Monday, March 25, 2013

March Preschool - The Kidless Version

So, this past week my boys were at Papa and Nana's again.  I'm taking full advantage of not babysitting right now and actually sending my kids "away" to give me some time "off".  Last month it was a very busy week and I really didn't get a chance to get things done here.  This time, I have fun AND work planned.

This is my plan (this was written a week ago as my plan):
Monday - Meet my mom for lunch to give her the kids :-); and then cleaning the boys room, doing a summer clothes inventory and moving Nate's clothes so he can reach them (they boys like to pick out their own clothes now) and make a quick run to the grocery store.
Tuesday - Scrapbooking; Clean the classroom - The closet is out of control as is my scrapbooking crafting stuff.  I want to finalize this project today.
Wednesday - Clean the living room and Steam Clean the carpets, head to town to do some shopping, and go furniture shopping with my husband
Thursday - Clean, Clean . . .print . . scrapbook :-)  The basement is on my hit list.  The plan is 30 minutes in the basement, 30 minutes working on lessons for the next few weeks, and then 30 minutes scrapbooking. (I only want 2 weeks worth of lessons so once done, I will just do the basement and scrapbook)
Friday - Scrapbook.  For real.  I do have to pack up some stuff for our weekend but for the most part I will just be Scrapbooking until my husband gets home. Oh, I also need to go to the store but without kids I can get that done in about an hour.

Now- here is what I accomplished (with photos this time!)

Monday - I met my mom at about noon with the boys for lunch then headed back towards home, stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things before heading home.  I'll be honest, I sat down and played facebook games for about an hour.  Darryl got home around 3:45 and we headed out to our favorite restaurant for dinner ( a rare treat!) .  I decided that when we got home I WOULD actually do a few things so I cleaned up the kitchen and then spent some time in the boys room.  Here is a before photos:




Let me note,  this is not normal. This morning, the boys decided to emptied every living toy onto Nate's bed.  I was not happy with them . . .So my first task was resorting toys.  I'll finish up this project on Tuesday.  Also, I included a picture from the living room on purpose since cleaning the boys room involves rearranging :-)

Tuesday - Despite some nasty winter weather, I went scrapbooking from 9-2 today and completed a goal - I finished October 2012 and actually almost finished November 2012.  When I got home I took time to switch my outside flag from St Patrick's Day to Easter since both Holidays fall in the same month this year.  And yes, I finished the boys room today as well.  I got out all of their summer clothes and I'm glad I did because Josh had a few pairs of summer PJ's I had forgotten about.  :-)

 I moved the rod that holds Nate's clothes to the left so it is now hanging low enough that he can pick out his own clothes. 



Everything is all nice and neat for a few days :-) 

Wednesday: I had decided that Tuesday and Wednesday were "alarm days". So I set my alarm for 8:00, got up, ate breakfast, took a shower and got busy.  I cleaned the living room (including move the couch to find the 3 million toys that got shoved under there HA) and steam cleaned the main traffic area carpet.  It always looks and smells so nice after cleaning them!  Then I tackled the classroom/my crafting space and finally really organized the bookshelf and closet areas so they are useful instead of a bunch of piles.  All of my scrapbooking stuff is organized and, thanks to some stuff my mom gave me, I was able to downsize a bag to reduce some clutter!.  Plus I finally have all of the kids activity books/coloring pages organized so each week I can grab something new to incorporate into our day.  Here are some before and after photos for you!
 One of the biggest thing I needed to conquer was that shelf!!!
Oh, and this bookshelf!!


 These two photos above show my crafting space.  The bookshelf holds only my stuff now and my lovely table is just perfect!!
The closet is awesome!  I picked up a couple more black bins to store school stuff, added a hanging rack (on the left hand side of the closet) to hold games and just really cleaned up the whole space.

Now, plans changed slightly back on Tuesday.  My husband said, "Check out priceline and see if you can get a room on Wednesday night for $40.00".  Why?  Because he has band practice on Wednesday - I had planned to drive him into work at 3:30 AM so that I could meet him in town for dinner and go to practice with him. . .instead we WERE able to get a room for that price and it saved us a trip so that saved $20.00 in gas.  I left home around 2:00 to run a couple of errands and then met him for dinner at Red Lobster.  We still had gift card money to use so that was a nice bonus.  Then, we headed to hotel (since we still had 3 hours before practice.  This is what we did:  1)Went to the pool area and sat in the hot tub, swam in the pool, got back in the hot tub and said "We need one of these.".  2) Went back to our room and each picked a bed (our room had 2 doubles) and promptly fell asleep HA!  WOW we are party animals, aren't we?  Luckily we woke up at 6:20 so had time to make it to practice. Staying in a hotel is one of my favorite things - if I'm at home there is ALWAYS something for me to do but when I go away to a hotel, I can finally relax. The best part?  I got to sleep in  . .. it was fabulous!

 Thursday: I totally slept in and enjoyed the hotel room (My husband actually got up at 4:00 am to go to work!!).  It was so nice to not be at home :-)  I did finally pack up and headed out to lunch at Culvers.  Do you know what I did next?  I shopped.  In a relaxed, take my time, no kids with me way :-)  I meandered my way through Target for a good hour, took my sweet time in Hobby Lobby, and then actually sat on a couch and read my Kindle while eating an Auntie Anne's pretzel in the mall.  Not to mentioned I stopped at the Christian Book Store to do some Easter shopping.  Oh, and I remembered that it was Happy Hour at Steak and Shake so I treated myself to a fantastic Chocolate Shake as I headed home HA!  What a great day!!

Friday: My main goal today was to scrapbook but before I could do that I did do a quick run through in the house to put everything away that was out of place.  THEN I scrapbooked.  I completed all of my goals for this month and then some - it was so fun.  Once my husband got home we headed out of town.

You may noticed that I did not get to the basement - no big surprise HA! 

It was a great week but, I'm glad my kids are back home :-)