What We're Loving Now {January 2016}

What we've been watching, reading, eating, living:

Sofia the First - the second season of this show went up on Netflix recently and the girls' just finished it.  "I'm finding out what being royal's all about..making my way, it's an adventure everyday."  The theme song is REALLY catchy, but Piper won't let me sing it.  

Bunk Beds - Cadence may not always be super excited to have her little sis in her room, but the bunk beds have none the less proven to be a lot of fun.  Piper figured out how to hang blankets from the top bunk in optimum fashion, so...

Downtown Abbey - You know, it's been a lot of ups and maybe more downs with this show, right?  I'm watching on the pbs website since we don't have TV, so I'm at least a day behind.  I'm really glad that Carson and Mrs. Hughes are married and that Edith has such fabulous headbands.

Homemade popcorn - I can't eat microwave popcorn anymore; I just can't.  We eat my homemade popcorn frequently and it kinda saved the day during the snow extravaganza.  I've developed my technique: popped in coconut oil, sprinkled with kosher salt.  Or tahin.  Or popped with coconut oil and sugar, then sprinkled with salt, which is kettle corn-y perfection.

The life changing magic of tidying up - I already wrote about this.  It feels really good to be letting go of things that we can send to a better home.  Or the dump.  The bookshelf in our living room has never looked so good.

We're tidying up!

 At the end of December, I read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and got very excited.  There are some crazy parts of this book, for sure, but I loved Kondo's thorough methods for going through your stuff and paring down to what sparks joy.  The amount of stuff in our house had really started to bother me - it was hard to clean and hard to put things away.  We have only sporadically decluttered after moving here, and we still had stuff like we lived in a much bigger house.

She recommends going through each category of item in your home and looking at them all together and touching each one.  So, that's all my shoes.  (Clearly, I owned two many pairs of shoes.)  It seems like a simple thing, but gathering all the things makes it much easier to see what sparks joy and what's just a duplicate and what I actually forgot I had in my closet.

This is all our cups on the kitchen table.  There are 4 people in this house.  I don't believe we've ever had more than 8 people eat a meal here.  I had no idea we had so many until I pulled them out of the cabinets.

13 bags/boxes have left our house so far.  Matt and I have done clothes, books, and papers, and started slowly on the miscellaneous stuff, like DVDs and cups.  We haven't even started on the rest of the kitchen cabinets or the girls' massive wardrobes and toy collections!

{this moment}

First Snow 2016

This is just the first taste...it's still coming down!