A Little Nap After a Hard Day’s Work

We are nesting around here, I know it might be a little early but better to be done and ready for the baby now then waiting until he's here!  So Chris and I are building two shelving units for our bedroom to replace the two dressers in our room that hold all of the children's clothing. Well, almost all of them, and that is the problem! We need more space and those two dressers are just not cutting it! So we have built one of them and Chris will finish the other one probably this weekend. The shelves are each seven shelves high and two rows wide, which give us a total of 28 drawers! Each of the kids will have their own row of four tubs and mom and dad will have some extra space as well. I LOVE ORGANIZING! So today I was able to get the first unit up and started organizing, but was stopped several times by unmonitored boys, fighting over toys. So I decided that was it! I told them that they could each go and pick out one small toy and that was it for the rest of the day, and I informed them that they would be working with me for the rest of the day, not to leave my side without permission. And if they fought over the one toy they did have, they would lose that privilege as well. So we went to work, it was about 10:00 am. We completely cleaned and organized my room, then onto the hallway, the bathroom, and kitchen. Stopped for a granola bar at 11:30, then onto their bedroom, and the living room. Stopped for lunch at 1:00 and they got a longer break (partly because I needed one too!) At around 2:30 the girls went to bed and I finished up some more cleaning while the boys each sat on the couch and read their story book Bibles until about 3:00. And it wasn't until then that I gave them their toys, they don't get toys while they are working, but had forgotten to ask for them during their break.  Did I mention that there was hardly any arguing during the working hours? They were too distracted with their jobs and I gave them each specific jobs so they wouldn't fight over those as well. It takes more energy to keep them busy but we really get so much more done when we are all working, and I don't have to bend over so much (that's getting really difficult to do these days and the boys love knowing that they are helping me with something that's really hard for me to do. I think they get that from their dad :) Aidan asked me, about two hours into cleaning, "are we going to work all day?" I thought he was complaining and I responded, "we'll just have to see but probably." He seemed pretty cheerful about my response. "Just like daddy works really hard all day and he stops for breaks sometimes. This must be how a little boy learns to work like a grown up man." Wow! Okay, I'm definitely going to do this more often! It's not that I don't have them work with me a lot, I do. But I think the mentality was different, they knew that they were not to do any playing until I said they could play, that was that! I guess that's how it should be all the time :) Boys need to work, that's how God wired them. If they don't learn to work at an early age, they wont be very hard workers when they are grown men. I love the picture of Eamon studying his two Bibles in his sleep. He must be cross-referencing his two different translations ;) Well, more pictures of our progress soon. It's time for me to hit the sack!