Crafty Clutter

Yesterday afternoon we decided to head into town so that Lem could go and see the baby chicks that one of the stores has every year before Easter. It was a lot of fun, in spite of the fact that the first thing that she tried to do was poke the poor chick in the eye.

Here are some pictures.

As far as decluttering is going, the Diabetes Association has come and gone for our pickup and we are already looking forward to the next. Tomorrow we have an appointment at 10:30 a.m. with a children’s consignment store, and so hopefully we will be able to sell a large chunk of Lem’s clothes all together.

It’s amazing how many very cute outfits that she had.

And if you got this far in my blog post, then you deserve a picture A-man’s smiling self.

We started our St. Patrick’s festivities yesterday while Ryan was at work. Lem and I baked our St. Patrick’s day cookies. The majority of our cookies were clovers, but we decided to cut out a few Buffalo cookies for Daddy, since he misses Buffalo on St. Patrick’s Day.

Here they are coming out of the oven.

I worked on frosting them, and Lem was not very interested in it. That is… until she got the bowl and spatula…. I forgot to take a picture of my frosted cookies, but I did take a picture of her nearly passed out in a sugar coma.

She was watching, Blue’s Clues… which is her new favourite thing to watch. In fact, two nights ago she was singing it in her sleep over the monitor. Interestingly enough, her speech is clearer when she is sleeping than it is when she is awake.

This morning, Ryan had started the Irish stew before I was even out of bed.

Doesn’t it look delicious?

He was proud to be using the Dutch Oven that he won last Fall from a work raffle.

Gratuitous dutch oven picture. Apparently he has “always wanted one”. Strange man, my husband.

I told him that next year we should think about doing some kind of St. Patrick’s Day breakfast, like green pancakes or something. Apparently he was way ahead of me, as we had “Irish Toast” for breakfast this morning.

You’ll note the clover made from powdered sugar.

Yum.

We needed a picture of the four of us to hang on our wall, so we headed over to my Mama’s house to ask her to take our picture. Ry carried both babies.

A picture of our little family:

And then one after Lem got bored:

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, Everyone!

Well, today we ended up giving away some items from our home.

A bag of dogfood, a kennel, a dog bed, a bunch of dog toys, a box of dog cookies, two food dishes, and our Maggie.

I hope that she enjoys her new home. She will have a little girl to play with, and hopefully a family that has more time and energy for a puppy. As much as we tried, a puppy was not a good fit with such a young family.

So much love to Maggie as she moves on. While we are working at freeing up space, it was a sad, sad way to do it.

Yesterday I decided to focus on the office. The project was cleaning and decluttering the desk and the top of Alex’s dresser (as well as a couple of boxes in the corner).

Here are some pictures of the finished desk:

Now I can sit in the office with my buddy, A-man, while Lem plays with toys on the floor around us.

I finished this project at the end of last week, but it’s taken me a few days to get pictures of it so that I can post it in the blog. It’s one of the first toys that I have knit, and I think that I will be knitting a lot more of them… they’re FAST! This one in particular was perfect since Lem’s favourite thing these days is ICECREAM!

I did mess up on the cone… blame it on having two kids and not a lot of concentration for following patterns lately.

Regardless of this, Lem was pretty excited when I passed it to her and screamed “MAMA MAKE ICECREAM” and then giggled.

Yesterday we did some hard core cleaning and decluttering. We put away our snowman dishes and brought out our beautiful blue dishes that we got for our wedding (we love them!). We also went through all of Lem’s 12-18 month clothing so that we could list and sell it. We had an appointment in the afternoon for someone to come take a look at the stuff, and she left with $80 worth of clothes (which actually didn’t even make a dent in these sorted bags, unfortunately).

We have a few more interested people in the listings that I’ve already done, and I’ll be doing some more over the next few days.

I’ll be working on a preemie sweater for my cousin as well, who just found out that she’ll have to give birth at 32 weeks. Here’s one that I made with this pattern a couple of weeks ago for an online friend:

Except I will be doing it in cream, tan, and blues… I will likely include a hat (I did with that one as well, but didn’t take pictures).

And here is my snowboarder baby, A-man.

