School room

The past few weeks I have been exciting myself by merely thinking of how awesome a school room in the house would be!  I'm aware that must sound pretty lame to most of you reading this, but it really does get me excited!  Right now, I have all of our books/storage/crafts/workboxes set up in the office, yet there is not enough space for us to actually work in there.  This is where our kitchen table comes in handy.  I suppose it's been working just fine to bring whatever materials we need to the kitchen, after I've wiped the crumbs from the table, and then carting it back to the office when we are finished.  Travis is usually in the kitchen with us, but there are times when he is in the living room by himself playing, or even times when I've had to turn on a cartoon to occupy him long enough to get some things done with Maddie.  I am not okay with the latter becoming a habit and realize I need to make a change before he starts requesting cartoons on a daily basis during 'school time'.

I was thinking about kicking the husband and his computer desk out of the office, but since that room is pretty small anyway, it still wouldn't leave a whole lot of space to be used as the main school room, and there would be no place for the husband and computer desk to go instead.  The 2 upstairs rooms are both decent size, but were being occupied by each kid.  Jake and I hadn't really considered having the kids share a room since they are of different gender.... yet they've been having sleepovers every night for the past 3-4 months.  So, that got me thinking..... why not have them just share a room and use the extra space for school?  I don't really think them being in the same room will be a problem for another couple years anyway, and that would at least give us a designated work area for that amount of time. This is when I really started to get excited.

Well, I am happy to announce that as of today, Travis has officially been evicted from his former room and moved on into the kid's shared room.  All I had to do was rearrange the closet area and move both of their dressers around a bit.  I do need to figure out a better way to organize toys and what not, but would almost rather wait until we get Travis a twin-sized bed instead of his little toddler bed since things will have to be arranged differently then anyway.  His train table and some toys will stay in the other room so he will be able to play in the same area as us while Madeline works on her school stuff.

Now that his old space is nearly empty, I can't think of all of the plans I originally had. Go figure.  I feel way too intimidated by this right now... mostly because it is not in our budget to just buy a bunch of bookshelves or other things to really get the room set up the way I want it.  I can somewhat visualize how I want it to look (ahem... mostly like a page out of an Ikea catalog), but have no idea how to get it to look that way using what we have.  Tomorrow I will move the rest of the stuff upstairs and probably just stack it up in a corner until I can at least come up with a temporary arrangement.  I am hoping to find an awesome table or workspace this weekend so we can start using the room next week.

Either way, this mama is happy to have a space devoted to our home school and am confident that it will come together one way or another, sooner rather than later.