space.

My husband had 5 days off last weekend. It was great! We spent time with family, friends, and each other. Now it's back to reality!! Good thing that most of the time 'reality' is pretty nice!!

The other day I thought that I would put some water in a tote to let the kids wade in a little since it felt like a bazillion degrees out with 100% humidity. Well, we don't exactly have the cleanest or clearest water here.

So that idea was scratched. And don't worry, we have filters...lots of them! This was right from the water faucet outside. From the other side of the faucet is where is goes in to our camper and we have a filter out there before it goes through the hose. Then once it gets inside, we have a filter under our sink before it comes out of the kitchen sink and then before we drink it, we filter it through the Berkey Light, which is an AMAZING filter that makes the water crystal-clear, sediment and chemical-free but leaves all the good minerals in!

And here is the typical view in front of our front door. It's a constant battleground with the shoes and socks. I try to keep just one pair per person out, but still that ends up to be 12 shoes in a very little area.


I've been trying to re-organize and de-clutter stuff again. This time in Ariella's room. I would like to get it cleared out enough that instead of using the bunk beds for storage, we can actually use them as beds! We are thinking of putting Ariella in the bottom bunk with a bed rail and Tiernan in the top. That way the 2 little boys don't have to share a bed anymore. They often complain about the other one kicking them :) I think their legs are getting too long!! BUT, that means that I need to either 1) get rid of a bunch more stuff or 2) find another home for all my stuff that I have in those bunks!! Well, I've been doing some of both! Yesterday I did figure though that we have too many books.

And this was AFTER I got rid of a huge garbage bag full of books a few weeks ago! I figure that we have "camper size" everything else, we should have a "camper size" supply of books too, and this doesn't look like it! So I went through the books again....threw away the ones that had several pages missing, put some aside that we love and want to keep for our kids' kids to show them what mom and dad read when they were little, put some in storage for long car rides (like if we ever make it back to mn), and then donated the rest! We now have about 15-20 books. Perfect! One tote down!

And speaking of totes...the idea of trying those 'space storage bags' for our clothes finally 'clicked' to me! So I went to the store and bought some. They are SO AWESOME!!! I would recommend them to anyone that has lottas clothes/blankets/anything that can 'squish' easily and limited space. I had 3 totes (one 31 gallon and two 18 gallon) full of winter clothes, winter coats, snow pants, and hats/mittens, etc. I ended up with this when I was finished.

I was amazed at how narrow the bag got with all our winter stuff in it! Wow! What a help! Now instead of those 3 huge totes under our camper, I just have these bags and TONS of space!!...something always needed when you live in a RV :)