My children have clubfoot. Lem has bilateral clubfoot, and A-man has unilateral clubfoot. We are really fortunate to have an amazing medical team at the hospital that they go to their appointments at, and neither of them have needed surgery besides a minor procedure that Lem had to release the tendon in the back of one of her feet. Both children’s feet are fully corrected (A-man’s are corrected ALREADY!), and they both wear braces to maintain the correction until they are 3 years old. Right now Lem wears her braces 12 hours a day, but A-man is new to braces and he wears them 23 hours a day minimum.

Now, my kids are pretty awesome… but they understandably do NOT like having their braces put back on for the most part. As the night-time parent here, and the person with smaller hands, I’m the one who does braces almost all the time. It’s hard sometimes. You don’t want your kids to have to be uncomfortable, but you know that it’s what they need in order to be healthy and happy down the road. I decided that I could use a little “reminder” above their changetable, so I’ve been toying with ideas for what to hang there… I thought about photographs of their feet, or of Lem walking and Alex’s feet… then I decided to do molds of their feet and hang them up. I found a recipe online for plaster made from flour, salt, and water and baked in the oven, and then I was on my way.

Our baby feet cooling after coming out of the oven.

They still needed something, even though we put food colouring into the plaster to tinge it green. So Lem and I decided to paint them yesterday afternoon.

Freshly painted. The parts that Lem didn’t paint seemed “unfinished” and I needed a way to tie in her pink ribbon, so I painted some pinky red around the areas that she didn’t paint.

Then I added some ribbon from my ribbon stash, tied it in a pretty bow, and they’re all ready to hang up.

Of course, a photo blog post wouldn’t be a photo blog post without one of my cute kids.

Have some A-man during his brace-free time this morning:

Instead of staying around the house and working on decluttering and cleaning (like we should have) yesterday, we decided to take the kids thrifting in a larger city nearby.

We left with a list of wants… blinds, curtain rods, a Spring coat for Alex, transition size jeans for me, storage solutions, etc.

Well, in spite of the longer drive, we didn’t come away with much. We found a coat and jeans, but that’s all…. next time we’ll have to try the stores closer to home.

So I started packing boxes full of stuff that needs to leave the house yesterday, and since I said that I would update as I work on decluttering, I thought that I would do so.

Yesterday we added these things to our “get rid of” pile:
-some clothes
-a scale
-an iron
-some knick knacky things
-a couple of small toys
-another box of books

I also rearranged furniture in Lem’s room so that her bed, the dresser, and her playhouse is in there. The playhouse looks big in her room, though, so we might have to change it around again and move it down to the basement when the playroom gets finished, we’ll see what we think after a few days.

We’re thinking of putting eavestrough bookshelves up in Lem’s room and possibly also in the basement playroom to make a “reading corner” down there.

To see what I mean, visit this link:

http://raisingolives.com/2009/07/raingutter-book-shelves-tutorial/

Well, I just got my knitpicks order in the mail, so I better go take a look at it (lots of yarn and a lovely book… I have some very specific projects in mind that are going to go on the needles VERY soon!)

A long awaited return to the crafty section of my blog is in order.

Yesterday, in spite of good intentions, was not the decluttery day that I had dreamed of. Instead, I spent a lot of time sewing and cutting.

Then Lem woke up from her nap and we did fingerpainting fior the first time. I thought that I should share a couple of the many pictures I took. I couldn’t help myself, she’s the cutest little artist that I know.

This morning I’m going to do a quick declutter and then I am headed into Lem’s room to rearrange furniture so we can have some living room space back. Pictures to come soon!

At least the decluttering part of Spring Cleaning.

Ry made a call today to the Diabetes Association to arrange a pick up for donated items. I’m SO excited about this. They are coming on March 16th, and I have a lot of decluttering to do before then.

So I’m going to do a blog challenge for the next 16 days. Each day at the end of the day I’m going to post an update on what areas I have decluttered and if they have gone into my “to sell” pile or my “donated” boxes/bags.

Here’s the progress that I have made in the past week to start, though:

-1 gigantic garbage bag of Lem’s clothes – TO SELL
-26 books – TO DONATE
-clothes from one of my drawers – TO DONATE
-dartboard – TO SELL
-printer – TO GO BACK TO IT’S ORIGINAL HOME
-exercise bike – TO SELL
-old crib – TO GARBAGE

Now I better go have some lunch and get going on today’s clutter busting.

🙂