The Intentional Life

We have a child in our house who gets quite anxious over the thought of storms.  And, as it so happened, we had a tornado warning in the middle of the night a few weeks back. This child has not really let go of that since. Yesterday she got an idea to create a Tornado Kit so we are always at the ready...at least in her mind. For us, we don't have a basement (boo.), so our place to go during a tornado warning is the kids' bathroom.  So, it made the most sense to have her disaster kit in that room. Well, when it came time to figure out where to put it, I decided that this room needed a 'little' help so it was the next place to tackle in the declutter mission. There are no linen closets in this house so when we moved into this house we had to come up with a solution. This IKEA cabinet was the pick for two main reasons: 1. It fit in the corner 2. It wasn't so big that we could just keep stuffing things in there. It created a small limit as to what we have

I'm coming up on a dilemma....if I do whole rooms every week I am going to run out of posts pretty quick. Spoiler alert: I don't have 52 rooms in my house. But, I probably have 52 different areas that can be addressed. So, I'm focusing on one such area this week.  And it may be a bit controversial. Books. I love books. I love to cuddle up with a cup of tea, a great classic, and get lost in the pages. And I love it when I see my kids enjoy the same thing.  No, I am not telling you to give all your books away.  But maybe evaluate what you do have. Prior to moving to our current home I had ALOT of books.  There were quite a few boxes that were moved that contained just the books I had collected over the years. I just couldn't bear to get rid of them. But one thing helped me rethink the need to have ALL of the books.  This: A large number of my books were ruined when our pipes broke and dumped a foot deep worth of water into our house.  It was a s

Whew. I've had a cold/bug/flu that has been beating me up for the past two weeks. This post was supposed to make it up last week but time slipped away from me. So, this week's Pare Down - well, actually LAST week's posted this week - is taking a slightly different vein.  I'm here to encourage you.  If you are contemplating paring down and it looks like too big of a mountain to tackle or you've done a bit and just really wonder if the fight it worth it - consider this up side of when it is done - despite being sick for 2 weeks, the house still managed to look decently clean/put together. And it's not because all the people in the house are on the same page with me - we have 3 children that live here and DO NOT have the standards of 'picked up' that I do. I'm sure you can relate. But when there is less to manage, it can be managed in less time. I have seen that lived out here. So, if you are in the middle of that battle, keep work

February. What is there to say. The month of hearts and Valentines and basketball and snow....er, well, for us it was all but the last one. As is not the norm for this time of year, we managed to get outside quite a bit this month. We also celebrated birthdays with both side of the family. Managed another date night, attended a boatload of basketball games, and generally lived life. Some peoples lives have lots of exciting things happening. That may be our life someday.  But, for now, it's living with joy where we've been placed, working with what we've got, and shining the Light as bright as we can. Here's our corner of the world in February....  Madeline starts out the month for us....turning 7, much to her delight.  Shortly thereafter we celebrated more birthdays with the Steffens  Hannah...no explanation. Valentines Day, and all it's school parties, were celebrated shortly after that..... Plus, reminiscing 20 years w

I feel like I am a bit behind on getting this post out there. We have been battling the cough, fever, congestion thing around here and it's wiping me out. I have just a few minutes before my NyQuil kicks in so I'll type up as much as I can.... To pay my way through Occupational Therapy school, I worked as a file clerk for a Neurology office. For a year and a half I would show up at noon to a stack of papers at least 2 feet high. Everything had to be alphabetized, and then filed in the correct patient charts. I made it my personal goal to have the stack gone before the office closed at 5. To many of you that probably sounds horrendous. Organizing paper. But, truly, I enjoyed that job immensely. That should have clued me into something then, but I was on my way to a degree so I was too busy to stop and listen. 15 years later I am at a job where my main task is keeping track of all of the papers and making sure they are where they are supposed to be. I love it.