Category: My Own Personal Weirdness

health, My Own Personal Weirdness

Medical testing

I’ve made a big post about this at my other blog, but in case you don’t read over there, or don’t want the whole long story of it all, here’s the short version: I had a majorly weird episode last weekend and the doctor is thinking either a) I had a mini-stroke or b) I’ve developed multiple sclerosis. Most likely B, as I’m already taking medications that would cause A to be unlikely and B is a side effect/co-morbidity of the immune condition/medications that I already have. So I’m going back to the hospital for more testing in a week or so (we’re waiting for insurance to say yes to it all).

There will be a fun kid related update tomorrow. 🙂

health, My Own Personal Weirdness

First week of April

Monday we had a horrible storm first thing in the morning. DSCN1666 There was some golfball sized hail and lots of thunder and lightning. Greg and I spent lots of time cuddled up on the couch. We also started working on Iheartorganizing’s Project Purge. 🙂

Tuesday all the kids were at school. I visited my rheumatologist (more about that here) and then met my friends E & H for Thai food. They brought me an early birthday present: scrapbooking pens, a layout book, and a nifty cottage mug. 🙂 (How did I manage not to take a photo?!) After school the kids spent time exploring the creek since it was still fairly full of water. p_00170Even Greg went over the fence (he usually stays behind with me) and took a look around. David had his first lesson out of his new piano books & Ben counted out how many songs left in his current book so he can “catch up” (they’re not using the same books, so he’s not really catching up, but that’s how he thinks about it).

Wednesday Greg and I went to the library for story time. p_00172There was a lady there from our local professional ballet troupe and she read the kids Pocahontas, as that’s the show they’re currently putting on. Since the version she read was the Disney version (and therefore mostly romance), the boys all got fairly bored fairly quickly. By the end of the story Greg was the only boy left in the room. We exchanged our books from last week for some new ones and went on home for lunch. DSCN1674After school Ben planned & prepared our snack as part of his scouting electives. We didn’t have raisins for ants on a log, but we did have craisins & dried cherries, so we tried those instead and it worked out well.

Thursday was another all-kids-in-school day, but I was feeling under the weather, so instead of being productive, I stayed on the couch and watched TV and dozed all day (fortunately for me my coffee date friend cancelled that day -serendipity!). It was a beautiful day, though, and the day that my rosebush erupted into blooms.DSCN1675

Friday Greg and I spent all morning playing with his kitchen & grocery store sets, something we haven’t done in ages. DSCN1685Greg made me six kinds of soup (because soup is good for you when you’re sick) and set up a “table” with a table cloth for our meal. It was very fun and something I could do while sitting down, which was great since I was so dizzy. That afternoon my parents arrived back from Germany and so we went over to visit and look at all their photos. Nick and David left for a while to go fishing with Uncle Mark in his boat (which we’d planned before we knew my parents would be up – my dad had been selected to serve on a jury that week, so we thought they’d not be up til Saturday). When they came back we had dinner together at their house.

Saturday we got up and I felt pretty good at the beginning of the day. I was perky and could finally smell stuff again. We went over to my parents house for breakfast and hung out for a while. By the time we left to go back home, though, I was starting to feel weird. Dizzy again, and tingly in my extremities. I went home and took a shower, hoping that would make me feel better, but it didn’t. I tried blow drying my hair, but couldn’t feel if the drying was blowing hot air or not, so I asked Nick and he said it was. I decided that I shouldn’t continue, for fear of hurting myself. The rest of the family got dressed and went on to church. I was supposed to follow along in the second van, but I was getting so confused, I couldn’t figure out how to drive. I called my mother in law to let her know what was going on, so she could tell Nick why I hadn’t made it to church (our phones don’t work out there very well) and laid down to rest. My parents eventually got back to me (they were out buying a new van, which took hours longer than expected, even once they’d picked it out), picked me up, fed me a bit of lunch, and took me back home to rest some more when I couldn’t manage more than a couple bites of toast. Once my in-laws brought the kids back from church (Nick was staying late for Men’s Club), I walked the kids over to my parents house for dinner (frozen pizza, the kids favorite), as I wasn’t sure I should be in charge of an oven. My parents tried to show off the new van to the kids, but something went wrong and the new van wouldn’t start. They spent the evening calling back and forth everywhere trying to get a technician out, but ended up leaving town the next day with the problem unresolved. The pizza, being left to me in the meantime, did in fact end up crispy critters. 😦 The kids ate around the burnt bits and were very sweet about the whole situation.

