P365 - Day 314 - still not well

It was my turn to spend the day at home with the sick little boy today. Only I feel like I’ve been struck down with the same thing he’s got, so even if I didn’t have to be at home with Juniordwarf, I would have been home trying to recover anyway.

He seems to be fine at first. He goes through energetic phases, and then suddenly crashes without a moment’s notice.

I tried to get him to rest up on the couch with me this morning, but he obviously missed his school routine because he set his chair up, put his teddies on the mat and went through the morning routine from school – calling the roll and then writing up on the board what they’d be doing today.

Um, no Juniordwarf, we are not doing all that stuff. We are going to rest.

He had other ideas, until just after lunch, when I was feeling absolutely terrible, and insisted we try and go to sleep for a while.

He wanted to build a train track. I was desperate to sleep. He really wanted the train track.

Okay, okay, AFTER we’ve had a sleep. Then we can build a train track.

At this point he completely crashed, started crying, wanted more medicine, insisted we were going to build the train track, and finally I had to carry him to bed. Then he wanted me to read a story. I didn’t have a book on hand (but I was starting to think I needed to have a copy of Go The F*ck to Sleep on hand for times like these) so I started to make a story up. I thought that might put him to sleep, but it only put me to sleep instead.

After we’d finally managed to get some rest, he was up and about again, while all I wanted was more sleep. The next thing I knew he’d got the wool out of his craft box and was cutting lengths of it to lay down in lines along the floor.

They were lines showing the way from the kitchen to his seat at the dining table; his bedroom to the bathroom; the stove to the bench; to show me the way from the hallway to my bedroom; and so on, all over the house.

Just in case we forget the way, I guess.

And we never did build a train track.

P365 - Day 303 - spice jars

I've been gradually buying new jars to store the random packets of spices and spice mixes that are lying round in what might loosely be described as our spice cupboard.

I've also been replacing some of the old jars (jam jars, tomato paste jars, coffee jars) with the new ones for no reason other than that I quite like the idea of all the jars being the same (or at least similar).

And finally, I took great delight tonight in emptying several jars that contained completely unidentifiable spices or spice mixes into the bin. I have no idea what these were, and have a feeling I've had them for more than five years. I figured if I've had no need for them in that time, I'm not going to now. Plus they're going to be well past their best-by date.

Into the bin!

The re-jarring project will continue for a bit longer, but after that the next step will be to create some steps or something in the cupboard so I can actually see what I have and find what I need without having to pick up every jar. I'm thinking labels on the jar lids as well as the jars themselves might help here.

So that was my well-spent Sunday night. How was yours?

P365 - Day 277 - playing cricket

Juniordwarf got a plastic cricket set for his third birthday. The first time we used it was a couple of months later when we went away to the beach for a weekend with Aunty Purple Bee. But he really hasn’t been interested in playing cricket up until now.

I made a DVD of Juniordwarf’s fourth year as an Xmas gift for our families, and there was footage of him unwrapping the cricket set and then playing with it on the movie.

Lately Juniordwarf has taken a great interest in all of the DVDs I’ve made of him ‘when I was little’. Inspired by this (I think), he’s recently started getting the cricket set out and wanting to play cricket with us.

Juniordwarf, Slabs and Mr Tall had a great time this weekend, and today it was my turn.

He’s starting to get the hang of bowling and he can throw the ball in the direction of the person who’s batting.

This is a big step forward for him, and his ball handling skills are getting better all the time, which is great to see.

He’s still having a bit of trouble swinging the bat in the right direction. He’s tended to hit down onto the ball rather than hit it away from him, but he’s very keen to learn how to do it properly.

We had a nice day at home today reading books, playing with the dog, listening to music, cooking biscuits and going to the library. 

At home

At the library

P365 - Day 275 - MORE housework!

Today I decided I really needed to follow on from last weekend’s cleaning frenzy 

On today’s list were Juniordwarf’s bedroom

and the laundry. 

Both of these are rooms that kind of terrify me.

With Juniordwarf’s room, I think it’s going to be a matter of working with him to make sure he puts things back where they’re supposed to go after he’s finished with them.

This is a habit I’m trying to get into myself as well. It’s not always easy, especially when I think that I’m going to use that thing/do some more work on that project/ read that magazine/whatever in the next day or two, so there’s no point putting it away.

Only I don’t do it, so the project/magazine/book/thing just stays there.

