Lots of our friends are off on fun trips all over Europe, enjoying the free days from school and the great weather. Since we are going to America this summer, any other travel is out for the time being. Instead we stayed home and cleaned! 🙂 Now, please don’t feel too sorry for my children when you read this. They had lots of time to hang around in their pajamas, watch hours of cartoons, play for days on end with Playmobil, and even went on a few local excursions.
Sophie made sugared, burnt almonds, Nidelzaetli (which I don’t know how to translate) and Berner Brezeli, which are wafer thin cookies some of you may know from Swiss Days. She got to decorate a cute tin to bring all her treasures home in, and the recipes to make them again another day. Sarah got to spend a morning riding and brushing horses (and may drop ballet to do that on a regular basis), and then Sophie went in the afternoon to make jewelry at a woman’s house in the next town over.
The boys were also allowed to choose some special activities, but neither of them wanted to do anything. While the girls were off crafting and riding, we took the opportunity to gut the boys’ room. We pulled out all the toy bins, reorganized them, and threw away lots of broken, or not played with anymore, toys. We also emptied out Nick’s dresser, getting rid of several more pairs of pants that he has outgrown in the last couple of months. The boys cleaned off their desk and dresser tops, and all the bits under their beds. We ended up with half a bag full of trash just from that one room! Oh, and a good stack of paper that went to recycling. We finished off by dusting everywhere, and then Nicholas rearranged his bookshelf. It all looked very nice when we were done.
This inspired me to do the same to my craft room. I got rid of a bunch of trash that I was going to “someday” turn into to “something”. If I hadn’t done it after 3 or more years, it probably wasn’t going to happen, so I tossed it all. Glass bottles, tin cans, big pieces of wood, it all went. Then I cleared off all the surfaces and started over, putting things back where it was easiest for me to get to them. I also pulled down all the kids’ artwork which had been taped up haphazardly over the years. They were a bit sad, but I did take pictures of everything for posterity’s sake. It just feels so much more open and inviting now.
The work table is all covered again in this picture. 
That is Sophie’s quilt, and Noah’s baby book in different states of doneness. But still, the room looks so much better now! Even my cubbyhole behind the bookshelf is emptier, since I trashed a bunch of stuff that was back there.
In preparation for doing the same to their own room, the girls’ cleaned out their treasures boxes. Each child has a large plastic bin holding any keepsake they wish. The rule is though, that it all has to fit inside the bin. If it gets too full, they need to go through and decide what to get rid of and what to keep. Anything that gets tossed will be memorialized with a digital photo first, and they can look at them anytime they wish on the computer. 
Fortunately, there were no tears during this process, just lots of reminiscing and smiles.
The boys did it as well, but it was a little more traumatic for them. So no smiling pictures to post. Now I just need to do the same thing for the kitchen and my bedroom, and the whole house, including bathrooms will have been thoroughly decluttered within the last 3 months. That’s a good feeling!