Progress...

We are hoping to move within the next year or so (preferably this year) but in the mean time I have been getting extremely frustrated with our lack of.... ANY space. So we've been doing little things here and there and it's really been making a difference! I went to Ikea with my friend, Caitlin, and this is the unit I wanted to get for Jo's room. But after seeing the whole collection in person I ended up buying this. My whole idea was to get a huge storage unit that could eliminate other things from Jo's room by condensing things to one unit AND provide extra storage space for future things AKA 2nd birthday presents and what not. We're building it this weekend and I'm quite excited! By "we" I mean Rob will building it =)

I had to reorganize Jo's room in order to clear off an entire wall for this unit to go on. It's 6' by 6' so it's quite big. Here are some pictures of how I reorganized it...

See Jo's TV stand? that will be completely gone from her room because of this new unit. There's not much on it compared to how much room is on that unit.

I got yet another closet organizer at Ikea, see the smaller one to the right? At least it'll provide a little extra space for all of Jo's clothes.

Here is the wall I cleared off for the unit, I had to take a lot of things that were hanging on that wall off and put them somewhere else in her room. The easel will go where Jo's TV stand was and those 2 cube blocks you see will also be able to get out of Jo's room as a result of the new unit.



Then in the living room we did some work. We organized all the wires in the back of the TV stand and got rid of a few things that Rob never uses. AKA a DVD player we've been meaning to throw away because it stopped working but we just kept it where it was haha and a few other things like that. We took all the things out of the bottom of the TV stand like the cable box etc. and stacked them on a shelf next to the TV stand, thus providing extra storage space in the cabinets under the TV stand. And by using that TV stand we were able to clear this space next to it...

There used to be 2 blocks stacked on top of each other just like you see where Jo's books are. Now that space is free for toys that were taking up too much room in another crowded corner.

THEN... the blocks that were there are now going to go in OUR bedroom here: (one is only pictured)

We're going to move the little closet type thing you see to the right of the block over to the right and put Jo's TV stand there and then the blocks from the living room and Jo's room on top of the TV stand to create even more shelf space in our room which we need BADLY (as you can see form the pile of things on the floor) Did you follow all that? I just can't wait for the unit in Jo's room to be built. We need it so bad!

In other news.... here is Jo eating a waffle and some raisins and being cute while doing so...

Busy, Busy, Busy...

We've been busy doing a lot of reorganizing and what not around here but right now, at 11:45 pm, I have time to update the blog! haha

The other day, my father-in-law was vacuuming the stairs and Jo was just fascinated. She was like in a trance watching him haha she actually pulled this chair up to the door and just sat there for a good 5 minutes just watching him vacuum.



We've been going to the playground almost every day lately. The other day Jo kept her sunglasses on the entire time, she looked so adorable!









And another day at the playground...

Smiley...

We've been walking A LOT lately. Today we must have walked at least 4 miles. We hit up The Dollar Tree (which I am just obsessed with), then headed over to Papa Ginos for a pizza dinner and then to BJs to get a few things. Here are a few pictures I took...

Jo's Collection...

Jo has SO many souvenir shirts that people get her when they travel that it has turned into an official collection. It's kinda cool if you think about it! I'm never going to get rid of them. She has about 20 at this point! My Dad travels a lot and always gets her one whenever he goes somewhere, he's gotten her a couple from different places in FL, Las Vegas, North Carolina, NH... Rob's brother travels a lot and has gotten her a few (Washington, Cape Town South Africa!!!, Mount Rushmore) and then she has gotten some from her Nana & Pepe who go on a lot of cruises to different places and she's gotten some from her Auntie who goes to Maine, Cape Cod, and NYC a lot and of course we got her one when we went to NYC and Mystic, Connecticut. I never really thought about how she happen to have so many until recently and I thought to myself, wow, this is a legit collection she's got going on here! So when my sister went to New Zealand for 3 weeks for work I told her she had to get her a t-shirt since she has such a big collection and ever since the South Africa t-shirt started the international part of her collection I thought it should be added to! haha so my sister didn't get her just one, she got two! Aren't they cute?


And here are a few pictures of Jo having fun with Dada...

"I wanna take a nap!"

The other day Jo went and got her Hello Kitty blanket, the one that she HAS to sleep with every night, and brought it into the kitchen while saying "I wanna take a nap!"...

