Winter Days

We have kept ourselves busy and winter is rushing by. We are warming up and the garden is on our minds. Already we are starting to spend hours on end outside and the kids are getting dirty again and needing a bath every single night. We have spent a good part of our winter this year pairing down what we own. We live in a very small house compared to what other people might think appropriate for a family of five. I am coming to understand that I can be happier in my home if I have less stuff. Not only does it give me more time as I don't have to maintain so much but my closets look clean and I feel less overwhelmed. I have been contemplating becoming a minimalist. When I really look at the way we live and have lived we are almost there anyway. We are not big consumers and we don't spend much money on possessions. We rarely buy new clothing for ourselves and if I need to shop for clothes I have taken to the local thrift store because they have some amazing stuff (we can thank the limited number of second hand stores in our wealthy neighborhoods for that). I bought most of our Christmas gifts second hand if they were not homemade and we don't own much stuff in order to survive our close quarters. Recently I have found a couple of articles to be very inspiring to me and they got me started on making hard decisions about some of our possessions in the past few weeks. You can see them here and here. I guess all that I need to do now is except that I am going to be a minimalist and move on forward with it.

As I scroll through these pictures I can see that we already have very carefully chosen the items in our home and most of what is left after my de-cluttering makes my heart sing. You can see that my kids have stayed busy and they are often creating beautiful messes. I took some photos of my kids room. They all share it and today I went through and put all of their clothes into that one dresser. My boy's clothes were in cubes in the small closet and I thought I would have to get rid of a lot to fit it all into one drawer per child. I was pleasantly surprised when almost everything fit with room to spare.

I love it when my kids are helpers and I am trying to relax and just let them do what they want to help. I was busy with something else in the house and they got interested in dishes. When I came into the kitchen I found them on chairs and in their underpants washing away. They did a good job and they soaked the floor.

My boy is into pirates from time to time and he recently decided he was going to build a pirate ship. He rounded up the supplies and cut some of it out. He made the mast all by himself and tried to make the ship. When he found it very hard for his little hands and muscles to cut the cardboard he came to me and asked me to help. He told me what shapes to cut and where to put the tape. Honestly I had no idea what I was building I just followed his requests and when it was all done I was a little shocked to see the perfectly formed pirate ship. He had visualized the ship in space and converted it into two dimensions in his head in order to give me the instructions to cut and tape, and put it into 3D. What a guy.