Silly Monkey Stories: Our Children May Be Tiny Hoarders

Last weekend, we decided that it was time for the children to clean their room.  With all the new items that came into the house over Christmas and their birthdays this month, this was long overdue.  Originally, we thought they just needed to clean things they left out and around their room.  Then our oldest child, Jake, discovered he had lost a prop he needed for a school project.  This led us to turn the room upside-down.  When they had no luck finding the missing item, I had a turn trying.  That was when I had the revelation that my sons might be hoarders in the making . . .

Here is a diagram of the items (I could recall seeing) that were in our boys' bunk beds.  There were many other little items, but I just cannot remember them all.  I honestly do not know how they have room to stretch out and sleep comfortably at night, but they seem to manage to.  Some odd things that stood out to me were the chemistry set, the 8 t-shirts, and the bookmark I found in the bed of a boy who never reads in bed.  My husbands says that he empties out their beds completely when he changes their sheets, but somehow everything ends up back in the beds eventually.

What is the oddest thing you've ever found in your child's bed?

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What Do You Do When Your Basement and Attic are Full?

My family of five has spent the last several months trying to declutter our home.  We schedule donation pick-ups with a local charitable organization almost every week.  Amazingly, after about 4 months of doing this, it still does not seem like we have made much more than a small dent in our clutter.  We have both an attic and a basement, which are being used completely for storage.  No, we do not have a garage or a shed.  If we did, though, I have no doubt they would both be filled as well.  What we really need is to find inexpensive self storage.  There are so many furniture pieces, among other things, that I would love to use in our future (much larger) home and it would break my heart to part with them.

Over the next month or so, my husband and I will be making it a priority to clear out the basement.  It had once been a finished family room, but it flooded, so we turned it into storage space.  We very much need the extra living space again, since our three children are growing bigger and the five of us are tripping over each other in this tiny townhouse.  We are hoping to turn the basement into a finished play space for the children.  We could put mats down, buy a kick bag for them to practice their taekwondo, and maybe add an air hockey or a ping pong table.

Now we just need to keep that goal in mind and keep chipping away at all the boxes and boxes of stored items we have collected over the past 18 years.  Do you have any tips on how to make this process less painful?

For Better or For Worse: The Early Bird Gets . . . To Be Tired

Since my husband has to be up the earliest out of everyone at least 5 or 6 days a week, he has inherited the job of waking everyone up in the morning.  He usually sets the alarm for himself, which I don't even hear anymore when it goes off, and wakes up whoever needs to be up that day after he is done showering and brushing teeth.

A couple of weeks ago, the morning went like any other.  All five of us needed to be up and out of the house early that day.  So we were all finishing up breakfast and doing whatever we needed to do to finish getting ready when my husband calls me from downstairs.  It turned he had just realized that he had gotten up a whole hour earlier than he had needed to.  He must have set the alarm for the wrong time.  As a result, everyone in the house missed out on a whole hour of sleep.  Being the one who needed to sleep the most, he was very upset with himself.  So we all had an extra hour of computer time and TV watching that morning.

Can you guess why he did not realize right away that it was not the right time to get up that morning?