Update 2/10/08

It's been a pretty busy week for us. After the In-Laws left on Saturday we spent the rest of the weekend relaxing and getting ready for me to go back to work. I started back on Monday morning and it was really hard to get up at 5 am. I did okay at work that day, but left around noon because I really felt lost. I worked full days for the rest of the week until I took off 2 hours early on Friday. Maw brought Quickbeam down Tuesday through Thursday at lunch time so that I could feed her and snorgle her and get my fix so I could work for the rest of the day. This week though I'll have to stand on my own. Gas is too expensive to have trips made every day, and our goal is for him to come down once a week (probably on Fridays) and have lunch.

Saturday evening we went to a gathering of people from our church with young families. It feels very odd now to be in the parent club, after being a childless couple for so long. I've never minded kids in theory, but don't like to be around a lot of them at once. The visit went okay, of course they were all doting on Quickbeam. I did get some insight on parenting though, when one of the ladies started tearing up when she held her. She said she hadn't held a baby since her last child who is now 7 years old. I know that time is going to fly by and we have to enjoy her while we can. Before you know it she'll be graduating from high school, moving out and starting her own family. I'm really going to have to watch myself that I don't suffocate her, because I can see that I'm going to be very clingy. :)

This afternoon I made some chicken soup that I saw on the Food Network. It was from Tyler's Ultimate and turned out very good. I added in some swiss chard so that we could get a little extra greenery in our diet. I packaged the leftovers up in individual serving sizes and am putting them in the freezer. Previously, whenever we would make soup or something made to serve more people, we would end up eating on it for days and be completely sick of it by the end. I figure that if we eat it for one meal, freeze it, and then have it throughout the month then it'll give a good variety. I can check out the freezer and pick out what I want to eat for lunch the next day, and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. Then I can microwave it at lunchtime and have a good hot meal. I had been eating out almost every day for lunch while I was pregnant and Maw and I were both working. Then we'd be too tired to cook when we got home so we'd eat again. Now that we are eyeing our budget more closely bringing my lunches is a major objective of mine, with eating out once a week. So we'll see how it goes. :)

Changes

This is my last weekend on maternity leave, I start work again on Monday. I went in for a meeting yesterday, to try to get back in the swing and wean me off of my Quickbeam addiction. All of the visiting family are gone now, and so now I'm going to take advantage of the relative quiet to finish the main project that I set for myself to get done with all of my time at home. When we moved down here from North Carolina, we went through a major purge of our stuff. I mean major, like leaving half of our stuff behind. Over the last few weeks I have gone through my closet to get rid of the old clothes that I don't wear anymore, so there is some more stuff gone. The last two rat holes that we have left are in our guest room closet and our computer room closet. I was watching Clean Sweep this morning while I was feeding Quickbeam, and I got motivated to go ahead and conquer the clutter at last. That way I can start my working life back and Maw can start his stay-at-home-dad routine without having to be burdened with it.

So, my first project this morning was the spare room closet, since it has less stuff in it. I pulled everything out of the closet and put it in a pile. I sorted out the pile into sub-piles. Throw Away, Donate, Quilting Supplies, Knitting Supplies, Paperwork to Shred and Paperwork to File. I had to have a heart-to-heart talk with myself on a couple of topics:

• Quilting - With a new baby, working full time and taking college classes too, I don't have a lot of spare time. I am going to focus on quilting as my main craft of choice. I plan on starting attending guild meetings this month to get reinvigorated. I did a major purge of fabric that I am going to set aside into a bag and donate to the guild. I also took several UFO (Unfinished Objects) that I have had for years that I have had guilt over not finishing and threw them away. When I'm ready to start quilting again I want to start on something new and fresh, not something half-finished that I no longer care about. This is progress here. :)
• Knitting Supplies - Even though I enjoy knitting, it isn't high enough on my priority list to keep hoarding yarn and magazines for a craft that I am not going to be doing anytime soon. Verdict: All of the knitting items are going in a bag and I will see if there are any knitters at the guild that would be interested in it.
• Work Stuff - There are a few large binders of reference material for training courses that I had taken in my previous job. My idea was to take them to work and leave them there in my office, rather than leave them at home. But then in thinking about it, I'm not going to use them any more there than I would here, so I threw them away.
• Idea Book - One of the other things that I have been carting around with me forever are clippings from magazines with ideas for gardens and house ideas. I sorted through this stack harshly and am left with my very favorite ideas. I plan on compiling these into a binder so that I can keep them more organized. I'm going to prune out my stack of gardening magazines so that I can clear up some space in my bookshelf. Then I'm going to take the idea book and design a plan for our yard so I can take things from just being an idea on paper and actually do something with them.

The focus of this year is to stop hoarding up things and actually put them to use. Stop just talking about doing things and actually do them. Live life instead of putting things off. And for goodness sake, stop keeping piles of things in the house. ;)