{pretty, happy, funny real}: New Living Room!

{pretty}

Remember last week when I was lamenting that I had a less-than-pretty view when I opened my front door?  Well, it turned out that moving the homeschool shelf was the missing piece to my living room jigsaw!

Here's the before picture to refresh your memory:

Looking back at this, it's not exactly ugly, it's just that the first thing I noticed was the pile of papers on my desk.  :(

Here is what I've got now!

I'd like to improve the wall art, but this is so much better!!

{happy}

My desk is now (at least initially) hidden behind the door.  And actually, I love sitting over here by the windows with the breeze blowing around me.  The internet is a tad slow being this far from the modem, but we'll have to see what we can do about that....

I've had fabric meant to recover that chair for years.  Must. Acquire. Crowbar. And. Staple gun.

{funny}

What would a {phfr} post be without some photos of this guy?

I put out the ottoman for one of these shots... reminded me why I don't leave the ottoman out.  Not to mention the underside is all cracked and full of nails sticking out at odd places.  Nice for putting up feet, though!

I then put away the ottoman, but John protested so much I gave him the pillow.  He likes to "sleep" on small pillows like this.  Normally, he gets the right end on the pillow, though.

{real}

As in, we REALly need some storage back here.  I was hunting around on craigslist for something to put in the place of the homeschool shelf.  Good thing I didn't find anything I really liked, because that was where the TV needed to go to make this new arrangement work!  Now I'm hunting for some kind of long and low shelving or buffet or cabinetry to put back here under the windows.  I do love that it's open now, but we need the book storage space!  And I also like couches in front of bookshelves.  Makes it feel like a library.

Linking up...

{phfr} What a break!

What has it been, two months since I last posted?  A few weeks after Fr. Andrew's ordination, we made a last-minute decision to attend our Parish Life Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.  Well, my decision was last-minute.  Fr. Andrew had been planning to attend already.  But the thought of my husband having several days off in a row for a long car trip with a giant hotel room to himself?  Bah!  We're coming too!  We lucked out with a fridge and microwave in the room and mostly ate out of those!  We had a nice time meeting new people and seeing some old, dear friends.  On our final evening (well, we were only there for two evenings and the first was the day we arrived, I think... whirlwind trip, it certainly was), we joined a seminary friend's family in hunting down St. George church in Cleveland, our hosts, and exploring a giant urban park across the street, complete with interesting bistros and good corner coffee shops.

{pretty}

On the day we departed Cleveland, we headed over to Fr. Andrew's sister's house to visit with her and her husband.  We brought them quite a variety of lunch food from our stash for our hotel room.  And in return, Aunt Leanna gave us this beautiful bowl from their recent trip to Turkey.  I just stuck it next to this icon of the resurrection (which in and of itself is fairly interesting, since it's not an icon seen very often in the East) and I love how the icon echos the shape and color of the bowl in the aura (is that the right word?  energies?) around Christ.  Not planned at all.

About a week later, we had a fun-filled visit from Fr. Andrew's other sister's family.  We had a total of ten people staying our house that week—and a total of six kids!  We had a great time having them here and we did a lot of exploring the city.

{happy}

 

One day found us in a park that was set up for some kind of outdoor theater.  The kids all ran around at random, and John was just so happy that he could now join in like the big ones.  His walking in earnest began somewhat simultaneously with Fr. Andrew's ordination, and he's happiest when all the adults in the room quit telling him how cute he is and trying to cuddle him already.  He just wants to move!

A couple of weeks later and we were off on another quick adventure.  My parents had gotten us tickets to an outdoor Shakespeare theater west of Madison, Wisconsin.  We picked up Daddy from work a bit early and raced up to meet Grandma and Grandpa at a Culver's (Mmmmmm....) near American Players Theater.  We had dinner and then left the kids with the grandparents who would take them to a nearby hotel to play in the pool.  We booked it to the theater for our walk "up the hill" to the stage.  If we'd have had more time, we could have picnicked in the park near the theater.  It's a beautiful location.

We slathered ourselves with bug repellent and grabbed the ponchos packed by my parents (hadn't thought of that...) and it was certainly a good thing we did the latter!  We got the full APT experience by getting thoroughly soaked as "the show must go on!"  The rain did let up for the touching final scene of The Taming of the Shrew and as we applauded the riveting performance, the cast applauded us for sitting through the weather!

{funny}

Here are our girls modeling their similar dresses in the hotel room the next morning.  They look a little too sweet, don't they?

And here's an out-of-order shot of John in our picnic basket.  Silly boy.

Finally, a week later and the National Antiochian Archdiocese Convention made its way to Chicago.  We left the kids with friends for "clergy day" so that Fr. Andrew and I could go to our respective meetings without boring the poor kids to death.  They had fun playing with their favorite two-year-old girl (whose blog hasn't been updated in a little while).  Mommy and Daddy had a fun day in downtown Chicago, sipping Starbucks and renewing friendships with fellow clergy families.

