Girls' Day!

Daddy decided to head up to the slopes this morning (without so much as a by-your-leave, but that's another post altogether!), so the girls and I are going on an adventure to Salt Lake. We booked seats to see Devereaux at 1:10, and until then, we're going to shop, eat, and just do girl stuff.

Hope you're having a great day too!

ETA: Fun day! California Pizza Kitchen is such a great restaurant when dining with kids... our waitress really took care of the girls. Devereaux was cute, but way long... didn't realize it was 1 hour 45 minutes long. The girls did great... and no accidents all day. Oh, and when we got home, Daddy had done two loads of dishes and made fried rice for dinner. Yay!

Finished for Friday -- Upstairs De-Toyified!

Today, I'm joining Lit and Laundry's "Finished for Friday" project. Essentially, every Friday I will attempt to post about something I finished. It can be anything. A project. A puzzle. A book. Anything.

Today, what I (ok, we -- the girls were HUGE helpers!) finished was....

TADAH! De-toyification of the entire upstairs of my house.

For those who may not have been to my house, we have an entire lower level that is (with the exception of a pretty-much unused workout room (*sigh*), a small guest suite, and my laundry room), entirely devoted to my children and their ever-multiplying STUFF! But despite the fact that they have two large bedrooms (the littles share) with walk-in closets and an entire, very large family room lined wall-to-wall with shelves and bins and baskets for their toys (oh yeah, and a small play "house" that G'Pa Irv made for them under the stairs -- and a closet in the workout room where I recently moved their dressups), despite all of that...

ALL THEIR TOYS WIND UP UPSTAIRS IN THE KITCHEN/BEDROOM/LIVING ROOM!

It drives me crazy!

So today, I used going swimming as a giant bribe (ok, I think I used chocolate as a bribe too at one point), I got the girls to help me De-Toyify the upstairs. We literally scoured the entire upstairs to find all the toys and piled them in a giant pile at the top of the stairs. The girls took their play shopping carts and drove them all over the upstairs looking for toys to put in the pile.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the giant pile-o-toys before we relocated it downstairs. Suffice it to say, the thing was HUGE. It took the four of us a good half hour to move all the stuff downstairs (we'll be tidying up and toy-purging the downstairs soon -- maybe for next Finished for Friday!).

But the good news is... the upstairs of my house is de-toyified! I'm so excited. We had a long chat about how all the toys need to stay downstairs. I think I'll try a mini-Flylady routine with the kids and add de-toyification to our nightly getting-ready-for-bed routine... gather up all the wayward toys right before teeth-brushing, then take the toys downstairs as we go down to go to bed.

Now, at least I can find the floor to vacuum it, and I might even be able to get all our Christmas decorations put away by the end of the weekend!

Ok, off to swimming we go...

How to have a sledding disaster, in three easy steps.

1. Decide to take all three kids sledding at the local park.

2. Procrastinate the morning away playing Hullabaloo and don't get the kids moving until about 11:30 (who were up at 5:45 this morning, by the way. Ugh!).

3. Fail to feed said children before leaving, fail to bring snacks to the park, and let said children (well, at least two of them) drink way too much water/juice right before you leave and/or in the car on the way to the park.

This creates:

a) tired, hungry, whiney children;
b) who can't tolerate, well, anything (like snow in their faces, cold feet, sledding with anyone other than mama or in anything other than the one rainbow sled); and
c) children who pee in their snow clothes!

Boy oh boy oh boy is this a recipe for fun, fun, fun!

And no, I have no pictures from this imaginary incident... but I hear G'pa Larry has some.

Luckily, we recovered the afternoon and early evening by having everyone lie down for a nap after a late lunch. Miss-D stayed up a little later than usual (after a three hour nap) to play Hullabaloo with Mama-V and Daddy-J, then watch Shrek the Halls, then soundly trounce Daddy-J at WiiGolf (strangely, the kid plays golf lefty and wants to take golf lessons next summer -- go figure!).