Organizing Like Mad

January is such a great month to declutter and clean out the house, isn't it? I actually started a big household purge right after Thanksgiving and got a good jump on this year! I have been throwing out and donating things left and right. I also set aside things that my mom might be able to sell, most of which is kid stuff. Mom does an amazing job selling things for Jill, Kathy, and me. She's awesome! On top of all that, I've been using up things and not restocking my stash; beauty product samples, food in the pantry/freezer, etc. It feels extra clean and organized around the house lately! 

Molly and Hattie helped me clean out and reorganized the pantry one day. We pulled almost everything out of the pantry, wiped down the shelves, I put in a new piece of carpet over the old and super dated stuff, and then we put all of the food back in the pantry. I reused a little cart from the bathroom as our new snack station and pulled all of the overstock food from the mudroom into the pantry so everything is in one spot. It made a huge difference! 

After: 

One thing that I wanted to tackle during the shutdown was updating our main bathroom a little bit. I didn't want to spend very much money at all but still wanted to give it a little facelift. Here's some before pictures:

After:
We took down the old cumbersome towel rack and put up a row of hooks (that we already had - yes!) for towels. The medicine cabinet came down and Matt put up a new and much bigger mirror. He also replaced the light fixture. Due to the wiring, we opted to install an updated light bar (instead of the super cute farmhouse-style fixture I picked out). Our intention was for the bathroom facelift to be a minimally invasive procedure that didn't cost a lot, and I think we did just that! The super cute organizer on the wall is from Hobby Lobby and it works beautifully. We put up a new towel bar and moved the hairbows to behind the door. It feels more open in the bathroom without the medicine cabinet and towel rack sticking out so far. I painted the bead board a fresh coat of antique white and the walls gray, both of which were leftover from other projects in the house. Matt installed a new white heater and then we were done! Probably the hardest part was turning the ladder to paint in such a small space. :) I'm really happy with the results!

January Review

Well, once the kids returned to school on January 7th, our life got pretty quiet. :) Looking back on the calendar, we did a lot of regular things; working at the Young Life office, taking Charlie and Alanna to basketball practice, piano lessons, small group, dinner guests... all of the normal things in our life! The calendar is also marked several times with who was sick because OH MY GOODNESS we had had a lot of sickness in our house this winter. This month, really. Ugh.

The government shutdown was the longest ever shutdown at 35 days meaning Matt was home from work from December 22nd until January 27th. It was epic! It was such a gift of time, really. Matt spent some time doing a few home projects, but the big project he worked on was turning our 2016 blog posts into a printed book. He spent probably a hundred hours (for real) on creating the books and the end result is five new volumes of family pictures and memories. It's so great! It was a really good time to get that project done. Matt actually started the next year and got halfway through 2017 before the government reopened. Yay! We got a lot of comments about the shutdown and most of them were questions about how we're doing. Great! We're doing great. I'm grateful that we don't live paycheck to paycheck because not receiving a paycheck or two wasn't a big deal. It was really neat to see our community rally around government employees by offering free services (like free labor from a local appliance repair shop) and extra food banks and the school district offering super fast processing on free and reduced lunch applications. There was one food bank set up for 1/28 which was Matt's first day back to work after the government reopened, and a retired BLM employee was helping out at it. That retiree wasn't seeing any BLM/USFS people at the food bank so he called one of Matt's coworkers and tried to get some people to come down and that coworker pushed Matt to attend so when it was all said and done, Matt came home with a trunkload of food from the food bank. Um, ok! I'll take free food as long as there's enough for those that really need it. We took advantage of a few other freebies; one was a free $40 gift certificate from a front range law firm, one was a pair of tickets to the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, and the other was a pair of tickets to a Harlem Globetrotters game (we're saving the tickets for Charlie's birthday!). Seriously, what a gift. Thanks, community, for loving on government employees and their families! :) 

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Hattie got herself dressed. Her undies were on backwards, her pants were backwards and inside out, and her slipper socks were on upside down so the heel was really bunchy on top of her foot. But she nailed her shirt! :) 

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I was working on a Young Life mass mailing and hired Molly to help me. She put stamps on envelopes for quite some time! I told her I would pay her one penny for every stamp she put on, and she earned $1.12 for her 112 stamps. A few days later, I paid Charlie and Alanna one penny for each envelope they stuffed. I had 350 invitations to send out so it was actually really helpful. I rounded up on Charlie and Alanna since their job was a little more putzy. Best $4 spent that week! :)  

 This was one of Charlie's worksheets from school. The last question was so cute! 

