Today’s tackle is actually kind of a silly one. Well, not silly to me or my kids, but silly to think of it as something I needed to “tackle.” It is, however, something I’ve needed to do for several weeks and just keep putting off for some reason or another. It required major surgery.

The boys have these stuffed reindeer. I don’t know who gave them to the boys or where they got them. We have looked everywhere online to try to find replacements but have not had any luck. The best I can do is patch them up until they are too decrepit to do anything with. We tried to take Ryan’s away (his is red) because it looked awful; nasty, dirty, etc. He cried and cried and cried. I took a chance, washed it, and (luckily) it turned out fine.

So today, I finally fixed Zach and Alex’s reindeer. Both are missing legs, but Zach’s is legless. Here are pics of my tackle:

Before:

After:

(No before picture of Brownie, but you wouldn’t have seen the hole on him, anyway)

So, there’s my Tackle It Tuesday tackle for the week!

I have no picture of the “before” for today’s tackle. It was sort of an impromptu thing. A few months ago, we bought a big potted plant with 6 different herbs and a tomato plant. In my kitchen window a basil plant has been sitting and so has Zach’s pea plant that he planted at school. All of these things have needed re-potting in bigger (or separate) pots for quite some time. The poor little kitchen basil plant looked all but dead, or dying, anyway. And Zach’s pea plant had nearly overtaken the basil plant and had grown up my window! There are even 2 little pea pods on it!

So, tonight while at WalMart, we picked up a couple of pots and some potting soil and decided to replant our herb garden appropriately. Here is the end result:

The kitchen window planter has (from l to r) rosemary, sage, oregano and dill

The left planter has the 2 basil plants together (the one from the kitchen window and the one from the big planter). The right planter has the tomato plant (with 3 little tomatoes!) and the parsley, which really took off and nearly took over the whole pot!

This last little pot is Zach’s pea plant from school. I really never expected a school plant to do so well! He’s so happy about it. As you can see, we had to rig some thin dowel rods and loosely tie the pea plant up. Maybe we’ll have a bunch of pods by the weekend?

I approached today’s tackle a bit differently. I didn’t tackle something that had to be cleaned, but rather something that needed to be “set up” in anticipation of school starting in the fall. Yes, I know, I’m 2 months early. There’s just so much that’s going to change when we all (myself included) start back to school in the fall that I want to start now so that I’m not scrambling to get it all done in the last couple of weeks of summer. So, here’s the first of my “getting ready for school” tackles

This will be our staging area, where book bags and coats are kept in anticipation for the next school day. I also hung a white board so that I can write down the kids’ monthly schedules. I have a weekly one on the fridge, but the month-in-review will be helpful, too. It’ll give me a better picture of what’s going on that month. I think it will also help dh, since he’ll be the one home with them in the afternoons while I’m at school and will need to know, also.

Today’s Tackle It Tuesday was fun. Why was it fun? Because it wasn’t my tackle! And I had fun dumping out the toys for the boys to clean up. Yes, that sounds like I was being a mean mommy, but I went to the playroom looking for something and couldn’t find it. While their floor had been clean, they shoved things in places they didn’t belong; under, behind and next to places they shouldn’t have been. So, I dumped them all over the floor. The first picture was taken mid-tackle. It actually looks better than it was. I had dumped a TON of paper all over the floor, and by the time I had taken the pic, it was piled on the table in the back. They also have a toy bin rack along the side that you can’t see that I also pretty much dumped, but that was after the initial cleaning, so it’s not shown in the picture, either. And while it has been worse before (trust me!), there are are so many little things laying on the floor that you can’t see, like Lego’s and K’Nex. OY! Those things are EVERYWHERE!! And they manage to find their way into every nook and cranny…it’s maddening!

The good thing about a tackle like this is that I can get rid of junk! I managed to get rid of a bookshelf, a small one that I put in their room to control the books that keep creeping their way up there. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! And, I managed to take back two plastic bins that I can now use to store the massive amounts of winter clothes that just don’t fit in the two already-full massive bins. *Sigh*

Ok, enough rambling. Here are the pics:

This really is more of a “tackle every day” sort of challenge around here. It became more of a challenge after our recent vacation. Not to mention that I still had not purged the winter clothes from the drawers and closet. I bit the bullet today and did just that, leaving only a few fall/winter shirts and pants, just in case.

There are still toys on the floor, but that wasn’t my goal. The toys are their responsibility, I just take care of the clothes

Again, I don’t take care of the toys and books. That’s their responsibility. I just have to find them under all the clothes, lol. Looking at that after shot, I realize just how decimated the twins’ clothing supply is after their most recent growth spurt.But, alas, that’s how it goes in this house. Alex has three times as much as he’ll ever need for the season and the twins are left with only what has been given to us through birthday presents, Christmas presents, or hand-me-downs. Only, now, we don’t have anyone to hand their clothes down to us.

What are you tackling today? Whatever it is, Happy TIT!