A Good Kind of Busy

Oh life...how you just have a way of...you know...yeah.  It's been over a month since my last blog post--wait, isn't that similar to what one might say at confession?  I'm not Catholic so I wouldn't know for sure but it sounds familiar (absolutely no religious-ritual-bashing intended).  Anyway, life has been moving steadily along.  It feels as though it's been both 3 years and 3 minutes since I last wrote, maybe because I'm always composing in my head.  Writing is my own form of song, a spoonful of sugar to help the daily medicine of life go down.  So even though I have forced myself, at times, to stay off of the computer it doesn't mean I haven't been typing away on my brain's keyboard.  Funny, though, that when I sit down and open up a new blog post nothing gets pulled from my mental files--no rough draft comes forward for a polishing.  So what you get is raw, and, frankly, I don't even know what I'm going to type next!  I'm trying to be honest, to be real, and keep things organic...whatever that means.

Back to life...I hate ants.  Hate them.  H-A-T-E them...  HaTe TheM... Let me give you an acrostic: A-annoying, N-naughty, T-troublesome, S-stupid.  Yep.  I used the "s" word.  The past week I've been consumed with AW478--that's Ant War 478 (which I'm not about to write out in Roman numerals).  Every summer with the first steady heat wave that settles in we get invaded.  They first appear around my bathroom sink, then my daughter's bathroom sink and tub, then the kitchen.  After that they seem to find their way into every part of the house.  I have done nothing for the past week but spray (all my good green intentions fly out when I see the little critters) and clean, repeat.  No workouts, no daily chores (except dishes), just ant annihilation--AW478.  Go ahead and lecture me on their value if you must.  I respect that God created them and that there must be a purpose for their existence, but that's where I draw the line at understanding them or caring about them.  Outside, no big deal...in my house, they've stepped their tiny legs over the line.  Last year one found its way into my EAR--I don't recommend that experience for anyone's bucket list, by the way.  I'm tired of ant trails, ant swarms, ant scouts, and the ant bridges to nowhere.  What can they possibly want?  Water?  Been tossing that theory around.  Sugar?  The only foodstuffs they've infested have been sweet, but very limited.  I don't care what they're after--I want them GONE!

Now that my ant rant is over, let me fill you in on the past month.  I've been making some changes around the house in anticipation of our upcoming first year of school.  Dman is going to begin his Kindergarten year--agh!  I remember being in tears over his first day of school when he was a day old.  I'm not exaggerating much!  Saving the homeschool story for another blog post, let me just say that the Lord showed us that He wants us to obey the call to homeschool our children, and obey we will.  I feel incredibly free because of that choice!  And Dman's first day of school?  There won't be a tissue in sight, unless one of us has the sniffles.  We are so excited about this amazing educational adventure, but I knew some changes needed to be made to prepare us for this journey.

If you're a mom you can appreciate where this all stems from.  I have no space, none.  No special hole or corner to call my own where I can be as messy or neat as I like, where I can begin a project and leave it OUT and UNATTENDED until completion, no where to store my "stuff" that isn't in someone's way (usually my own).  I'm not expecting a place to go where I can be left alone--I can't even go to the bathroom in peace and I don't know the last time I even bothered closing the door.  But I have scrapbooking supplies and photography equipment and tons of books...and most of it ends up tucked into spots all over the house and I end up having to send out a search party when I have need of something specific.  My desk has been in the loft--which slowly morphed into a tv/gaming/homeschool room in addition to my "office"--and always ended up covered in my "stuff" simply because the desk and the stuff were both mine and there appeared to be no where else to place it.  My scrapbook supplies are stored in my bedroom closet--I'm ok with that but there is more "stuff" than storage for it, especially the larger working items like my Cricut and paper cutters. And when I have some special project to work on I end up hauling everything downstairs to the kitchen table or dining room table and leaving my mess from here to yonder while trying to keep little hands from pushing buttons and exploring sharp objects and permanent pens and glue.  As my photography interest grew so did my equipment and books...and there's no safe place to put it so that it's all together when I need it.  All in all I've felt scattered and misplaced for the past 5 years.

When we moved into our home I suggested to Josh that we share the extra bedroom as an office.  After he stopped staring at me as though I had grown an extra head he reasoned there just wasn't enough space for both desks and all his hobbies and that he really needed a space all his own.  He needed a man-cave, I let him have his man-cave.  I was content to be able to shut the door on his man-caveness and not see it; I told myself my computer would likely become the "family" computer in time anyway and that the loft just made more sense all around.  Fast-forward 5 years and I'm tired of looking at the man-caveness for 2 reasons: (1) the room is SO messy I can't shut the door, and (2) the man is no longer in the man-cave because he decided almost 2 years ago that he liked having his computer downstairs so that he could be around the family.  So last month I made the executive decision to clean out the cave and reclaim it as a dual office and hobby space.

I took time cleaning out and consolidating, throwing away and reorganizing.  The extra room once again became functional.  The hobby desk hadn't really been touched by my husband since we moved in, though he took time to cover it in every tool he might foreseeably need at some point in time should he decide to do...something.  I left him all of the space in the office, minus the one hobby desk I claimed for scrapbooking and photography, and patted myself on the back.  Then I made the comment that we could have easily shared this room from the get-go because of all the wasted space, not really intending anything but just reiterating a point I tried to make years ago.  And you know what?  My hubby suggested we move my desk into the room and SHARE it so that there would be more space in the loft!

I gotta say, it feels so nice!  We laughed that in creating more usable space we are stomping around in my pet-peeve territory.  I hate what we call "wall-to-wall furniture" but we had to allow for it in the office so that we can both have functional space.  And as Josh said, it doesn't have to be pretty and sophisticated, it just has to work for us.  And we can actually shut the door!  It's still a but rough--a curio that doesn't have a spot, some boxes of electronic equipment that need to be gone through and put away, etc.--but MY desk is clean and I have somewhere to scrapbook!  And the loft feels more spacious and brighter with my desk gone.  The kids have more room to play and our homeschool area is less scrunched.  We can even play Kinect or Wii without falling over my desk chair.

Things aren't perfect.  I know that life has a way of shifting and changing so that what works now won't always be the right solution later on.  I'm happy with the way things are, now, though, and I think we are off to a good start.  It's good, all this busyness.  There are other things we've been working on--I'll write about that separately.  Now if the ants would just retreat I'd be happier!