Put away, throw away, give away

I have been blogging lately about trying to get organized in my life. While I have backslid a little in some of the daily cleaning habits I had developed, I am overall still on track. I feel like the definite success has been in looking at our life as a whole and deciding where overhauls need to happen. About two weeks ago my husband mentioned wanting to make our time more intentional. This turned into one of those all night discussions where we made big plans and went to sleep feeling totally satisfied with all we had agreed upon. The big points revolve around us making the most of our family time. We have been setting a not so good example for our children of indulging our whims and putting off the "have to or should do" stuff. We decided that a work before play mandate needed to be set for our household. The best way that we thought of to make our time more intentional was to sit down once a week and map out the following week. We plan a few projects, some for the grown-ups and some for the whole family to do together. Family work projects are always followed by something fun (park, board game, etc) to motivate us to get it done. We also plan one night for us to spend time together, not that we don't spend most every night together, but again this being intentional time spent together. Along with all of this we are trying to curb our bad habit of blowing off previously thought up dinner plans to eat out. I meal plan and always have a weeks worth of meals in the house but we tend to indulge our lazy/gluttonous side by eating out and wasting food we already have and money we don't have. So we are trying to make new habits there. Oh yes, and our daily twice daily Starbucks runs had to go as well so we are once again doing the at home coffee thing. When your 3 year old can recite daddy's Iced Venti Quad Skinny Caramel Latte, you know you make coffee runs too often!

Our family work project today was to tackle Nathan and Jordan's room which looked like Hurricane Katrina had her way with it. And for all you could tell by looking at it, it had been a good 5 years since I tidied up in there because it was truly a mess. We had told the boys the game plan for the day and at lunch we explained how the clean up was going to go. We were going to be putting stuff where it belonged, throwing away the broken toys and giving the stuff they don't play with anymore to Goodwill. That of course elicited the "you are giving our stuff away??!!" response which led to a teachable moment (elementary ed major here....LOVES the teachable moment:). We took this time to talk to them about how fortunate we are and that other families aren't as lucky as us to have so much stuff. We explained to them how we are to live like Jesus and that He gave everything he had to others and that we needed to be willing to do the same. They were okay with that for the most part and the discussion continued on in a fairly productive manner. When it came time to actually put the first item in the give away box we asked Jordan to hug his Tickle Me Elmo and put him in the box so that another kid could have the chance to love him. He was such a big boy about it! Nathan followed in suit with the next item and before we knew it the room was tidy, the garbage bag was overflowing and we had some gently loved toys to pass on to the Goodwill. After that we were able to enjoy a few hours at a park on the river and it felt good knowing we had earned it. It felt even better knowing that we had passed on some valuable life lessons to our kids in the process.