Decluttering Day

Clutter is at the root of all evil. (Cleaning evil, at least)

To this end, I invented a holiday- decluttering day. You can even become a fan of it here. It's May 23rd. I'm going to declutter my house, with the goals of 1. cleaning less and 2. having a tag sale (which has been on my resolution list since the original Year of Frugal Living, I think.)

Anyway, if you're not into Facebook, it's on May 23rd, and that day we're going to sort, toss, donate and clean. Get ready!

Also, check out my debt payoff ticker! It's amazing what on-time child support payments will do. :)

Why moms need breaks

Right around the time of the conference, which was a MAJOR work project that pretty much took over my life for the last 4 months (including why I wasn’t blogging), I started to feel like I was perhaps the world’s worst Mom. I was yelling at the kids, they were being bad and crying all the time, disaster city. So last week I took two days off from work (when I started blogging again) and sent the kids to school. I felt terribly guilty about this for about 2 hours. Then I went to get them, and I was calm, happy, fun, and in response they were calm, happy, fun, and I realized that:

 

Moms need vacation days.

 

Only after I was able to get it together enough to calm down and stop making a BIG DEAL out of everything did I realize that my kids were acting out in response to my bad mood. Since then, things have been awesome. They have been so good. In fact, we even took a little after school road trip to Mystic last night, after school, which meant they had to sit in the car for an hour and 20 minutes at 4:30 in the afternoon. I thought they would surely act out, but nope- they were excellent. All it took was a one-woman comedy/entertainment show from me, which I only had the patience and energy to do because I’m not stressed out.

 

So in conclusion, if you can take day off in some way, shape, or form, DO IT. (And Mother’s Day doesn’t count. That’s a day to be LAZY.)

The Book Thief

I’ve been reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. If you haven’t read it, I won’t spoil anything but I will say that it’s about a German girl named Liesel and takes place in the late 1930’s/early 1940’s, and is narrated by Death. There are a lot of amazing things about this book and at page 143, I’m so hooked that I went home to read it on my lunch break, but what I was thinking about today was luck. We are SO LUCKY. This little girl can’t read at 10, and when she does learn, she treasures books like gold. But in Nazi Germany, books are hard to come by, and she cherishes them.

 

When I was 10, I read voraciously. My mother jokes about telling me to “put the book down and go to bed” and it’s true, I read with a flashlight under the covers until I was discovered. I mean, I grew up to be a librarian, so you can see where I’m at with reading. And my own children love to be read to, now my five year old is starting to read on his own, and their rooms are filled (bookcases to the brim, overflow on shelves in the closets) with books. To think of a little girl who can count her books on one hand… it’s amazing how much we have.

 

Information is access to freedom. Without information, people are relegated to their current state, with no hopes of becoming better educated, better paid, better fed and better housed. Those with access to information can vote intelligently, can make changes, can understand when something is WRONG. That’s why Hitler burned books. People who are deprived of knowledge are less likely to revolt.

 

So, yeah, you might say I like the book.