Over Haul!

We are making some major improvements around here. If you aren't familiar with our living situation... we live in a very nice apartment buuuut we are very short on storage space. Basically we have 3 closets in our apartment. We also have a storage unit and shed but those are only for things we don't need to get to very often at all so basically in house storage is very scarce around here! With Jo's 2nd birthday coming up and just... life continuing in general, something needed to be done around here. I don't have ANYWHERE to put ANYTHING. And that is not an understatement!

The closet in Jo's room is our biggest closet and so therefore was our main storage space. Rob had boxes and boxes of stuff taking up the whole bottom layer of the closet and then I had tons of bins stacked up on top of them and you just couldn't get to anything without taking out a million bins first. Things DEFINITELY needed to change here! So Rob went through all his boxes and threw out 99% of the stuff and I made the bottom layer of the closet my bins, therefore they weren't stacked anymore. Then we went through the miscellaneous stuff that was stuffed along the outer edges of the closet and after all that, we were left us a lot of room! The plan was to move all of Jo's clothes from her bureau to the closet so we bought a few closet organizer and here is the result:

We still have a slight problem here, but it's manageable. What you see right there is about 30% of Jo's clothes. I'm not even kidding. This girl has more clothes than anyone (and it is not my doing! trust me!) so basically I have no room for all of Jo's clothes to be clean at the same time. I have to do her laundry in terms of what I have room to put out at that time.

One of the top bins I had in the old closet was a huge laundry basket full of my shoes and NOW my shoes are condensed into not even a foot of space! (you can see that all the way to the left). Seriously, this shoe organizer is the BEST. It's double sided and is REALLY long, it goes past what you see here. And depending on the shoe is can fit 2 pairs in one slot. It was only like $5 at Wal-Mart!

On the top of the closet I have bags and just random stuff that if I wanted to get to before I used to have to move about 5 bins to get to it! The on the other side of the closet I have some of Jo's stuff hanging up, a bunch of blankets, and a storage bag full of random winter stuff and some sheets and what not. I am BEYOND pleased with the closet makeover! I wish I had a before picture so I could show all of you what I was dealing with up until now!




In our bedroom we don't have a closet. Our clothes are all over. There are 2 "closet" like things we bought from Target which hold our clothes, there is a bureau too and all along the outer edge of our bed... hidden by the bed skirt... is a ton of piles of folded clothes. We have a huge chest at the foot of our bed full of clothes. The 2 bottom drawers of my nightstand act as my underwear drawer! haha and as you can see in these pictures... the old tv stand from our living room that is now in our bedroom also has clothes in the bottom of it. This just makes it sound like we have a ton of clothes but no, we really just have no where to put them so they're in a lot of different places. My plan is to get rid of that giant, horrible chest that is at the foot of our bed and to put the old tv stand in it's place instead and then take Jo's now empty bureau and put that against the wall where the tv stand is now and fill it with all the clothes that were in the chest. Did you follow that?




Why are we doing all of this? Again, it all comes back to having NOWHERE to put ANYTHING. I can't even imagine fitting one more toy in this house. What we plan on doing by taking the bureau out of Jo's room is getting a VERY large, VERY substantial shelving unit to fit into Jo's room somehow (I need to play around with the arrangement of the things in her room now to figure it out better) because we seriously have nowhere to go but up haha.

In other news, I got Jo her bathing suit for this summer. How CUTE is this!?

Lots Of Pictures!

I have a ton of pictures to post, are you ready? haha

Here is Jo playing with her Easter present and coloring eggs!



The entire time we were coloring eggs Jo kept saying "Mama, I wanna eat it" so I finally made her her own egg to eat and she enjoyed it so much she didn't stop trying to eat the colored ones haha.





Here are pictures from when Jo went to the playground with Ayden the other day...








While we were out the other day running errands we went out to dinner at a restaurant that is quite popular around here called Kelly's. They have these huge fish tanks with crazy, exotic fish in it all around the restaurants. Here is a picture I took of Rob showing Jo the "fishies"


Here are some adorable pictures I took of Jo when we got home from the playground the other day and were waiting for Daddy to come home!






Here is Jo having some raviolis for dinner last night. Here is a nice before and after shot haha...
Before:


annnnd After:


Today we went over Ayden's house because his Mumma, Lori, was setting up his new play house! Jo had so much fun!