How I Spent My Snow Day

We had a snow day yesterday here in PA.  Since I was home from work, I figured I'd tackle a project that had been bugging me for a while.

We have a piece of furniture in our kitchen that used to house baking and cooking items.  When the kids were born, we started adding some art supplies to the mix.  Things got out-of-control pretty quickly.  And now, it looks like this:

I know.  I KNOW.  Something needed to be done.

On any other day, I probably would have gotten in the car and run to Ikea to get some storage baskets.  But we had over a foot of snow yesterday.  By mid-morning, my yard looked like this:

And that was just the beginning, so I had to improvise.  I gathered a few boxes that were ready for recycling, and cut the tops off.

Then I put masking tape around the edges so they were smooth...

And wrapped the box with some pretty wrapping paper.

And now, my cabinet looks like this:

Ahhhhhh.   That's better.

We're snowed in again today, so we'll see what else I can tackle.  In the meantime, I'm staring at this photo I have tucked in with the plates in our kitchen.  It was taken in sunny St. Thomas, long before kids, or toys, or coloring books.

C'mon, Spring!

Organization Tip for Busy Moms

Kids come with a lot of stuff.  I'm not just talking about the toys, either.  I'm talking about all of the other things a family accumulates along the way.


Some of these things aren't worth saving, but there are definitely things that I do want to save: some of the artwork they create, the certificate from their first Phillies game, their Baptismal candles, little snips of curls from that first haircut, and notes from their relatives...you get the idea.

The problem is, I'm not really a scrapbooker.  Chasing around after these three little ones is crazy enough, but add a full-time job and a master's thesis on top of that, and the last thing I feel like doing is decorating albums with patterned paper and stickers.


Here's my solution.  I bought big boxes when the kids were born and labeled each one with a kid's name.  When I receive something that I want to save, I toss it in the box.  Maybe when things slow down around here, I'll go through the boxes and sort them into albums.  But maybe I won't.  It really doesn't matter -- they look fine in the boxes, and I can still look through them easily.  AND, they'll be easy to pass along to them someday.

And this little guy LOVES to look through his box with me to see what I've saved.