It says: 2. How do the pioneer chores compare to household chores today? Are they the same or different? Would you prefer to live then or now? Give reasons to your choice.

Charlie wrote: I would want to live now, because there would be no electricity, no books, and no sinks. 

No books! Boy, that kiddo loves to read. :) :) 

APEX Center in Arvada

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We ate breakfast at the hotel - I love a good continental breakfast! We took our time checking out of the hotel and then made one return at a store before heading to the APEX Center in Arvada. It's a big rec facility that has an indoor water park, a lap pool, a full gym including a rock wall, an indoor play area (like a McDonald's play place only bigger, neater, and so much cleaner :), an ice arena, and probably a whole lot more that I don't even know about. It was priced really nicely, too. We normally don't do things like this because it's almost an automatic $75-$100 just for the day for our family! Ugh! We came in just under $50 for the day passes to the APEX Center which we thought was a really good deal. 

We got into the water right at 1 (I looked!) and swam our hearts out until probably 4:30 or 4:45. The water was really warm in both pool areas, even more so in the younger children's pool. The deeper pool had two water slides, one that required a tube and one that didn't, a circular area with a current so it felt like a toilet bowl, and a little obstacle course area. The big three kids had a BLAST! Alanna and Charlie could do the water slides so Matt and I took turns going with them. Not that they needed our help, but just to hang out together. Molly mostly wore her life jacket so she could flit from pool to pool without me having to worry about her safety. She and I spent a chunk of time together in the shallow pool area so she took it off then. At first, I wanted to keep everyone together but that just wasn't working. Eventually, Charlie and Alanna had free range of the place and Matt and I stuck with the little girls. Hattie had a good time but she was done a whole lot sooner than I anticipated. We did swim the night before at the hotel, but it wasn't super long so I don't think she got burned out of swimming from that. Matt and Hattie hung out in the shallow pool area quite a bit together; Matt's energy level matched Hattie's interest level on this particular day. 

I didn't take many pictures because we were too busy playing and swimming!

Here are a few online images of the APEX Center:

 About 3:00, we took a short break and ate some snacks that we brought in with us from the car. People were bringing in pizzas and Jimmy John's - outside food was welcome! After snack time, Hattie wanted to snuggle with her towel a bit... and you know where this is going... she fell asleep on Matt's chest for probably 30-40 minutes. Right there in the middle of it all! 

 Who knew that Nutella and pretzels could cause this big of a chocolate face!

 Alanna just coming out of the waterslide. 

 Charlie had a blast and loved the waterslides, the tube-less one in particular. 

 In the lazy river/toilet bowl thing. 

 Matt pulled two chairs together for Hattie to lay on, which she did for a short bit. But the comfort of Daddy's arms prevailed. 

 Sound asleep! I think Matt even shut his eyes and rested for a short bit.

 PRECIOUS.

After Hattie's nap, she wasn't terribly interested in going back into the water. By that time it was 3:30 or after, so she and Matt got dressed and he took her to play at the indoor play area. Charlie, Alanna, Molly, and I stayed in the water for another hour before getting dressed and meeting Matt and Hattie in the play area. The kids played there for another 45 minutes or more and spent every last ounce of energy they had. Sheesh! 

This is a stock photo of the indoor play area. It was really neat!

What a full and busy day! I think we got in the car to go find some supper somewhere between 5:30 and 6. We stopped at Noodles and Co. for dinner before driving home that night. We had such a fun trip! It was so neat to experience something new together and to do something that we don't normally do. I think we'll go back again! 

