You Happy?

No, my darling neglected blog, I have not forgotten you. June has just been a month so full of happenings I haven't had  much time to blog. My "real" writing is going well, however, because I'm keeping a notebook on my person at all time.

That's been the best part of this month so far, focusing again on my writing and making it a priority. I am still trying to figure out how to balance everything. It's so much harder than I realized. The problem is that if I don't make time for myself and the things that are important to me that no one else will. I'm a better mom when I'm doing my own work too.

Recently my three-year-old has started asking me a thought-provoking question:

"You happy, Mama?"

It's a question that always stops me a little short. In theory, I am but in actuality I feel restless and discontent. There isn't enough time, I keep lamenting, to do all the things I need or want to do.

In better news, my continued quest to get my home in order is going really well, although it is currently a complete and total mess - but that's life when you have kids!

Temper Your Expectations

I hope you weren't expecting me to blog every day. That is just not going to happen. Life is too busy and I'm too disorganized. Maybe as I become a better person I will be more organized and blog more.

But probably not.


It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. -Henry David Thoreau-

Kitchen Cleaning and Deep Thoughts

My life has been in disarray since March, it seems. I think I've been expecting to catch up, but that hasn't happened. So today when I started cleaning out the cabinets in my kitchen, I think it became a metaphor for my life.

I've been reading an interesting book called, A Mom's Guide to Home Organization: Simple Solutions to Control Clutter, Schedules and Stress by Debbie Lillard. As I've been reading it I've taken copious notes (it's a library book and I can't mark it up, unfortunately). It made me realize that my kitchen is the least functioning room in my house. It gets the most casual use, gets dirty the fastest, and takes the longest to clean. Something needs to be done.

So I started making a plan to get rid of the clutter that gathers on the counters and all the junk that winds up laying around. Today, however, I only focused on the cabinets. I went through my spices and, since I'm not much of a cooker, I wasn't surprised to realize a lot of them (like 90%) expired in 2013, although there were a couple that went back all the way to 2010. Yikes.

I went through the medicine and did the same thing. There was a ridiculous amount of empty bottles that had somehow never gotten thrown away and our antacids had expired in 2008. Yikes again.

Canned goods were next, followed by the pantry. Purge, purge, purge. Then I moved all of those things around so I wouldn't waste so much in the future. Our "pantry" is a corner cabinet and stuff seems to get lost in the nooks and crannies of it, so I switched it out with our plates, bowls, and cups. Voila! Suddenly I saw just how many bags of powdered sugar I have (four) and realized that two different things of spaghetti had been opened and half used.

After all of this I sat down and felt a little sad. So much of that stuff was wasted because I never took the time to see what I had. I never checked to see if I had powdered sugar, I just assumed I didn't and went out and  bought more. It seems like I do that a lot, not just in the kitchen.

Like I said, I made a metaphor out of this. And I think it helped me be just a little bit better.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more kitchen excitement, because we are nowhere near done! I plan on going through all my pots and pans, bowls and Pyrex, and try to get my kitchen functioning at a normal level again.

Out of clutter, find simplicity; from discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. -Albert Einstein-