Mommy! I'm Boooorrrred!
Hooray.
So the other day, because we are on a huge Cupcake Wars kick in this house, the girls played Cookie Wars. With playdough. And some beads. And my kitchen cabinets as the ovens and fridges (you know, to cool the cookies down).
And you know what I did? And I mean besides desperately begging children to take their pink medicine and let me put eye drops in the eyes - I sharpened all the pencils in the house. And it made me irrationally happy.
Sounds like I've lost my mind, right?
I haven't. At least I don't think I have.
My kids use pencils every night to do homework; we have what may very well qualify as the mother-load of pencils here and since it's about halfway through the school year it makes sense that not too many pencils had points left on them. They needed to be sharpened. I knew they needed to be sharpened, I thought about sharpening them every day, twice a day. Once when I pass by the bucket of pencils on my out the door in the morning and once more when it's time for homework and we are reduced to using crayons and then also using a crayon to write notes to the teachers apologizing (again) for using crayons to do homework. Oy.
***
Last week, my awesome sister-in-law was visiting with her kids - and because she is awesome, she began the organizing of my kitchen cabinets that should have been done when we moved in, but was not. We moved in three minutes before Josh started his new job and so in those three minutes, we unpacked as many boxes as we could and shoved as many things into closets and cabinets as we could, and yeah, that's how we've been living for the past six months because I can't seem to catch my breath here.
But then Sara showed up and all of a sudden, I was able to see what I had in my pantry and I must share - I have a lot of almond milk. And tons of Veggie Straws.
I have a lot of cabinets - that's not a complaint, just a happy fact. And Sara was not able to get to all of them while she was here, but I was so inspired by her work that while the girls played Cookie Wars, I tackled the last four un-organized cabinets. And you know what I found? A sharpener.
Happy days!
In the middle of organizing those cabinets, I stopped and sharpened. And sharpened and sharpened. And emptied the sharpener and sharpened some more. My kids were thrilled when they sat down to do homework and I felt accomplished.
The cabinets were a big deal and finally making time to do them felt good. But I didn't think about the cabinets every day. The cabinets were more like something in the back of my mind that I thought would happen whenever. The pencils, though, they're big. They took up precious space in my brain on a daily basis, multiple times a day and I didn't like that.
I think a lot of things are like that in life - small things that take up an inordinate amount of space in my mind. And I feel like makes me super unproductive, so even though it's a little late for new year's resolutions and also I kind if don't believe in resolutions, I'm making one - but I'm not calling it a resolution, just a new way of being.
My new way of being now is to (try) do the small things when they occur to me instead of carrying them around for weeks or months. I could have very easily picked up a sharpener on my frequent trips to target but I didn't.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I think I just never remembered to buy the sharpener. I feel like I need to write things down more.
Okay, so that's it. This is the new non-resolution: I will write things down when they pop into my head.
Now I just need somewhere to write them.
:)
Jen