And then there’s the next thing that I’m going to do/finish/read/work on, and the next one and the next one . . . and before I know it, the room is back to where it was before I cleaned it, I’m getting stressed at the mess, and it takes all day to clean it up again.

Believe it or not, there are things I’d rather spend my weekend doing than tidying up the house.

Today was a really concentrated effort to not only tidy things, but to find places for things that will mean they can be easily put back once they’re finished with.

I hope.

By the way, after I'd cleaned the laundry, I could see the pattern on the floor tiles. It's kind of cool, I think.

P365 - Day 268 - let’s talk about housework

I loathe and detest housework with every bone in my body really don’t much like housework.

I’m not very good at keeping things tidy.

The concept of ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’, while being the cornerstone of every decluttering/home organisation book I’ve never read, is about as foreign to me as the concept of, well, exercise.

I’ve heard of it, and I’m told that it can make your life a lot easier and healthier. I’ve even attempted to do it once or twice, without much success.

Our house is a bit of a mess. All I can say in my defence is that none of us have asthma or horrible allergies and the largest number of mice in the house at any one time has been one. So a bit of dust hasn’t endangered anyone’s health.

I’d like a clean house, but I also have other things to do. Like work, getting to work, cooking, spending time with my family, watching Very Important things on TV, doing (ahem) research online, sleeping, keeping my bench top clean . . .

And I’m not very good at packing things away. If I’m in the middle of a project, the stuff all tends to lie around until I get my next burst of inspiration, which might be three months later.

I think my son might have inherited my inability to tidy up after myself too. I set a shocking example!

I am also a reluctant disposer of things I don’t need. I won’t say hoarder, because that brings up images of that dreadful show on TV about people who really do hoard to the extreme. Trust me, I am not that bad! We can get into every room in our house, we do eat on the dining table, and there isn’t a single cupboard where we’re too scared to open the door in case everything falls out.

My dilemma is that I have other things that I have to do ahead of housework – and I especially include spending time with Juniordwarf in that list – I don’t want to miss out on experiences with him because I’m too busy dusting or scrubbing the laundry floor. So, say those who know, the housework can wait.

But, on the other hand, the messy house makes me feel stressed and tense, and on days when I feel like I’m about to hit rock bottom, having to step over stuff just to get in the front door doesn’t make me feel any better.

And when the whole house is like that, well, the effect is compounded.

My problem is, and has always been, that I am an all or nothing person. And the result of that is nothing.

So instead of saying ‘the house is a mess! It’s upsetting me! There’s so much to do! It’s too much!’ and not doing anything, I need to forget about the big picture for a while.

One of the things the counsellor suggested on Friday was to make a to-do list, but to only put three things on the list. Three things that I could do, or make progress towards doing that day. It might – and indeed should – be as simple as ‘hang out the washing’ or ‘go to bed early’. That way by the end of the week I’ll have 21 things that I’ve achieved or made progress towards.

So with that in mind, my three things yesterday were to tidy the lounge room, tidy the kitchen and get a couple of things for Juniordwarf’s room to store some of his more scatterable items in.

Those three things actually took most of the day, but I took a stop-start approach, so I could make sure I had enough time with Slabs and Juniordwarf, and cook dinner – which I actually enjoyed doing for the first time in a long time  . . . probably because the kitchen was tidier than it had been for a long time!

Today one of my three things was to vacuum the lounge room. I’ll spare myself from the embarrassment of admitting when the last time I vacuumed was and just say that it’s been a while. I was going to do it yesterday, but I didn’t get to it.

The good thing about that was, I didn’t care too much.

This is a huge step for me. A while ago I might have gotten cranky with myself for not having finished the whole job yesterday, and told myself how slack I was for not having done anything.

But yesterday evening I could look at my list and see the three things ticked off. Correction self-critic:   I have done three things today, thank you very much. And I knew I could just put the vacuuming on my list today; it would be the first thing I’d do this morning (after having coffee) and after I’d done it I could go outside with Juniordwarf.

Which I did.

Keeping the lounge room tidy is going to take some work for all of us. There will be days we won’t pack up, but the challenge is going to be to not let that one day drag into two and three and a week.

But I'm not going to worry about that tonight. I'm just going to relax in my tidy lounge room.

P365 - Day 265 - a crap end to a crap day

P365 - Day 263 - gardening

Juniordwarf said he wanted to go outside this morning, so I told him to go while I finished what I was doing.

A while later I went out to see what he was doing. He’d put on his little gardening gloves, got his little digger and was in the vege garden digging in the soil.

