Finishing Projects

During the holidays Ben had off almost a month from his rotations and it was a lovely break, but it's also been good to get back in some sort of routine. After a month of having valuable family-time but accomplishing very little, I've finally gotten around to completing a few things.

As I've said before, I am not a photographer and still haven't figured out the art of taking-good-pictures-when-you-live-with-the-curse-of-fluorescent-lighting.

1. Blacking out the curtains in the nursery: finished.
You can see light in this picture because they are open, but upon closure all light is blocked out- sweet!

2. Rearranging the nursery by moving the crib away from the window to make it safer now that Anna is climbing: finished.

3. Framing wedding pictures: finished.

Our wonderful wedding photographer contacted me months ago to inform us that we had a $500 credit left from our wedding-that-was-over-three-years-ago because I hadn't ordered an album. Instead I'd chosen to design my own via Blurb because I'm a control freak, and it cost like 1/100 the price (great decision by the way). The only thing left to use the credit for was prints. Since we didn't have any wedding pictures framed, I ordered a few. Most of them I just tucked away for who knows what (anyone want a wedding picture? :) but I did put up a few with some frames I already had.

(This one is 16x20 but I wish I had gotten it larger. I love this picture because it shows the whole wedding scene and the beauty of the wooden chapel set in the middle of a garden with swaying trees. *Sigh*)

(I liked the idea of using a picture from our wedding locale as an art print. Every time I see it in the bathroom I remember our wedding). 

4. Creating and framing a verse from my favorite motherhood poem, and hanging in the nursery: finished.

5. After finally scrounging enough bread ties, labeling my electrical strip so I don't have to spend eons under the desk pulling on cords to figure out what's what: finished.

6. Getting back into a cleaning schedule: finished.

I pretty much shunned all cleaning in the name of family time and I still feel good about that decision. I used to hate to clean, but I realized that I actually missed my cleaning schedule. I started to somewhat enjoy cleaning once I made a schedule of one thing to do each day, rotating easily by the week of the month depending on how often it tended to get dirty. Instead of noticing the dust on the TV and thinking, "Ugh what a gross place I live in, when am I ever going to fix that?" I would think, "It's getting dusty in here. Good thing I'm going to be dusting on Thursday" and wouldn't be bothered by it. In a strange way, having a plan lifts the burden to clean all the time. And since we have a 950 square foot place, I rarely spend more than 30 minutes on any one thing.

(No I don't clean the bathroom every week. Don't judge).

Well, I am feeling accomplished!