I Met the Most Beautiful Baby in the World Last Weekend

I was honored to become the godmother of the most precious little girl in the whole wide world. Her name is gorgeous and melodic and can be abbreviated in a great nickname. On this blog, I’m going to call her Bee. She’s so gorgeous that I really almost took her home. Really.

See? I’m not lying. She’s precious.

I had a wonderful time in Denver for the quick weekend. We saw Bee and her mom, S, my first cousin.

Frontier Airlines gave me a cookie before we landed in Denver. It was even hot!

The sunset when I landed

My lovely goddaughter, doing what she did for most of the weekend, sleeping.

My silly first-cousin-once-removed

 

After the Baptism, we took a drive on Sunday up to Boulder to visit the Celestial Seasonings factory and got a tour.

And no, there are no pictures of me in that awful hair net. Because I will delete them from my mother’s camera as soon as I can.

 

We got our “tea-kit” – a packet of honey vanilla chamomile tea. When they called that flavor, that would be our cue to get in line for the tour!

We had such an amazing time in Denver visiting my cousin and the new baby, Bee. Oh I wish I could live out here! Maybe Husband could get a job in Denver? I could stand the cold for views like this!

Technology Sometimes Is Smarter than I Am

I have an iPhone, a Canon point and shoot camera and a DSLR. I love taking pictures, even if I’m not the best at it. It’s fun to look back and see what was going on at a particular moment in time. It’s very hard, though, since Husband is a bit camera shy.

I was writing up my post on my goddaughter’s baptism that I attended in Denver over the weekend when it occurred to me I have a bunch of photos on the iPhone since the DSLR died halfway through the weekend.

That made me wonder – for those of you with an iPhone, how do you back up your images, or even organize them on the phone? Is there an easy way to pull them off the phone and get them on my blog, for example?

I need some help in this whole technology thing. Seriously.

“The Ruin of Most Men Dates From Some Idle Moment*”

Productivity.

It’s a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, I love how I feel after I complete a project. I even add things to my to do list so I can cross them off and get that sense of accomplishment. Cleaning out my closet on a random Wednesday night? Awesome. I went to bed with a smile because I loved the idea that I would wake up and be able to see all my clothes at a glance.

On the other hand, I despise productivity. No matter WHAT I accomplish, there is always something more to do. So I can be as productive as possible but I will always want to be more productive.

So it’s good and yet not so good. I am determined to clean up the entire townhouse this summer. Every Saturday, I’ve assigned ourselves one room to declutter. This weekend doesn’t count because I have to head to Denver to be a godmother to my cousin’s second daughter – which is going to be awesome, by the way. I love little babies and I’ll get to hold this one all weekend! Can’t wait. :) But after that little jaunt, we spend one day each weekend cleaning out one room.

But then there’s the whole thing of KEEPING the room clean. I guess I’ll worry about that after the room is decluttered and clean? Hmm.

*title quote by Hillard

Organizing is a Tricky Thing to Do on a Week Night

The next time that I suggest on Twitter that I want to clean out a particularly big area in my house (ie – anything bigger than one singular drawer in a singular room), please refer me to this post.

I have got it in my head that the entire townhouse must be decluttered. I believe it’s called nesting – I have the most urgent need to throw things away, gather like with like and reorganize every single space in the house. And it must be done RIGHT NOW. I have no idea why it has suddenly started but it has but boy, it’s insistent.

I was so proud of my work on the pantry and the fridge that I organized over the weekend that I thought I should tackle my guest bedroom closet one work night when Husband was at class. Because that was a good idea.

Right in the middle of the whole thing, I tweeted out this picture -

And this is why one should undertake such a large decluttering project when really one should be watching the SYTYCD performance show. Because who does this on a work night? Seriously.

So here are the before pictures of the great closet decluttering adventure. It’s a large closet that takes up most of one wall – I love having this much space for all my clothes! Hubs has all of his clothes in the smaller closet in our master bedroom so I get this one all to myself.

Left side:

Middle:

 

Right side:

 

After removing almost everything from the closet, purging and reorganizing, here is what I was left with at the end of the night:

Left side:

 

To the left are my dresses, which are nice to hang here because they can hang beyond the second shelf. Below is my stepladder so I can reach those things on the top shelf. Plus pillows and a box of blankets for those in the guest bedroom.

Middle:

 

Here’s where I’m very proud of myself. I rolled all of my tshirts and stood them up in the buckets on the top shelf. I hardly ever wear them but still need access to them. I actually donated a bunch of old shirts that didn’t fit to Goodwill – because why do I need to store them if I’m not going to wear them?

In addition to the buckets purchased at the Dollar Store, I also got those red fabric boxes. They’re holding tank tops and other light long-sleeved shirts that don’t need to be hung up. It’s a great place for them.

Next to the drawers of undergarments are my shoes. You can sort of see more buckets on the floor with additional shoes. There’s another shoe holder at the foot of the guest bed, but I definitely needed more shoe storage. I thought the buckets would do the trick!

Right side: 

Here we have all my love suit jackets and skirts below. Up above is our traveling stuff – pillows and packing cubes. There’s also a mirror in there that needs to find a home but I don’t know when that will happen.

Although I’m very happy with the space that I have now, I still need to do more purging and cleaning. But baby steps are good steps, right?

I Love Flowers

I came home from a long day of work yesterday, plus an hour and a half long baptism preparation class so I can be a godmother to my cousin’s second daughter next weekend. It was exhausting because of a major meeting at work I had to set up, exhausting because of the meeting we had with SLU regarding the donation in Dad’s name plus a mass said for the repose of his soul. I was on the verge of tears for most of the day.

So I got home and saw those lovely flowers sitting on my kitchen table and couldn’t imagine who they were from!

My mom’s cousin, Helen, had sent us red roses – one for each of us in the family plus my Grandma. Wasn’t that the sweetest thing? She wanted us to have a smile on the anniversary of Dad’s passing. Well, it definitely happened. We smiled the rest of the evening and again this morning when we walked downstairs to see them.

This totally counts for my 101 in 1001 list!

Thank you, cousin Helen!