A special reading nook

I LOVE to read! There is nothing like settling in with a great book and being brought away into another time or place. I've always wanted to encourage a passion for reading in our children and have had baskets with books throughout the house so there is always one nearby when the mood strikes.

Our new house has all kinds of fabulous nooks and crannies...it's a hide and seek dream! And I decided to turn one of those nooks into a special reading spot for the kids.

Step 1- Buy a couple touch lights...the LED ones were 2 for $4 at Wal-Mart and I was able to hang them up myself easily.

Step 2- Throw in a couple pillows, lovies or blankets to make it more cozy. I love that their nook has doors on it for privacy, but you could easily add a curtain too.

Step 3- Add books.

Done! It took me all of 2 minutes to give them a quiet spot of their own in which their love of reading can grow.

The long awaited Family Organizing Center

Warning- this post is not for everyone! Not that any of my posts are, but many of you may think that it's extreme to dedicate an entire wall to organizing your family's schedules/paperwork. I could probably use another three walls. :-) An entire family organizing room. Can you even imagine!?! Sigh.....Okay, snapping out of it.

Ta-da.....

Yes, it's not all hanging entirely straight and yes it's driving me crazy too. :-)

The magnetic calendars you'll recognize from here.

Other features of our organizing center include:

•Two cutesy dry erase To-Do lists, one for me and one for Jeremy. These are made by taking an old picture frame, spray painting it, scrapbooking a cute paper to go inside, and writing on the glass with a regular dry erase marker.

•A "mailbox" folder holder for each of our family members. I originally looked for these in the store, but all I could find were plain ugly clear ones and it was like $25 for three of them...and we needed four. Jeremy and I made all of these out of one $10 sheet of particle board and two 99 cent bottles of paint. Plus we have enough of the particle board left to make an awesome mailbox like this for Liliana for Christmas.

By the way, Micah is very disheartened that he has not gotten any mail in his "mailbox." When I get the mail from outside I divvy it up and usually it's all for mommy and daddy. During the school year, he'll put his folder in here but right now, he's been stuffing his bath towel inside because it drives him crazy that it's empty. And my attempts at giving him pretend mail for in there hasn't worked. So if you'd like to mail the kiddo something, it'd be much appreciated. Message me for our new address.

•A chore chart- this isn't something I was planning on putting up. I was trying to avoid the whole laminated-clip-art-looks-like-little-kids-live-here thing. But Micah insisted that he could not possibly help with chores without his chore chart hanging there. I'm hoping to redo this into a cuter something or other eventually.

•A menu board- done in the same style as the To-Do lists. My mom joked that most people who just planned out a menu for the week would consider themselves organized. I will say that we definitely don't adhere to it as much as I'd like to, but usually we end up making all of the meals, just mixing up the order.

•And finally, a little holder thing that has the pieces for the magnetic calendar and some pens, tape, etc. so I can fill out any forms I need to from school and put it right back into Micah's folder. Funny story- I was so excited to find this awesome holder thing at Goodwill for only $3! Score! Then a week later I saw it at Ikea for $2 new. Whoops!

So there you have it. We're officially organized. I will say that the thing we're enjoying the most is probably the To-Do lists. I keep finding little things throughout the day that I need to remember to work on when we get a chance. It's great to jot them down and put them out of mind for the moment. And Jeremy seems to work really well when he has a list of what he needs to do. Not all husbands do well with that, but he appreciates knowing exactly what I need of him and the satisfaction of being able to cross it off the list when finished.

Obstacle Course!

This is a GREAT activity to do on long snowy winter days stuck inside the house, and it turns out it works for long way-too-hot summer days stuck inside the house too!

Grab anything and everything you can use to do something physical with...(think hula hoops, jump ropes, masking tape put on the floor in a line, folding chairs with a blanket draped across them to make a tunnel, couch cushions, brooms held sideways as a limbo stick, you get the idea).

Line them up in any order. If you don't have a great big space, you can make the course run throughout your house, in different rooms and down hallways.

Show your kids what to do...hop off the kitchen chair, do a somersault to the couch cushions, hop on one leg onto each couch cushion, crawl under the blanket tunnel, do a silly dance and tip toe along the masking tape line. Keep it short at first and then you can add things on as they get bored.

After they've played for awhile, let them rearrange and come up with their own course. They'll love being the boss! Liliana's involved swinging while singing.

We are very blessed to have a large space with lots of large motor type toys for this kind of thing...we have a mini trampoline with bar, cube climber with slide, crawl through tunnel, swing and gymnastic rings in our basement. Liliana is a VERY physical child and plays with those types of toys more than anything else, but you can improvise with this idea with anything you have in your house. Creating the course is half the fun!

Check out Micah showing off his mad gymnastics skills...

This is also a fun thing to do outside and you could even incorporate water into some of the activities to cool off!

It's the Little Things

I'm easily pleased, as evidenced by my sheer delight in our new marker holder!

This is how we used to store our markers.

This is my new 25 cent marker holding solution.

It's an ice tray that makes long skinny ice cubes to stick in water bottles. I got it from a rummage sale for a quarter. Jeremy was like, "Really???" And I was all, "Yep."

Now you can sleep better at night since you won't be up wondering how to properly store your markers in a neat and easy to use manner. You. Are. Welcome!

Moving!

