THIS PAST WEEKEND

This past weekend was one for the books! Ken and I promised each other to not schedule anything for the weekend (well, except church and our picnic lunch afterwards), so that we can spend every moment at home getting things done around the house. It was long overdue and it felt so good. I can’t remember the last time that we cleared her schedule is like this to prioritize our home, and it was a great reminder that we need to schedule not just cleaning days, but downtime for our family.  I’m trying to get in the habit of being proactive about this, which for now means saving one weekend day for nothing else except to be at home and with each other. One day doesn’t seem like a lot, but even that has been hard to get in.

We had made a spring to do list earlier this year, and there was so much on there that we hadn’t been able to do because of the busy summer, and then start of a new school for Sloane, and a new job for me. Besides closing the pool, which was also long overdue, our bushes and hedges were totally out of control. We spent a good portion of Saturday trimming the hedges, and picking up all the branches and leaves. Here are some other things we got done: filled water bags to put around the pool, trimmed bushes, cleaned and bagged up the clippings (for ginormous trash bags full), vacuumed the whole house, organized and cleaned the mudroom, organized food pantry, organized linen closet, sorted and organized the attic, put away summer clothes and re-organized winter clothes, cleaned garage, organized utility room, cleared out bar room, painted bar room.  We still have more to do but we made such good headway!

As we went to bed on Sunday night, Ken and I remarked that it was a great feeling to tackle so much of our to do list, but how the best result if it was that it no longer felt like we were in survival mode because we had gotten a handle on some of the basic needs of our home. That is a big theme for us this upcoming year: priorities. Ken and I have had a lot of discussion lately about what it means to prioritize our time and resources. Especially as the girls get older, I want us to be very conscientious and intentional about how we live and what things we live for, so we don’t wake up one day and wonder what happened to our life. 

The photos above are from our weekend and church on Sunday morning, and below are a couple of photos that are indicative of our fall days: Sloane, always ready for roasting marshmallows over the fire pit with her stick handy, and family walks that we tried to get in after work...when it didn’t get dark before we got home. You guys, it’s happening: it’s dark and it’s cold and I am bracing myself for the next few months. Battle strategies, coming up!