tip for protests

I’m not an expert of protesting by any means, but here’s a thought.  If you’re standing on the side of the road holding a sign stating your reason for protest?  Write large and don’t wildly wave the sign around.  It does your cause no good if I can’t actually read what you’ve written.

Thatisall.

flyin’

So here’s my latest thing.  We’ll see if I can keep up with it.

I’m doing FlyLady.

Haven’t we all tried this at one point in time?  Has anyone actually ever stuck with it?

Here’s the deal.  I have no patience.  So following her exact plan is tough for me.  Some days I might only want to spend 15 minutes decluttering, other days I just need to keep going until I almost literally drop just so it’s done already.

A few weeks ago, Jason had to go out of town on business, and I knew shortly after that that family would be coming to town for Kat’s birthday, and then shortly after that my Father-in-Law would be visiting for a weekend.  I knew that if I didn’t bust my rear and do a full-on marathon cleaning before all the chaos started, that I’d never get it all done and I’d be hiding piles of stuff in my master closet when we had guests.  Again.  ;-P

So that’s what I did.  I actually did a pretty good job, no half-assed cleaning here.  I reorganized linen closets, cleaned out drawers and cabinets, donated and recycled a TON of stuff… and somehow I’ve managed to maintain it really well.  I’ve actually surprised myself!  Ha!

I decided that since I’ve not let the house go to pot, that maybe I’d put myself on a deep cleaning plan - hence the decision to follow FlyLady again.  I’m actually not following anything on her plan except the “FlightPlan” where you deep clean a “zone” for an assigned couple of days.  I find this pretty easy to follow, and then I do everything else (laundry, dishes, picking up toys, vacuuming, etc etc etc) on my own schedule.

So far so good!  Last week was easy because it was the dining room, foyer and front porch.  This week is a little harder for me because it’s in the kitchen.  And I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I h-a-t-e cleaning the kitchen.  I hate dishes, I hate wiping down counters 38290 times a day, I hate scrubbing food off the table, I hate cleaning out the fridge… anyway, I’ll get through it and then I’ll be able to move on to fun rooms again, like bedrooms and the family room. 

new floors! - a home improvement project

This is going to be a loooooong, drawn-out project (like pretty much every project we do, ha!)  I’ll document with posts and photos as it progresses.

First, I have to tell you a secret.  The floors in my kitchen?  Not wood.  Nope.  It’s VINYL!  Vinyl that looks like wood.  Okay before you groan and say “ew,” I will tell you that I can’t count how many times someone has come into our house and said “beautiful wood floors!”  Granted, that’s before they actually walked on the floor.  But totally fooled, so it’s always made me feel a little better about it.  (The wood floor in my foyer is not vinyl however.  I love it, and it stays.)

A little back-story:  when we built the house 4.5 years ago, we asked for an estimate on putting wood floors throughout and actually didn’t think the number was that bad, but the real estate agent/builder’s rep (who was awful to deal with, just awful) told us it would be even cheaper to do it ourselves later.  We believed her and had them put in this wood-looking vinyl in the kitchen, breakfast nook and laundry room to hold us over until we got around to getting the nice floors in.  Welp, we never got around to it (ha, another typical story for us) and come to find out, it’s way more expensive for us to do than it was to have the builder do it.  She was on crack.  And we should have done our research.  So here we are.

Okay so with that out of the way, I’ll also say that we have decided to stay in this house a little longer (and by little, I mean more than a year, less than 4 - we don’t have an exact number).  Since we aren’t here for the long haul, we’ve decided now against the wood floors throughout.  It’s just not worth it to us (we’ve got another idea for that money now - more on that later).  So we’ve decided to replace vinyl floors with tile and replace our old, crappy builder’s carpet with new, pretty carpet.

Yay for new floors!

Um, except booo on picking out new floors!  I never realized how overwhelming, exhausting and just plain NOT FUN picking out tile is.  I’m not enjoying it.  I’ve got a stack of tiles too heavy for me to even pick up by myself and none of them look right to me.  We have different light in different parts of the room, so tiles that look good in the natural light of the breakfast nook look like junk in the artificial light of the kitchen, and vice versa.  Really frustrating.

I’ve gone from darker tiles to lighter tiles; from grayish tones to brownish tones.  Nothing is striking me.  And I need something to strike me before I can commit to it.

Jason saw a discount/factory outlet type tile place in town, so that’s our next stop.  Cross your fingers for me, hopefully something there will be perfect and maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be inexpensive too!

