Monday, November 5, 2012

Day 25: Clean out the kitchen and Day 26: Complete a project

The blog that I read that first inspired me to do this month has done some pretty radical cleaning out.  One thing that really got my attention was they cleaned out their entire kitchen.  They literally took everything out of their cabinets and laid it out so that they could see it all.  Then, they went through it and decided what they really needed and what they could get rid of.  Almost immediately, I knew this was something we needed to do.

We have a pretty decent sized kitchen, but I really don't like the way our cabinets space is set up.  We have a lot of drawers, which can make storing this difficult.  Also, I love to bake and host parties so we have a lot of kitchenware.  But there's also a lot of stuff that we don't use, and it was time for  us to go through it all and make that decision.  We didn't empty everything out like the blogger did (she mentioned how time consuming that was and we just didn't have the time for it), but we did go through each cabinet and got ride of several items.  The one that was hardest for me was a set of dishes.  They were cute dishes I got from IKEA years ago and like to use when I'm hosting my friends.  But the truth is I rarely use them.  Even when I'm hosting, I use my regular plates and nice serving dishes.  Plus, my taste has changed and I didn't like them as much anymore.  We also got ride of a lot of extra coffee mugs.  Brad and I don't drink coffee, although we love tea, but we had a LOT of coffee mugs.  In addition to the set of 12 that matches our everyday dishes we had probably 10 additional mugs.  Honestly, we rarely use any except for our Mickey and Minnie mugs that we got in Disney, but some of them have sentimental value, and it is nice to have some mugs for when you have guests that like coffee (or tea or hot chocolate).  We got ride of so much that we were able to condense all of our glassware onto two shelves instead of three.  Then, we moved our medicine containers (see earlier post) to the top shelf along with all of my cupcake decorating supplies (finally! a place for them!).  That left us a whole smaller empty shelf where the medicine used to be.  Of course, we have since filled it with straws and toothpicks, but I feel like my kitchen is so much less cluttered now, and I love it!  Now, my hope is that we don't try to fill it up again.

Day 26 was our last complete a project day.  Brad's project was to hang the shelf in Judah's room.  Back when it was still Micah's room, he was playing around while we were changing his diaper and he accidentally pulled it off the wall.  Ever since, it has been sitting on our dresser waiting to be re-hung.  Brad finally got around to it.  After over an hour of trying to find the right screws and dry wall anchors he finally got it on there securely.  I am so happy!  Now, his room looks a little more complete (although, if I was honest with myself I could give you a whole list of things I still want to do in both of the boys' rooms, but for now they're okay).

My project was to put together some busy bags for Micah.  Micah is a very busy little boy and he can be hard to wrangle sometimes, especially when we're in a waiting room of any kind.  I've seen so many pins about busy bags and how awesome they are I knew I wanted to make some.  I just haven't had the time.  So, I finally sat down, went through a LOT of blogs to find what I thought would work for Micah and set to work to make them.  I started with four bags, I'm hoping to add to the collection.  I made these shape builders out of pipe cleaners and straws, this pipe cleaner color match out of a puffs container (I still want to decorate the container, but it works for now), this pom pom stuffer our of poms poms and a take and toss container, and this shape/letter maker from popsicle sticks and velcro.  Micah actually has a bunch of different appointments coming up in the next few weeks so we'll get a chance to try them out.  I can't wait!

What about you?  Have you made any busy bags for your kids?  Share your favorite ideas!


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