Walks, Naps and Water

As I may have mentioned, naps had become problematic around here. For a few months, a certain golden-haired toddler just couldn't remember how to fall asleep come afternoon. Which would be fine, if lack of sleep didn't result in mega-meltdowns come dinner time. And over-frequent useage of the word "NO!" before then.

All that has changed.

I am currently celebrating an entire week of easily getting Aurelia to sleep for naps. The key? A long walk after lunch, followed by warm tea with milk, a quiet read and off to bed. As a very pleasant side-effect, Blaise is tired after the stroll in the warm sun as well and he goes to sleep at the same time.

Sometimes we fly to see Grandma and Grandpa during our walk.

 

 Sometimes we just fly high in the sky like a bird (if we're not too busy chasing butterflies).

While Blaise looks on, enjoying a splash of apple juice in his water bottle.

 

Then we like to see what marine bounty God has waiting for us at the end of the dock. Will the dolphins be back to play right in front of us today? 

Enough watching, it's time to run! While pushing my baby brother in a stroller!

 

Here we come!

While Mom and Dad (who fills in for Hilary on Fridays) wait with bated breath.

You have a PRESENT for me?!?

"Honey, don't forget your brother"

Brother safely returned, the promised present handed over.

No caption needed.

 No "Flipper" today, but Mr. Crabs came out for a show.

 Goodbye, Bay. See you tomorrow!

Or later today, as it turns out! Because the water park is closed. Even though it is 85 degrees.

Liveable Laundry Goals

Two of my favorite blogs are talking about laundry this week. As part of "Simplify Your Life" month, Sheila shares some great laundry tips and systems over at To Love, Honor and Vacuum. I'll share one quick tip that I've learned after nine years of marriage: if you want your husband to use the laundry hamper in your bathroom, take the lid off of it. Piles of laundry NEXT to the hamper drove me crazy for years. When we moved to our current house, there was a lidless hamper (not to be confused with the Lidless Eye of Sauron, even if that's how laundry appears in my nightmares on occasion) in the linen closet in the master bathroom. Now if I leave the door open to the linen closet, the hamper actually gets used!!! Wish I'd figured it out on my own, but I'm happy to embrace the serendipity (and results) of this discovery.

In perhaps my favorite post yet in her "31 Days To A Less Messy Nest", the Nester encourages us to lower our expectations. It is a simple change of perspective, but changing my laundry goal from "empty laundry hampers" to "having enough clean clothes available" really frees me from a lot of stress. There may not be a day in my foreseeable future when I don't have to do laundry, but if I simply accept that fact and move on, that's okay.

15 minutes to a simpler...mantel

Over at To Love, Honor and Vacuum, Sheila issued a challenge to find an area of your home to declutter in 15 minutes. Although I had many options, I chose the mantel/bookcase area on our tv wall in the living room. Mostly because the other areas that popped into my head would require more than the allotted time...haha.

Here's the before:

Yes, the glass vases have been sitting there with paper in them since we moved. In June. A lot of the Wii gear was just scattered around the mantel, and someone has been forgetting to hand already viewed movies back to Aurelia when she picks out a new one. Oops.

And the after:

 I put the less-used Wii gear in a box under the Wii remotes, the movies back in their homes and moved some of the movies down into the cabinets in the white bookshelves. I'm not in love with the flower to the left of the vcr, but something needs to go there to hide the wire clutter. It'll do for now.

Okay, so to make the deadline I cheated a little by simply moving the totes of  toys and books to the laundry room for later sorting. Glancing at my plan for the week, that will happen on Thursday. So I won't let it bug me today.

Week 1 of Simplification

Many of my favorite blogs are doing a "31 Days to --something better--" thing in October. I am loving the tips so far, on everything from how to take a better photograph to how to live more fully in grace. But the articles that are speaking to me the most right now are the ones focused on simplifying life. Sheila Wray Gregoire is devoting an entire month of blogging to this very topic (check out today's post at To Love, Honor and Vacuum for some wonderful insight as she kicks off the series).

I am very intent on creating a good daily rhythm to live by, and to that end I sat down last night and scheduled my entire week out...not every minute, but in a few reasonable blocks of time for each day. I don't intend to do this forever, but I thought it might be useful to be deliberate with the details for a while just to get the right pace. And I will NOT beat myself up if I don't stick to the plan -- which is good, because with a baby boy who woke up with a cold and another tooth coming in, pretty much nothing went according to schedule this morning.

Anyway, the reason for doing this is that over the past couple of weeks I've felt like I've neither accomplished anything nor spent any time doing little things I enjoy (like blogging). Part of this is because I've been fighting off a cold myself, and laundry and dishes do take up a lot of time...but mostly I've just been too sloppy with planning. I was also a bit depressed over not having the resources to do any real decorating, which killed my motivation to do much beyond tread water. There is no reason, however, that I can't clean and better organize what I already have.