That Saturday, we joined my parents again, this time at the Convention hotel rather than Madison for some downtown shopping (can you guess how often I do that?) followed by Vespers.  The following morning, All Saints worshiped with many bishops and three metropolitans at the Convention.  It was a beautiful liturgy with many, many worshipers in attendance!

So, I think that about brings us up to the present.  No wonder I've felt somewhat off in my housekeeping and blogging and general normalcy.  There hasn't been any normalcy since the ordination!

{real}

A final monkey wrench in our life has been that a few members of our family have needed to be off of white flour and sugar.  So these cookies were made with whole grains, stevia, and "date sugar" (which is just ground up dates).  Yes, the chocolate chips had a wee bit of sugar, but I only put on three per cookie.  Not bad for a non-refined-sugar cookie, though!

And now, it's the beginning of August, we haven't been to the beach even once, and I need to make some decisions already about our homeschooling books.  Really, I just need to sit down and order them already.  I'm half excited and half terrified to beginning homeschooling again.  We sort of winged it last year (and considering my kindergartner taught herself to read, I think we did OK), but I'd like to be a little more organized for the big First Grade.  I'm sure I'll look back on this or on our future kids' first grade years and barely blink, but for now, I think it's a lot about establishing good habits—mainly for me!  Wish me luck!

****Update: Boy am I rusty.  Here's the missing button!****

{pretty, happy, funny, real} Reasonably Clean

I have something I've wanted to write about for a long time.  It's nothing deep or weighty—just one of those every day ramblings about housework.  The photos will have nothing to do with that (or almost nothing).  There is just so much to do every day that spending a long amount of time blogging just doesn't happen.  It's thanks to Leila's idea for {pretty, happy, funny, real}, that I do any blogging at all lately!

{pretty}

Two out of three in their Pascha (Easter) best.  This was actually taken on Bright Wednesday since on Pascha proper, they were all asleep by the time I thought to take any photos.

What I wanted to write about, though, is this.  Awhile back, I stopped doing housecleaning "systems."  I've done FlyLady, I've tried rigid schedules, and finally, I just stopped them all.  Instead, I vowed, I would clean things when they were dirty.

It seemed that with any kind of imposed system, I was training myself to ignore dirt.  I tend to have this problem in lots of areas of my life.  I ignore the time on the clock, the crying baby in the playpen, the alarm on my phone going off under my pillow—all because I don't feel like attending to it.  With housecleaning, I talk myself out of needing to do it right then because it doesn't fit into my "system."

So, with the "no system" system, I simply look around, and if it's dirty, I clean it.  No talking myself out of it unless it's truly dinner time, bedtime, or time to leave for somewhere.

 {happy}

These are the bay leaves that are thrown around the church on Holy Saturday.  As soon as I put John down in them that morning, his face lit up with delight.  He didn't know where to crawl first.  Of course some of them went in his mouth, but they're just spices, right? 

Now, I'm not truly satisfied with this way of doing things, but I think I needed the step to sort of tune up my awareness of mess.  I'm incredibly indebted to FlyLady's system as a beginning point.  When you have absolutely no idea where to start, go there.  She told me exactly what to do and my house was a whole lot better than when I was doing nothing because I was so overwhelmed.  But I also noticed that I never seemed to finish anything.  With all the timers and not doing "too much," I never actually seemed to get anything to the point where it was actually clean.

I do understand that a huge part of her system is not being a perfectionist (which is, amazingly, what often causes me to do nothing) so I see the value of learning to do a "good enough" job.  But I was coming to the point where I knew what a clean floor was, and with her way, I never had one.  Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I wanted to actually spend as long as it took doing the floor occasionally.  I suppose she does provide for those tasks somewhat with her daily missions, but since I am terrible at doing anything every day, I would often skip the missions because inevitable adding them to my life would cause me to "crash and burn."

{funny}

This kid will not leave the DVD player/VCR alone.  Doesn't matter what I put in front of it—he is obsessed.

Getting back to my "non-system," though, I knew it was lacking—things were going too long between cleanings, and I knew I could be more regular about it.  Plus, I needed to be able to set aside time for homeschool.  I'd noticed some things about my laundry that were starting to fall into a sort of routine.  We'd gotten rid of enough clothes so that the task wasn't as daunting and actually needed to be done at least weekly instead of me being able to stretch it to two or more weeks without really doing it completely.  I also started to finish it up by Saturday so I didn't have to do it on Sundays. 

I finally thought I could handle some kind of schedule without falling apart, so I went back to one of Leila's Reasonably Clean posts—The Moderate Clean: Two secrets to keeping your house on track.  I was a bit nervous about this, but I sat down with a pen and pad of paper and tried to make a system out of it.  One thing I realized was that I still hardly ever "cleaned. the. room."  (Quoting my Dad.  It drove us nuts when we were kids, but we'd ask if we were done cleaning, and he would inevitably respond, "Clean. The. Room.  Listen to the words.  When the room is clean, you're done."  Makes a lot more sense to me now!)

