Summer is over

Well, at least for us it is. This week marks the first week of school and therefore, all of our unscheduled free-wheeling days of summer are over.

The past few weeks have been busy with last minute summer fun activities. Our family had the pleasure of going to a local water park this weekend for a friend's birthday party. We've been to parks and to a local kids fest. It has been so great spending quality time with the kids.

This week I also spent a lot of time cleaning out boxes of packed up stuff and getting our house more organized. I decided recently to hold a garage sale, so I've also been trying to get ready for that. In preparation for the garage sale, I knew it was finally time to sort through the many many toys we've had and sell some and garbage others. Thankfully, my friend, Jen, offered to help sort through stuff. We had a wonderful night of "toy cleansing"! I seriously think we reduced our toy stash by about 2/3's. Probably resulting in 1/3 in the trash and 1/3 in the garage sale. My husband and I even hauled all the trash out that same night and moved the garage sales toys into the garage to avoid the barrage of questions from our children as to "why we were selling this?" or "why are you throwing away that?" The end result is that I feel great about the toys we have left and the ease of maintaining/organizing our toy shelves.

We spent today playing Monopoly with our two older sons and then hanging out with friends from church for dinner and bowling. We had a great time. My mom watched the kids so we were blessed to an adults only evening.

The past few hours have been spent getting ready for school tomorrow. With the garage sale coming up this week and other projects in midstream, a friend suggested that I wait to start school. As soon as I discussed that with the boys, they were so bummed. They have been looking forward to this day for a few weeks now. I figured I couldn't disappoint them this time... especially when it comes to school work (who can complain?), so on we go. Tomorrow, oops, today will be day 1 of school. I've reviewed the lessons and work for the day and feel pretty comfortable with it all. I guess we'll see how it goes. If you happen to read this today.... throw up a prayer for us!