Peek at my week

Ok, so these are actually photos from last week and weekend, but the amount of clutter everywhere hasn't seemed to go away, so although the areas might be different this week, this is basically what I've been wading through this week. I find it so funny that some days I can look around and feel that I've gotten a handle on the clutter in our home, and then not even a week goes by and all of a sudden it is out of control... At least we are working on controlling the clutter, with a combination of better storage solutions and boxes to fill to give away :)

Little M's closet part way through her makeover, hopefully more details to come after this weekend!

pile of clean clothes on the spare bed, Remi covered with a blanket and being served tea!

Contents of Little M's closet spread over the spare room, along with boxes of outgrown baby clothes & other items

Whew. Looking back at these piles makes me glad I'm started down the path of dealing with them! As of last night I had 3 boxes worth of things to give away sitting in the spare room. And if my husband manages to convince me we don't need to keep all of Little M's outgrown clothes in case we have another girl next time, well then there might be a heck of a lot more boxes to add to that give-away pile! Ah... spring organizing!

and more snow...

Well, after a busy weekend filled too full with trying to get Little M's new closet system built and installed before my father-in-law came to visit for a couple days, I'm rather behind on a number of things. Like cleaning the bathroom before he arrives (not gonna happen!), and doing anything about the large pile (ahem, HUGE pile?) of boxes and things between the end of the bed and the wall in the spare room. Oh, and blogging!

I was hoping to have a great before and after post to share yesterday about how Little M's closet went from packed disaster to organized and pretty, but it just didn't quite happen. Don't get me wrong, the closet is looking very organized, but the shelf I built for the middle of her closet isn't all the way installed, and definitely isn't painted. I just had to get all of her clothes and things off of the bed in the spare room, so I started filling her new shelves up! I figure next weekend I'll have some time to pull everything out, properly install the unit, and get started on painting.

There was also a little incident with some of my pepper starts falling off the top of the freezer at 10:30 one night when I was trying to use up some of our ridiculous number of eggs... so Little M and I spent some time reseeding our hot pepper plants, as well as some time starting seeds for Marigolds and Kale (not on my original list but I saw these White Russian Kale seeds which came highly recommended for picky young eaters and couldn't say no).

Oh, and it's snowing again! After getting 3-4 inches as measured on our back deck on Saturday morning, its now coming down thick again. I am getting rather tired of switching the carseat back and forth between my car (front wheel drive & non-studded tires = no steep hills in the winter) and the jeep (gas guzzler and stinky hunting rig, but does great under almost all snow conditions! 8"+ of unplowed snow on hills sometimes causes problems though!).

I'm so ready to be out in the garden doing this:

Pinterest inspired challenge - wall art for Little M!

So months and months ago, back when I was just starting to get hooked into Pinterest, I found and pinned a cute little kids name wall art piece that I thought I could easily replicate for Little M. I found my inspiration at this cute little shop called Penny Paper Co.

Well, as it turned out, I didn't find it quite so easy to recreate this in any of the programs I typically use, since I don't have any real drawing or designing programs. Then I realized that it might be easier to do in powerpoint. And after a while longer than I really had to devote to it, and longer than I planned to spend on something so seemingly simple, I was done! I think it turned out fairly nice, and looked even better once matted and in a frame on her wall.

I'm linking up to Young House Love's Pinterest Inspired Challenge. There are lots and lots of great projects over there, so head on over and check some of them out!

Patience

At first I wasn't sure if I had anything to write about today. Then I realized that I did: patience. I'm not a very patient person by nature. But I seem to be doing a lot of waiting lately. Mind you, I've been keeping myself very busy with lots of other things, but there are a number of things I've just had to wait on. Its a balancing act for me, between the waiting and the keeping busy. I don't want to be focused so much on waiting for things in the future that I miss out on the present, but I also don't want to be focused so much on the present that I miss out on opportunities to get to the things in the future I'm waiting for.

I've kind of solved the problem a bit by making sure I make long term plans for where I want to be in 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, and 6 months, and by making sure every six months or less I review those plans. And by setting yearly goals and monthly goals that seem right at the time yet also correspond to my long term plans. I've been working the past couple months to improve how I translate my monthly goals to weekly goals so that, with my busy schedule, I still manage to get done what I want and need to get done weekly to make those monthly goals.

I bring up my goals because I've found that when there is something I could fall into the impatient trap about, it helps me to see it out in the future on my goals list, or on my long term plans list. For example our rental house. We've been trying to sell it off and on for almost 3 years. Now we've accepted an offer and are waiting for it to close. We've been here before. A part of me wants to jump forward in time to the end of April to get to the place where we either have all that mortgage & sale stuff done and set, or know that it fell through. But I know that by jumping forward, or only focusing on that place in the future, I would miss out on all sorts of things in the next month and a half.

So I make sure 'selling the rental house' is on my plan & goal lists. Good, there it is. On my long term plan list it's under my 6 month plans, so we're doing good there. Its also under my financial goals section of my 2012 goals, so we're doing good there too. On my monthly goals, which we set before we had the increased interest in the house, I didn't even have 'accept an offer on the rental house', so we're doing great there. I likely should add something to my monthly list along the lines of 'keep the house sale moving along to closing', which would remind me to put items on my weekly list such as 'submit the report from the home inspection fixes we did last fall' (which actually is currently on my weekly list).

If I was just doing items that related to the sale of the rental, then I would worry that I was missing the here and now, and just focusing on the future and struggling with my impatience. But since I know from looking at my weekly goals list that I've got several non-sale related items on there, and since I know my days are filled with non-sale related items too, I can remember to relax a bit and know that I'm managing to wait without just sitting around being impatient :) I know in my heart that the good things in life come from letting go and letting things happen as they will, but sometimes in my head I have to do a bit of fighting with feelings of impatience and eagerness before I get to that calm state where I let go and see what comes, while still making sure things get done as they need to, to allow good things to come. My to do lists help me with that :)