{real}

Notice the artful stacking of these dirty bowls from smallest to largest?

So, here's what I pulled out of her post:

• I need to clean up (blitz) the house every day.  Blitz!  That implies quick!
• Most of my hard work each day should be in one zone.
• In zone cleaning, I need to "clean. the. room." Begin by putting things away, removing things that aren't supposed to be there, getting the room into an ideal (or passable) organizational state, and then actually clean (as in dust, sweep, maybe even mop!) the room!  Now, this probably won't need to be done weekly in each zone, but at least I should assess the room (with my new-found "dirt awareness") weekly from the aspect of "is it clean?" and daily from the aspect of "is it passably tidy?"

I did come away with a schedule of sorts, but I'm also being very flexible with that.  Yesterday was not supposed to be kitchen day, but I felt like the kitchen hadn't been truly clean in weeks, so I went there yesterday—and finally figured out how to clean our toaster oven (by... um... scrubbing it.... I'm a slow learner).  Basically, I'm making the zones fit my actual house and how much I can do in a day (or week) and I'm making the schedule flexible as dictated by what is actually dirty.  But the schedule is there so I don't neglect to truly clean, say, the bathroom (as opposed to a quick wipe-down) for a couple of weeks!

The thing I'm trying to figure out is how she gets it all done in an hour (including dishes and laundry!) every day.  It gives me a good goal in that I need to work faster and that I need to be OK with "good enough" in some aspects and just move on to the other things in life.  And I'm sure that after these days of initial cleaning after a period of neglect, the work will go faster on subsequent days.

If you made it this far, bless you!  Here's your bonus photo:

 {just because}

Someone having a blast at the Chicago Children's Museum.  His gap-toothed smile is SO. CUTE.  ARGH!

My personal bonus in all this thought about housekeeping is that after truly cleaning something, life is actually easier! Whee!  For example, it's so much easier to cook in a clean, orderly kitchen!  And I certainly don't feel like I was lazy.  I'm even a little bit sore from all that scrubbing!

{pretty, happy, funny, real} Holy Week, Pascha, Etc.

{pretty}

I bought a couple of potted plants, intending to take one of them to church for our Pascha flower display.  This little stalk of lily of the valley broke off, so it briefly adorned my kitchen icons.  Incidentally, I forgot to take a potted plant to church.  A lot going on that week, no?

{happy}

The rest (I apologize) are going to have my kids in them.  But these two have a special bond, and their happiness makes me happy. 

{funny}

This guy loves the cat.  And surprisingly, the cat loves him back.  Opie (the cat) has been recently deprived of his partner in shedding, as we had to put down our other cat Faust.  Faust used to sort of manhandle Opie quite a bit, which perfectly prepared him for John's expressions of love.  Here we have John trying to crawl into the shelf (which used to store my wok) to be with his cat-friend.  According to my five-year-old either of them (when in this position) is "pretending a pot."

{real}

My children fell asleep quickly at the Pascha Vigil.  We didn't even make it outside for the procession.

I think next year, I'll do my best to keep them awake for that and then allow them to pass out at will.  This one, at least, was rouse-able for communion.

Not a great shot, but a little perspective on their "church beds."  At least I got to go this year!

{Joining up at Like Mother, Like Daughter}

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

I love the photography over at Like Mother Like Daughter.  It has seriously helped me to stop lusting (seriously) over magazine photos and decorating blogs full of looks I like but can never have (or at least, not for a while).  It's good to get ideas.  It's not good to despair because my home will never, ever, look like that. 

Leila's photography is filled with little corners of her beautiful things.  Not designer things, just beauty in the form of little bowls, filled vases, flowers, food being prepared. 

An old insulator from those ubiquitous electrical and telephone wire poles in the alleys of Chicago made into a candle holder by my father-in-law.

Yesterday, she invited us to join her.  Tomorrow is the first day.  Thursday.  Plenty of time to figure out what to post.  None of this Monday nonsense.  ;)

So, as an explanation of why this blog has been so quiet lately...

I offer a few shots from our dining room window sill.

Q Day in our home school

I know my shots aren't that clear.  The camera attached to my hand-me-down iPhone goes only so far.  But it's what I've got.  It's quite convenient, since every time I need to charge it, I plug it into my computer, and it magically automatically syncs my photos. (Yes!)

Plus, our real camera was stolen.  Sigh.

I'd like this blog to coexist with me living life, rather than be an escape from it.  I have so many things to write about, but the reality of homeschooling with three children five-and-under means any posts must be short to fit in all that they require. (Which is mainly eating and cleaning up, right?)

This is totally something I can do.