Moving from 3000 square feet to less than 1500 is a bit of a squish. What I'm missing most is closets - there are only the bedroom wardrobes.

We got rid of lots of stuff, but we just ran out of time. Some things appeared that I really didn't intend to bring like 6 games of Scrabble, too many stuffed animals, boxes of light bulbs that don't even work here...

As the games were unpacked, they were stacked in a large unruly pile on top of a bookshelf in the hall. I couldn't figure out where to keep them that the kids could both access them and Ms.I wouldn't dump them out of their boxes multiple times a day. After a week of staring at them, I realized that we have under the couch storage.

I added a Library of "Games and Puzzles" to the same app that's logging our books and added the games all in to it. Ms.C added photos of each of the boxes for each entry, so we don't even need to open the couch in order to decide what to play. We've got 23 items in this library: 18 games and 5 puzzles. For some reason it was easier to purge puzzles than games. I'm still trying to streamline here, but I could only convince myself to give away 3 games games from the pile, and they're all duplicates. I'm keeping 3 Scrabble boards: Junior, Regular, and Travel.

Why do we even have this many games?

Well for one, we had the space before. Games lived in their own closet in the playroom. But mostly, because we use them for school. Why do a worksheet when you can play a game? No one even knows they are learning. They are playing! But they're growing in leaps and bounds: taking turns, following directions, learning the rules, learning to accommodate younger players who can't do it quite according to the rules yet, not to mention real life math and reading practice.

Ms.C learned how to add and subtract into the thousands as the Banker in Monopoly without ever seeing a worksheet on it. Her spelling improved by leaps and bounds by playing Scrabble Junior without ever a spelling test. Now Ms.E is learning the letter names and sounds with Scrabble Junior and how to quickly identify sets of numbers with Dominoes.

We should invite some friends over to play some games.