Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Spring Cleaning

While we've only been in our house for (just over) a year, we desperately needed to do some spring cleaning! Iowa gave us yet another snowy weekend in spring and we used our (hopefully last) wintery weekend to do just that. I pulled out some of our lesser used toys to donate to a friend having an adoption garage sale, got our downstairs playroom severe weather ready so it's safe to head to the basement with the littles if severe weather strikes, cleared out the toy storage room so we can build a new storage system in the next few weeks, and overall got the basement ready for our next big home improvement project: an egress window in the basement. Our goal is to turn that into a fifth bedroom for our oldest in the future. Until then, we'll use that side of the basement as a game room for the bigs during daycare. The real highlight of our weekend was our Family Game Night the minis created for us while we worked in the basement.

I have to admit, I had sentimental moment as I put each of the toys into the garage sale pile (thank goodness I'm not the one actually selling them because I don't think I would actually go through with it if I were). I'm odd and remember where each of these toys came from and the story behind each toy. That little tea cart was pushed around for hours upon hours by kids for many years. I bought it at the height of my middle son's tea party obsession. It was a beloved daycare toy. It was also the push toy that forced me to create the rule "we don't run over our friends!"
The stroller was a gift from my mother-in-law to my daughter. It was her favorite toy for a long time. The little doll bed came with a doll set, but we have numerous sets of doll beds so one had to go. The Little People amusement park was the toughest of all. I spent one summer scouring garage sales for used LP items. Because of those early morning Saturday sale adventures we have sooooo many LP sets it's unreal. The amusement park playset was one of the lesser played with sets nowadays. But boy do I have some good stories about that summer we spent garage sale-ing!

Read about our epic Family Game Night here. I was incredibly impressed with our minis and their creativity!

We cleaned, we got rid of our never or hardly used items....which only meant we could order more stuff (wink wink). In all seriousness, I've been looking for a better way to do sensory bins and I found this table at IKEA. The bins are the perfect size plus it's a useful table when the sensory bins aren't in use! $50 well spent!

This was the first weekend in quite a while that I didn't leave the house at all or spent writing, researching, and planning. It was kinda nice to be busy in a different kind of way, although I'm sure I'll retract that statement once we get moving on digging the hole for the egress window. Our basement is finally clean, albeit crowded because one and a half of our spaces are cleared out at the moment, and organized! If that doesn't make for a successful weekend, I don't know what does.