Blue-eyed beauties 3-2-1

I wish I could say I’ve been busy slaying dragons and conquering new skills, but no. Mostly just housework, hanging with the littles, and reorganizing my house. Actually, we shall restate that first bit. I have slain a dragon. Our playroom. I have completely reorganized it into an entirely unbeautiful and very functional toy storage system a la Rubbermaid, that makes it way easier for the kids to spend five minutes cleaning up. Instead of me spending two hours reorganizing every toy into it’s special spot, I have a bunch of buckets that are either by theme or by type, and they get one at a time, and if they want another they throw everything back in the Rubbermaid first. Pinworthy and beautiful? Not particularly. Functional? Absolutely.

I’ve also been working on skills, actually. Firstly, on my houseworking skills. Let’s be real here – it does not come to me naturally. If I strike you as the homemaker type, I apologize. In reality, I am the artsy fartsy type, and if I leave myself in my natural state I tend to sit up every so often and wonder what the heck happened. I’m forcing myself to create new habits and routines and so far I’m doing pretty well. I mean, two steps forward and one back – I have a toddler and a baby after all.

Secondly, I’m giving running another go. It’s actually just happenstance that I took it up in the New Year. That’s just when my husband and I came to the conclusion that going to the gym was not fitting in particularly well in this season of my life. Jackson has been clingy off and on, and my husband struggles with him when I’m gone, and that’s stressful for everyone involved. So in lieu of not having a whole gym available we opted for a second hand treadmill. I’m nearly done my second week of it and I’m getting stronger, faster, and yes, losing weight as well. But mostly I’m feeling more energetic, which is really helping with that housework skills thing… especially since I’ve got less sleep lately than I ever got when Jackson was a newborn. C’est la vie, and this baby season is long days and short years, and all the snuggles and laughter are totally worth the lack of sleep.

However, I have resolved to do or create something every day, even if it’s just a photograph. So, on a particularly crazy day, I pulled out my dslr and took pictures of my crazies. Then I edited them another day. Every day a little bit of something! Running and creating even just little bits, that’s what’s keeping me in a happy, healthy place (mentally and physically) this cold cold winter.

How about you? How do you keep in the happy healthy zone?

Crazy Paranoid Lady

Okay so I am a crazy paranoid lady in the middle of the night. Let me start off by explaining that my craziness is not completely random. I watched Degrassi The Next Generation (stupid show, I know, but it was on and My Darling Daughter was not into going to bed early) and there was this thing about advertising or whatever. Girls were wearing this dress as a form of advertisement for a sponsor who was sponsoring the badmintine tourney, and this became a huge deal as they were told how they could and couldn't act/eat/whatevs.
So, anyways. 12:30 am rolls around and The Baby starts to cry. And cry. And cry and cry and cry. I'm pretty sure she was suffering from some painful bloating from the potato soup we both ate (lots of onions) because I had the same problem about 15 minutes later. Anyways, so I think this woke me up from some sort of wierd dream, because when The Husband made a comment about The Baby crying (she sleeps in our room at the moment) I started irritably going on about how "They" shouldn't be allowed to advertise like this. The Husband, although more than half asleep himself, still found this a little wierd. "What?" I proceeded to try to mumble some sort of obtuse, vague explanation that "They" were advertising via the crying baby and it shouldn't be allowed because it just wasn't right. Meanwhile, The Baby continued to cry loudly, stopping for a moment when I rocked her but starting right up again, twice as loud, of course, when I lay her back down. The Husband made one last attempt at grasping what exactly I was jabbering on about. "What are you talking about? What are "They" advertising by the baby crying?"
I don't even remember what I mumbled back to that one. It wasn't any sort of logic. I didn't have any, of course. I couldn't really answer the question, but I knew that was his fault, and not mine. That or "Thiers". The Husband, being half asleep, decided to just pretend I wasn't talking anymore.
Between this and the constantly crying baby, I was completely frustrated. I gritted my teeth and picked up The Baby, then lay her on the bed beside The Husband, where she calmed down somewhat, realizing she had once again sucessfully wound up in the master bed. Then I stalked off to dig the Infacol out from under the lazyboy in the livingroom, (I'm not sure what's wierder, the fact that it was under there or the fact that I knew where to find it) administered a good dose to my sniffling child, and went back to bed. I did not remember or realize my complete lack of sanity until my husband texted me at 9:30 am to apologize for being a jerk last night. (After I crawled back into bed, he asked me to go grab his long johns from the clean laundry and bring them to the bedroom so he wouldn't have to walk around cold in the morning. I was completely unimpressed with this request and informed him he could get his own long johns, in the morning. He informed me that getting his long johns was 'the least I could do.' This was 197% the worst possible thing he could have said to the woman who pretty much single-handedly has been getting up with his baby in the night for the last seven months. We are both a little stupid in the middle of the night.)

So yeah. I'm kind of a crazy person, a little. Just at night though. Maybe somebody should take my baby away at night. hehe. Yesplz.