Getting Stuff Done

Warning: This post is extraordinarly long! I don't know what happened, but just so you know, I did not mean for it to be this way! :)

So basically this picture has nothing to do with the title. I just looked at our blog the other day and realized how sadly pictureless it is! So here is a picture of Boo saying: "Just because you give me a spoon to play with doesn't mean I will eat!" In answer to the big question, no, he is still not eating. It has gotten to the point that our occupational therapist told us to not even try to put anything to his mouth at all until Monday. Wow... Who knew that eating could be such a rough topic?! I guess as long as we are on the topic of eating: Boo has been getting 24 ounces a day of regular breast milk, via the tubey. Due to his inexplicable, yet consistent and excessive weight gain, our pediatrician recommended that we feed him roughly 21 ounces of breast milk per day and 3 ounces of pedialyte! We are doing anything we can to get him to lose weight (or at least to stop gaining), as it seems to be making his breathing worse. He is now back on his original amount of oxygen that he was on when he came home from the hospital in November, which is disappointing. So that makes three of us Steeds who are currently on diets, varying in our levels of commitment thereto.

Now to the title of the post. My life has completely changed! Little Boo now takes 1-2 naps for 3-5 hours per day! WOO HOO!!! (He used to just do twenty minute cat naps and stay up late and wake up early, all of which made for a somewhat less happy me.) One might ask what I do with these extra hours of me-time. I...GET THINGS DONE!! It has been awhile since I have been able to get much done. It was all I could do to make the bed and get dinner on the table, in between all of the things I was doing with or for Boo.

Here are some of the things I have gotten/am getting done.

1. Tonight I pruned the rose bushes. When we were in the process of buying our house, the previous owner mentioned to us that her rose bushes were "the talk of the neighborhood." Personally, I have heard no such talk, but certainly if the neighbors were inclined to talk about these sorts of things, they would not be mentioning OUR rose bushes! Last year we did not get around to pruning or taking care of them and they ran wild. I really wish I had taken a picture, as they were really quite embarassing. At one point, S made a half-baked attempt at pruning them in the fall, but it really was still a mess. Now, they are all at knee-height (just like I learned in my yardwork class). I was glad to have accomplished this at night, when I at least cannot see the spiders. (What I can't see can't hurt me, right?)

2. The other day I organized one of our cupboards (the one that has the cups and bowls and plates in it). I guess S and I have been miscommunicating all this time about this cupboard. Since sometimes he puts the dishes away and sometimes I do, things got disorganized really quickly. After awhile, S started thinking to himself: "I wonder when A is going to organize this cupboard; it looks terrible." I was thinking: "If I thought it would make any difference, I would organize this cupboard. But S puts things in the strangest places, and it would not stay organized long enough for me to justify the effort." Well the other day, S suggested to me that maybe we could organize the cupboard. I told him that I always want to organize the cupboards and I hate having them be so disorganized, but that he puts things in such random places... Anyway, he claimed to have put things in random places because they were so disorganized. And I claimed that things were so disorganized because he put things in random places. It's hard to know which came first, but needless to say, the cupboard nearest the sink is now organized and has remained that way even to this very moment.

3. Yesterday I cleaned the main floor. This did not take me quite as long as I had anticipated. It involved transferring a bunch of stuff (namely, the baby bathtub, the activity gym, and the pack and play) to Boo's room upstairs. He now gets to nap in there. (He took a three hour nap in there today and I shut the door and he slept so well! It was great!) Soon we will move him into it entirely, but we are waiting for Samuel's schoolwork to slow down a little first. Then I vacuumed (while Boo was mad, since it usually calms him). I put away a bunch of papers, organized our little baskets full of stuff, mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned all the surfaces of the kitchen (I usually do a decent job of keeping the kitchen clean. It is one area that really demotivates me if it is dirty). It took all my me-time, but it was worth it for the way Samuel and I have felt in a clean house.

4. I have finally started attacking the office. My goal is to get everything in all the rooms in order so that when my mom comes we will not feel compelled to do that kind of stuff. And we need to be able to fit a couple of beds in them! The office, I am sorry to report, looks even worse than before I started to mess with it. There are just too many papers!! S has put up a fight about getting rid of all his old engineering homework, random mission things and such, which has made my clean up fairly difficult. I have done a fine job of getting rid of his old love letters and the like. :) Certainly I have my own things that are a mess as well, but I am having an easier time parting with them. For now, I believe my only option to be huge containers with labels such as: "S - Engineering; S - Mission; A - College Notebooks (which I cannot seem to part with); A - Mission; etc. I hope that we can fit all this stuff in our crawl space so we don't have to see it ever unless we are looking for it! :)

5. I also got the upstairs bedrooms in working order. As I previously mentioned, Boo will be moving to his room soon, which has many of his things in it already. Our future daughter's room (no, this is not an announcement) looks GREAT! There is no random stuff in there anymore and the bed is made and the curtains are up. Now for the master bedroom (aka the clean clothes room, being where we dump out all our laundry baskets on the bed)... that will not be an easy or a quick one!

6. I have also finished filing all our papers. Well, except for the ones that have come in the mail in the past two weeks. It seems like papers just keep coming and never stop and never get thrown away either. Hopefully at some point here we will stop getting so many bills and statements, etc. All this filing has been driving me nuts! So it has been nice to have it pretty much done.

7. Lastly, yesterday and today I have been raking. Our yard is not that big really (0.19 acres), but for some reason it is completely SMASHED! If anyone has a good explanation as to why our yard is entirely smashed and everyone else's yard in our neighborhood looks normal, I would be happy to know of it. My current strategy is to rake, just like I did last year. It takes forever, but it is a decent workout (moreso last year when I was pregnant) and fun enough. I usually just take Boo for a little walk and he falls asleep, so I park his stroller in our driveway in the shade and I rake. Like I said, I actually kind of enjoy raking, but I just can't imagine why our yard is the only smashed one around!

It seems like there are always plenty of things for me to be doing. I suppose that will always be the case, which is actually a good thing. What would I do during Boo's naptime if nothing needed to get done? (I mean, besides read a book in a warm bubble bath, like I did for awhile this morning... Hmm, can relaxing be considered part of being productive? :) I will say this: it is SOOOO much fun to be a wife and mom and full-time homemaker!!!!!! It is so satisfying to get things done, no matter how big or small the task. Seeing progress is awesome. Being with Boo all day and hearing his little laugh and watching his eyes light up when he smiles and laughing at him when he jumps in his jumperoo (insert photos), and talking to him in a squeaky voice is the best! Having S to talk to every evening is also great. He is a wonderful husband and we always have good, interesting, and often humorous conversation. I wouldn't trade my life for anything!