Spring Cleaning

I've never really felt compelled to do the whole "Spring Cleaning" thing, but we are, quite possibly, living in squalor right now. To be fair, it's not really squalor, but it's definitely below my standards (which are low for housecleaning).

Mainly the problem is that we have stacks, piles, and mountains of stuff. Books, magazines, random to-do lists half-completed, odds and ends are littering our house. I tackled part of the kitchen today. (Well, if we're being honest here, just the counter.) I bought a desk organizer from Target and cleaned out our old kitchen basket. Everything is now neatly in its place. Everything that didn't fit in the basket got shredded or pitched into the trash.

Now, the only problem is where to go next. I don't feel like our house is necessarily dirty -- just cluttered. I've bought "organizers" before, but they never seem to work out for one reason or another. You really need to have a plan and see what fits for your particular situation. Boxes and bins sometimes just contain the clutter instead of eliminating excess junk.

Normally, I'm great at organizing smaller spaces -- like my classroom at school -- but the entire house just seems so DAUNTING.

Tell me, interwebz, how do you stay organized and eliminate the clutter at home?

In the meantime, I'm going to peruse Martha's Spring Cleaning checklist and see if I can muster some motivation to tackle it.

Table Manners

We're embarking on one of the first independence milestones: Feeding ourselves.

Oh how fun -- and terribly messy.

We've started to introduce Little Man to table food. Whatever we eat (within reason), he eats. I thought this would be NO BIG DEAL since we had already mastered the spoon. Wrong. Everything we put in, comes right back out. Only once that terrible food has been expelled from his mouth, does Little Man begin to chew. It's like we've started right back at the beginning.

At the suggestion of a friend, I've put some puffs on his high chair and he willingly grabs, smacks, whaps, and crunches the puffs. But, he does not eat them. Sometimes, he will tease his poor mother and put them near his mouth, but he does not actually ingest them. I've tried mashed potatoes and those were great fun to flick and fling all over the place, but no eating. (To be fair, maybe once, by accident, did he get the potatoes in his mouth.)

And, since we're talking about food here, let's have a nice picture of Little Man eating. Isn't he cute with his dinner smeared all over his face?



So, I think this is going to be a case of wait-and-see. Eventually, he will get the hang of it, and then I will miss the days when he needed me to feed him.