Sunday Nick made us a nice breakfast at home before running off to work. I was still feeling really weird, so the kids and I stayed home and had a quiet day. The kids were really well behaved all day and mostly kept to themselves, David with his Legos, Greg with his games, and Ben with his book (he’s reading Barthe de Clements “Nothings Fair in Fifth Grade” – which I read as a child).
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Yesterday morning I woke up feeling nearly normal. I was finally able to drive the car & managed to get the kids to school, the mail stamped & mailed at the post office, and the milk & bread purchased at the grocery. Of course, I spent all that time also fielding phone calls from the various doctors offices that were finally calling me back (I’d left messages over the course of the weekend asking for advice). The rheumatologist didn’t think it was a drug-reaction or an RA related event, even though he’d specifically mentioned numbness & tingling being a possibility at our appointment earlier in the week. My primary physician wanted to see me “right away” but didn’t have a hole in his schedule until today, which the nurse thought was all right to wait since I was feeling okay by that point. Greg and I spent the rest of the day doing our quiet little Monday things: tidying, dishwashing, laundry, watching movies, the usual. The big kids came home and had a snack before David ran off with his friend on bikes, riding through the neighborhood. Once he and Nick arrived home (within moments of each other, so I was surprised into not taking a picture of David arriving home), we had a bbq picnic outside (another one of Ben’s elective’s for scouts).
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Around the House, Books, Crafts, Family Time, Lifelong learning, My Own Personal Weirdness, Parenting

Happy President’s Day

We’ve had quite a day here. My eldest son hit a golf ball with a baseball bat and it went straight through the kids bedroom window. The glass company said they’d be here in less than 2 hours, but it took many phone calls and 7 hours for them to get here. Delightful, really. I made a list of good things about all this in my head all day long, to counteract the screaming, hysterical woman in my head. Such fun.
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So anyways, since it was President’s Day and I’m a theme-loving kind of gal, we had a whole day of fun planned.

First we played Animal Crossing. We like taking care of our little town and I think it’s good that this game teaches them to take care of the environment with the recycling center and to pull all the weeds and take care of planting all around and not just in their own little places. It’s fun!

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Then, for second breakfast, we had what I like to call “The Color of Money Muffins” which were green muffins with multicolored sprinkles inside to mimic the dollars that Presidents adorn. They were chocolate orange flavored. Yumm.

The kids played outside, which is when the glass thing happened.
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After cleaning up all the glass and moving around furniture and cleaning up all the toys we found under said furniture, we made George Washington-style hats to wear around the rest of the day and also made cherry trees out of craft paper and yet more of the little red pom-poms leftover from Christmas.
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Another thing we did was a game called “Ask the Kids.” The first question: If you could be president for a day what would you do?
D: make some laws, like going green and saving animal habitats.
B: wanted to save the animals, too, by checking if they were okay. for people, he wanted to have floating chairs for all the elderly people, the kind that don’t have to be pushed by anyone and that float high enough that it would be easy for them to get in and out of cars easily.
G: didn’t want to be president. he wanted to be a robber and steal peoples clothes (?!?!?!) or, even BETTER, to be a Jedi and battle the droids.

The second question: What do you think the President of the USA does all day?
D: He stays in his office and works on paper and passes the laws.
B: WORK! He works all day!
G: I don’t know. Maybe he writes to his friends every day.

The third question: Why do we have a president?
D: So we can stay free from other countries. In the beginning people wanted George Washington to be King, but he said “No, I want to be President.”
B: He’s here so we don’t get robbed or anything. He makes laws to help us.
G: (ran off & had to be dragged back) Because someone needs to do some work.

