Smiling.... and Project Simplify

Some things I am smiling about right now.....

A very generous gift received in the mail from anonymous. What a blessing! Totally unexpected! What kind of awesome person does this?

The Shr*ner's comment on our way to the hospital, "The last driver told me he was so impressed with your husband and how attentive he was to that little girl."  Music to a wife's ears.

Finally finding the perfect convertible carseat. Only took three tries.

Skyping with a couple from Thailand who wanted to know more about the treatment of Fibular Hemimelia in America. It was fun talking with them and seeing their sweet little girl.

Anna's face when riding this at a friend's house.

The OneRepublic album Waking Up. I know I may be a little behind, but I don't listen to the radio much and am enjoying it.... if a few years late.

The book "French by Heart" by Rebecca Ramsey.

Anna turning back into herself now that her casts are off: no more meltdowns on the kitchen floor. Sitting like a perfect angel in the shopping cart for the entire grocery run. Making friends with everybody.

Kroger carrying more health food/allergen-free food than I thought. I was looking in the wrong section. Foods I  didn't think they carried are available and clumped together in the Natural Foods section.

Only four more months until Ben graduates.

And Project Simplify....

I'm a big fan of keeping things simple. I don't like living with endless clutter or a million books, photos, toys, magazines, etc. This $5 e-book, "One Bite at a Time: 52 projects for making life simpler" put out by Simple Mom has been a great motivator for me. I love the idea. Each project is only 1-2 pages long. Many are things I have been thinking of doing or already started on before reading the book. I love that it's an e-book, so you can click on links and page numbers easily. I did print out the table of contents so I can check off the ones I've done so far.

I take it slowly and do one project here and there. Of course there are some that I don't need to do, or am not interested in, but overall it's good stuff. If you want to see what kinds of projects are included, I scanned my table of contents. Hopefully some of you will enjoy this e-book, too.

(Sorry if it's too small to read! Check out the link if you want).



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!

Accomplished

Well, I've gotten, count it, ONE non-baby related thing accomplished in the last two months! Today while Anna was napping I finally got around to making homemade household cleaners. We have a small apartment and I got tired of toxic cleaning fumes permeating the place, and now that we have a little one, I wanted to find a better alternative. Almost everything I made used the following ingredients (plus water, hydrogen peroxide, and lemon juice which are not shown) and are completely non-toxic and OK if ingested.

I grabbed some empty spray bottles at Walmart. Normally I would shop around to find some good quality ones, but I don't have time to shop around these days, so Walmart will have to do. I also made a vegetable/fruit wash that's not included in the picture.

I used recipes from this site as well as one other. It felt good to toss those chemicals with the skull and crossbones and TOXIC labels strewn across them. Good riddance!

Eventually I will get around to making this as posted on my friend Sarah's blog. With all the laundry I'm now doing, it will definitley be worth it. I'm just waiting to use up what I already have.