After Christmas

So, when we returned home from our holiday travels we knew we were going to have to do some rearranging in order to get all the new toys in the house. It occurred to me, even before Christmas began, that if we never phased toys out as we brought new ones in, our house would literally be taken over with toys. This is the only problem with generosity. A friend of mine shared with me once that her sister's family adopted a tradition at holidays that each child would be charged with choosing a toy that they didn't play with much anymore and they put them together to give to the underprivledged. I think this is such a good idea. This year was the first year that our oldest, Andrew (3 1/2) started to ask why I was moving some things out into the garage or bagging them up. I think as the kids get older I'd like to adopt this practice to promote giving.

Not only did we get on a rampage with minimizing the toys in our house, we are more like on a general rampage of downsizing for the sake of both comfort and aesthetics as we begin to think more seriously about how the house will show to potential buyers. While this prospect is still in the future a bit, we'd like to enjoy the changes we make a little instead of just doing things to sell the house. On the horizon we have: replacing the dining room set of table and hutch with bar stools for our bar and a much smaller table. The set we have now belonged to my grandmother and is a beautiful set, just too big for our little space. Eventually we'd like to get some painting done and redone and replace our floors. Ahhh, if money were no object...

Since I'm on the subject of changes, it's worth noting that we also changed the bedroom arrangement for the kids again. Since the last update on this I'm pretty sure that we had Anna and Andrew sharing Andrew's room. This worked out really nicely and was fun for us to see their friendship blossom, but it got to where they would play so late into the night that they were literally losing sleep. So, then we thought we'd move Alissa in with Andrew since he really loved having a roommate and I forgot to mention that near the end of the Andrew/Anna era, Anna really starting into these crying sessions every night. We thought it best to leave her in a room alone for a while. Andrew loved having the baby in with him. It was only a week or so before we traveled for the holidays where the girls shared a room and did fabulously. So, when we returned home we finally moved everyone into the room they belong in. The girls are in their cute pink room with their correct names on the wall and Andrew is once again flying solo in his cool racing stripe room (also with his name on the wall). So far so good!