The kids left for a while after all this to hang out with my parents while the glass man came…or didn’t come, as happened for several hours. I crawled around their room with a light, checking for glass in unexpected places (it was still everywhere, despite vacuuming, because we have Berber carpet in that room), and did laundry, and entertained B when he came back because the Lord of the Rings cartoon was too scary.

We were also going to make cherry tarts today, but since we didn’t make it to the grocery, that has to wait until tomorrow, I guess. For storytime tonight we read some of our President books: “Arthur Meets the President” by Marc Brown, “Stand Tall, Abe Lincoln” by Judith St. George & illustrated by Matt Faulkner, and “Sesame Street: I Want to be President” by Michaela Muntean and illustrated by Tom Brannon. We really recommend the Sesame Street one, as it explained the best what a president actually does. The Abe Lincoln one is really good, too, but we’re not done with it yet, as it’s a very long one. The Arthur one is mainly Arthur-ish, but still good.

Anyway, hope everyone else had a great President’s Day! 🙂

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

After the organizing was done…

So Kristal over at Kansas City Cristal wanted us to do an “AFTER ORGANIZING PARTY!” and I totally forgot that yesterday was Groundhog’s Day until someone in the house mentioned it this morning, so I’m just now getting around to taking my pictures.  I actually don’t have a whole lot to show you, as we really haven’t changed up anything too terribly much since the organizing took place.  I did wander around and look in all the drawers and closets, though, and will share some of the funnier things I found.

  • Day One: The Junk Drawer: I chose the kitchen junk drawer.  When I went back to look in it this morning I discovered something surprising: we have a new bright yellow microplane grater WITH A HANDLE!  I am totally surprised and completely happy about this, as our old one was just one long stick of grating, no place to grab on.  What a lovely surprise from my husband!  🙂

  • Day Two: The Computer Desk: This one I have a photo for:

  • Day Three: The Tupperware Cabinet:  Nothing new here, people.  My kids are so happy that they can find their stuff each morning that they make sure to keep this area tidy.
  • Day 4 – Linen Closet: This one looks a little different.  It had come to my attention that my decorating style had become less a style and more a “let’s see how much of the stuff I love I can get out on the shelves at once.”  So I started decluttering out in the living room a bit, then moved bit by bit through the house, taking 1 out of every 4 items down (or more).  I have to say that I really like the difference it made in the house.  The thing is that all this stuff, when it’s not out, lives in the linen closet.  So I tried to put it away neatly, like with like, and this is how it looks right now:

All of those places on Days 5-8 look exactly the same as the organization day.  I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to keep it all up.  🙂

Well, you saw in my post a couple days ago, we’ve redone the boys room.

Days 10-16 are all the same as well.  A few things added, a few things taken away, you know how it goes.  People use up one thing, another takes its place.  🙂

  • Day 17 – The Mail: This area got added to:

 

  • Day 18 – Keepsakes: These are still being worked on.  I have had a lot of difficulty going through and tossing cute kids stuff over the years, so there is just so much to go through.  Here are the notebooks I’ve made so far, neatly lined up in the living room so people can look at them whenever they want to:

I'm trying to go through another years worth of stuff each week, so I'll be done, umm, 6 weeks from now. But it's a manageable schedule for me, which means it'll get done.

 

 

Day 19 & 20 haven’t changed either.  🙂

  • Day 21 – You pick!: I picked our “Room of Requirement,” as everything extra from the organizing had been dumped there.  It looked pretty good after I was done with it, but it has improved a little bit on one side since you last saw it:

I changed out the blanket (going to make a cushion out of this fabric, but for now it's just draped) and added frames from the linen cabinet that I painted to match each other for a frame collage (my favorite is the mirror, which had been dark green & gold splatter-painted).

 

So there it is.  All still good and organized, which is a good thing because we’re having company over tomorrow and I need to focus on cleaning the areas that people actually see now.  🙂

 

 

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organizational Challenge, Day 21 (last!)