Oh and on the bright side?  I *did* find carpet that struck me!  Hopefully I can find tile that works in the kitchen AND coordinates with the carpet because I really love the carpet.  More on that when we’re done dealing with tile!

time outs and stuff

I saw these time out spots on Jon & Kate Plus 8 (anyone else addicted to that show?  does it not make you feel like you’re on vacation with your own family?) and thought they were a brilliant idea.  And so cute!  I’ve been debating whether I’d buy one or try to make my own - finally just broke down this morning and bought one (the pink spot for Kat since we’re getting to the point of needing it).  How dopey that I’m so excited about a time out rug!  ;-P

Totally uneventful weekend here.  Didn’t get much of anything done (Kat’s pink paint is still in the can, sitting on the counter in the laundry room - doh!), but I guess we got some rest.  Here’s the thing - I h-a-t-e sitting around doing nothing on the weekends.  It drives me crazy, I want to be out doing STUFF.  Whatever, anything - just something, ya know?  Jason, on the other hand, wants to lay low and relax after a long week at work.  So we sort of clash every weekend.  We usually compromise and spend one day out and one day in, but I’ll admit that our one day in usually leaves me really frustrated and grumpy.  I’m thinking I should find a part time job one day a week - maybe I should look into assisting wedding photographers on Saturdays or something.  I don’t even care about getting paid (although play money would be nice), I just want to do something fun!

Enough of that blather…

I’m going to go watch my DVR’ed Scott Baio is 46 & Pregnant, then find some motivation to get stuff down around the house this afternoon!

groceries

Oy.  I’ve been putting off grocery shopping all week, trying to avoid having to take both kids at the same time.  Really, I could take them both and it’d be okay.  I’d want to come home and drink heavily, but I could do it.  I just dreeeeeaaaaad it.  Anyway, we’re getting so low on things - I really just need to suck it up and do it.

As usual, I’m having trouble coming up with menu ideas.  We usually get ourselves in ruts, where we feel like we’re eating the same things all the time.  At one point I tried to come up with a “meal database” spreadsheet where I listed meals, their approx cost, their preparation time and level of ease, and then rated each.  I got a good start on it and kept it up for several weeks, but let it die and now it’s terribly out of date.  Too much work.  I need to do something simple like a recipe box and index cards I guess.

So I need a chicken meal idea.  Doesn’t necessarily need to be really easy or inexpensive.  Just good.  Got anything to share?

On to other news - today is the last weekday of Jag’s winter break!  I don’t know if I’m happy or sad.  He’s already complaining that he doesn’t want to go back.  I wish he hadn’t already picked up the anti-school attitude.  He’s got a long road ahead, it sure would be easier if he had a brighter outlook on it.  I’ve been trying to encourage him to enjoy school, but he says the schoolwork is boring and the only parts of the day he enjoys is recess and his once-a-week music class (he’s been asking a lot of questions about Mozart lately - he’s really into learning about historical figures).  I’m not sure what to do about that, honestly.  Part of me wonders if I should be homeschooling him to keep him challenged, but that is such a huge task to take on.  I’m not sure I’m cut out for it.  I just don’t know…  :-/

Anyway - hopefully we won’t hear too much whining this weekend about school starting back on Monday and we’ll be able to enjoy ourselves.  I’ve definitely decided on the dark strawberry pink for Kat’s room, so I hope to get that paint and some white paint for her dresser so I can get started on that.  I also think I may have found some bedding that will work in our master, I hope to double check with the paint chip and then make that purchase.  It’ll be good to have a pretty bed again!  I haven’t had anything but random quilts and white sheets on the bed since Jag sprayed my wheat-colored damask duvet cover with bleach cleaner 2 years ago.  Little stinker!

(I’ve been rambling on about decor type stuff for a number of entries now - how boring!)

Oh, something interesting (to me!)… I was taking the tree down last night and found a lizard living in the star on top!  Poor little guy was so dehydrated and weak.  I waited for Jason to get home to remove him, but it was too cold to put him back outside so we put him in Jag’s little terrarium to keep him inside until it warms up this weekend.  We put a little water in last night and put him under the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen to warm him up a bit and he looks so much better this morning.  The kids are having fun watching him.

i’m around

I haven’t disappeared totally yet.  Don’t want to give up on blogging.  I’m just always putting it off and then I forget what I was going to blog about to begin with… and THEN I sort of get out of the habit of blogging so when I do have something to say and I do have a minute to type it up, it seems awkward and forced.

