On a Mission

I have been on a "decluttering/get organized" mission for the last two months.  I do not like clutter and let's just face it...kids and clutter go together.  I think that was the biggest adjustment for me in having children was the fact that there was now so much "stuff" in our home.  As I picked up after the kids all summer long, I decided that we needed to get rid of some "stuff".  We were at the beach one day with some friends and they were talking about the same thing.  We decided to do a garage sale.  I've never done this before and probably will never do it again.  I knew this was going to be a tough concept for the kids to grasp.  We have so many toys around our house that simply never get played with.  Of course they didn't want to part with anything.  I then happened to mention that if we made enough money, we would purchase a popcorn machine for the basement.  We love to do family movie nights at our house.  All of a sudden the toys started coming out of the woodwork.  Everybody was on board.  We had the garage sale in September which was eye-opening to say the least.  We sold a ton of stuff and made enough money for the popcorn machine.

The popcorn machine arrived last week and let's just say that it has been a HUGE hit.  Our home smells like a movie theater.  While everybody is at school and work, Quinn and I have gotten into the groove of just popping a little popcorn when we need a snack.  It has been so much fun.

In the process of getting ready for the garage sale, I pretty much gutted our home and it felt so good.  I am now switching my efforts to my computer which has a whole lot of clutter.  My husband who is a technology guru is amazed at the amount of memory that I consume...both in the volume of pictures that I take as well as the layers and layers of psds and now all of the videos for class.  I'm now in the process of reorganizing, backing up and deleting files that I have no need for.  I'm excited about feeling a whole lot "lighter" in all areas of my life.  

I'm also starting to actually print out some pictures.  Through the process of creating my heritage album, I realized how important it is to have hard copies of some of the more important photos.    I haven't printed out pictures since I started digital scrapbooking 6 years ago.  I haven't started this yet but I am planning on going back and printing a handful of pictures for each child over the last few years.  My Documenting a Decade album is going to come in very handy because when I created those spreads, I used my favorite pictures for each year.  

The last few months have totally been consumed with creating my heritage album which I am so excited about.  I will admit though it feels good to move on and to take care of some of these things that have been building up around here.  

Now we just need a bulk shipment from Orville Redenbacher and we will be all set!