FIVE Toes on Each Foot

Hi. Remember me? It may seem that I fell off the face of the planet. We have been super busy and somewhere at the beginning of August, I realized that I could dig in and get all caught up on the blog, or I could play with my kids for two more weeks before school started. That was an easy choice. So, the blog has gathered dust and we have had a rip roaring end of summer. Needless to say, there will be lots of catch up to do, but I don't mind. Sometimes that is just the way the cookie crumbles.

Let's take a journey back to week five. That would be at the end of June, for anyone counting. There wasn't any real rhyme or reason to when we would do the room changing week. I just picked a week and we went for it. Turns out, it also was the week we went to CA, so we shifted many things around and then left for a week. That meant we came back to the house in utter chaos. Not my favorite plan, but since I was expecting it, I was able to handle coming home to the wreck we left.

If you have forgotten why I like to change rooms, you can read about my rationalizing here. Most of the reasons are still the same, but a few things have changed. 

First...the spiders. We didn't spray in the Spring last year, and I regretted it all summer. We had a terrific amount of spiders. Ivory did not last very long downstairs by herself. She couldn't handle all the extra little visitors, so in the Fall, she jumped ship and took up residence upstairs with Pearl. Pearl was very gracious to accept this new, unintended roommate in her solo space.

The basement was empty once again. (Unless you count the spiders. And we did spray in the Fall.) The bedroom down there turned into a convenient guest room for when Grandma visited. (Either Grandma.) But I will admit that the usage of Atlantis in general went way down.

Now...this year. We sprayed in the Spring, which helps the spider situation immensely, but it usually means we find a lot of dead spiders instead of live spiders. (That is fine. I'll take it.) Still the space wasn't being used all that much. We were in the process of moving all the rooms around and it was like taking a square peg and trying to fit it into a round hole. The kids just have too much stuff. (And this is after the five garbage bags of recycling and trash that went out the door.)

Second....the stuff. (I bet you were wondering if there was anything after the 'first' up there.) I still like the idea of the kids sharing their space, but it was getting crazy just trying to fit furniture into the rooms. I figure the kids will still share bathroom space, but in the case of rooms, they were living practically on top of each other.

Third...wasted space. Tyler was lamenting that we had all this space in the basement and no one was using it. True that. I told him that we could send someone back downstairs to the bedroom, but it was Pearl's turn to be down there and I wasn't sure she would dig it. We mulled over possibilities and Tyler came up with the idea to turn the 'family room' in the basement into a 'bedroom.' I jumped on this idea quite quickly. After all, that would put TWO kids downstairs and I like the buddy system. (One of my beefs with one kid down there is that if something is wrong, there is no one to help.) It seemed like a good idea, and so we implemented.

Here is Pearl's room. The neon clock is to help Pearl with the dark. Someone showed her Harry Potter, and she has been a little scared of the dark. Oops.

It is a really good thing that June is right next door. Pearl walks out of her room, into June's. They share the bathroom down there. We made a hanging closet for June and I think it is quite a cozy space after all was said and done.

There were no before and after pictures because no one was down there before. Upstairs it was a different story. There was much switching and cleaning and sighing as mom threw away stuff. The kids are pretty good about decluttering, but I can see more potential for giving things away than they can. Go figure.

Now these 'before' photos are pretty rough. The kids aren't incredibly clean, but their rooms look pretty good on Saturday. However, I remembered to take these pictures after we had already started the process and definitely not on a clean day, so they are a good representation of a typical day. :) First the room Ivory and Pearl shared.

Daisy got that room. Spacious now.

June and Daisy were stuffed in their room pretty well. (I still love the hot air balloons.)

Now, Robyn has the high flyers all to herself.

Finally, Robyn's old room. (Somehow she has managed to have a space all to herself since moving here. Impressive and almost necessary for this tween.

Ivory now owns this space. She has been working extra hard to keep it clean, because I told her she needed to show extra responsibility if she wanted contacts in the fall.

I had ambitions to take selfies throughout the process, but what with the vacation, I completely forgot. I only got one with Robyn on the first day.

And although we didn't do our regular activities, we still had lots of fun. We took an evening off and went to play with the Lindsay's. I haven't seen Angela in a long time. We reunited when a mutual friend lost his spouse suddenly. We were able to attend the funeral together. It was so nice to see her that we decided to get our families together for FHE. We played some kickball as the sun set. It was such a lovely evening with them.

We got a group shot at the end, and I'm sorry for the blurry quality. Not my best. But those people in the photo are the best!

I didn't take the kids to the library, but I dropped off books and saw Robyn's art on the wall. That was fun.

And so ends the exchanging of rooms. It is one of the hardest weeks of summer, but so satisfying in the end.