More house work!

No more major re-do's but there is a lot of cleaning and purging that we have to do in a lot of areas of our home. I am more of a "let's keep that and decide later if we want to throw it away" kind of person, while Buck tends to throw it out now and think later. :) Needless to say, I usually win so there are lots of piles of "stuff" everywhere! I decided to tackle our office/library/computer room/piano room--really I should just call it the "catch-all" room. It's beautiful with great built-in cabinets but the books have been in exactly the same places since we moved in (almost 4 years ago), at which time I was so tired of boxes of books that I just threw books up on the shelves. My intention was to group books by subject and then add some of our little treasures around them as well. I am not a big knick-knack person but my one weakness is nativity scenes. I collect them from all over the world (literally) and have not had a great place to display them and could never decided if I wanted them out all year or only at Christmas or if I wanted them in various places around the house, or just in one room. So with a little help from my organizational queen friend Ann, she got the ball rolling and I took it from there. Here is the before shot of the library shelves:

DURING (yes, there was a method to my madness...all those piles had a purpose!)

And AFTER! AHHH...Just a big sigh of relief...

There are the sections that I had always wanted: textbooks, fiction, parenting, marriage, spiritual growth, business, and of course I have a whole shelf devoted to midwifery and birthing books! And believe it or not--I learned this trick from organizational queen Ann--there are more books hiding behind the books that are displayed. Yes, I'm a nerd. I have THAT many books.

Here are a few of my nativity scenes. The black set on the left is from my sister-in-law's trip to Uganda. The colorful one in front was from my mom's trip to France. The wood one in the back was from our high school youth pastors' trip to Israel--that was our wedding gift. It is extra-special to me since Buck and I met in our high school youth group. :) The wood one on the right is from my uncle (who used to be a photographer for National Geographic magazine)'s trip to Nigeria. Anyone traveling anywhere fun soon? :)

The nativity on the far left is one I just bought on our trip to Riviera Maya. I had to buy it because all of the people are kind of chubby and smiling, and the baby Jesus is in a hammock for goodness sake. How great is that? Like he's taking a siesta. The stone one on the right was from my mother-in-law's trip to Kenya, when she visited hospice facilities there and did some training with the workers there. She is a hospice administrator here in Iowa.

The woven bowl is from our friends Eric and Becky, from their trip to Ethiopia to bring home their daughter D. The small nativity in front is from my mom's trip to Italy (she is quite the world traveler, huh?). The blue one in the back is a little hard to make out but it is cool in person. It is from Canterbury, England, which I got on my once-in-a-lifetime trip to England and France after I graduated from nursing school.

I love how colorful this one is. It is from Haiti. My mom just went there this past spring on a mission trip. Buck and I both spent time in Haiti while we were in college, and being in Haiti is when God laid it on my heart to adopt sometime in the future (I would have done it right then and there, but I was a 20-year-old college sophomore!)

And this one is from one very special place--can you guess? Yep, Ethiopia. Zoe has one waiting for her too, when she is older. And next to the nativity, that maroon leather book is an Amharic (the language spoken in Ethiopia) Bible. It is absolutely beautiful. G-Funk gave it to Zoe on her baptism day.

So thank you for indulging me in the little tour of my shelves. And who knows, maybe inspiration has hit and you can clean off some of your shelves too! Happy day, friends.