Spring Forth

Photo Credit : Martha Stewart

She's here!

She finally made her arrival this weekend! Beautiful, glorious Spring! In celebration of this special occasion my wonderful friend Kellie of This Blessed Nest is hosting a Spring Fling Party today! You HAVE to stop by and take a peek into her craft room! Oh my happy spring goodness! It is one impressive makeover! Make sure you link up with your own spring post!

I wanted to create this beautiful egg shaped piece of spring heaven, complete with pearl pins for Kellie's party today and sit with a cup of my favorite tea and blog hop and look at all of your inspirational spring ideas!  

But when I thought about what I needed to do it was screaming for a makeover and I have just been putting it off for about as long as one can.

It's the place in our home where everyone just puts their stuff. There is so much stuff sitting in and on this space that it is hard to tell what this space is really meant to be! And to know me is to know that I do not like clutter. I like things clean and streamlined and very organized. I can't think when everything is a mess! 

So you can imagine how I must be feeling to look at this everyday................

As we say in the south when we are just not sure what to say.........Have you ever in your life?

Is that a lamp shade you ask?.....why yes it is. I'm sure your wondering what it is doing in the kitchen and the answer to that is that someone decided to wear it as a hat and dance around the kitchen while I was trying to cook dinner last week.  I love Motherhood. :)

Here is another shot with a wider view so that you can really grasp the full level of chaos!

I didn't bother opening the drawers for a picture, mainly because I could barely get them open!  But here is a picture of what was inside a few of the drawers.

Are you overwhelmed yet? Me too. 

That's why I decided to call in for reinforcements and asked Southern Butter to hightail it over to my house this weekend.  I sent Mr. P and G out for an entire day of birthday man stuff. Like a facial and a massage.

Here she is hard at work with the cutest baby in the world ~ Mr. Wiggles! I told her to put that baby down and help me sort, clean and organize! I was on mission Spring Fling and I did not have time to sit around and hold adorable babies!  Isn't he delicious though?

She did put him down for about two minutes. 

Long enough to pick up a hot cup of coffee and her cell phone. Ahem.

Meanwhile back at the ranch......one of us broke a sweat and brought some order in the house.  I am pleased to show you the results of our hard work.

Here it is! All I can say is that I can breathe. Finally. 

I took every single thing out of all of the cabinets and drawers and threw most of it away. 

I cleaned house! I kept only what I absolutely needed and loved. I did not buy anything new at all except for the fresh flowers!  

I wanted to use the left side of the cabinets for all of my cookbooks , recipes and cooking magazines and the right side for all of the kids craft stuff. 

I did not want anything on the desk top except white legal pads , pencils and my calendars.

Again. Clean and simple. Less is more for me.

I also love to drink hot tea and coffee and thought that this would inspire me to sit down during the day and gather my thoughts~ instead of writing my kids Doctors appointments down on the back of a gum wrapper.

Here is my file drawer. I filled each drawer with color coded files and folders and used one of my favorite inventions of all time to label each folder. I then took hundreds of pieces of paper and filed every single one in it's proper place. It was not easy, in fact it took me the entire weekend but now when the school needs a shot record, it will take me all of 5 seconds to locate it! This is a wonderful feeling!!

Here is a closer look at the desk and a few of my favorite things. 

Fresh flowers. My calendars. A teapot and my favorite tea. A black and white glossy of my babies. A candle, blank legal pads and a bouquet of pencils. 

The linen carry-all is what I take with me in the car to hold mail, bills, magazines, etc and I do my best to organize and sort while I am sitting in the car pool line every day. 

I also did a little floor move this weekend and created this spring reading nook for the children. I love to encourage reading and creating special places for them. You may remember the comfort closet post I wrote a year ago. I have yet to recreate that here in our new place but this will have to do for now! 

I would much rather them reach for a book about why we celebrate Easter than to sit in front of the television any day.  I put this little cabinet right behind the sofa in our family room hoping to encourage a lot more reading!

I bought some wheat grass to use to decorate with around the house and a little wheat grass seed so that the kiddies could also plant their own and watch it grow. They are learning about sowing good seeds, planting the love of Jesus and Springing Forth this Easter season! 

How are you spending the first week of Spring?