I need to get back into the habit again.

Lots of nothing going on here, at least nothing big.  We’ve all been sick, Halloween came and went, Thanksgiving is around the corner (didn’t realize just how soon until a few days ago - eep!), lots of school stuff going on with Jag (meetings, field trips, etc) and Christmas is creeping up on us too.

I have to say, I’m really stoked about Christmas.  As usual, I have lots of big ideas and probably won’t find the time to make them happen.  Last year I gave up on big ideas without even trying.  Made my life easy, but it wasn’t very much fun.  So this year I’ll drive myself crazy trying to make things happen.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m also feeling very overwhelmed by a cluttered, disorganized house.  I have so many things I want to do and I don’t know where to start.  At this point, *everything* has become priority - our dysfunctional laundry/mud room, the messy master suite, the shove-stuff-where-ever-it-fits kitchen cabinets, the kids’ toys that seem to be reproducing in the closets at night and are slowly leaking out onto the floors of every room…

I don’t know about you, but when I’m disorganized, I feel like I can’t *do* anything.  I put projects off until x, y and z are cleaned and out of the way.  So to get to my Christmas projects, I feel the need to get my house straight.

Argh.  Overwhelmed.

Yeah, anyway - still planning on blogging, just need to make myself do it.  Watch for more posts soon!

how did i get here?

Yesterday, my house was mostly clean.  I was almost caught up on laundry.  My kids were healthy and happy.  I had a plan for dinner.  Life was good!

Then somehow, sometime during the day yesterday, it all turned upside down.  I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started - whether it was when Kat suddenly got unusually grouchy over some blocks.  Or when I put off emptying the dishwasher so I could watch The Hills.  When I spent way too long picking up a few things at the grocery store.  Or when Jason came home late again.

Nope, I don’t know where exactly the dominoes started to fall, but I’m sitting here amidst the wreckage.  A baby with a fever, a Son who went to bed too late, woke up tired and therefore fought me over every detail of getting ready this morning, a husband who got grouchy over his morning routine being messed with and a kitchen with a day and a half’s worth of stinky dishes piled up.  I’m overwhelmed.

In a situation like this, I take extreme measures to make myslf feel better so that running far far away doesn’t seem so tempting.  This morning it’s Illy coffee and Decadent Peanut Butter Pie.  A mama’s gotta do what a mama’s gotta do to keep her sanity, knowwhatImean?

i hate buying my groceries online

For me, online grocery shopping can be a real pain in the butt.  For one, it’s way more expensive.  I pay the fee for the “personal shopper,” and I’m not there to physically see and choose the best deals.  And two, they always get it wrong.  Always always always.  There are either things missing (they were out of stock and didn’t bother to substitute or call to ask my preference), or the substitutions are all wrong (for example, I order a 16 oz sour cream because I need that much for a recipe, and they substitute with an 8 oz).  One time Jason picked up the order for me, drove all the way home and when I looked in the bags I found someone else’s entire order!

All that said, I stupidly just placed an online order.  I know.  I know I know I know.  I am so asking it.  But you know what?  I’d also be asking for it if I tried to take two antsy children into Walmart.  It’s a lose/lose and I decided that today, I’d rather lose in the privacy of my own home and car.  Oh crap, I just realized I forgot the beer…

Welp, here’s hoping Lowes Foods to Go gets it right today.

hello, fall!

With that tough day behind me, I’m finally feel free to enjoy autumn with it’s slowly lowering temperatures, the gorgeous fall colors, trips to the pumpkin patch, the excitement of the holiday season just an arm’s reach away… and oh yeah, SICKNESS!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen (are there gentlemen reading?), our first illness of the season - Jag is sick.  Not sure exactly what it is, but it includes sore throat, runny nose, headache and pink eye.  Pink eye!!  We’ve never had pink eye before!

I guess on the bright side, he’s still on fall break (almost done with week two) so he’s not missing school.  He is missing football, but I’m not sure he minds so much.

I’m crossing my fingers that Kat doesn’t get it, too.

i need a break from the break

Let the record show, it took 6 days and 3 hours of fall break to reduce me to tears.  (I’m counting last weekend since Jason had to work all weekend, they may as well had been weekdays.)

If I don’t update again for a while, it’s because I’ve run away…