Edited to add: I wrote this light-hearted post earlier this week before the intense flooding here in the North East began. We are safe and dry at home and right now it appears that all of our friends, family, and neighbors are also safe — though many are (at least) knee-deep in water in their basements. I hope that today’s post finds you and yours safe as well.
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The week before we left for our trip I was overwhelmed by a wave of nesting energy. Forget about packing and making sure we had sunscreen, all I wanted to do was move furniture, organize my sewing projects, go thrifting and set up new little nooks in our house.
(Does this happen to you too? I’ve recently come to realize this is a pretty typical pre-travel pattern for me and I’ve started allowing myself to ‘go with the flow’ – even though it sometimes makes for some last-minute, late-night packing!)
The first thing that I had to do before we could leave was to make our art supplies more user-friendly. We have had a number of different set-ups over the years, always with the intention of making our creative supplies as accessible as is appropriate for the ages of our kids (and Mama’s sanity level). Permanent markers, paints, and glitter, for example, are not self-service supplies. Crayons, colored pencils, paper and stickers are.
We also have to factor in that we live in a relatively small home where all spaces are shared spaces. In other words, there is no art studio, yoga studio, sewing room or woodshop where projects can be left untouched for days at a time. All of our creating, of which there is no shortage happening, takes place on our kitchen table or in our living room.
One thing that has helped tremendously in our closet-lacking country house are the shelves my cousin Dan has been building for us. Simple wooden boards mounted above window and door sills are allowing us to “stow our gear” — out of the way but still readily accessible.
I also dragged some child-level shelves in from the barn right before we left to create some more storage space in our kitchen – specifically in the dinette that until very recently was our “play room.” As I dusted off the shelves I noticed some wire around the back rungs and remembered the first time I dragged these shelves out of the barn.
Lily was a newly-crawling baby and I wanted to create a safe place for her to play and explore with her “creative supplies.” So I filled the shelves with baskets of board books, stuffed animals, play silks, wooden blocks and a few plastic, battery-operated, beeping things that I mostly detested (ahem…except when I was on deadline for a writing project) and secured the shelves to the wall with wire.
{ april 2005 }
Today these same shelves are filled with blank paper, stamping supplies, homemade play dough, crayons, a basket of beeswax, a few preschool workbooks (which both of my kids are absolutely loving) and a little makeshift “listening station” – something I have dreamed of creating for my children since my (very brief) tenure as an elementary school teacher many years ago.
(I got all of these books – new Barefoot Books with CDs – at a thrift store in Florida for $2.50 each!)
I also recently brought our wooden kitchen back up from the basement. And although for years this beautiful hand-me-down stove was once THE center of activity, the kids have largely ignored it as of late. Lily did mention the other day that it would be nice to have some more play food – not the plastic kind but the soft wooly kind that you make Mama – since we can’t seem to find the food we used to play with.
So that’s what I’m working on this week — nesting, making nooks, felting food for my little ones — and savoring how wonderful it feels to be home.
How about you? What’s in progress in your world?
