art shmart.

hard to leave this little face at home.

three weeks ago marked the end of my maternity leave. (obviously it also marked the end of my free time, hence the abrupt end to blog posts.) it was a bummer because as a happy homebody, i do not suffer from a burning desire to be employed. alas, there are bills to pay, so back to the grindstone. but the exciting part about returning to work is that at the beginning of the year my principal did some finagling and managed to hold open the art position just long enough for me to get my art certification. and now, that's right, i am an art teacher. and it is divine. i teach art to all the students in the second through fifth grades. it is official. i love my job. 

two fourth grade classes at one time. crazy, but we survive.

now i am not one for complaining. well actually, that's a lie. i complain a lot. however, at work i try to keep my chin up, because i have learned that the place is what you make of it. i wander the halls with a big smile, because my personal motto is "a happy face makes a happy place." are you gagging? sorry. now where was i? oh right, about to tell you about the trash pile i inherited that is supposed to pass for an art classroom. yikes.

six 1" squares of fabric clipped together and stored in a box. what the what? why save these?

floppy discs from 1993. how did we manage with 2mb of storage?

okay, so i am thrilled to have a classroom - not all art teachers are so lucky - but this place was a dump. bursting at every seam with bits of paper, jumbled up crayons, oozing tubes of ink, lumpy paint, broken pencils, and dust. oh my god, so much dust.

politically correct crayons. i heart crayola.

the good news is that under the craziness, i unearthed a surprisingly good selection of art supplies. three weeks of tossing, scrubbing, sorting, cleaning, and organizing, and i can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. i still have six boxes of paper scraps to sort by size and two hundred large art reproductions to organize, but then i will have a dream classroom.

making adinkra "cloth" with a third grade class.

and my days will consist of wrangling children to create gloriousness, wandering the internet for project inspiration, and creating sample projects. did i say, i love my job? i do. i love my job.

declutterization.

it has been about a year since i felt any inclination to clean our house. wait, let me try that again, lest you think that the hubby and i are living in filth. to rephrase, it has been a loooooong time since i had any motivation to put away all the nonsense that finds its way into our living space. the mister regularly (okay, semi-regularly) cleans the house, as in sweeps, dusts, mops, etcetera. unfortunately, he is not typically given to putting away "stuff." clearly it does not help that yours truly is a wee bit particular about how and where things are put away.

the end result is that we start creating little heaps of things. unfortunately those collections are like the spawn of the devil, because they grow and grow until they have babies and the next thing you know, you are living in a house of heaps. everywhere you turn there is a conglomeration of stuff that is wanting to be dealt with. needless to say, after twelve months we had about oodles of these jumbled collections.

but NO MORE! as if by magic, i woke up on saturday morning with a sudden inclination to put everything away and get rid of all the stuff we do not need. whaaat?!?!?! yes. you read that correctly. i am not sure what prompted this, but i went with it and surprisingly, this impulse persisted throughout the weekend. thus far i have cleared off the dumping grounds otherwise known as our kitchen counter and dining room table, whisked away the chaos that was the top of our dressers, reorganized my entire paper stash (gasp!! although some might think it as muddled as ever), and rearranged our "office." next up? the closets. ah well, if this motivation persists, i might need to pursue a second job, otherwise you might come knocking at our door and find us living in an empty shell. maybe then my life would qualify for the 100 things challenge. sadly, short of exempting my crafting supplies from the challenge, which would probably be considered cheating, i am probably incapable of living without all my goodies. i love the notion of simple living, but hate the reality.