He was digging soil out of the garden and putting it into the polystyrene box that we’re trying to grow carrots in (rather than battle with the oxalis in the vege patch).

I asked what he was doing, and he said he was gardening.

Of course he was!

P365 - Day 253 - packing (10/09/2011)

Isn't packing to go on holidays fun?!

P365 - Day 252 - car wash

Juniordwarf and Slabs spent the day together today. By all accounts it was a good day. They did a whole range of ‘special activities’, did a tip run, took my car to the car wash, went up the street and went out for lunch together.

When I got home from, Slabs said we needed to go out. I was very curious, but he said it was a surprise (that he then whispered to me). He took Juniordwarf aside and told him where we were going, but not to tell me.

So I asked Juniorwarf where we were going, and he blabbed it out straight away – the car wash (for the other car). Remind me never to tell him any secrets.

Slabs asked Junordwarf if he thought I’d be scared, and Juniordwarf said yes, he thought I would. So Slabs told Juniordwarf that he’d have to look after me so I wasn’t scared.

And off we went. It’s not something we do very often, so it was a big adventure for Juniordwarf. Maybe his second or third time in a car wash. He thought it was fantastic, especially the noisy parts. Slabs said he’d been a bit nervous the first time, but he was well over that the second time round.

He had a great time!

P365 - Day 246 - you know you're living with a 4 year old

when almost every blind and light switch in your house has a step or a little chair underneath it.

P365 - Day 242 - lava lamp

Juniordwarf is the official turner on and off of the lights in the house, as well as the official raiser and lowerer of the blinds.

Tonight he decided, in this capacity, that we were going to turn on the old lava lamp in the lounge room and, because that light was on, we wouldn’t need the main room light on.

Sure Juniordwarf, whatever you say!

Just warming up

P365 - Day 240 - some of what we did today

This morning I looked into Juniordwarf's room and this is what I saw:

He said he was lining up all the numbers. He'd obviously run out of room at the bed and had to continue the sequence under his bed. He was taking one number or one picture under his bed at a time, then emerging (backwards) to get the next one.

Today was a pretty quiet Sunday, so I decided to post a few pictures of what we did.

Inspired by an Instagram friend, we did chalk shadow drawings.

Slabs created his own artwork.

Juniordwarf and I went on a two hour walk and explored the (disused) local railway line along the way.

I wasn't sure if we should go, as the sky looked like this:

We looked at the daffodils when we got home.

And after all that collapsed on the couch.

P365 -Day 221 - five years (9/8/2011)

Tonight is officially Census Night. The Census is taken every five years, and the last Census was in August 2006.

So much has changed in my life – our lives – since then.

In the last five years we have lost some loved family members, and have also welcomed new people into our extended families.

This time five years ago we didn’t have Juniordwarf. I was 34 weeks pregnant, and he was called Peanut. According to the measurements the doctor made that day, Peanut was going to be about 3.4 kilos (7½ pounds) and he was going to have short legs ‘like its mother’. We hadn’t found out whether it was a boy or a girl, but Slabs said he thought if it had short legs, the baby would have to be a girl, because he said no men in his family had short legs. At least on his father’s side. Wrong!

I was looking pretty huge by this stage (that is, I was at the point where the caption on a photo in a newspaper might describe me as being ‘very pregnant’ – as if there is such a thing as a degree of pregnancy).

This time five years ago I was counting down the days to when I would start maternity leave. I was really tired, not able to get comfortable during the night and waking up constantly. I felt like I was functioning on autopilot. I kept wondering whether this was training for what it would be like when the baby came, and whether, despite the expected night wakings, actually having the baby might be better for my sleep patterns, because I might actually be able to get comfortable during the night.

What a lot I’ve learned since then.

So we have a little boy, and we had to answer questions about him on the Census form so that he can be counted as an official statistic in Australia for the first time.

The Census form also asks you what your address was five years ago. This year, our previous address is the same as it is now.

But this time five years ago, when my ‘very pregnant’ self was filling out the 2006 Census form, our address five years previously had been in another state – almost another world away. 

Slabs and I were both working in full time jobs. I was supervising staff and had even spent some time in an acting Manager’s position, something I was keen to get away from, and got my chance when we moved to Tasmania. We had over an hour’s travel every day to and from work, between our peaceful country cottage and the city. It was great, because it felt like every weekend was a weekend away, but it had started to be a grind doing the trips on a daily basis.

