Just a quiet one . . . that’s how I would describe our weekend on the whole. Generally we are flying around here and there trying to fit as much as possible into our weekends, trying to make the most of the time that we are all together. It’s no wonder our children rarely sit down and relax, Hubby and I are hardly good role models for that.
Over the past few months we have felt that our house has been getting smaller and smaller, although obviously this isn’t the case. Houses don’t get smaller do they, but we do tend to put more and more into our house which encroaches on the available space. It’s natural I guess since we added a new human being to the house at the end of last January in the form of our gorgeous little Jelly Bean and anyone who has ever had a baby will know that they come with a whole heap of equipment, which compared to the size of the baby is actually ridiculously large!!! Now that Jelly Bean is fast approaching his first birthday I feel like we are starting to turn a corner with the things that we ‘need’ around the house. Unlike Beanie Boy, Jelly Bean hasn’t ‘loved’ his Jumperoo, I think we bought it too late for him as he was already crawling and so he didn’t like being confined to one place. Jelly Bean is a very sociable little boy who doesn’t like to be alone, wherever I go in the house, he will be fast on my heals so I think it’s time for the Jumperoo to go.
This weekend we had a very quiet day on the Saturday. During the morning Little Bean and Curly got their homework out of the way, then Curly and Hubby attacked Curly’s bedroom and had a bit of a sort out. He still had toys in there from when he was about 7 years old which he has long outgrown. They had a really good tidy up and we came to the decision that it was time for Curly to change to a standard single bed to make his room feel more spacious so now we need to sell his Cabin bed too.
Little Bean, Beanie Boy and I set ourselves a challenge to cover as much of the lounge carpet as possible before (a) we got fed up of doing puzzles or (b) Jelly Bean woke up. To be honest, it all happened around the same time. Beanie Boy hasn’t quite grasped jigsaw puzzles as quickly as Curly and Little Bean did but he is getting there bless him and we had lots of fun just chilling out and taking our time.
Next on our agenda was the playroom, with four children I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how many toys we have accumulated. The trouble is I think we have more toys than the children know what to do with and so very often many of the toys stays stowed away in boxes and don’t get played with as they should. My master plan is actually to sell off and give away a large amount of the toys and keep just their favourites. We have kept pretty much every toy that has ever come into our house(s) over the past 10 years, it’s time to have a clearout. Any ideas on what to do with all the toys on the top???
Finally, we tackled the ‘book’ situation throughout the house. I have mentioned in the past that all of the children love reading and I’m pleased to say that is passed down from Hubby and I as we both love to read too. Each of the children have their own bookshelves in their rooms but when it came to Hubby and me, we would just have ‘piles’ of books tucked away in cupboards, in the bottom of our wardrobes and anywhere else that we could find space to hide them. Well, no more! We found these ‘baby’ bookshelves at Argos and they fit perfectly along this wall on our landing. In the past this section of wall has become a dumping ground for the clothes the children have grown out of and I hated it so now we have made a feature of it and we have our own little library. We don’t quite need the sliding ladders but I was surprised by just how many books we had scurried away in the depths of the house. Pretty much all of the books you see haven’t even been read . . . yet!
Our home is still far from tidy and how I would like it to be but hey, Rome wasn’t built in a day! It felt good this weekend to spend the time together at home, to have the children helping to get the house into some form of organisation. Sure there were still the odd arguments but on the whole I was very proud of the children this weekend and how well they got on. Curly was even teaching Little Bean some of the Spanish he has been learning at school!
Saturday evening was all about bonding, once the tiddlers had gone to bed, I went to spend the evening with my Mum eating popcorn, putting the world to rights and watching Burlesque on DVD (very good!) and Hubby spent the evening with Curly bonding over SuperMarioWorld on the Wii U!
Sunday was a little more of the same before popping out to the shops to buy a new bed for Curly and then trying our hand at doing the food shop in Aldi (we normally shop at Tesco) in a bid to save money now that Hubby is out of work. Surprisingly the shop wasn’t too stressful bearing in mind that we had four children in tow and we saved a heap of money so that was a bonus too!
To round our weekend off nicely we settled down last night to our #familyfilmnight tradition and watched Justin and the Knights of Valour (post to follow soon).
How did you spend your weekend?