Battle of the basement returns & wonders of FreeRange Kids

Dear James, Daniel and Emily,

Nothing major planned for the weekend, and with the weather pending to be unpleasant on Sunday it looks like we will have a return to the battle of the basment. Saturday there is James' basketball, and a company outing for King's that night, but Sunday is wide open, and I actually have some more things I want to implement down there.

FreeRange Kid

So the neighbor kids are the epitome of FreeRange, they wander all over the neighborhood, doing all kinds of stuff. Not bad stuff, not getting into trouble, they just happen to have a small house and large family so they get outside for sanity sake as much as anything. And James spends a lot of time with them, especially the youngest son who is a year older than James.

Well lately they have discovered that the parking lot in the little strip mall behind our house has a large pile of snow that is scraped up every time it snows. And they have undertaken a project of tunnelling and digging in these piles of snow to build forts. I wasn't really aware how much they had done until last night when I went over there to get James to come home. It's really cool, and pretty amazing what they have done. So here are some pictures:

Ice Forts

Battle O' the Basement

So there is a battle that all parents must fight on some level. Kids are little chaos machines. The only way to not have them produce some level of clutter/mess is to remove every sinlge toy, movie, stich of clothing etc. And I can accept that. And I don't mind the daily pickup of the living room as a price to pay for sanity. But the basement/rec room which is the kids primary play domain has again been overtaken. And it's a price we pay for having a place to send them when we want some quiet time.

That being said, it's again time to tackle it this weekend, restore order, pick up all toys etc. Plus there are some things we need to do in the back room to clean up as well. I got the bright idea from a friend to put all of our music CD's in cases like we have done with the kids movies. Tehn get rid of the box of CD cases, freeing up that chunk of clutter. Another item is we have a couple of boxes of toys, good toys, wooden train sets etc. that the kids don't use or play with. And the question is how long will we keep them? And if we continue to keep them how and where should we reasonably store them? Just some things to ponder.