May The Force Be With You

Yesterday I mentioned that I've been busy working on organising and preparing for Caelan's eighth birthday party at the end of the month. Now there are a few things you'd learn about Caelan within minutes of meeting him. One is that he is madly in LOVE with anything 'Star Wars' and he'll talk your ear's off if you let him. The other fun facts you'll learn is that he loves LEGO, he's made about technology and if he's not reading he'll be search YouTube for new video's take feature anything Star Wars or Lego related.

So I knew straight away that if we asked if he'd want a birthday party he'd immediately want a Star Wars themed party. So once I had the go ahead, I started searching Pinterest to see what ideas I could steal borrow for his upcoming birthday party. It was during my search that I came across the fabulous party printables made by the lovely Simone she runs an online party business called Simone Made It. The first thing I did was to make sure that I'd use the majority of the printables that are included in the pdf file especially as I'd have to wait another eight years for Quinlan to hopefully want to use the same theme.

I'm using the invitation in the top left hand corner.

All the text on these particular invitations was changeable so this allowed me to enter all of our party details and make up individual invitations for each child. I printed out each invitation using our printer and I set them aside for twenty-four hours so that the ink would set before cutting them. Now in my part of Brisbane we've been dealing with a heap of rain so I quickly came to the realisation that handing out printed invitations wouldn't be ideal.

To make the invitations a bit stronger I framed the invitation with two layers of card stock. I decided to use three different coloured card stock just because that's what I had on hand in my stash, now I went with silver glitter card, purple glitter card and a blue shimmering card stock. Now as I've been listening intently to Caelan during the last two weeks I knew that I had to add some shimmer and/or glitter to the invitation so that it resembled the starry galaxy that goes hand and hand with a Star Wars theme.

So I cut out the paper image, placed double sided tape on the back and stuck it onto the glitter card stock. I wanted some of the glitter to show through so I allowed 0.5 centimetres to create a boarder around the printed image. I then struck the glitter card stock onto black card stock so that the entire invitation was more solid. Again I created a 0.5 centimetre perimeter around the glitter card just to tie it all together. After all that I placed the invitations under some heavy telephone books just to make sure that everything stuck together properly. So after hours of cutting, measuring and gluing both Caelan and I were extremely happy with the way his invitations turned out.

The invitation at the front has a purple
 glitter boarder BUT it photographs blue.

So tell me what do you think? Do you think that the glitter worked? I'm very happy with the way the invitations turned out my only disappointment is that the blue shimmer card stock (invitation that has Luke on it) isn't the wasn't the correct colour but it was the closest I could get at the time. Caelan was really, really happy with the way the invitation looked and he couldn't wait for school to start today so that he could hand them out to all his Star Wars made friends.

Megan

It's my birthday and I'll cry if I want to...

Today's my thirty-eighth birthday and I'm not really feeling it. Ask the children my age they'll tell you I'm really old, hundred's of years ago I would have been considered 'old' but today 38 is just a number. I'm reminded everyday that there's women just starting their families at my age, some people are travelling for the first time, others are starting new careers and some are watching there children move onto adulthood. If you'd asked me when I was in my 20's what I'd be doing at this age, being at home full-time with children wouldn't have been my only answer.

I always wanted children and I wanted to raise them but I also wanted to have the ability to work from home while I raised the children. I've come to realise in the last few years that I probably should have planned my life out a little more, planned more holidays, taken more trips with the children just so we could explore things, learnt to dance, taken up knitting, done a short course, searched out beautiful antiques and started doing more crafty hobbies. One thing I've come to realise is that I'm my happiest when I'm helping others, so coming up with an endless list of things to cross off a bucket list before my next birthday won't make me any happier.

My focus is my children, our family and as a twenty-five year old I wasn't mature enough to know what I'd need to be doing as a mother or a wife. I now know that I need to focus on showing my children how I love them, playing games with them, making them laugh or smile but most importantly doing things with them or for them to show them that I'm here. I want to be present in their lives, I want to share things with them and enjoy their joy, their loves and their sorrow. I want to more than just their mum I want their love, understanding and respect. This year I'm going to try and make them smile more, laugh more and I'm going to cuddle them more.

