The mom takes her jeans off, crawls into bed, and eats leftover pizza! Right? Thats the social standard, I think…
Seriously though, the three kids are down for quiet time after an almost scream-free lunch, and I’m taking a load off in my room, too. While things are not exactly smooth around here, a few small successes seem to have reminded the kids that they can still have privileges and special things. The days can be fun! And when it doesn’t work out that way, they seem a bit more accepting of their punishments. So, somewhere in the last few days, maaaybe some things are sinking in?? Maybe.
I haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet, but we did some purges around our house recently in an effort to occupy the kids and give them a specific thing to focus on, and they turned out so well! The first was a bit of a toy purge. Now we have TONS of toys all packed up in the garage that no one has missed for 2+ years, so when the basement is done, we’ll do a big sort and decide between keep vs donate vs sell, but for right now, the kids have an ottoman full of toys, a tub of duplo, a tub of lego, a tub of links, and lots and lots of books. They are very satisfied with their toys, and I like our simple system. However, since Christmas and Rowan’s birthday rolled by, the ottoman is overflowing. So the kids and I emptied it out and sorted through it. I didn’t have big goal to throw everything away or anything. Just the obviously broken toys, toys with missing pieces, anything that had tape on it, etc. needed to go. The kids were shockingly on board and chose to get rid of so much!!! Our ottoman now looks like this 🙂
Yes, it WILL get mixed up in there, but at least we know it WILL close, which is the main thing. Floating around the bottom of that ottoman was about half of our duplo, and the bottom of the duplo bin contained almost all of our links, so the reorganize was a HUGE success, and our kids are happily building again! They were so proud of their hard work 🙂
The next day, Brady and I started making plans for our dining room. We are planning to add something to it soon (You can’t know until it shows up! I’m crossing my fingers and toes!) and it needed to be moved around to make space. We weren’t sure where everything would go because we had such a nice layout! I wish I had a “before” picture but I have little to no foresight, so I don’t. But I was suddenly struck with an awesome idea, and I have to say, it turned out SO nicely!!
The reality is that, once we add our mystery thing, we’ll lose more space, so extending the table will leave our dining area a little squishy. But really, if we’re growing the table for a big waffle brunch or something, we’re likely all comfortable enough around each other to be close 😉 And secondly, when our basement is finished, our tv will move downstairs, and the sitting area can shrink up just a bit, so eventually the dining area will be spacious again. I don’t even care, though. I’m SO amped for this set up! It should’ve always been this way, withe the coffee bar off the counter, and the bookshelves along that long wall. Makes SO much more sense and looks SO much nicer.
There are still lots of jobs I’d really love to get done, and I love how excited the kids get to be part of them! Moving the bedrooms around was a big hit, too. I just tend to get discouraged when SO MUCH rests on the basement getting done, because I feel like I’m often just moving messes to new locations because their forever location doesn’t exist yet. Does that make sense? But little by little, we’re getting there!
Small victories in BIG times of life.