Unpacking with Help

After seven days of intense labor we can report that the kitchen is in good shape. How can it take seven days to unpack one room?! It's no easy feat to combine three kitchens into one. What do we keep? What do we delete? Three toasters, five crock pots, two food processors, three blenders, five spritz presses (all Mirro!), nine large aluminum cookie sheets, etc. We had over a hundred bottles of spices to sort through. That seemed like a lot of work, but it was nothing compared to combining our utensil collections.

The endless decisions that have to made are difficult and when one is sleep deprived and not functioning at optimal level, it's that much more difficult. And then we have three little helpers. While they are truly awesome, they seriously impede our ability to accomplish our goals of unpacking boxes and rearranging furniture.

Even though there are baby gates at the base of the stairs going up to the bedrooms and at the top of the stairs going down to the family room, we still spend a lot of time trying to keep track of the kids and trying to keep them out of trouble. They add toys to boxes we are unpacking, they scale the stacks of boxes, and they pull stuff out of boxes and run off with it. They are not an asset to our unpacking.

Here's Viva and Jake hanging out with me in while I unpack book boxes in the library:


Viva discovers the fax machine, a favorite "toy" of hers.


Jake playing with the door knobs, a favorite "toy" of his.


Viva and Jake helping great-grandma sort through her cookbooks. She has three and half file boxes of cookbooks. I have three. Kara has two and half. We have LOTS of cook books in our library.