re-arrange {aka my crazy gene}

My favorite thing to do to beat cold winter day doldrums is rearranging furniture, hands-down. I love the way it gives a room an immediate {and free} but very gratifying change.

Two other bonus reasons:
1. I purge more stuff -- garbage, broken toys and McDonald's junk that we've held on to for too long. Love the feeling of filling bags for garbage and Goodwill.
2. The boys find things. Long lost things. Play things. Things that keep them happily and busily playing for the hours it takes to put the room together again. {thank goodness}

I blame this on the crazy gene I inherited from my mom. She too, loves to rearrange furniture. Nurture or nature, I learned to love it growing up.

On Monday, we had a long afternoon of winter doldrums on our hands. Henry had stayed home from school, it ended up being a false alarm and as he was having the time of his life, I teased him referring to him as Ferris Bueller. {I like false alarms, we tend to err on the side of caution with sickness and I liked having him home and having him not sick.} I got a wild hair to bring the former coffee table upstairs to the toy room to use as a drawing/play/cafeteria-for-restaurant table. One thing led to another and I became the mouse from "If you give a mouse a cookie". In fact, the entire thing started because I wanted to make Valentine's with the boys and thought it would be nice to have a change of scenery, thus the upstairs table. 

As I well know from having lived with this crazy gene for my entire life, things always look worse (a lot worse) before they get better. The middle of the room was a pile of toys. It stayed that way while we vacuumed base boards, lined shelves and stuck contact paper to our little table (and a patch of the wall courtesy of Henry) -- see it gets very "if you give a mouse a cookie". But in the end it was worth it. It feels fresh and cheerful. I like seeing the space right when I walk up the stairs. The two little wooden rocking chairs are from our sweet neighbor Darrel. He made them for his grandchildren who are now adults and he thought the boys would like to have them. He was right, they're just perfect at the little table.