Random Thoughts and Pics

I've been participating in a Facebook Group called "40 Day Declutter".  There are 17 members, and we are encouraging one another to organize and declutter our homes.

I'm really good at "baby steps" where decluttering and organizing are concerned.  This week was super busy and I've been very tired, so I just did a few little things.

This probably looks small and unimportant, but it was a valuable "little thing" to do.  This tub holds kids' videos, 95% or more of which are Veggietales. Most mornings, our 2 youngest watch a Veggietales video on one of our computers. The advantage of doing it at the computer is that it is easier to contain Daniel that way; in the basement, with the fences down, he can roam freely and wreak all kinds of havoc.

So anyway, this bin of DVD's was a MESS.  People kept wandering off with the cases, and there were random DVD's just thrown into the bin or stuck in broken jewel cases from Sam's.  I went through them all, matched what I could, threw out broken jewel cases, exchanged some of the DVD's for less watched DVD's in the basement and voila, big improvement.

Here's another not so small project, and it happened last week but I forgot to mention it.  It was all Kevin's doing as he is the strong, capable guy who does most of the heavy lifting and hard physical work around here.  (And the older kids do the rest of the hard physical work -- I'm wimpy these days.)

So, explanation...way way way back when, 16 years ago, Kevin and I were married. And my parents offered to buy us a table as we didn't have one.  We chose this one, which was unfinished.  Kevin spent hard days in our garage finishing it, and it has served us very well.  It looks huge and it is...but it currently has 2 leaves in it. When we first were married with no children yet, we had it up without the leaves and it was large but not ridiculous.

Ok, so then we had a bunch of kids.  Obviously.  The table is now fairly crowded, and we found that children kept accidentally getting food stuck in the cracks where the leaves are inserted. So last week, Kevin glued it all together and filled in the cracks.  So now the table is essentially permanently huge, and the kids don't have to work to keep food out the cracks.  (They found it hard to be as careful as we wanted them to be, no surprise.)

This is really nice as it means we can distribute children along the table without thinking about where the cracks are.

At some point in the distant, distant future, our home will not be full of children and the table will be ridiculously large, but we will cross that bridge later.

What else happened this week?  Well it was busy and tiring for me, and I often felt rather unwell by the end of the day.  The big girls attended an American Heritage Girls meeting at another troop, which took care of a requirement for their badges.  I went to the dentist and the obstetrician.  We sold a bunch of eggs, which was good as our chickens have been laying furiously.  The children had a pretty good week of school in the middle of it all.  My current plan is to have a hard hitting next week, then a week to pull things together, then I'll have the children's year of work assessed by a certified State of Ohio teacher the following week.

May will include more art, more reading, more writing, and finishing up some math that needs completed.  But we're moving down to a more relaxed mode soon.

The baby keeps being very active.  She doesn't have a name yet, and we've not even discussed a name.  We'll get around to it sometime :-).