I have two more quilts to share, but need to find the time to photograph them ... maybe tomorrow?


My oldest daughter, not named Grace, had her second sailing accident in less than a week. The first was getting tangled in her mainsheet while sailing and somehow doing a backflip, landing face first on her boat, bruising her face in a few places, bruising both elbows, knees, and one hip, and straining her neck and back. Thankfully she's ok.

And then, as if that wasn't graceful enough, yesterday she was helping to put a boat on a trailer when she had some sort of accident and received a very nasty cut between her thumb and index finger, requiring a bunch of stitches to fix it up. Again, she's ok, and was very very brave during the whole procedure. I've suggested she find a different, safer sport ... like ice hockey.

Today we took a break from schoolwork and went on a fieldtrip. The kids brought along their nature journals to write or color in, and we discovered "new to us" places.

Today's goal was La Belle, a town along the Caloosahatchee River. It's an older town with a few older buildings and lots of mature trees that create canopies over the streets ... which, in south Florida, isn't something you see everywhere and is just such a lovely sight.

Our first stop was Hickey's Creek Mitigation Park.

Quick summary: Beautiful park with 3 hiking trails, wonderful terrain changes throughout the trails, large wild cat of some sort (seen by C., not the rest of us),and when it's 95' and very sunny with little shade it's HOT! We walked about 2 miles. Very fun and we all agreed we'd go back ... in January, when it wasn't quite so hot.


Then a quick visit to the LaBelle museum, quick because it's small and the kids were getting a little restless (they'd just eaten lunch with dessert). One thing we learned, that I'd never heard before, is that they find a lot of huge old bones in the river. I. and M. were so impressed by the size of the tooth they'd found (it was bigger than a small animal's head).

A decision was made this evening to clean A. and K.'s room. It had been bothering me for a very long time, just tons of clutter, and I'd put it off more than once ... it was a huge mess. So the six of us spent over 2 hours cleaning it ... well, really four of us because A. and K. wanted to keep everything and were sent to watch tv. In the middle of the project C. suggested I take a picture. Frankly, the quantity of crap they had was too embarrasing to share with anyone (in my defense, most of it either came from their brother or Ditto Kiddo) so no "before" or "work in progress" photo was taken. In the end we sorted into three piles ...


trash


Ditto Kiddo (yes, four garbage bags and all the big cars and Little People stuff in the back)


and keep, we all thought the boys would get upset when they saw what was left but instead they were just thrilled to discover what we'd kept that they'd forgotten they had. Their train stuff and matchbox cars were all kept too, but aren't kept on their shelves. Next stop, I.'s room, and then M.'s.

I love decluttering and getting rid of stuff, it just feels like the whole house gets lighter, and having less stuff definately makes the house easier to clean.