Posted in Daily Life at Home

So I was sitting outside the other day while the olders bounced on the trampoline and the littles played in the water (baby was on my lap) and I discovered why you see Southern ladies with fans. It has nothing to do with keeping cool - really doesn't help much to move the hot, humid air. The reason they have fans is to keep the gnats out of their faces!!! I don't own a fan, so I grabbed the nearest thing - a frisbee - to keep the pesky bugs away. If you have never experienced the fearless things, you cannot imagine how awful it is! They fly into your eyes, hair, ears, and every other part of your face! They swarm around your head - don't dare to look up! Now I know God created them for a purpose, but don't you think they should just stick to that purpose and leave us humans alone???

The other day (okay, it wasn't day - it was very early morning during a feeding) I was thinking about how dh and I want to lose weight. I started thinking about the reasons people should lose weight. We want to be healthier, more able to do things, look better, etc. While pondering this, I began to consider how our house is much the same. It needs to lose weight as well. Things have gotten very cluttered and we just have too much stuff. We spend all our time cleaning up and putting away. It is unhealthy because the dust settles on everything. We can't do the things we want because we are too busy keeping up. The house would look much better with less in it. God loves order, so our house should have order, too. We should not be slaves to our stuff. We can't hear God if there is chaos! Therefore, we are putting our house on a diet. This is a drastic, no mercy diet. I am getting rid of at least half of the stuff in our house. We will give some to the local thrift store and sell some. If we make some money off the stuff we will put it aside for our larger van. The children are going to help with this, too.

Today we started the diet by cleaning out all the clothing we had stockpiled. I had the children bring up all the stored clothing (picture to come soon). We went through it and got rid of lots. We saved things that tend to cost more to replace (remember, we can pass clothes down). These are items like dresses (hard to find the longer, modest ones), sweatshirts, long sleeve t's and pants for the boys. We separated the big pile into girl and boy clothes. Then we categorized by size. What a job! But it is great to have much less. Not sure what we will tackle tomorrow - maybe the playroom??? Stay tuned...

Oh, and as for dh and I losing weight? Eating healthier and exercising will take care of us (I don't do diets). Dh has been riding his bike to work - a little over 12 miles each way. The children and I will be going walking.

Does your house need to lose a little weight? Look around and see if there are some pudges that could use reducing!!

Have a blessed day!