Bye September

Something about the changing weather invigorates me. I find the energy that I knew I had once, several months ago, and my drive returns. September is always a good goal month for me. I did crank it out this month.

My one goal was to figure out something with photos. I have so many photos on my phone and I did recently sign up for Google Photos as another stop gap for the "what if I lost them" feeling. But that didn't fully cut it. One of my sister's and my favorite things when we were a kid was sitting down and flipping through our old sticky, magnetic photo albums. We loved flipping through the pages of memories. My parents had some old ones - paper ones with corners on the photos, that were there too from the time before we were born. But we rarely looked at those because WE - the center of attention in the house - were not in them.

This is a bit similar to our house. I have albums upon albums of 11 years of our joint lives before children. Every once in awhile one of them gets pulled out - our wedding, or look at the monkeys we saw in Costa Rica, or the bears at Katmai National Park, and it inevitably migrates to look how skinny dad was and how young mom was! We have an album of Leif as a baby I think. Back when we thought we were so busy. But apparently I wasn't busy enough not to do a photo album.

Then I did some photo books. That was always kind of nice because I could print off a few of those as gifts. But then life smacked us in the face and there was no longer time to organize the digital photos and caption them electronically either. I have managed an occasional album here and there - focused on single events - like Disneyworld trip #2 or Disney cruise and Disney trip #3. But the photos are slapped into a themed album and called good.

I have been using Instagram since Silas was about 4 weeks old. And I have used it pretty consistently, so I thought my easiest, low hanging fruit solution would be something that prints my feed. And Chatbooks is so far easy. An app on my phone that continuously uploads my Instagram feed into volumes. I go through the volumes and pull the dumb photos, the food photos (well most of them), and they print up 60 page hard bound small books. I have enough photos for 25 of the books so far... so it isn't an inexpensive deal. I am buying 5 volumes a month, which means in another 4 months or so I will have my last 4.5 years of important photos in hard bound books.

The quality is alright. I wasn't blown away, but he photos are there, available to be handled and loved and laughed at. And someday if I want, I can reprint or create custom books for each of the kids.

It works for now. I am inspired to continue posting to my Instagram. And my September goals is done.

And because it is fall now and my motivation has returned I also accomplished a boat load around the house this month. Because I feel better when I can document my accomplishments, well here they are:

• Cleaned, purged, and organized our linen closet.
• Cleaned, purged, and organized our medicine closet. 
• Cleaned, purged, and organized the linen closet in the boys' bathroom. 
• Cleaned, purged, and organized Silas' bathroom
• Cleaned, purged, and organized the laundry room. Ugh. You have no idea on that one. Apparently it has just been neglected since we moved in. But I organized and threw away a ton of stuff, scrubbed the floors and walls, relocated a bunch of stuff from my medicine closet (second linen closet in the master) that the kids and everyone comes to our room to retrieve (Kleenex, toilet paper, wet wipes, etc.) to the shelves in there. I am now very happy with that space. I dream of painting it... but I don't fantasize about making it happen yet. 
• Patched and painted a massively dinged up wall in my front stairway. Then relocated a few pictures there. 
• Patched and painted a messy, dinged up small hallway between my kitchen, pantry, and dining room. It needed it so badly. 
• And then since I had a nice clean freshly painted hallway, but measurements from 2 of my 3 kids were now gone, I pilfered a really nice board from AB's stash and made a giant ruler thing, then sealed it, hung it, and moved over all my kids' height measurements from their growth records and the walls. Now I have a beautiful board with a boatload of interesting data! I LOVE it. 
• And last today - I cleaned out my pantry. 

See - - really pretty amazing for one month. I also worked on my plans for my October - November - and probably December project. The playroom reno- which will be the next blog post.

Counting Down...

The signs of the weather changing are there. The evenings are cooler - in the mountains this weekend they were downright cold. School is starting (7th, 5th, and last year of preschool). My pumpkins in the garden are starting to turn orange. The garden is overflowing with yumminess. Fantasy football is spinning up.

My absolute favorite time of the year. I am pretty sure I say it every year - I used to despise summer the way many people around here complain about snow. I love snow. I want to live around it more. This last snowy year was fabulous in my book. But anyways, summer is my 4th favorite season - but despite that, I don't hate it anymore. I don't like the heat (neither does AB, probably even more so than me). But since moving to the Pacific Northwest 15 years ago I have found a summer I can go with. The days are longer, the super hot days are shorter lived. The summers in the Pacific Northwest are yummier than anywhere else I have lived (except for the RibFest in Reno, and Palisade Peaches and Corn in Colorado).

I can't wait. I love the football season weather, the cool nights, the Indian summer warm days, the food, the Holidays and watching my kids anticipate the upcoming holidays. I'll take it.

So I always take a break from my goals in the summer. I didn't write about them much last spring - just no time. (Even right now I am sitting near a squealing 4yo, after I moved from a room where he was rough housing.) But I did work them and succeed in redecorating our bedroom.

So here it is.

September Goals:
1. Figure out my photos. Create a plan. I miss having photos in hand, but don't have time for sorting, printing, putting in albums, or photo books. I have recently come across some subscription services that print your Instagram feed monthly for a fee. That's where most of my "good" photos. This might meet my need.
2. Plan the "Playroom Transition". We are taking the kids' play space that Skadi no longer uses, filled with toys that no one plays with, and transitioning to a teen space. Skadi and I are doing this together and have been pinning many ideas. She even saw some chairs she liked recently at camp and went to the director and asked where she got the chairs. Then promptly forgot. But I loved that she is thinking about this and excited to make this transition.

October Goals:
1. Start the Playroom Transition. This may be a two month thing... and actually the completely finished date may be Christmas time since some of the upgrades (new TV, game system) will likely be gifts.