Shovels and Safety Glasses May Be Required

The boy's room! With Stacey, Zach and Matt's help we rearranged the furniture, filled an entire garbage bag, got them a new system for dirty clothes and rehung all of the wall stuff in it's new places. Once again, I did not take a before picture...Grr! We are hoping that Ryan will like it when he gets back late tonight. I now just have all of the things that really need to go in other places to sort through. I am looking for a way to organize storage on the top shelf of their closet and books they love to read. Everything that I pulled down from there had been just tossed up there in hopes it would stay.

I would like to report a HUGE breakthrough while cleaning for Zachary. He has had a shelf up by his top bunk that has been FULL of his gymnastic trophies. He was in gymnastics for four years until we had to take him out because of yea, my cancer and the cost. He has a very hard time throwing anything away and an equal amount of difficulty boxing something up and storing it. Trophies (and these I do say he earned and didn't just get for participating) when I moved the shelf over I asked him about the trophies. I about fell off of the top bunk onto the floor when he said it would be okay to box them up and store them downstairs. Now he has room for other things up by his bed. (And I am no longer worried that in the middle of the night one or more of them won't fall off the shelf and take out his eye or worse!)

I will have to write on a different day how I feel about our trophy "earning" children. Starting with my wrestler whose biggest trophies of the year (and bigger than any other trophy in the boys' room) is fourth place out of four. Twice. What do we do with all of these trophies? Ryan has soccer trophies and piano trophies, Zach has gymnastics, piano and pinewood derby trophies, and Matthew has wrestling, piano, and scout trophies too. Is it all necessary? Half of them aren't really awards, but participation. Maybe another day to ponder all of that. Today though, I have a box of gymnastics trophies that have sat very dusty on Zachary's shelf ready to go into storage. So you can see, on the way to our new normal we have a few minor victories. I think the boys are going to love their new room arrangement. I know I do!

Next up...my desk! (Ugh)