Fat, NYC and Loving My Shadow Self

It is winter and I have gained a little weight again. Not a lot of weight, not even an amount of weight I care about very much...but its noticeable enough that I went up a size and that I feel larger. Something ancient and real about the very nature driven urge to have a little extra padding, or else to move less in efforts to conserve strength, heat and energy. Because I was paying attention last year and the year before I am pretty sure that this is a cyclical thing for me. I am my thickest and most muffled self in the cold months and then I shed the extra and am a more wirey version in the summer heat. Very, very hard this time of year to think about getting up and actually shuffling out in the pre-dawn chill for my once a week, sunrise yoga class. I am totally okay however, with perpetual mugs of tea with cream and honey.  We are just living the other half of the equation now and remembering that we are creatures who till and garden and harvest and adventure and dance and also creatures who burrow in and sleep extra and recover.

 We went down into New York City tonight to see A's work and have dinner together. Pom was so excited about all the hustle and bustle in the city. He kept yelling, "Taxi!!!" and "I sees two peoples!" and other key sights as we drove along. I felt so stressed about trying to drive down into the city with the boys and find parking myself but I really wanted to be brave enough to handle it so I told A that I was game. I was not above texting him when we had arrived and asking if he wanted to come down and help me park. Imagine, if you can, how astonished I was to find out that the curbside parking spot I had pulled into, at the front door was perfectly legal and free! Sometimes life is astonishing.

 The boys and I are going to start work tomorrow on our valentines. So many, many hearts to make and cut and paint and stamp and draw on! I am thinking about the very ambitious plan of making enough to mail to all their cousins AND all the kids in their co-op on Fridays. Am I crazy? At least I am not buying little gifts and making hand crafted astounding little gift bags and rhyming limericks for every child we know! How do some women do it?!? I feel like I am totally hitting it out of the park if I manage to pack snacks for a day's outing. I did, truly, and really astonish a friend with that simple feat today. I'm not a fussy mama. I'm not even a prepared or organized mama although I do at least aspire to those goals.

Then again....I need to remember this yin and yang, this teetering and tottering, this time-for-everything-reality. I stumbled on this poem by Haafizah the other day and it made me smile and remember to appreciate my double sided self. I want to be neat and orderly but I also love passion, flexibility, and visual chatter....the things that make me who I am.  Love your shadow self and the self you aspire to be. They both matter and they are both real. 

Lego Distraction-ating

Started working on my second major Lego build in my life tonight.The boys and I are putting together this one, Dee's big Christmas present this year.

Its good to have a project after dinner when it is California Week (the one week a month that A is spending in Cali). We just got a little bit of it done, the first four or five pages in the instruction manual....a layer of bricks on the base piece. The baby was so exciting he kept stirring the box full of pieces and sending them flying and then climbing up onto the table in his excitement. Super silly!

Dee loves to build these scenes and really enjoys hunting for the next required bricks in the "Big Pile" of materials but he gets worried by the complexities of the big picture and feels all nervous and stressed that he'll "do it wrong." He actually is a pretty good team player with Ru who has bravado for miles and loves to read out directions but doesn't have the patience for hunting for the exact bricks specified. If I'm around to pluck a baby off the table and lend encouragement and the occasional long fingernail for prying bricks apart....we make a great construction crew. Nib is so far not really old enough to join in and follow directions. So he usually does his own thing next to us, building some imaginary design and we bargain with him for bricks we need off of his structure. It works. He's peripherally involved and free to do what he likes and generally occupied on the same topic.

Love these Legos but wondering what my organizing future holds for storing, constructing and displaying them. Right now the boys aren't anywhere near organized or motivated enough to possess a lot of them or to have one of those incredibly pleasing sorted-by-color file drawer storage cabinets that are always floating around on Pinterest. It would be a mess. So right now they all live mixed in a big glossy rainbow in a small tub with a lid. My in-laws have an astounding amount of Legos leftover from raising their 7 children and my eyes widen every time we are there to visit and they bring in the GIGANTIC Rubbermaid tub with 5,000,000 bricks in it. Is this in my future? 

I am not equipped. 

Laundry Salvation

So excited about my new laundry system.  Small, home-making victories that matter!!!!

I have discussed my laundry battles before. Some woes are perpetual. I think, however, that this time I have the upper hand with my clever new scheme. On the weird side....it involves five million laundry baskets....on the plus side, its a LOT more organized, somewhat perpetually caught up, and it makes me feel like a mommy-rock star!!!

 

 

I have baskets for sorting the laundry and all the dirties get put immediately into one of these bins as soon as they enter the basement laundry zone.  Ru has just started learning to load the washer or dryer and having sorted bins of dirties makes it a much saner process. He just stuffs the washer full with his chosen color (I sort whites, lights, darks and reds) and then I add soap or bleach and start the machine when I get a chance. 

 

After washing and drying, all laundry gets folded and sorted into the next bank of baskets, labelled with names. Each person has a basket, neatly labelled and they stack on top of each other for space saving convenience. Love this part. So soothing to go down in the basement in early morning before the house is awake or late at night when the littles are running around crazily with toothbrushes on the 2nd floor....and just have a little sorting binge.

Just me and the laundry...each thing in its bin, every one folded and ready for putting away.

Dee loves the new system and it is bringing out his inner organizer. He goes energetically down the basement to empty his basket every morning and tells me several times a week how much he loves the new plan. Cute little kindred spirit. I am a mess on the outside and full of spontaneous creativity but I have a strong inner craving for order and aesthetic smoothness. Dee and child-me are a lot alike. 

 

The Great House Hunt

Today was an errand day so most of it I was running around town, dragging the kids in and out of places of business, buckling and unbuckling and the at the end of the day, filling the gas tank to make up for it all.

BUT...this afternoon there was a small window of time when I was home...(just long enough to gulp lunch down and pull off naps)and today I started putting together my house hunting notebook!

(an apartment we considered when hunting for this one)

I took a small three-ring binder and filled it with the Realtor.com profiles of all the houses I am interested in and separated them into "Already Drove By And Looked At Them"(Further Action Needed)and "Still Need To Drive By." I also categorized them by town within those sections so that I can make sure to find all the houses in the same area when I have the next chance to do drive bys. I have been taking notes on the back of the Realtor.com profiles as I see houses to make sure I remember my thoughts on each place and if needed (say a profile doesn't show the front of the house at all) I take photos that can supplement the photos in the profile.

(the living room of our last apartment)

Today I also added a three ring notebook pocket to hold post-its, three pens (extras for realtors and A in case we need them) and two highlighters for noting the good and bad stats on a house profile. A while ago I sat down and brainstormed the things we: Want to Have, Would Consider Bonuses and Want to Avoid in a prospective house.

 (one of the houses I looked at last week, we hope to see the inside this weekend!)

The last thing on my list is to make a collage for the cover...hence the stack of decorating magazines you see above! I plan to peruse them for dream-home ideas and inspiration and then take scissors to the pages and hack and cut to my heart's content until I have two beautiful 10X13 collages to cover the front and back of my new notebook.

(a mountaintop chalet we saw in Switzerland)

Thus armed and inspired...I plan to try to find us a home of our own this year...perhaps even this spring!