A Chinese Room?

In my quest to de-clutter and organize, I turned my sights on Elise's room. She's usually a pretty tidy little girl, but over the summer, she's played hard in her room. Very hard. It's been a disaster zone.


She surprised me by announcing that she wanted a Chinese room. I think she misunderstood my de-clutter/organizing to mean a total re-do. Not exactly what I had in mind!


We spent most of Friday cleaning out, tossing and putting things in the Goodwill pile. I was so proud of how willing she was to give away unloved toys. She can be a hoarder so I was thrilled to see her letting go of a few things.


On Friday night, the kids went over to my parents for the weekend. Perry got tickets to the BOSTON / STYX concert in town this weekend and my folks were babysitting. (The concert, by the way, was AWESOME....it felt so good to rock out to some music from our high school years and feel 20-25 years younger again!!)


Today, while Elise was still at Grandma's, I tackled the task of finding some Chinese touches to add to her room.

I really should have taken a "before" picture but I was anxious to clean it all out. Imagine the floor COVERED in stuff and all the furniture covered in sticky-messy LibbyLu play makeup.

Pink sparkly Princess...meet Chinese accents!

We did get a new organizer to help Elise keep her toys separated by type. The bookcase is for her room safe crafts. Part of the mess was the crafts she'd brought up to her room...markers, paint, yucky messy stuff that should have stayed in the kitchen. That and the sticky-messy LibbyLu play makeup. Did I mention what a mess that stuff makes?!?

Here is a baby quilt that I purchased in China. It's silk and has just sat at the top of Elise's closet all these years. (Don't mind the dowel rod still sticking out...we still need to cut that down!) Elise also LOVES, LOVES, LOVES to write her name. I had her help me paint the letters on the top yesterday and I added glitter to them today.

And I followed my friend Sandra's idea and put one of Elise's Chinese outfits in a shadow box. This is one of my favorite outfits that we purchased in China. We had professional pictures of Elise taken when she was 2 and used this as one of the outfits. The pictures of her in this outfit were my favorite and one hangs in our living room. It brings back such strong memories of both being in China and her wearing it, that even if she doesn't like, I'll move it to our room! :)

So, hopefully when Elise comes home tomorrow, she'll be happy with her "Chinese" room.

Now, Carson wants me to re-organize and re-arrange his bedroom. He has so many living critters that require tanks and habitats that it's difficult to move anything! I think a good cleaning would do wonders! I'm pooped for today. Maybe I'll tackle that later this week.