Sunday, May 25, 2008

Ahhh, Spring cleaning....

Well, it seems as though Spring has arrived. I've always wondered about this "sping cleaning" idea. Now, I'm not one that likes to clean AT ALL, but why such a big emphasis on doing it in the Spring? Well, now that the weather has decided to become more mild and a bit sunnier than it has been in awhile, I actually do have this urge to clean things up. We moved into this house in the month of April (5 years ago), so I think this time of year reminds me of when everything was brand new and everthing had a place. It could also be that I'm tired of entering every room in my house and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of clutter. It makes me want to run the other way!

Since we aren't going anywhere this weekend we decided this would be a good time to start our cleaning spree. We decided to begin with our biggest problem child - the one unfinished room in our house. When we moved into this house in 2003 only the main floor was finished. This house has a daylight basement the same size as the main floor and we had the builder go ahead and sheetrock the basement, but there was no flooring, doors, moldings, etc. Within a few months we painted most of the rooms and put in carpet. I think it was another year or so before we got moldings and doors down there. Now it's almost complete except for one large room.

When we moved in back in 2003 Mateo was 3 and Jaxon was about a month old. We've been telling the boys from that very first day that this pretty large room downstairs would be there "play room". To this day it's still called the "play room", but there has never been any playing done in this room at all!

I should have taken a before photo of the room yesterday before we started. Imagine a 400 square foot room with white primered walls and no flooring (just a subfloor) packed with boxes and toys and just and overwhelming amount of "stuff". The clutter touched all walls and piles averaged about 5 feet in height. Crazy for anyone to have this much stuff and this is just one room in our house - yikes! (No, the other rooms aren't that bad, but they're bad enough.)

I'll take a photo of the room today, but mind you we removed about half the room yesterday (all toys) and moved that into the family room to sort into piles - throw away, Good Will, ebay/craigslist, keep, etc... I did take a photo of the family room and you'll probably gasp in horror when you see the amount of toys we had all hidden away in the "play room" not being played with at all. At one time we removed all buy a few toys from the boys for a punishment (Mateo was going through a naughty streak) and they never came out again. That part wasn't planned. We really did intend to bring at least some of the toys back, but believe me, they've accumulated more, so NO they are not deprived!

We've always tried to tell people that we have enough toys to open a toy store and now maybe they'll believe us. I'll post photos a bit later today, you may want to make sure you're sitting down when you check back :)

Part Deux:

OK, so I didn't get to posting photos on Saturday. I did take the photos right after I wrote the first part of this post, so here goes...

The "play room" after removing about half the stuff... you couldn't even get down this little hallway without climbing over stuff.






















Where Chico is standing was the worse spot. The "before" photo of this spot would have filled the whole frame and boxes were stacked just shy of touching the ceiling. I didn't think we'd removed anything but toys out of here at this point, but he had.


Now I'm standing where Chico just was.


OK, here's the shot of the basement from the bottom of the stairs looking into what would become my "weekend of fun". It took me all weekend to sort, find missing pieces and decide what to do with everything.








Doesn't Chico look excited? While I took over the toy part of the weekend, he focused on going through a ton of boxes of paper that was in the "play room". So now you can imagine what our living room looks like! I'm not going to show that right now, downstairs is embarassing enough. Thanks for all your hard work this weekend Chico!






















Here's the "after the weekend" shot of the family room. We had pushed back all the furniture to make a work area. Hopefully tonight I'll get the last remaining things out of here and move the furniture back into position. We've got some Wii playing that needs to get done!!

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Indiana Gallegos

There's Indiana Jones pandemonium in the Gallegos residence today!! The new Indiana Jones movie starts tonight and the boys are soooo thrilled! They are supposed to go see it with Granny this weekend. Mateo came home sick from school today, so hopefully he'll recover and be able to go.

They've been excited about this movie for months! We now have all the old movies, Legos galore (not enough according to the boys) and they really want the Indiana Jones game for the Wii.

They've also started acting out the movies. Mateo let me capture a few photos of him in his Indy garb. I thought he did a great job of coming up with this outfit from clothes found in his closet. He just needs a whip and the look would be complete! (Yeah, there will be no whips in this house with these two boys!!)

Alright Mateo, I mean Indy, go find us some lost treasure!!



Friday, May 16, 2008

Take me out to the ball game...

Well, now that the baseball season is halfway over I should probably post some photos of the boys...

This is Jaxon's first year playing t-ball and I think he's having a pretty good time. His team is the Chicago White Sox. His team is a pretty young one. Most of the players are 5 & 6 year olds and I think maybe only one of the players has every played before. Let's just say there's a lot of flower picking and socializing out on the field. :)

This is Mateo's 3rd year playing ball and his 1st year in AA. He's on the NY Yankies this year. This level is pretty fun to watch because unlike t-ball, where everyone gets to hit and run in, in AA they start the 3 strikes rule and they start learning more plays.

Both the boys played tonight at 6 pm. Thankfully they both play on fields at the same school so we could just walk back and forth between the two fields. It was soooo hot out there!! I don't know what the official temperature was today, but it was supposed to be about 95 - it felt like it!!

Well, no photos from tonight, but here are some random photos from other games. Enjoy!!




































Monday, May 12, 2008

Yesterday was a good day

I had a really nice Mother's Day yesterday! Mateo woke me up so that he could give me his gift he made for me at school. He made a very nice card with a little poem inside and a ceramic bird's nest with a real egg inside. I had to break the egg open to find 6 little rolled up messages inside. Very cute!


















Then when Jaxon woke up the boys gave me the projects that they had been working on all week with Chico... I got two new bird houses!! They were so proud!























I had to get a couple of things done in the morning, so the boys and Chico went out and got me my favorite Caramel Sauce Mocha from Starbucks and some great doughnuts from Jim's market in Banks - that's what I call breakfast!!

In the afternoon we went out to deliver gifts to Granny and Nona. Granny made a BBQ for lunch and there was tons to eat!! We gave Granny a pretty rose plant and the boys each gave her a plant that they picked out. After visiting with Granny & Uncle Lee and watching a movie we went to Nona & Papa's. The boys gave Nona a new puzzle and a hula hoop. That was fun gave watching Nona give it a whirl!! I made Nona a framed picture of the two of us at my wedding (back in 1997). I think she liked it.
















I didn't tell the boys until tonight that my gift from Chico was "Mario Cart" for the Wii. Might sound funny, but I really like playing the Wii with them! Mateo and I are getting pretty good at Guitar Hero III.

Anyhoo, it was a very nice day and I hope all of you other Mothers had a wonderful day as well!!

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Our new toy...

Well, it's actually more of a necessity with today's fuel prices!! This is our new VW Cabrio (new to us - it's a 1998) we got this on Sunday. It's my new commuter car and we're saving the Diesel Excursion for little trips and such where we want the room and the dvd player for the kids. Did I mention Diesel is over $4.31 a gallon. That's ridiculous!!

Anyway, this should be a fun car for the summer!! Honk if you see us!