Rylen's Turning One! Planning a 1st Birthday Party...

I started planning our son's first birthday party, (WHAT?!?!? a year already?) and I have realized that this "thing", this elusive 1st Birthday thing is more about the parent(s) or let's be honest, more about me the mother, than anything else...  As one of my mommy friends put it,

"it's a celebration of making it through the first year of your first child's life without killing your spouse."

I could not have put it better. 

I have two more months to go until the big day, but seriously, there have been moments when I wanted to kill the husband because we were not on the same page with this crazy parenting experience... many, many (many many many) times.  I'm "older" and the husband and I felt we were totally ready to change our lives and start a family.  We were mature enough to put our lives as we knew it aside and to do the parenting thing.  We were going to be awesome parents.  We as people would not change... we would simply add a new special someone into our lives to make our family complete.

Phfffff!  What the hell did we know?  Let me tell you,

We knew NOTHING.

We did not know that not only would our lives change, but our relationship towards each other as husband and wife would change.  We did not know that such a little person could and would rock our worlds and that life would never, ever be the same.  And our kid isn't even that difficult!
It's April, and we have pretty much almost made it through our 1st year and our little Rylen is:
a.) alive and well and b.) we are alive and well.
We are so blessed with a genuinely happy and healthy child and we could not be more enthusiastic to watch him grow every day despite all the challenges that a new baby brings to family life.

So, back to the birthday planning...
I kept trying to think of themes that would be cute, but something Rylen would not necessarily ask for when he actually knows and cares what his birthday is all about.  (And when it is actually about him and not us parents...)  That knocked out all the usual boy themes.  Pirates, Super Heros, Fire Trucks, and Dinosaurs, etc.  I spent a week thinking I would be super cheesy and do a 'Construction Site' theme - seeing that everything we would need for props and decorations is in our garage... but it was just not nostalgic enough for me.  And let's face it, I'm planning this party for myself as much as for the Ry-Guy and I am the design side, not the construction side.
I finally settled on vintage airplanes because the husband loves planes and thanks to Pinterest (LOOOOOVE me some Pinterest!)  I think that I have all the inspiration I need to throw Rylen's 1st Birthday in style.

When all is said and done, I will post some pics of course!  But until then, here are some inspiration images...  Gosh darn people are sooo creative!!!
(All images taken from Pinterest: search - Airplane parties)

How cute is this rocking plane?

Table deco & Favors...

Sweets, Treats and Things to eat...

LOVE these straws... 

Playroom Organization!

Now that I have a little one of my own, I can see how toys and stuff magically accumulates.  It's hard to keep all the knick-knacks organized and even harder to teach little kiddos how to put their toys away after they have been played with.  I get it.  Especially for busy working parents, who wants to put their children's toys away at the end of a long day??? 

I believe the best way to organize toys is to compartmentalize and to label everything.  It seems tedious, but once they see that there is a home for everything they own, I find it is a lot easier to encourage putting things away into their designated places.  It may not work on an everyday basis when they are just learning to pick up after themselves, but even a once a week family clean-up session with your munchies will teach them to appreciate and take care of what they have and to nurture the ever-important values of organization for later years.

I had the pleasure of working with friends of the family on their girls' play room.  It was so much fun working on this space not only because I love the girls to bits, but simply because they are GIRLS!  I secretly LOVE all the girly stuff!  And let me tell ya, these kids have it all.

It was not that they didn't have the room to house all their toys, it was just that there was not a designated place for everything.  The clutter seemed unmanageable at first glance, but in the end all it took was a few hours of weeding through everything.  Both kids and parents helped me make mutually agreed upon piles of 'keep', 'donate' and 'toss', (just like any organization project) then I went to work laying out the space, labeling all the bins and creating some desk space for art projects and homework.  Enter IKEA.  I found practical storage solutions on a budget and all in all, I think that the play room turned out quite cute.  I got to incorporate a lot of pink which I don't get to do with my little boy...

The after pics were taken a few days after the project was complete and I think that sisters K and K are doing a great job making their play room their own by adding their own touches and mom and dad report that they are quickly learning to put their toys in their respective homes.

Here are some before's and after's.  Enjoy!

Before Pictures...

Up the stairs to the 3rd floor play room!
Let's see what we have to tackle.

Games - Rule of thumb: Don't stack boxes too high
or things at the bottom will never get used.
I like to stack boxes 3 high at the most.

Existing Bins...  Not labeled = Not used.

Little closet full of under-utilized space!

Old behemoth TV...  Perfect place for some desks!
Now who is going to move this thing downstairs?

Lots of room but too much stuff out in the open. 

When the floor isn't clear, there is no room to play! = toys end up
all over the house because kids will try to find available
open space elsewhere to do what they do best... PLAY!

This cute little art desk was never used because there was
too much stuff  on top of it.  This is a great place for a
few chairs for a reading nook and for watching TV.

 After Pictures...

Individual little desks and shared drawers.

Smaller TV on shelf mounted onto the wall.

That "under-utilized" closet was cleared out for bins
with sparkly labels.  Ahhhh...

Good old IKEA comes through every time!
And lots of clear floor space for imaginative play! 

Little recliners?!?!?  Sooo CUTE!

Multi-tasking in Multi-functional spaces

I was helping the husband put numbers together from a bid-set of drawings the other day and came across a room labeled, "drawing room".
Who designs a house these days and purposefully creates a room meant for doing nothing?

A drawing room is a room in a house where visitors may be entertained. The name is derived from the sixteenth-century terms "withdrawing room" and "withdrawing chamber", which remained in use through the seventeenth century, and made its first written appearance in 1642 (OED). In a large sixteenth- to early eighteenth-century English house, a withdrawing room was a room to which the owner of the house, his wife, or a distinguished guest who was occupying one of the main apartments in the house could "withdraw" for more privacy. It was often off the great chamber (or the great chamber's descendant, the state room or salon) and usually led to a formal, or "state" bedroom.^[1]

Thank you Wikipedia for proving my point.

We live in a multi-tasking, high-efficiency world.  Some are better at it than others.  I can probably eek out 3 things at the same time without dropping the ball on any given task, but the husband can do about 5.  Which is pretty rare in a dude since I know many that can only do 1 thing at a time and even then, the task is usually done half ass. And mind you, none of those 5 tasks includes breathing and scratching his *****, for naturally, those are like second nature.  I've seen the guy have a full on conversation with a sub while typing an e-mail, listening and occasionally commenting on a sports podcast, throw a stack of papers into my in-box "to file" and write a to-do list all at the same time.  Just wanted to give a quick kudos to my hubby.  Now if I can only get him to change more than one diaper a day, clean the toilet, call his mother and remember our anniversary...

I believe that rooms within our homes should multi-task as well.  Kitchen/dining/living spaces.  Sleeping/playing/storage spaces.  Bathing/laundry/flex spaces.  There is a multitude of multi-functional design options that can be created with a little ingenuity.

We place so many expectations on ourselves to get more done within the alloted time we have in a day.  Why can't our living spaces help us to do more on a daily basis?
Here, I found examples of some flex-spaces and multi-function rooms that are lovely.  This is how it should be done!  Screw the non-distinct 'drawing room.'  Let's reach for higher functionality and multi-task our rooms!  You will get more bang for your buck that way.
NOTE: This is especially true for those like us who live in small spaces.  Not all of us have the real estate to even consider having a useless space such as a drawing room!

Lake|Flato Architects - Livestrong Foundation, in Austin, Texas

Lake|Flato Architects - Livestrong Foundation, in Austin, Texas