I’m often asked how we handle big kid stuff (legos, art supplies, open cups, etc.) with small kids around.  It does require some management and there are times the older ones are inconvenienced.

We keep all small toys on the 2nd floor. Since mine share a room we have an extra bedroom. The little ones have no need to be up there without an adult. It is hard to convince one child to play away from people on their own at that age so they won’t get as much use as they would nearby or if there are multiple big kids.  Art supplies are in a closet that only gets opened when babies/toddlers are napping.  On rare occasions the younger ones are happy in the gated playroom and the older ones can use art supplies elsewhere.

(Can you tell we have boys?)

That being said, over the years I’ve found that some small toys are more manageable than others. For example, brand name Matchbox & Hot Wheels cars are not my first choice for toddler teeth, but they hold up very well unlike knockoffs so I have no knockoffs.  Also, its easy to rush to the “big kid” toys. We have far more LEGOs than anyone actually needs and we didn’t even start with the oldest was well past 4 (youngest age on sets). My oldest gravitated back to the “baby toys” as soon as the twins got interesting enough to play with.

I don’t think this is news to anybody if you stop to think about it, but for some reason it really hit me this week.  Perhaps it was because we missed trash day last week.  And perhaps it was because it was really windy on trash day this week so I didn’t put out as many recycleables as I could of lest they blow around and make a mess.

But, we had 6 bags of trash (covering 2 weeks).  Two were exclusively Christmas:

• Wrapping stuff that doesn’t recycle
• Broken / old (non donate-able) stuff getting replaced by new stuff for Christmas
• A few strands of mini-lights (old ones that finely went and are being replaced by LEDs, but we still have one left after this Christmas)
• Gingerbread houses
• Packing material that doesn’t recycle from whatever’s been shipped to us
• Plastic envelopes from whatever’s been shipped to us (we got a lot of those this year and they don’t recycle them here)
• The wreath – they don’t recycle these here because of the metal frames they’re built on

Plus there is a lot of extra recycling:

• Wrapping paper
• Tubes from used up wrapping paper
• Shipping boxes
• Greeting cards
• Toy packaging
• Cans/jars/etc from Christmas cooking
• Bottles/cans from Christmas drinking/entertaining

Anyway, I felt a bit odd when I put a 7^th bag of trash in the can as I returned it to the garage.  And, I filled half our recycling bin on the way to the garage 10 minutes after the truck emptied it with items I didn’t want flying off.  It will go eventually, but goodness that felt like a lot.  The boys did/will play with a lot of the recycling until it gets too banged up to be useful.  I still have a lot in the house that will make its way out over the next month.

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday.

We have deer in our backyard.  This is not a rural place; it is definitely suburbia.  But, last spring we had 9 at once!  The other day we only had 3.  But, this time I took pictures.  I don’t have a great camera and I took these from inside as I didn’t want to startle them by going outside.  But, here they are (look closely) about 30’ from the back of the house.

They’ve come to eat the pumpkins.

The weather is turning so I’ve harvested the last of the foods for this year.  I’ve still got celery and a few carrots in the ground we can use, but otherwise its been picked.  While I didn’t end up with too much this year, it succeeded as a summer project for the kids.  Also, we were gone a bunch so we were reliant on whatever fell from the sky and we missed the corn harvest entirely.

I’d do corn again, though.  It came up well, we just left a week or so before it was ready and it was gone by the time we got back.  I truly recommend celery as its great to go get one stalk when that’s what you need for a recipe; we’re not big celery eaters.  Carrots take up a lot of space for not much return so I probably won’t do those again (but the boys pick so one never knows).  I had that same issue with broccoli last year.  I was fairly sure I’d purchased a yellow pepper plant, but they never moved beyond green.  The peppers were very good, but yellow would have been better.

The squash took over the yard.  We ended up with 1 butternut, 2 delicata, and 1 pumpkin (which is big but doesn’t seem to want to turn orange).  We only had one plant of each type, and my kids don’t like squash of any sort, so I’m not complaining.  The last time we planted squash we got 9 off one plant and had it all winter.