Bah-Humbug

I'm starting to feel that "after-Christmas-letdown" that makes you realize that all you have ahead is a good two months of crappy cold Illinois winter (you know, where one week consists of freezing, thawing, ice, rain, snow, and thunderstorms.) and lots of quality time in your messy house. Ugh.

Luckily I only have Ardyn's little tree to take down, and I won't even take it down, just take it to the attic as is. Normally it would be a major production to get all the decorations away. I am thanking myself for not putting my pregnant self through that again.

Every day since Christmas I have attempted to get the dining room table clean again and I haven't yet gotten it done. I am waiting on a response from Carter's (which would get the recalled baby clothes pile off the table) and also on a callback from Hunter (which would get Ardyn's humidifier out of the way also, since it stopped working and isn't even a year old.) If there wasn't water in the basement, It would also be much easier to put away the newest clearance ribbons in the wrapping area of the sewing room. As well as the Christmas Candles that are waiting to go down in their plastic drawers. And once I get the dining room table cleared off, I could setup my Cricut on the table and thoroughly play with it, and install the software on the computer and attach the Cricut to that also.

And if my husband cared about the state of the house, he would hang up the two loads of his laundry that have lived on the loveseat since the day before Christmas. Ugh.

Today I cleaned the nursery. I pulled out the crib, vacuumed behind it, changed the crib sheets, etc. I also organized and labeled a few drawers and things like that, and put away some 2T clothes in the under-bed container for this coming fall/winter. Then I put away all the Christmas books and got out a bunch of new books that she has never seen before. We have SO MANY books, and all of those that don't have board book pages have been kept out of her reach, but now she is good to them, so I have brought a bunch down and plan to have them in a rotation. I have to remove all the dust jackets first, but she enjoyed the new books. We spent some time reading Spots Big Learning Book, that has LOTS of pictures that help with numbers, shapes, colors, counting, and objects around home, school, etc. I love the pages with the objects. I have discovered lately that even objects she doesn't say, she still "knows" and instead of pointing things out TO her, I have started to ask her questions like "Where is the tea set" and "Show Mommy where the Clock is" and she points these things out in books very easily. I love doing it with books she has never read before, because it's like Where's Waldo... I can see her wheels turning and her eyes skimming across the pages looking for the objects, and the delight and excitement when she finds the clock. Yesterday she saw me put on my new watch and she got all excited and started pointing to it and then to the clock on the wall of her room, shouting "Clock! Clock!" One thing that she did learn today was that when you count objects, you can use your index finger to point at them as she counts. So even though she can't count past three, I am catching her pointing to things and counting "gibberish" - like this afternoon she was pointing and "counting" the snowflakes on my pajama pants. I heard her say "Two" and then a bunch of crazy made up numbers.

I went through her sock drawer AGAIN and took out too small socks, as we seem to have had a rash of them lately. It is so frustrating how every single brand fits differently, and because Ardyn has usually had crazy small feet, she is just starting to outgrow socks that most kids wore at 6-12 months. I didn't pack her infant socks away until she was about a year old. When she was 1, she was just moving into a size 2 shoe.... but then she had a rapid growth spurt, and she is moving into 4's or the occasional 5, depending on the brand.

My hangup now is that when I pack away, I can't just pack away by size. I have to seperate what might be considered girly, versus what is gender neutral. I am trying to save myself time in the future as far as getting clothes OUT for Marek, but it also means double the storage totes or whatever I use to pack things away in. I generally collect too small things in a tote under my bed and then when the tote is full, I go through them, sort by size, and then pack them into separate totes for the attic. I was so frustrated around 3-9 months, because all the clothes seemed to fit so differently, she would be wearing 3-6 months in one brand, and 6-9 in another. Ugh. So I had a hard time packing things up by size. I think I ended up making one big tote with two sizes inside. The cloth diaper butt exaggerates that even more, because pants need a little more room.

This evening we went to Evan's parents and had dinner, and Ardyn opened up the remaining presents they had for her. They were technically presents to leave at their house, which was fine by me because I really wasn't sure where we would put them anyway. We have reached toy capacity. When we got home, Ardyn took a bath and played and played and played. We played in her room for a while and now she is watching Little Einsteins before bed.

I'm going to eat some Christmas Clearance Candy and play some solitaire on DS, and then probably go to bed myself. I should do some laundry, but since the dishwasher is going, I can tell myself that there isn't enough water pressure and put that off until tomorrow :)