Sunday, November 28, 2010

Crazy Black Friday

For the first time ever, we decided to go shopping on the day after Thanksgiving! We got up at 5:00 in the morning to get to JoAnn's when they opened. Flannel was on a HUGE sale ($1.29 a yard!) and we are out of baby presents. We were there four hours the first time, two of which were at the counter getting fabric cut. We ended up filling a shopping cart with the cut pieces of fabric! Then we went to Panera for breakfast/lunch which was a nice break from standing on the concrete floors. Then back to JoAnn's for the second round, resulting in two more bags of fabric. We found some really, really cute designs - sweet peas, moons, and Scandinavian pine trees. :o)

We didn't end up leaving until after 2:00. After that we did Meijer's, GFS, Lowes, and PetSmart. Needless to say, by the time we got home after we were really tired. Mom and Sarah counted the pieces and it turns out we got 94 different pieces of flannel! Our sofa is piled high with bags of beautiful flannel. Now comes the really fun part . . . matching all the pieces up and making them into blankets!

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Books, records, and eBay

I haven't written a new post in ages! Life has been really busy around here. Feels nice to be getting back to "normal" life (although, it could be debated about what "normal" in our family really means ). Dad finished stacking all the firewood this week and the winter weather has already settled in (not snow, just grey and cold).

For the last two weeks I have been working on putting all of our newly acquired books away on the shelves upstairs. While I was at it, I decided to go through them as I went and get rid of any doubles or titles that we no longer wanted. So far I have made it through adult fiction, adult bios, and presidents. We did manage to weed three boxes full - to help make room for the seven boxes of new ones! (Somehow the math seems wrong here???) Books are always so fun. I could work at them all day, every day.

Sarah and I have also been working on cleaning out the attic over the TV room. There is way too much stuff up there and we have been wanting to get rid of some of the plastic toys that we had kept. So, right now, Mom is hot and heavy working on listing the better stuff on eBay.

At the beginning of the month, Sarah and I did a massive weeding job on the record collections. It is very sad not to be able to keep them all, because you really don't see them around much anymore. However, we just don't have enough room and it was getting quite out of hand. So we sorted through every single 78 and got rid of about half of them ( that means close to 700). I also went through our LPs, but we are going to do a better sort-through together.

All in all, we have handled lots of records, books, and other stuff in the past month! The cats are not sure what to do with all of the stuff around the house. Although, Monika and Iveta did have a grand time exploring the walk-in closet while we were cleaning up there!