Good-bye to a sweet era

Jacob will be twenty years old this year, Abby will be 18 soon, and Alyssa is in her last year where she's too young to drive. What is happening? The kids are growing up!

Due to this reality, I made a difficult decision. It's hard to let go... to experience change. But there's no avoiding the inevitable. I knew I had to give something up. I did it. I gave up my... cookie cutter/ sprinkles/ cake decorating tip kitchen drawer. I loved the drawer and its multi- colored, multi shaped sprinkles, cake decorating tips and cookie cutters. But the days of my three littles and me decorating cookies regularly are long gone as are fun birthday cakes that require food coloring for the icing. 

Reaching the decision to let go of my sugar laden goodies and accouterments dedicated to all things sugar and sweet drawer was made much easier by determining that I needed that space for something much more practical- like my spices. The spice situation has not been ideal, ever, really and I decided I needed to give up my scarcely used cookie/ cake decorating drawer for a drawer that would hold something practical like spices that we use almost every day.    

I found this set of spice drawer organizational goodies from Amazon. The price was $59 which seemed vaguely like highway robbery. But, one does not exactly barter with Amazon so I paid that amount for it (appears to be on "sale," lol, now).

I also organized another kitchen drawer while I was at it. I love the results. And, while I miss my cookie/ cake decorating drawer, I know that it was the right thing to do. I found room for all of my cake/ cookie items in a kitchen cabinet so I am not bereft of those items; I just can't see them as readily as I could before when they were in a drawer. 

Before: my sprinkles, cake decorating, cookie cutter drawer. 

Before: this is where I kept most spices that we use- it's in a lazy Susan cabinet. I almost wiped off the loose cinnamon that's on top of some of the containers before I took the picture because it looks so bad and the spill had just happened but I decided to take the picture as is. Numerous problems are evident with this set up: one is that you can't see what the spices are- I just knew which spices I kept in the plastic container because they're the ones that we use the most. So every time I needed a spice, I'd open the lazy Susan and start holding up the bottles until I found which one I was looking for.

Here's the before of another kitchen drawer. It has tea bags, sweeteners and other miscellany things.

Here she is- the empty spice bottles and plastic holders that I bought from Amazon.

The set contained labels that are chalkboard print looking (ostensibly...) and labels with a bit of a prettier font. We thought the chalkboard print ones would be easier to read so we used those. (Alyssa helped me.)

The set also contained a funnel for easier transfer of spices in their original bottles to the new ones and two types of plastic lids to choose from. 

After: Here are the spices in their new jars and new space in the kitchen. We use more than eighteen spices so some spices had to stay in the lazy Susan. However, contained in this drawer are all of the spices from that ugly plastic container shown above and a few others besides those. Note that the pre printed labels contained dozens of spice names, a few of which I'd never heard of, but did not include Nothing but the Bagel seasoning that Abby uses a lot. So didn't place a label on the side. Rather, I took a blank label and tried to write on it; the writing turned out terrible so I put the label on the very top :). 

Here is the other drawer that I organized. I used the metal dividers that I used in the former cookie cutter/ sprinkle drawer. I like how much better this drawer looks with a little bit of organization.

In this bag are all of the containers that I was able to dispose of- all of the old spice bottles and boxes.