Christmas Getaway Gift

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Matt and I opted to give the kids less gifts this year in favor of doing an out-of-the-ordinary family experience. It really worked well and is something we will probably keep doing! We bought and wrapped up three gifts for each kiddo to open when we celebrated Christmas, still plenty for them. Our un-wrap-able gift to the kids was an overnight in Denver and day passes to an indoor waterpark! Because we weren't traveling to Minnesota this year, we went on our adventure toward the tail end of Christmas Break. It was so much fun!

We left for Denver around 9 on Friday and made a stop at the outlets in Castle Rock. We didn't shop much; Charlie likes to go into the UA outlet, and I wanted to go to two stores. It was a pretty short stop! We took a picture by this giant Christmas tree... with the bright blue Colorado sky behind it. :) There was a lot of salt on the ground from a recent snow and apparently Hattie noticed it crunching beneath her feet as she walked because she said, "Why is there so much crumbs on the floor?" Ha!

 We ate lunch at Sam's club - the price just couldn't be beat! 

After lunch, we drove to Union Station to see if the big Christmas tree was still up and it was! It's decorated so densely that the green can hardly be seen. :) Who puts a clock in a Christmas tree?! It's so fun to look at, and Union Station is a really neat place to hang out. We stayed for a bit and then walked over to Tattered Cover bookstore on 16th street. Matt and I took turns sitting with the kids in the kids section and walking around the store looking at books. The kids would have been happy to stay there the rest of the day! 

 There was a giant Christmas tree right outside of Union Station, too. 

 This is Matt's brave face; he wasn't feeling awesome that day. I think he was feeling under the weather in part due to the last and final rabies vaccination shot and because he was legitimately coming down with something. (In hind sight, I'm grateful that he just powered through. If we would have waited until we were all healthy, we still wouldn't have gone on our adventure. For the love!)

We stayed the night at the Residence Inn in Littleton which was also a short 5 minutes from Costco. We swam in the pool for an hour and then and ordered a Costco pizza for supper. It was a fun day! The BIG adventure was the next day....  

Ice Skating at Pueblo Ice Arena

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Debbie invited us to meet her in Pueblo and go ice skating one afternoon so we piled into the car and went for it. It was SO FUN and so cheap! We paid $3 per person to skate for two hours and that included our skate rentals. Talk about a deal! Oh my word we had a blast. I was so glad that Matt could come (again - shutdown! yay!) to help with Molly and Hattie. The ice arena had a handful orange PVC pipe walker-type things to help with balance and they were amazingly helpful. Matt instructed Molly on how to push with one of her feet just like she does when she rides her scooter, and whatever he told her totally worked! She took off like a rocket! Charlie held onto the wall at first but then he was gliding along pretty well fairly quickly. He fell quite a bit, but nothing too bad. Alanna used the walker thing for a bit and also held onto the wall, but she was also doing well just holding onto one of our hands. It took a little bit for Hattie to get the hang of it; we started off with me holding her hands which felt like I was pulling on her arms so much. Her legs kept flopping all over the place and it was hard for her to understand what was going on because I don't think she had enough weight on her feet (due to me holding her up). So then I tried to hold her under her armpits so it wasn't so hard on her arms and that wasn't terribly different. Then we grabbed one of the walkers and I was skating backwards while holding onto her hands on the walker. It was better than before, but not great. Eventually, I realized that she needed to take her mittens off and hold onto the walker fully by herself so she could actually try to control her feet and that worked out pretty well. At that point, Hattie could hold onto one of the walkers and skate all by herself. She took lots of breaks, but considering her age and the fact that it was her first time ice skating, I thought Hattie did a fabulous job! ALL of the kids did so great! I was amazed at the difference between when we first got out on the ice and when we left that afternoon. Matt and I had fun, too - we hadn't been ice skating since high school! It's definitely something that we will do again!

 Like I said, Debbie invited us to come and meet her there so we took a quick group picture before the end of our skating time. 

From left to right: Cooper, Emmett, Logan, Adam, Alanna, Molly, and Charlie

(It's possible that one could see Hattie up in the stands. She took her skates off and was done about 10 minutes before everyone else.)