total spent after 2 hours of #shopping at the #outlets? ZERO!!
10:51 PM IFTTT , WordPress 0 Comments

Hubby took me, for our date night, to the new outlets about 45 minutes from where we live. It was a great sunny day, and we had a really good time. It felt like a high school date :) just walking around hand in hand, eating ice cream together, having dinner from a street vendor – Japadogs – they are Japanese-style hot dogs. A lovely date.

When we are about to leave, hubby looks at me and says “no bags!! You didn’t buy anything?” nope!

I love that. I think as a society we consume too much: too much food, too many clothes and shoes, too many things which end up in the garage and then get donated.

When Alex and I lived in a beautiful condominium with the boys, we had very little space, but we found it absolutely perfect! Then we bought a house so the boys could play in a yard, have friends over, the usual.

I remember when we first moved in. We brought our furniture and it looked so tiny in the house! The house felt enormous. It is a four bedroom house, not huge by any means, but compared to the apartment, it was very large. I remember looking at all the cupboards and closets and thinking that it would be impossible to fill them all with our belongings.

Well, we have been here 11 years and not one closet is empty. In fact, we were looking to buy a 6 bedroom house so we wouldn’t be so “crammed”. Imagine that! Then the thought cross my mind: It’s not that we have a house that is too small for us – it’s that we have too many things! The point wasn’t that we had to buy more so we could have more, the point is that we had too much.

For the next few months, I went through every single item in the house and made sure we wanted it or needed it, and voilà! There’s space in our house and it’s no longer too small! Would I still like a 6 bedroom house? Nah.

The thing about small(er) places is that we spend most of our time together as a family.We are all in the same space, all the time. Of course we each have our room (at least our children – Alex and I have to share a room ;) ), but during the day, we are all together.

I had not looked at it that way before, but thinking back, I am sure that it had a huge influence on our relationship with our sons. When they do homework, we also work, together, on our dining room table. When they have friends over, we get to know them and develop a relationship. For many years I have woken up on a weekend morning to a house filled with boys, all in sleeping bags or wrapped in our blankets, asleep, and there are few things I love more than that.

So , in essence, less is more. :)