Gratitude Journal 3/27/11

Today I am thankful for:

1) My neti pot

2) Quick recovery from the cold that knocked me out yesterday

3) That my big boy is such a fabulous helper. Even when he doesn't want to be. Even when the other kids are running around like little monkeys instead of helping.

March Artwork

Yellows

by Benny

Yellow Giraffe

by Benny

Katie's Beauty 2

by Katie

Ice Cream Good

by Sammy

4 Cannon

by Sammy

Katie's Beauty

by Katie

Gratitude Journal, Day 23

Today I am thankful for:

1) A kind referral to an awesome midwife (Thanks, Cathy!)

2) Outback Steakhouse. For some reason I was craving their steak, and it and the Caesar salad made the BEST meal I've had in months! And for the friend who came over and watched my kids so I could duck out and pick up dinner for all of us.

3) That my hubby made it safely back to his regular work location, after being stuck at his conference location waiting for a flight. (And my hubby in general. Miss him terribly!)

Gratitude Journal, Day 18

Today I am thankful for:

1) That the big kids wore their new glasses all day long

2) That none of my kids have developed a lazy eye (apparently 2 are in danger of it)

3) That we were able to get out of the house today. I had some serious cabin fever!

Gratitude Journal, Day 17

Today I am thankful for:

1) That my FIL's stent surgery was successful

2) My housekeeper

3) My phone

Gratitude Journal, Day 16

Today I am thankful for:

1) No more fever in the little guy

2) Half a decent night's sleep, and everyone sleeping in

3) The lasagna I found in the back of the freezer when I was hungry, but too lazy to cook.

Gratitude Journal, Day 15

Today I am thankful for:

1) That my baby is coughing less and is less feverish tonight than he was the rest of the day

2) That my big boy can entertain himself almost all day long if need be

3) That the 2nd desk is out of the office. One step closer to making it into a girl's room.

Gratitude Journal, Day 14

Today I am thankful for:

1) That the sickness this week is only a cold, and nobody is throwing up

2) A clean, organized bathroom

3) That my husband did not get blown up by rockets

Growing weeds!

The kids are getting BIG! 33", 41", & 48" tall, and 25.5 , 35.5, & 47 lbs. Wow!

posted from Bloggeroid

Adventures in Organizing, Part 4

Master bathroom. Once a messy jumble of forgotten toiletries, carpeted with dirty clothes who couldn't find their basket. Today, a retreat haven. (If you can ignore the messy master bedroom in the mirror.)

Before:

(this was actually a pretty good day, compared to how it looked before the recent purge)

After:

Hubby's cabinet. Not much stuff in it since he's not currently here. Actually, that's not true. Even when he's here, almost all of his bathroom stuff fits neatly inside his dock kit. Now, this cabinet is housing the bathroom tissues (we always need a tissue box within reach in this house!), space heater (which we use on cold nights), and a box of his bathroom things to go through/purge when he gets home.

My cabinet. Pretty uncluttered before, really, (probably because everything lived on top of the cabinet!) but now virtually empty. Houses extra towels (we pared down to 2 towels per person long ago), kid bath stuff, and my makeup/travel bag.

The drawer. I had it organized, once upon a time, but curious little fingers worked hard to undo that. ;) But it's all fixed, now! (Empty basket for kids' tooth flossers when I find them again.)

One of the big drawbacks of this bathroom is there is no high-up storage. Not really a problem for two kidless people, which we were when we bough this house. Big problem for attachment-parents of a two year old who will help himself to the flavored toothpaste every chance he gets. The cheap solution - hang a suction cup basket up high.

Towels currently being used (typically the same ones over and over) live on hooks. (No change, here.) The kids' towels live in our bathroom because their bathroom is too small for me to get into to bathe them. And our bathtub is big enough to fit all 3 at once.

My personal shower stuff lives in another suction-cup basket at the back of the shower. Since I've switched to natural/homemade toiletries, this basket is a lot less cluttered! Hubby's things live along the window ledge and/or in the built-in cubby at the front of the shower. (Sorry, no photo.)

The "Toilet room." I have a love/hate relationship with this room. I've mentioned before that I have claustrophobic tendencies. So I rarely close the door when I'm in here. But sometimes (like when I'm sick) it is nice to be able to close the door and have a little privacy.

Unlike the closet, I mostly really love my bathroom. My biggest complaint about it is its lack of appropriate storage for feminine hygiene products. (Well that and the brownish-pink accent tiles in the shower.) There is no place for storage in the toilet room, which is where I think they need to be kept. And remembering to grab something from the cabinet under the sink BEFORE I sat down was always difficult for me. The solution I came up with was another pocket organizer (like the one in the coat closet) for the back of the toilet room door. There is also a basket of rarely-used but still-wanted bathroom things (e.g. curling irons, nail polish, hair spray) which used to live under the cabinet or in the hall closet, but will soon live in the high pockets of the same organizer.

Gratitude Journal, Day 13

Hmmm. I realized that somewhere along the way, I lost track of keeping up with this. Drat!

Anyway, today I am thankful for:

1) That God made us all different

2) People who are willing to share their time and talent in order to help me out (today especially Kerry, Mike, & Christine)

3) That we are relatively healthy, and the bugs we have caught this season have all been pretty minor, and nobody has anything chronic.

Adventures in Organizing, Part 3

This closet didn't look too bad before, or so I thought. But it is much neater now, and reorganized to be more kid-unfriendly (for the things like cleaners and medicines which need to be kid-unfriendly, I mean).

