Paralyzing Fear

I have been trying to upload pictures to my blog for several days now with no success.  As a result, I have been avoiding writing anything.  I am paralyzed with fear at trying to write a blog without pictures.  It somehow seems easier to write when there is a picture to start with.  Maybe I have a subconscious hope that if my brilliant writing does not draw the reader in, my mediocre pictures will.  My insecurities aside, we have had a lot going on.  We visited MN as a family the last week of January to celebrate JJ's birthday and Christmas with Eric's family.  It was fun to have a second Christmas and Eric's brother's family hosted a great party.  They even had decorations for JJ's 1st birthday!  While in MN we decided to get our house on the market.  That meant that the renters had to move out and we had to get all the stuff still in the house organized into some kind of order. 
The original plan was to be in MN for a week.  Working on the house would clearly not be done in that time frame since we already had something going on every single day.  We decided that Eric would hitch a ride back to ND with a friend we were hoping would move out there, leaving the kids and I behind.  Eric left MN on January 31st and the kids and I stayed until February 10th.  I worked on the house while Eric's mom watched our kids. 

I had no idea we had that much stuff!  Being away from all but the things we absolutely need all summer and most of the winter helped with the junk purge a lot.  I lost count of garbage bags at ten only a couple of days into cleaning.  I think I donated about seven bags of clothes, the thrift store also took two van-loads of assorted house stuff.  We still ended up with an entire room full of boxes and another full of furniture.  Maybe when we unpack all of those boxes I can find more things we can do without.  It was also kind of exciting because I had forgotten some of the cool kitchen things we don't have room for now.  I'm pretty excited to have room for my blender and food processor someday, hopefully soon.  It will also be nice to be able to bring up our dressers, there is just not the space right now. 

It was nice to go through all of our stuff, we moved to the basement of our house rather quickly so a lot of organizing needed to be done.  I found some things we had misplaced and was able to get everything boxed and stacked in a way that will, hopefully, make it easier to find things in the future. It was also so helpful that Eric's mom was able to watch the kids for me.  There is no way I could have done the work I did and kept kids occupied.  They got to spend some quality time with grandpa and grandma and I was able to work as quickly as possible.