Speaking of children I'm in the process of planning my son's eighth birthday party. This year we are inviting a few children over to the house for a STAR WARS party and I can tell you that Caelan is beyond excited. He can't wait. The best part so far has been listening to him talk endlessly about all the characters he likes, he's helped me name the food we'll be having, he's helping think up things to do while the kid's are here and he's counting down the day's until the invitations get handed out.

I'm not showing him everything, I want to have a few surprises on the day so that he has to smile even wider. Tomorrow I'll show you the finished birthday invitations, were I found all my supplies and what other things I need to cross off my list.

May the force be with you....

Megan 

When Clutter Own's You Part 2

During the last six months I've shared a few posts about my issues with clutter, (find them here, here and here) how I've tried to declutter our house and how I've signed on to various 'organising your houses' programs that other bloggers host in an attempt to make an impact on the mess clutter that we having been living with. So I've taken some time away from blogging and I've been working on finally unpacking all those boxes that I'd dumped all over the house.

In Queensland, we have been inundated with rain during the last two months so it was an easy decision as to were I was going to start. The first area that I needed to address was getting the our KIA Carnival into our double garage especially with the heavier rain falls happening during school drop-off and school pick-up times. Having to time it so that I could run each child out to the car with an umbrella means that by the time I get to the car I am very wet and as the return trip home is done with twenty minutes I usually have to take my clothes off and try to dry them over the clothes horse. So with this in mind I set about clearing the garage out so I could get the car into the garage and the kids in and out without having to deal with the rain.

Before.

Before.

As you can see there is a heap of things in the garage that just shouldn't be there and these pictures were taken after I'd previously spent six hours clearing out things. The majority of the work I'd already done was to remove all the clothing out and install a storage box that I'd purchased from Ikea months and months earlier. One of the reason why I only spent six hours in there was because we had so many large and small items that there wasn't really anywhere to put them.

I started off by removing all the boxes, containers, toys etc and I worked through these sorting them into various piles so that I could put them in there correct position later. I knew that we had a few heavy items like a refrigerator, unused tiles, an old wardrobe and a metal shelving unit that stored poisons, petrol and other items that need to be stored in a shed (which we don't own). With the amount of heavy items I had Mr Opoes work with me so that I could focus my time on going through the stuff I'd moved into the house. It wasn't an easy job, with all the things we had in there it's often difficult to find places for them in other rooms without first looking through a box and only keeping the things we need.

I still have a number of boxes to go through and I know that the majority of the boxes are filled with toys so one of the next jobs I have to accomplish is to organise the storage area in the kid's room which is next on my ever growing to-do list. Clearing the garage in order to get the people mover in took nearly six hours, at least half that time was spent re-positioning things like tiles, an old wardrobe and household items e.g. wooden ladders, art canvas and wooden dolls items. So in total we have probably spent twelve hours so far and there's probably another four to five hours just finalising things once we get a shed organised. It will also mean that I can move the four kid's bikes out of the living room and into the shed.

So if you're still reading you probably want to see same after pictures. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the same angles as the before pictures but I was able to capture a more detailed photograph so that you could see how we went about fitting everything in.

The Garage (80% completed)

After.

Done:

▪ moved all the tiles into an area so that it would be easy to sell them.

▪ stored wooden ladders out of the way.

▪ placed items needing to go into the shed in one area.

▪ put shoes in pink box in the shoe storage area.

▪ swept floor so that the area was clean before the car came in.

To Do:
▪ remove all the shed related items into the shed.

▪ sell the tiles, wardrobe and any baby related stuff that I don't want.

▪ move the refrigerator, clean it and plug it in. 

▪ work on setting up an organisation station.

▪ set up zones so that the room is more functional.

As you can see there are still items that need to be rehoused but for now we are all very happy to have the car in the garage. The other thing that we've noticed is that the garage might not be a true double garage size especially when you take the brick work into account, we would struggle to fit a small car into the space that's left. The fun now is learning how to get down the driveway without damaging the new garden beds. Hope you have some fun de-cluttering just like we did!!

Megan