Top row: medicines, first-aid, bandages, etc.
2nd row: cleaning supplies & hair trimmer
3rd row: "Bathroom Store" - Extra things for when we run out (toothpaste, tissues, cotton swabs, ...)
4th row: "Baby" row - Basket of baby-care stuff. (Temporarily home to 2 bags of give-aways, but after that stuff is gone, cloth diapers will go on this shelf.)
5th row: Extra linens
Bottom: Extra blankets, and humidifiers when not in use

Adventures in Organizing, Part 2

I was probably more scared of this organizing job than any other in the house - the master bedroom closet. Especially since, in it's vast overstuffedness, all the extra jackets/coats got relegated up here as well.

Once again, you will notice I forgot to take before pictures. (You will probably notice this theme quite a bit. I'm so gung-ho to get to the final results, I almost never remember the before pictures!) Suffice it to say that this closet was a big, jumbled mess. Also, my clothes were all on the other side of the door, which meant that to get to them, I had to go into the closet and shut the door. I can get pretty claustrophobic pretty quickly, so this was very frustrating for me. (To the tune of I have hated this closet's guts for the last 6 years.) All my non-pregnancy clothes were in a jumble on the floor waiting to be put into a space bag. There was no space for folded clothes. It was just a big, huge, mess. And that was with half the clothes that *should* be in it, being in baskets or the crib or on the bed or on the floor of the bedroom. Which is another beast for another day.

First view inside the closet: Right side - My clothes on the bottom, hopefully seasonally-appropriate clothes for hubby's visit home on the top, my pants and hanging dresses (read dress, because I hate them) on the left. On top of those, some shelves (which I can't reach, but will get a stepstool expressly for the closet/upstairs use) for me to put my folded casual pants/jeans. Extra purses on top of this shelf.

Straight-on view of this same area. Jewelry organizer (funny if you know me), summer pants, and my shoes organizers just to the left of that. Plus the couple of pairs of footwear I own that wouldn't fit in the organizer, on the floor under the hanging clothes.

Inside the closet, you have to shut the door to access the rest of it. Hubby's stuff in this area - belts, sweats, & hats. Lots and lots and lots of hats. (To be honest, I think about 1/3 of them still haven't made it back in here.) To the right of that, his hanging clothes and shoes. (I would never have thought to put shoes up high like that. But he is plenty tall enough to reach them!) And there was no room for them on the floor for all his boots. Which didn't make it into any of the pictures. But believe me when I tell you they take up the floor space of half the closet's perimeter!

Between my shoes and the wall are the dressy things we don't use very often, and all the coats that got brought up from the coat closet downstairs.

I have to admit I am pretty amazed at the results. It is still too overstuffed in my opinion, but it looks 1000x better than it did!

Gratitude Journal - Day 3

Today I am thankful for:

1) Music, and being part of a group that makes it

2) The neighbor who watched my kids so I could go to rehearsal

3) That my husband still knows how to melt my heart with sweet words

Gratitude Journal - Day 2

Today I am thankful for:

1) A decent support network in a city/state so far away from our families

2) No more throwing up

3) The blessing of fertility

Gratitude Journal - Day 1

Today I am thankful for:

1) A furnace that works (Our high today was -1.)

2) My children

3) My husband's willingness to work so far away to support his family

Testing Blogaway

Mobile blogging, test 2. This post is from Blogaway.

It has convenient toggles for bold, italics, and underlining. Plus some other buttons I'm not sure about yet.

Testing Bloggeroid

I am looking for a good Android app that will let me make new or edit existing posts. I will let you know how it goes. This post is from Bloggeroid.

posted from Bloggeroid

Adventures in Organizing, Part 1

A friend (who used to be a professional organizer) is helping me get my house organized. The first area we tackled was the coat/jacket/bag/purse storage. I found an old photo of the disorganized hall tree, but I wish I had thought to take before photos of the closet. (Of course, I probably would have been too embarrassed to post them!)

This is our "shoe bench." It used to be home to our jackets (5 people, 5 hooks, made sense to me!), purse, diaper bags, work bags, keys... Anything we needed when we walked out the door. Unfortunately, it also was usually a dumping ground for anything we came inside the door with.

Then:

Now:

Inside the shoe bench I used to have 5 boxes, one for each person, for hats, scarves, and gloves. The boxes were always overflowing, and it was hard to find matching things in them. Now the inside of the bench is home to our bags - music class, dance class, MOPS, extra pullups and clothes for the boys in case we are out for a long time, plus an extra-large diaper bag I can grab if we're taking a long outing, and a purse for me to use on the rare occasion I get to leave the house without the kids.

The top of the coat closet is mostly the same, but more organized. The plastic drawer that used to hold adult hats is gone. Left on top is our swim bag, beach towels, and couple of tall things (world map for next year's school and roll of drawing paper), because they fit nicely there and are protected from little fingers.

The inside of the closet looks vastly diffferent. Instead of being stuffed full of every adult-sized coat and jacket in the house, it now has room on the left for most-used adult jackets (limit 2 per person), and on the right side we have hooks so the kids can hang/retrieve their own jackets and backpacks. (Big deal when you have multiple kids, and are about to be the sole care provider for a newborn!)

Inside the door we hung a pocket organizer, which is the new home to all of our hats, gloves, and scarves. Each person has his/her own row. Including the baby. (And I have two. Because I'm special that way. ;) These things are so much easier to find/choose from now! I love this!