Now we’re both working part time, with a much shorter commute. We’re living in a bigger town, which has advantages because we’re a lot closer to shops and services – important when you have a young child – but we still miss the peace and quiet of our former life and the scarcity of neighbours. (Also, I don’t miss the freezing cold winters of our former residence.)

In some ways it’s hard to believe that so much has changed, and that we have an almost five year old son. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday that we were talking about how we might do up our old cottage to make it more like our dream house, and that having a family was not on the immediate radar.

At other times it’s hard to remember life before Juniordwarf, and what we used to do when we were child-free.

Either way, it brings home the truth of the statement ‘the days are long, but the years are short’, and I know it won’t be long before we’re filling out the 2016 Census form, reflecting on all that’s changed since today.

P365 - Day 202 - view from the couch

This is the view out the window from the couch that I spent most of the afternoon resting on, trying to recover from my head cold.

P365 - Day 201 - tissue box

Last night, at the exact moment I lay down in bed, my throat started hurting, my head started to ache and my nose got stuffed up.

Usually when I get a cold, there's some kind of warning it's about to happen - usually a lingering sore throat for a couple of days, or sometimes a headache or earache. But this time there was nothing. One minute I felt fine and the next I felt terrible.

I still felt terrible this morning, so I stayed home from work to rest.

I needed a lot of tissues today. This is my tissue box cover. I couldn't think of anything else to take a photo of today.

P365 - Day 165 school holiday fun

This is the second week of school holidays. Because Juniordwarf is only in school three days a week, there’s only three days we have to cover each week, so Slabs and I each have taken a day off work and my mother has kindly agreed to look after Juniordwarf for the other day.

This week I had today off so, combined with the public holiday on Monday (thanks monarchy!), I’ve had a five day weekend.

It was great, and reminded me of the past few years where I used to have Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, by the end of which I felt like I was just getting into my ‘Mum’ role, only to have to go back to work the next day.

Today we did a lot of fun things. We did housework.

Actually, we spent some time cleaning up in Juniordwarf’s bedroom, and reorganising his bookshelf in the lounge room. We vacuumed and we continued to bring an airer full of washing in from outside at a time in an attempt to get it dry before next week’s washing day.

Juniordwarf discovered a bag full of flyers for the local community radio station that Slabs is involved with. He’s recently been watching a DVD we made of his first Xmas, which involve a rather lengthy sequence of me (in a Santa hat) handing out presents to everyone.

So today he got the flyers out, sat some of his toys down in a circle and proceeded to hand them out their ‘presents’ – ‘Teddy from Santa’, ‘Mum from Dad’, ‘Juniordwarf from Sleepydog’, ‘Mum from Juniordward’ and so on, until all of the flyers were handed out.

It took a long time, and an equally long time to pack them all up again.

I had a productive morning constructing the third tier of a scrapbooking paper rack that had been sitting in a box by the back door for longer than I care to remember. Also in the box was one of those fold up outdoor chairs that we got for Juniordwarf but never took outside to store with the rest of the chairs.

He sprang upon it as soon as I took it out of the box and decided it was time for him to set it up. So after lunch that’s what he did.

This was the temperature.

This is him.

I don’t think he feels the cold. I certainly do.

The last thing we did today, after a quick trip up the street to put the contents of Juniordwarf’s money box into his bank account and do the shopping, was to make sushi for dinner.

We had sushi because that’s what he said he wanted, and he was telling me all about how some of his school friends have sushi for lunch. About one of them, he was saying that she has sushi for lunch, then he said ‘actually no, she has a sandwich’. Bit of a difference there!

This is the first time Juniordwarf has had sushi and I was encouraged by the fact that a lot of the ‘healthy kids lunches’ type books suggest this as something kids will eat, and I’ve heard other people say their kids love it. So what a fine way to get him to eat vegetables.

I haven’t made sushi very often, and I’m not particularly skilled at it. I can never get it to look as dainty and perfect as the sushi gurus – probably because I make it every six months or so as opposed to every day –and I’m delightfully unimaginative when it comes to fillings. My standard is smoked salmon, carrot and cucumber. I’d love to try using raw fish, but I’m terrified of doing it wrong or keeping it at the wrong temperature and poisoning myself, so I usually stick to what I know.

Juniordwarf helped out making his roll. I let him taste a bit of wasabi, but he was less than impressed, as I suspected he would be, and so his was just salmon and carrot. He even ate a couple of carrot sticks on the side. Small victory!

