Downsizing

Ayden and I spent the day at my parents house today!  He had a great day.  This two longer naps, and sometimes another late cat nap, per day thing has been AMAZING!  His overall mood is better and his cues make more sense. It's also nice to be able to work in three hour intervals as apposed to two.    Our nights have been going much better as well.  He still wakes often but doesn't cry as much.  We also made a final decision about our sleeping arrangement but that's for another post on another day :).

The three older boys went fishing with my middle sister and her husband on their new boat and the three babies hung out with my parents, my oldest sister and me.  My mom has been busy with the sewing portion of the matching muffins birthday presents we are making for my nephew (who turns 1 tomorrow!) and niece who will be turning 1 in September.  I forgot to snap a picture, but I will be sure to include one in tomorrow's post.  Our plan was to paint the muffin cups with acrylic paint, but surprise surprise, the paint wouldn't stick to the non-stick surface of the pan.  Our solution?  We gorilla glued matching fabric into the bottom.  It worked out well!  At first it will just be an in and out/one-to-one game but they'll be matching and naming colors soon enough! :)

Before I headed to meet up with the fam I took care of a few things around the house.  The biggest item was selling our office furniture:

I was so proud that I actually took initiative.  I put it up on Facebook and had a message from a taker within a few hours.  David and I have been going round and round for the past few months about whether or not we want to sell our house.  Our ultimate goal is to build on some farm land (probably on my family farm where we hung out all day today) but we haven't been able to decide what to do in the meantime.  I think what we've decided on is putting our house on the market and then looking to buy or rent a much smaller house to live in while we save and plan for our dream house.  Selling this furniture is step 1 towards downsizing!  We have another smaller desk in this same room that hardly gets used so David is going to move his computer to it and we'll have much more space.  David asked what I was planning on doing with the extra space and I said, "I'll actually spend time in our office and let my mind feel at peace while I'm in there..."  I'm not a fan of clutter and it is WAY over-cluttered in there.  We used to have separate offices but one of them (mine) is now Ayden's room.  We did a pretty good job merging and making a lot of stuff work in the space; but a lot of stuff is still a lot of stuff no matter how you arrange it.  I am hoping that getting rid of the desk/hutch, chair, filing cabinet and shelves pictured above will make us feel a little lighter and will motivate us to keep purging.  We are working towards a more simple lifestyle and this is only the beginning.  All of our "stuff" has been weighing us down!  We want to minimize and downsize and really focus on playing, living, and enjoying our lives.

We are also planning on painting, rearranging, and giving the whole room a bit of a facelift, as well as a few other minor projects that may help our house sell a little quicker.  I'll try to post about it all along the way!

Tomorrow is a very busy day!  We've got a birthday party, a wedding shower and a 5k race to run...  I'm going to be one tired mama by the end but it will be fun!

Ayden after another day playing hard with his cousins :)

~Sarah