Yesterday I started with the master bedroom. Why pick the room that is usually the last to get attention in a new house? Well, before I could decide what to do with the main living area, I had to figure out what furniture we owned would fit nicely in our bedroom. The room is hardly "done", but I'm really glad that I didn't wait until I had the desk I wanted or could build the bed or buy the curtains or find a good rug or recover the chair.We're already enjoying the new space.

More importantly, I can see the evidence of my work.

Which inspires me to keep this process going. Next up: pretending I actually own storage containers and organizing piles of what I would have in them and where they would be.

Because when my house is in order, I can spend more time doing this:

Focusing on the task at hand...the downside

When my life was a duel between grad student and homemaker, I almost always had to just do what had to be done, one step at a time. Especially when our commute took up nearly three hours a day. THREE HOURS.

As a full-time "SAHM" now, I still use this approach for most everyday tasks. I don't really want to look at the broader view of the day and cringe at how much is full of mundane, repetitive housekeeping chores. If I just follow a rhythm of doing a few things that need to be done, then play with my children, take a break to read and have a mocha, then do a few more things that need to be done...then usually everything gets done and I don't feel overwhelmed.

The problem comes when I want (or need) to do more than just maintain the household. In Sheila Wray Gregoire's excellent blog, she asked yesterday for readers to comment on the biggest source of stress and "busy-ness" in their lives (she's getting ready to teach us how to simplify, woohoo!). This was an easy answer for me: House. Work.

I already know what I need to do to streamline housework. Mostly it involves some storage containers and a weekend of deep cleaning. But before I get storage containers, I need to paint my bookshelves. And before I paint my bookshelves I need to refinish my dining table and paint it. Which is going to require some coats of polyurethane, which means I need to clear out space in the garage (which is full of boxes of books waiting to go on freshly painted bookshelves). Before I do that, I need to spend an evening finishing up the final little details on my awesomely cute coffee table-turned chalkboard activity table.

Oops. Anyone see a problem with my (non) plan of action? If I just take care of the task at hand, I'll never actually complete the above list of projects. Fortunately, by writing out the list I was able to see that a lack of strategy won't work. And now that I type that out..."duh".

Wishful Wednesday: Video Scrapbooking

What's Wishful Wednesday? A new linky?

Nah. Just what I wanted to call this post. Since I had an idea for a product I really wish someone would develop (pun intended...wait for it) at 6am while I was up feeding Mr. Hungry Poopy Pants...and today is Wednesday...you see how it came to be.

Anyway, wouldn't it be really cool to be able to "print" short video clips on 4x6 cards that you can put in a photo scrapbook? I guess good ol' J.K. Rowling already thought of the magical version of this. Maybe it's not so original.

But I really want it.

Because laying on the bed next to Blaise and watching him lift up his head and look out the window, listening to Jon puttering in the kitchen, smelling the coffee brewing...I wanted to capture ALL of that as my "Picture of the Day" so I can flip back to it in my Project Life kit twenty years from now.

I'm not asking for a holodeck here. Though that would be cool too, while we're busy wishing :).

The future of undervalued marriage?

I ran across an astonishing article while skimming the Wall Street Journal this morning. Haha, doesn't that make me sound intellectual? Just know that I was reading it while rolling around on the floor with a baby and while my toddler scattered sections of the paper all over the living room. Don't want to give any false impressions.

Back to the article: "Only in Japan, Real Men Go To a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends". Basically, a former honeymoon destination in Japan is trying to find a way to survive in a country where the population is shrinking and the marriage rate is falling. So they're catering to a new idea of "couple": real men taking their video-game character girlfriends on expensive weekend vacations. In the first month of the promotion, over 1500 men brought their virtual dates to Atami for romantic walks, an afternoon kiss and an evening of fireworks. They paid for two people to stay in a room at the hotel featured in the game, adding to the "realism".

Wives, homemakers, helpmates...if you ever doubted your value, consider this as proof positive that men NEED us in order to be their best.

My husband and I married when we were still undergraduate college students, which often surprises people. In response, my husband says that if he hadn't married me when he did, he likely wouldn't have finished college. Judging by his just-prior-to-marriage student id photo and his post-marriage driver's license photo, he would have become a bum instead. And then the world would be short one brilliant scientist (not that I'm partial in my assessment or anything).

The need for a companion, the despair of loneliness, goes so deep in man's nature that when a helpmate can't be found man creates one to fill the vacuum. The idea of a a grown man spending hours playing a video game to earn "boyfriend points" so his virtual girlfriend doesn't give him the silent treatment seems crazy until it is considered in light of the power of loneliness.

Fortunately, God knew this and created a better solution than Nintendo can compete with.