He was so keen to eat his sushi. He kept asking when it would be ready and when he could eat it and I had to keep telling him to wait a bit longer because it needed to be chilled.

Finally he got to eat it. We showed him how to dip it into the soy sauce and eat it, but he ended up unwrapping it. After a couple of pieces he decided he didn’t like it after all, and pulled the rolls apart, picked out the salmon and left the rest.

At least he tried it, and he knows what it is now. I wonder if he’ll be as keen next time or if that’s it for his sushi experience for now.

P365 - Day 145 it's all too much

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I’d come to the realisation that ‘life is now’. It’s not something that happens once you’ve worked out what you want to do and how you’re going to do it. Although I was feeling pretty unwell that day, I appreciated having some uninterrupted time to think about things and be a little reflective for a while.

I came up with the ‘life is now’ mantra, which I think I’ll turn into a nice wall plaque or something for my crafty space to keep  it at the front of my mind.

After that day, I had a couple of ideas about what I needed to do and where I wanted to go from here and I was feeling quite positive about it all.

Only real life interfered and pushed all that stuff to the back of my mind, where everything that is ‘on hold’ sits.

Right now it seems to me that I can’t even do the simplest thing to make my life easier, and that I’m hell-bent on sabotaging everything. I don’t have time, I don’t make time and I can’t be bothered anyway.

I’ve lost count of the number of time management, how to prioritise, how to get things done, how to manage your life, secrets of organisation books and websites I’ve looked at, how many times I’ve seen a great idea and thought I want to do that, how many times I’ve started something that’s fallen by the wayside . . . you get the idea.

Every time I see a new book or a new website, I think, yes this is the one that is going to work for me. And what happens? I read the book, print out all the worksheets, start to fill them out, maybe even start to do one or two things, and then it all gets too hard and I slip back into my old ways and life goes back to normal.

I don’t know if it’s because my life doesn’t immediately change as a result so I don’t think the strategy is working, or if it’s because it’s just so hard to break an old habit and replace it with a new one.

(I know, I know! It’s flawed logic. You don’t put on that extra 15 kilos overnight, so you can’t expect to lose them after one session at the gym.)

Here’s an example of what I mean: I want to drink more water during the day. I make it as easy as possible for myself by taking a full water bottle to work so I don’t even have to go to the water cooler. And still some days that bottle can sit in my bag, right next to my desk, all day without me having a single drink from it. I don’t think I could make it any easier, unless I got one of those beer caps with the tubes running straight into my mouth.

So if I can’t do something as simple as drink water, what hope do I have of doing anything that actually will get me to where I want to be?

I’m feeling quite disheartened about it all.

All I can think of is that for me to be able to work out where I want to go and how I’m going to get there, I need to get out of the real world for an extended period, sit down and work this all through. I can’t do it while I’m tending to my day to day responsibilities. It’s too much. I don’t have time.

A week in a secluded retreat, with no phone, no contact with anyone, days to think and write, quiet uninterrupted nights, blissful silence. Wouldn’t that be great?

It would, but it’s never going to happen.

Still I keep thinking to myself, if only I could somehow get to that place, then I could sort myself out and things would be better. I could work out which dreams I want to pursue and which ones aren’t me any more.

The result is I don’t do anything, and things stay exactly the same, and I keep wishing they could be better.

This week, however, I’ve read two things that give me a glimmer of hope that I might be able to find a way through it.

The first was a comment in (yet another) book about decluttering (from Simplify 101), which was the very simple and very obvious premise that you have to actually do something. All the reading in the world won’t help if you don’t get out there and start doing it.

That is: to create change, you must take action. Or in motivational speak ‘if nothing changes, nothing changes’.

And to do that, you have to make a commitment to take action, and then do it. And doing it once and sitting back and thinking ‘that’s it’ doesn’t work either. You have to do it again the next day, and again the next day.

It’s not rocket science is it? And I bet every book I’ve ever read says the same thing. I’ve certainly heard it many times before.

But what am I going to do? There’s so much I want to do, so much I need to do and so much more I don’t even know that I want to do yet. It’s all too much. I really need that week-long retreat to work out what I want to do, so I can work out where to start.

Really?

Since the retreat is not going to happen, at least not now, if I want to do this stuff (a lot of which is just vague ideas of future plans, goals, dreams and hopes), I have to do it within my day to day life. That is, now.

I actually have to make time to do it. Gretchen Rubin came to the same realisation when she was embarking on her Happiness Project. 

