Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Clean Up!

Today, after a VERY long bike ride during which I got extremely lost in an effort to help find Dave a safe bike route to work (by the way, it can't be done without riding all over highway interchanges), I continued the finer points of unpacking our house.

First off, the moving company made it over this morning to pick up all of our packing material which had been filling our garage. We now have a garage ready for our vehicles!

Yesterday I received a request from Jake's Kindergarten teacher for "spare" art supplies, plus scraps of ribbon, yarn, sponges, wrapping paper and CDs. Well, Jake's class will hit the jackpot from us! I found a wad of craft ribbon, tons of yarn leftover from my scarf and blanket projects and several duplicate bottles of paint.

I had been planning to consolidate two plastic drawer bins of art supplies into just one, so I've been gathering the pencils, markers, crayons, paints, crayons, paper, crayons, glue sticks, crayons and glitter.

Did I mention crayons?

The original Crayola crayon boxes don't last in our house. One of the boys will open the box with too much gusto and "poof!", the top rips right off. Of one of them will empty all the crayons onto the table, and the box falls to the floor. Then I walk past the table and step on the box on the floor. So early on I decided that when the kids got crayons, they'd go into one of those plastic Ziploc containers.

But I now have 4 of those containers, filled to the brim with crayons, plus a good-sized wooden cigar box.

Timmy was on a "must break all crayons" phase this past spring and today I was picking out the pieces of crayons. Timmy is currently on a "must peel all crayons" phase. I was about to throw out all those pieces of crayon and it hit me that I could recycle them into "chunky crayons".

All you have to do is peel crayon scraps, pop like colors into Dixie cups in a muffin tin and then warm them gently until the scraps melt together.

Chunky crayons will be good for doing rubbings, so says one mother on the link I offered above. Good idea!

Timmy will be tasked with peeling several dozen crayon scraps. He'll be thrilled! Hopefully he'll never want to peel a crayon again!