Today, the last day of the Challenge, we were challenged to do a space of our own choosing.  Now I don’t know about y’all, but organizing my house has three main steps: 1) Identify the area to be organized. 2) Make surrounding areas messy while organizing target area. 3) Blissfully stare at newly organized area.  Did you notice something missing?  Something important?  CLEANING UP THE SURROUNDING MESS! Yeah, that’s the part I never get to.  So today I headed into that room that contains all the mess.  You know, that place you stash everything when your mom/neighbor/friend says they’re on the way over. In our house we call it the Room of Requirement.

Here’s an incomplete before (I totally should have photographed the closet, but I went in not intending to deal with that today; just imagine stereotypical boy mess):

Did that scare you?  AIE.  It scared me.

Here’s the after for the closet:

left side of the newly organized closet

right side of the newly organized closet

Here are many afters for the rest of the room:

This one gives the best all over affect of the room.  See how it’s more like a second living area now?

Starting over on the left next to the closet, the kids art & playdoh supplies

The Lego chest with Art Gallery above

The window corner with MegaBlocks & Art/Memory Bookshelf

My craft overflow shelves, scout supplies, science stuff, TV, & solitary games cupboard

Next corner: spare craft/computer/sewing table with light above

The crib-turned-daybed (the fourth side can also be a stand alone full size headboard). The blanket color is really not that lurid in real life, I assure you. It's pretty & subdued & nothing I do in the image editor fixes it.

So that’s it.  A minor miracle, if I do say so myself.  The kids are, naturally, scared to go in there now.  Whee!

I’m very glad to have joined all of you on this 21 day adventure.  My house is cleaner and tidier, my husband is, I think, happier with the house, and the kids are just happy that I’ve mostly ignored their room for the last couple weeks. I may do their room tomorrow. This got to be addictive. I can’t wait for another challenge!  🙂

My craft overflow shelves, scout supplies, science stuff, TV, & solitary games cupboard

Crafts, My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organizing Challenge, Day 20

Day 20 was to organize our photos.  Mine were mostly organized already, since I’m a scrapbooker.  The other day I tackled the Drawer of Doom, which was the place that I put photos from events already scrapped.  I re-integrated those back into the main storage units, but didn’t take photos of any of it.

 

Here’s where my digital photos live:

(I have my parents photos scanned in, so it goes back to the year they got married)

 

…and in each folder, it looks like this:

 

 

Here’s where my non-digital files live:

Inside

This is my Creative Memories storage box.  I got it way back when I worked as a consultant.  They don’t give you enough little white tabs per bin (only two and I need about 4).  So I use my own labels.  Could use some tidying up, I guess, but it’s fully functional the way it is and I”m the only one that uses it, so it’ll stay this way for now.

The other boxes look something like this inside.  These are all mismatched boxes that I’ve painted purple so they match.  I made tabs for all the months inside (this one is relatively empty because it was the year my first son was born and that year has been scrapped to death.  In the back are all the negatives in their sleeves, all labeled according to event.  The photo place I used back then labeled the back of each picture with it’s photo ID, so all I really have to do is look at that to find the right negative. A very nice system.

 

The big white box holds all my big wedding photos, the ones that aren’t in the wedding scrapbook.  The little clear blue box holds the weird little negative boxes that some of my older film came trapped in.  The negatives are still in there.  I hope to one day soon have them all converted to digital so I can stop worrying about not being able to get those negatives out again.  (That top purple striped box is empty currently.  My middle son would like to use it for his scrapbooking box – he just learned to scrapbook last night at cub scouts and he’s all excited about it.  I am, too!)

 

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Organizing Challenge, Day 19

Day 19 was to clean out your master bedroom closet.  Mine wasn’t too bad off, just some stuff that could be better grouped and labeled.  My clothes are already coordinated, first by sleeve size, then color order.  I did my husband’s the same way.  Moved the two storage drawer sets together, took out some extraneous stuff, and put the shoes back on the racks.  It didn’t take that long, but between a sick kid and my parents visiting, it made for a long process.


