Trying to declutter beyond my 3yo’s concept of feng shui

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chi, declutter, decluttering with a toddler, energy, feng shui, impossible task, organize, time, trying to stay organized

This is not my son’s playroom. This room is more tidy than my son’s playroom often is. Photo by Flickr user Elizabeth (Creative Commons license).

My stepmom runs the tightest, cleanest ship of a kitchen you’ve ever seen.

You might have every intention of “redding up” (central PA colloquialism) after yourself when preparing food, but there’s a strong chance she’ll beat you to it and you’ll feel guilty. You might even have the best intentions when helping her put away groceries or clean dishes, yet still feel like you’re annoying her or getting in her way. (You are, and you are, but she’s nice about it.)

The other day, I was “helping” in this manner. I gave up after she moved a jar of jelly I’d put in the pantry…six inches to the left of where I’d put it originally. This has happened before—when I moved the soup ladle from one drawer to another (WRONG) or put something in the upstairs freezer that is CLEARLY (translation: clear to her and her alone) meant for the downstairs deep freezer. I know when to back off. Twenty minutes later, groceries in their new homes, my son whipped open the pantry door to try (unsuccessfully) to weasel a cupcake before supper, and the pantry gleamed like a Pinterest fanatic’s work of DIY/space-saver art.

Seriously, it was awash in the glow of a golden light shining down from the heavens. My son said, woooooow.

“Look at this, Mom. You have all the labels on all the jars facing perfectly front. All the cereal boxes are lined up so they face the same direction. Even the stuff you can’t reach is symmetrical. You are nuts,” I told her.

She stuck her tongue out at me and said, “Whaddya gonna do, blog about it?”

So here we are. In equal parts reverence and teasing, I present to you my stepmom’s neuroses about a clean kitchen, through the lens of a single mom who craves an equally absurd level of organization…but has a three-year-old.

Still superhuman: My son’s second hospital stay

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hospitals, Jax, my son is superhuman, perspective, Super Jax, surgery, time, yelling at doctors

I hate hospitals. Photo by Flicker user Ralf (Creative Commons license).

Last week, my son had surgery and I had a poem accepted for publication.

The two events are unrelated except that both happened to me, and I started thinking about how life pretty much goes on whether you think it will, or want it to, or not.

For example. When I say “my son had surgery,” what I mean to say is that my son FINALLY had surgery. I recently posted about yelling at doctors and health insurance people. All of that was a direct result of numerous attempts to get the damn surgery scheduled in the first place.

Hopefully (?) blogs will be obsolete enough in the future that my son won’t ever have to know that I told the intrawebz about his right undescended testicle. Sorry, bud.