And since changing everything at once is way too much (and I don’t know what ‘everything’ is that I want to change yet) and is completely unachievable, I need to take one step.

I need to make the time to take one step. Surely that’s not too hard.

And here’s the second thing I’ve found helpful. An email from the Planning Queen (aka Nicole Avery, who runs the Planning with Kids blog and has just released a book called Planning with Kids).

She said what she did was focus on the things that made her grumpy. Being grumpy was making her day worse and dragging everyone else down too. But if she could find the things that triggered her grumpiness and work out something she could do to deal with those triggers, in a 15 minute timeframe, which would be manageable in a busy day, she wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed or be as grumpy.

One of her examples was not having cluttered bench tops.

I totally relate to that. Just the fact that the benchtop is cluttered seems to make me (more) tense and anxious. It makes preparing meals more difficult and is a particularly unpleasant sight first thing in the morning, when I’d rather still be in bed. Looking at a clean benchtop is somehow calming. It makes me feel like things are under control, even if they aren’t.

Cluttered benchtops are definitely a grumpy trigger for me.

It seems to be a common thing among organisation books and websites that clearing your benchtops (and kitchen sink) at the end of every day is a great first step to making your life more manageable. I made one of my resolutions earlier in the year to wash up and clear up every single night, and I stuck with it for a while, then it fell away.

So today I’m returning to that resolution. It’s the one thing I commit to do every day, starting today. I will do it every night immediately after dinner or, if I’m putting Juniordwarf to bed, as soon as I’ve done that.

This is my first step. It’s action.

And to make sure I stick to it, I’ve made my own version of Juniordwarf’s rewards chart. I made a resolution chart earlier in the year as part of my Happiness Project, but I always kept it in my journal or somewhere else out of reach and always forgot to look at it or update it.

It’s now in full view. I hope this will make me more accountable and that by taking this first step, I'll be inspired to take the next step.

P365 - Day 120 little shoes

Last night Juniordwarf as packing up before bedtime and he decided to put his shoes by the back door. Slabs told him to put them on the shoe rack.

I didn’t realise until much later what he’d actually done. 

It looked so sweet, I had to take a photo this morning before he went to put them on.

P365 - Day 114 it's not perfect, but it's mine

(Today's title brought to you by Tim Minchin)

Today I did something I decided on Friday to do. 

There's something I’ve been complaining about ever since my scrapbooking hobby became bigger than the dining table and started to spread across two rooms.

I don’t have a scrapbooking space. 

I can use the coffee table, but it’s very uncomfortable to work at that level. And I have to pack everything up to keep it out of Juniordwarf’s way. I can use the dining table, but ever since Juniordwarf has started eating his meals on there instead of his little kids table, it’s become less than desirable as a venue for papercrafting. And again I can’t leave anything out.

So today, I did some reorganising of the furniture in the study, got Slabs to help me move my desk back into the house from my shed (where I have used it precisely zero times) and started to set up a scrapping area.

Originally I was going to use these bedside cabinets
as 'legs' for a sheet of chipboard . . .

. . . then I remembered I already had a perfectly
good desk (and yes it is the same desk I had
at high school).

I managed to do this without getting rid of a single item of clutter in the spare room, and still enabling some kind of (restricted) access to the room, which I think is testament to my ability to hoard.

It’s still a work in progress. It’s not a huge area, and at the moment it means that my scrapping stuff is actually spread across THREE rooms. That might continue to be the case, because I don’t think there’s going to be enough room for everything to be consolidated. But it does get a lot of stuff out of the lounge room and, more importantly, it’s my own space.

I’m so excited!

Now to work on that clutter . . .

P365 - Day 113 memories

Juniordwarf's room is also home to some of Slabs' and my stuff that hasn't really had a home anywhere else in the house. I remember the top cupboard of the wardrobe in my room as a child served a similar purpose.

Today we spent the whole day going through all that stuff and trying to make the room a bit more functional for a 4 year old. This included the construction of some new shelves.

One of the hidden treasures that Slabs found was a scrapbook of his family history, which is now stored with the rest of the family albums. When we moved here (before I started scrapbooking and creating many many albums) we didn't really have an album storage space, so this sort of thing got stored a bit haphazardly around the house.

Slabs was very excited to show Juniordwarf some photos of his ancestors, and of himself and his sisters as young children.

Someone recently commented that Juniordwarf looked a lot like Slabs at the same age, so here are a couple of photos - what do you think?

Slabs age 5

Juniordwarf age 4