My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing, Saving Money

ABFoL Day 18

Today’s challenge was to put our keepsake/memory stuff in order. I laughed long and hard at that, told a friend about it, laughed long and hard with her, and then went home and spent 6 hours working on it before giving up for the night (dinner was nearly ready at that point – so glad I have a lovely husband that cooks).

I didn’t do a before picture: our memory/keepsake stuff takes up many, many boxes in the garage and a giant storage bin out there and several smaller bins and drawers inside the house as well. I went through two storage drawers and another box full of stuff today (which only leaves one more drawer and one more box inside the house to do, as well as all the garage bins).

The after picture is just of the utilitarian folders that I made that sort of resemble what ABFoL did for her kids stuff (they’re not decorated yet – I figure on Sunday I’ll have the kids dig through the scrapbook paper and let them choose their own papers,yay for money saving stashes,  but today they weren’t here while I was working). I have one folder per kid that covers pre-school, divided out by year (2’s, 3’s, Pre-K4, Pre-K5; the eldest two’s stuff is still in the garage and will have to wait for another day) and one for K-2 and another for 3-5 (our eldest is currently in grade 4). Each tab(leftovers from high school & college!  money saving FTW!) is labeled by computer tab printouts.  Then I made a folder for stuff more belonging to my spouse and I divided by year (rather than school year). I’ve basically gotten done all of the folder setup and stuff from the last two years, with occasional forays into 3 and 4 years ago as well. I will start again on Sunday (as tomorrow is the Sabbath) and try to at least get through another couple years of stuff (which is actually fairly well sorted out in the garage, just hard to get to since all our “emergency water” bottles are currently living in front of those bins).  In the meantime while I struggle to get through all these things, I have set up a folder for each kid and one for the spouse and I in a bin near the other filing stuff to file assorted papers & memory things as time goes by.

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Day 17


Today’s challenge was to revamp our mail station. Now I’ve had lots of problems with my mail station over the years and I’ve tried many things and none of them have worked. So today what I did was go through all the junk that piles up that shouldn’t have, one load on my bakers rack and one load that had been on my baker’s rack before our last guests came over, which I’d dumped into our laundry basket.

So I spent a lot of time digging though the giant pile (on my bed, of course), putting things away in their various places: lots went to the kids room, lots to the craft area, and lots went in the “keepsake” pile. Here’s what that looked like when I was done: one empty laundry basket, one trash can full of trash, one smaller laundry basket (twice emptied) full of recyclable paper. The keepsake pile went into the Room of Requirement in the keepsake drawer of doom (it’s overflowing). Then I moved the paper shredder up under the computer area to be closer to the mail sorter. I made a folder for the mail sorter to keep ads & coupons in for the Nicholas to look at and filed away things from the to-be-filed folder. Tomorrow when I get time I’ll clean out junk drawer #2 and return the mailing supplies to it (it has about half of them there right now, but some got moved while I was doing Christmas cards & thank you notes after Christmas and never made it back into the drawer because one of the kids jammed the drawer full of junk during one of our cleaning rushes New Year’s Eve).

(There’s no photo of the shredder because, well, I thought it was super boring)

My Own Personal Weirdness, Organizing

ABFoL Challenge, Day 16

Today’s challenge was to clean out the fridge. Mine wasn’t too bad off, but it took me most of the day because I took out one shelf/drawer/ledge at a time and cleaned it off at the sink, put it back in, and let the fridge have time to cool back down before moving on to the next shelf/drawer/ledge. I didn’t use any extra organizational stuff because the one thing that needed it (the seeds for our garden) had been organized a few weeks ago (using another old fruit container and labels and then alphabetized).

Once I got everything clean and dry I reorganized:

The main compartment:
top left: leftovers top right: seeds & medicine
middle: leftovers
bottom: dairy products & juice & stand-up produce
left drawer: wine, vermouth (& beer if I get some again) right drawer: produce

The stuff in the door:
tippy top: eggs & butter
top left: taller glass bottles top right: asian & mexican & italian condiments
middle left: sandwich condiments & syrup middle right: more italian condiments & powdery stuff
bottom: salad dressings, sauces, whipped cream, & jams/jellies