{ 7 comments }
Ah, the living room. Once a place of no functional space now brightens my day. This corner of our room (where our Christmas tree stood) has always baffled me. Our large painting has always hung here, leaving little options for filling up the space around it: maybe a plant or a chair. It has always frustrated me because there are so many things that should be in this room. Like blocks and my girls’ art and my books and random projects we like to pick up and work on without storing in some other room, etc. This is our family space where we begin our morning and Bobby and I end our night. Shouldn’t this room work better for us??!!
Two enormous changes. One, moving my big blue painting and two, bringing a bookcase downstairs.
{ 14 comments }
It seems like all we do is prepare food, eat food, and clean up from eating food with a family of six. Do you ever feel that way sometimes? We recently started a chart of “dinner helpers” who are responsible for, well, helping with dinner. Caroline, 6, and Johanna, 4, are the only two on the schedule. They usually help in the kitchen and set the table. Depending on which child is the helper for the night, I place emphasis on different things. Johanna loves standing on a chair and working alongside me and Caroline loves creating elaborate centerpieces and making name cards. It has thankfully become a real help and quite enjoyable for the two of them.
{ 6 comments }
We don’t buy bread. And for that reason, I am supposed to be on top of things in terms of baking our daily bread, rolls, etc. This is definitely a weakness lately– just ask my family. They know those days well by eating crackers with their lunch. I’m pretty tired of it, too. You see, if the morning goes by without the ingredients getting themselves into the bread machine by 8:30: no loaf. If the morning goes by and it is 10am: nothing on the dough cycle. So the morning-timing dictates our eating bread. ( I could do the delay cycle at night, but am usually too tired to even think about bread at night.)
For months I’ve talked Bobby’s ear off about creating a “baking station” in the kitchen. A corner where everything always sits, waiting to be used to make a loaf: the bread machine, bread book, measuring cups, and measuring spoons. The mornings when I am grumbling under my breath, hurriedly gathering ingredients and searching all the drawers for measuring cups and more salt, I’m thinking of how easy life would be with a baking station.
{ 8 comments }
Good morning. I’d like you to meet my favorite new hues of my otherwise unexciting kitchen.
These colorful jars have a place on my kitchen window sill, a place where glasses usually sit (Bobby’s glass forgets about its place at the water station often), random buttons and other tiny objects, my herbs, and the likes. It is a shame, too, because there is such beautiful light that floods that window during the day. But now these beauties let that light shimmer through them.
{ 14 comments }
For the past week I’ve been building up momentum to totally change up my house. I don’t know if it is the hole where the Christmas tree was or the new year or lack of enthusiasm with my house (and lack of functionality) right now, but it has become the obsession of the weekend. I’ve been known this weekend to be working on one thing and rush to another–as an idea pops up in my head–afraid I might forget it if I don’t tackle it that moment. It has been rather thrilling to have ideas come to me as to what our family needs in terms of functional spaces.
I decided this weekend that I am done with aesthetically-pleasing-only spaces and surfaces. It just doesn’t work anymore in a house of four (homeschooled) children and a mother who needs spaces to work.
{ 6 comments }
We recently spent $3 on three bags of corn at a fly fishing shop next to Boiling Springs Lake. Of course I fought Bobby on it, trying to convince him that the kids could still have fun in the freezing cold by walking around the lake and not feeding the ducks. (I’m not always a party pooper.) He claimed that feeding the ducks was the only way to enjoy the lake, or so his ducking-feeding childhood had convinced him of it.
Bobby’s memories of the lake won out, thank goodness. It would have been a rather freezing duck-watching day without the corn. He’s always right, doggone it.
{ 7 comments }
While some are getting healthier and others are just getting sick, there has been some time to flop down on the couch for sticker books and weaving with the healthier girls. Whether myself or my children, sickness always makes me flop down on the couch when I would otherwise be running around in my usual rhythm.
{ 6 comments }