I'm baaaaaaaaacccccckkkkk!!!!! Our lives have finally gotten organized enough to return to blogging. Not too shabby considering we unloaded the moving truck three days ago. I can't stand chaos (shocking, I know!), so we worked like crazy to get boxes unpacked quickly. We still have a box here or there and everything isn't quite set up how I want it, but it's good enough to take a break. I'm very thankful to have someone from the church coming later this week to watch the kids while I finish getting organized!

So moving....

Moving day went VERY smoothly. Because we're in seminary, we know a lot of people who move a lot. I basically sat back on moving day while these geniuses managed to pack in way more stuff than should ever fit in a moving truck and left us room to spare. I joked about needing to go rummage saling to fill the space. Jeremy didn't find it funny.

We're very thankful for all of our friends who helped us out! The truck was loaded up in two hours and then we were able to finish cleaning the house while a neighbor watched the kiddos (thanks Amy!)

We "camped" out in the new house that night since our beds were still loaded and the next morning a bunch of church people came and helped us unload. I think they're going to have a difficult time finding people to help us load up next summer when it's time to leave now that everyone has seen how much crap we have, how heavy it is, and how we wanted all the heavy stuff up or downstairs.

The kids have adapted very well considering. They've been a little on the naughty side lately, but more because we've been too busy to spend time with them than that they're upset we're in a new place.

They also enjoyed all of the time spent with their grandparents during the moving process and we were GREATLY appreciative of all their help!

A couple of things that helped all of us transition better:

•We talked about it...a LOT! We read books about moving, we researched the new town and told the kids things like, "Wow! Our new library has quite the collection of Star Wars books! Micah- would you like to read those when we get to our new house?"

•We visited ahead of time and brought the kids and the camera with. When we went through the house I said things like, "And here is the kitchen where I'll make you macaroni and cheese." to correlate it to existing things we did at our current house. We took pictures and then showed them to the kids often, so when we actually got here, the house felt very familiar to us all. Plus, I knew where I wanted to put stuff then since I had been looking at photos for months.

•We included the kids in the packing process..."Do you want to bring your ponies with you or leave them here? Where should we put them at our new house? Let's look at the pictures and decide!" We also had them around for loading up the truck even though it would have been way easier not to. Liliana did NOT do well with this. I was really surprised since Micah was her age when we moved the first time and it was a great therapeutic experience for him to be involved. Liliana screamed because she didn't want her toys going on the truck no matter how many times we explained it to her. She was excited to ride her bike up the ramp though.

•Moving is a great time for transitions and "losing" items in the move. Any really loud annoying toys got "accidentally left" at our old house. It's also happens to be the law in our new town that you're not allowed to have sippy cups if you are over the age of 2. How convenient!

•We role played scenarios with our kids since our new neighborhood is MUCH different than living in seminary student housing. We pretended different people rang the doorbell and had them practice what to do besides shouting, "Come on in, it's open!" like Micah did at first.

•Not always possible, but Jeremy and I went for just the day the week before we moved and totally unpacked and organized the kitchen. It was AWESOME to be able to walk in and have one room completely set up and ready!

On a funny note- we asked Micah what he thought tomorrow was (the correct answer being Daddy's first day of work.) Instead he said, "Hmmmm....are we packing up again?!?!" Jeremy and I both simultaneously shouted, "NOOOO!!!"

"Celebrate Birthday"

The posts for the next two weeks or so will probably be very sporadic. We're in the middle of moving and it's not really worth blogging about...packing, unpacking, rearranging, repacking, wondering why we have all this crap....pretty much sums it up. Here's a photo of what our living room looks like right now.

Which explains why we have nothing fun to blog about...because all of our fun stuff is packed!

The problem with moving during the summer is that Micah's birthday is in August. So we're always in transition at birthday time. Because of this, we've gotten into the habit of celebrating his birthday twice...once when we visit our family anytime remotely near his birthday and once on his actual birthday. (This year, we're adding in a half-birthday celebration with his friends in February since he won't know many friends yet on his real birthday.)

Which means Micah got to have a "Celebrate Birthday" (as he decided to call it) this past week.

He wanted a store-bought cake instead of a homemade one, because store-bought cakes have a toy on it. I couldn't argue with that logic. Check out this perfect shot of sibling rivalry. Liliana was so disappointed that it wasn't her "celebrate birthday" as well, but she was insistent that she needed to be in the picture, even if she wasn't going to smile for it.

His cousins came over to celebrate with him. Both my kids have sooooo much fun with their cousins. The age range is perfect...the three boys are older, about two years apart each and the three little girls are really close in age, just 6 months apart each. Even though we don't see them very often, Liliana says Cailyn is her very bestest friend!

And of course, presents. We didn't tell him we were going to celebrate his birthday until the day before so he wouldn't be too obnoxious about it. He got Star Wars legos, a transformer and a new bike! He was sooooo excited that it took him two days until he asked how many more days until his real birthday and how many presents he'll get then. :-P We're working on appreciating the things we have. It's not going well.

All in all, a successful "celebrate birthday" was had. I'm thankful that we're able to experience these milestones with our family even when we live so far away from them!

3 Steps to a Good Time

Step 1- Set bowl of cheerios on table with some clean shoelaces.

Step 2- Sit back and read a magazine while your children concentrate on their project, building fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination through fun!

Step 3- Model your new necklace!