And back to the binders *I* made....

Thinking about making the Important Papers binder led to my decision to completely reorganize my current medical paperwork, which led to my digging out alllll the old medical paperwork for all three of us and making an organized binder for each of us (mine is actually two binders - one of just my medical history, and one with everything else, because I'm overly complicated like that).

As you can see, in there are my CDs of MRIs, echoes, x-rays and CT scans I've had. I have tabs for: Test Results, Family History, Primary, Genetics, Allergist, Physio, Vision, Dental, Receipts, Meds/Supplements.

I'm have contact info for all, am going to add dates of all visits with reasons for visit for a quick reference. There will be an About Me page at the beginning with all pertinent info including blood type, allergies, diagnoses at a glance, doctors' phone numbers, and height.

My husband's and son's have the same information, sans Allergist and Physio, and both of their medical histories fit in one small notebook apiece, thank goodness. Theirs are MUCH easier to organize.

This has been my weekend.

I have these windows of brain lucidity and absence of anxiety/overwhelm where I can actually manage these types of things, so I am taking full advantage. I don't know why I felt the need to share this other than I am feeling pretty darn accomplished right now, because I have created a system of organization that makes complete sense and also makes everything really easy to find. I'm not finished, but now I will have ALL of our medical records for the first time in EVER, and that is pretty amazing. I just have to call a dozen places Monday to procure said records, but this has been put off for the longest time because I couldn't remember who to call - but now I know!