Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Another picture...

snagged from my sister's blog...Eli-if you would just upload them to Shuterfly I wouldn't have to steal them! ;)


Isn't he darling?? :-D

Today the littles and I went over to Heather's house to sit in her air conditioning and generally wreak havoc (sp?) on her day. :) Except for one dinosaur sized melt down between the two 2 year olds (the direct result of little or no nap!), we had a pretty good time. Poor Miss Zoey is already teething and spent much of the time chewing on poor Ducky. We drank iced coffees and ordered pizza and it was so nice to just sit and visit with Heather! --and to know that we all have the "worst mother ever" feelings... ;-) I have to say that the best part of the visit was finding out that Anthony likes Zoey's baby swing. He was asleep within 3 minutes!! I'm currently waiting to hear back about one on craig's list. :-D Not only did he fall asleep quickly, but he was out enough for me to get him in and out of his car seat, and into his bassinet, where he napped for an hour! :)

While he slept I had my first post-baby productivity! I found (in a box still) our vacuum bags so I can once more have clean floors, and I got most of the living room picked up. I'm going to be trying something new with Jenny's toys, so I got those sorted out. Up until now her toys have been sorted into four bins, 1 for kitchen set, 1 for music, and two for the rest of everything.
Plus a Noah's ark toy, a "bob" house that was mine when I was little, 4 or 5 puzzles, a sewing box to "put things in", and one of those alligators with a piano on his back.
PLUS a toy vacuum, one of those push toys that makes a popping noise with the bouncy balls, and a shopping cart.

Far to many toys for any one person to play with...even with a different toy every day. So here's my new plan (so that I don't spend all of my free time picking up toys each day!)...the kitchen set is by far her (and my) favorite toy, so it will be staying out. Everything else gets put away in a closet or on a shelf. Special activity time stuff, like puzzles will be out, but on a shelf just out of reach...so she can ask for them, but not dump them out herself. The other things will be put in the hall closet (of which she has yet to notice, lol) for special times, or times when I think a new toy would do us all some good. Maybe one per week or something like that, and they'll just get rotated out and in of the closet. Perhaps it's neither brilliant, or original, but I'm hoping it will work! :)

Now that I'm getting back into the swing of things, I'm trying to learn from having to sit and rest for two weeks. I've noticed that there seams to be stuff everywhere...partly because I was never able to properly move in here, but mostly because we have to much stuff... on Friday we will have been married for three years. In those three years we've gotten a bunch of stuff in all of the possible ways to get stuff (well, ok, I don't think we've stolen anything), plus the stuff we brought with us when we got married, and well...since we're going to be here a long time, it is time we did a major de-junking. I am just itching to get to decorate this house, but I don't want to put the effort into making it nice and pretty, until the stuff is down to a level that will let me keep it neat and pretty.

So I'm putting myself on a buying fast. Meaning I will only be buying things we really truly *need*. This includes starting Mr. Mister in his cloth diapers (now that he is proudly sporting a belly button!), and getting Miss Jenny potty trained. Right now we have to buy diapers for both of them, and there really isn't a cheap way to do that...less expensive vs. more expensive certainly, but not really cheap either way. So! We have training pants for Jenny thanks to Zac and Heather' birthday gift (hurray for people who ask what your kid needs!!), and I have cloth diapers for Mr. Mister that just need to be pre-washed. That should save us a large amount each month that I can set aside for paint/decorating expenses. :-) The best part is that this will not only prevent me from bringing stuff into the house, but will help me to use up the stuff we have here already. For example, new clothing will be made by me for the most part, and one step further-out of my stash. Thus helping me to clear out extra fabric and saving money at the same time. The "fast" will last as long as it needs to...I'm hoping it will just become a new way of doing things around here. :) I'm going to call it quits for tonight...I'm extra sleepy due to Jenny having a nightmare which resulted in her adding a fourth person to our queen sized bed...with the light on, because somehow the dark was connected to this bad dream. :( We put a night light in her room and thankfully, she finally went back to bed! Hopefully tonight will go better! Thank you all if you've made it to the end of this rambling post! ;-) (and I'm sorry, but I'm not proof reading this time!)

2 comments:

Heather said...

You type a lot!!! Thanks for wreaking "havoc" on us today...we'll return the favor soon I'm sure;)

Sarah said...

Oh, what a handsome, darling baby! It makes me long that much more for my own new one. :) We're starting to try the cloth diaper route as well. . .thankfully my boys both wear the same size diapers so it hasn't been TOO terrible of a cost ($15 for diapers enough to last 10 days) but that money could be used elsewhere. Hope everything works out in your new organizational plan! I love the idea about toys, esp. puzzles. I need to get their puzzles up since the majority of the mess in their room comes from dumped puzzled pieces!