Week 2: My Out of Control Center

My new Out-of-Control Center

The blog is still in the midst of an identity crisis, but that won't keep me from using up some of my beloved nap time alone time to pound away all my thoughts onto the interwebs. Pretty random thoughts coming up here. 

• Above: I was (am?) ever so sick of the mountain of miscellaneous crap that kept getting piled in the middle of the kitchen island, mostly by me. I'm famous for my "I'll deal with that later" piles, and then dealing with them by just making neater piles. I finally got fed up and decided to create a little, for lack of better word, control center. I'm in control of nothing, so the irony does not escape me, but I needed to see a clean island, at least for a few minutes. We had this old box floating around full of more miscellaneous crap, so I cleaned it out and made space for a couple of magazines and fliers I wanted to keep and added the little sorter for mail that needs attention. My planner fits perfectly opened up to the current week. My little box fits on the counter by the cookbooks and sink and is mostly out of the way now. It's been about a week and I've been able to keep the island looking reasonable (always a water bottle and kids cups and lots of works of art from the kids, but not a giant pile of hateful clutter). Time will tell if I can keep it up, but it's taking a little bit of unnecessary stress from me, and for that I am grateful. 

• I mentioned we got the boys a Wii for Christmas, and I still question that decision whenever they are using it. But just for giggles, I got started using Wii fit during nap time on Monday, and I've done it 4/5 days this week. I'm aware that 13-21 minutes of vague movements and playing games should not count as exercise to a respectable person in their mid-thirties, but BUT it's 13-21 more minutes of activity than I was getting previously, so I feel good about it. I lowered my Wii age from 44 to 36. Boom! A pleasant by-product is that I'm drinking more water, and that's always good. I'm starting to lose hope that I'll ever want to go outside again because I've forgotten what temps above 0 feel like, and so I'm counting my paltry minutes of Wii Fit for something!

• Last year I started the Upstream Field Guide course from The Art of Simple because I was really sick of just muddling through life. I stalled out after session 2, because 2016 was #cray. Then Tsh emailed that the course had been updated so I decided to kick of 2017 by restarting it. I even wrote it in my planner...for Wednesday. And then forgot to do it. Classic. But I did it today, and then I downloaded all the journaling pages for the entire course. I'm hoping to do one session a week, so by April I'll just be totally killing it, living life with purpose. Ha! I am looking forward to it, though. I don't claim to be a journaler, but as a melancholic, the idea of looking inwards always appeals to me and I haven't done a ton of introspection lately. I have high hopes! A pleasant by-product is that she includes a Spotify playlist for each session! I have been terrible in my thirties about listening to almost any music except my old favorites, and it feels good to step out of my comfort zone and listen to new-to-me music. 

• We had company on Tuesday! A friend and her two boys trekked the 90 miles along I-94 to spend a few hours with us and it was glorious! We haven't had much company or seen their kids in a long time, and our visit was so refreshing. One of the boys was Daniel, and so my two-year-old definitely expected Daniel Tiger to be coming. And then he continuously referred to him as Baby (older sister's name) or Tiny (old brother's name), most likely because he was still waiting for Daniel Tiger to arrive. My friend and I talked quite a bit about books, which leads me to...

• Goodreads! This friend and I had talked about reading lists before, but neither of us had found a great way to keep track of what we've read and wanted to read and accompanying information. We both had some misconceptions about Goodreads and it's capabilities, but she figured it out and showed it to me and I quickly became obsessed. I took an inordinate amount of time organizing my library that night. So much fun for this nerd! I haven't transferred my whole Pinterest board over yet, or figured out how to integrate kids books into the mix, but I'm still really excited about this new development. I can't explain how wonderful it feels to get weird stuff like this down somewhere so it's not all floating around in my brain. 

• Speaking of reading, I finally gave in to my curiosity and listened to a couple episodes of two new (to me) podcasts: Real Aloud Revival and What Should I Read Next. I really liked them both, and reading aloud to and with the kids has skyrocketed toward the top of my priority list for this year. More to come as I get it sorted out in my brain. 

And those are my thoughts on this hatefully cold Friday the 13th. Additional heart-eyed gratitude goes out to my husband for coming home on his lunch hour to take #2 to preschool so I didn't have to load up Daniel Tiger's fan club in negative temps. Whoop!