Autumnal Bliss

I'm knee-deep in household projects. Amelia sleeping only in her swing for naps has its perks and its pitfalls. Mostly pitfalls. On my list of "household projects" are things like "organize kitchen pantry" and "organize baking cabinet". I have to say that I love, love, love having a husband who is happy to load and unload the dishwasher, especially since I can handle the loading but if I unload while Amelia is sleeping (in her swing) then I inevitably wake her and I try to avoid that. Sidenote: I do realize that I should live as I live and she can get used to the noise but that's not the way it has worked for us. For the first couple of months of her life we did everything we could to live normally and make any noise we needed to make while she was asleep and amazingly she did stay asleep but she's no longer a heavy sleeper. At all.

Anyway, David unloads the dishwasher in the morning while Millie and I are still in bed before he goes to work. It's fantastic, it really is, and things are generally in the cabinet where they belong but they are rarely in the order in which they belong. I spend a lot of time organizing cabinets only to have them in complete chaos and disarray less than a week after I organize them. For a while, I just gave up. I felt bad for complaining about how my husband was unloading the dishwasher and decided to focus on the fact that my husband was unloading the dishwasher. He's a doer anyway - I'm not by any stretch of the imagination married to a slob. We are both varying degrees of "neat" and, as a matter of fact, he might even have me beat on how neatly he keeps things and likes things. One thing we differ on is that David just wants things out of sight and in their proper place...he doesn't really mind if the pan isn't stacked neatly inside the other pans where it belongs as long as it's in the correct cabinet. Same goes with the kitchen pantry. This is our dilemma.

Recently I implored David to straighten out a cabinet full of pans because I had done it before only to have my work undone by a well-meaning husband. So, he did, and that cabinet has been neatly kept ever since with pans stacked tidily in other pans. I'd ask him to straighten out my baking cabinet but I'm home all day now so the best I can do is post about it on my blog and hope he tries to put things back where they go when he unloads the dishwasher (which I really appreciate). My point in all of this was to say that it's noisy to reorganize a cabinet full of cookie sheets and muffin pans as well as rearranging a pantry full of crinkly food packages. So, those items have been put off but I need to get to them this weekend at some point while David is around to entertain our daughter.

Other items on my list are to send out thank you notes from my Oregon baby shower and order photos for a ton of frames as well as for Amelia's baby book and for my pregnancy journal. My shower was on August 31 and I do feel terrible for not having sent the notes out yet but I have some done and will do the rest this weekend! The picture thing - well, it's kind of a pain. I was happy to have found mats for a couple of the frames at WalMart (we have a halfway decent one in Covington) but deciding which pictures go into what frames and even where the frames should go is something I know I can't really make too many mistakes with but it still is a lot more work than it sounds!

Tonight I went to a Ladies Bible Class at the church building. The speakers were really fantastic and I learned a lot. It's amazing how much you can absorb when you're not preoccupied with an infant. It struck me on the way there and on the way home how much I missed turning the CD up and singing along with the music. I don't, however, turn the CD up too loudly because apparently I am sensitive to noise (but more on that later). I was listening to Rascal Flatts. I'm very big into lyrics. I concentrate so hard on lyrics to songs that I can usually listen to a song just a couple of times before I can sing along without making too many mistakes. I play a particular song of Rascal Flatts over and over again called "Why". It's heartwrenching. I've embedded it here if you want to listen to it. I get teary-eyed every time I hear it.


David and I are going to see the movie "Amelia" on Saturday. We didn't name our daughter after Amelia Earhart but I still think it's neat that there's a movie that came out the same year Amelia was born. So, we'll go see it and I'll let you know what we thought of it.

Here are some pictures from the Pumpkin Patch a couple of weeks ago. We go to a place on Sauvie Island in Portland every year with my family.

David with Amelia & the 3 girl cousins in the pumpkin cutout



Caleb on the tractor & the 3 sisters with our 3 baby girls. We dressed alike and got a LOT of stares and comments. Some people even took pictures of our babies.

My twin & me sharing a mini-chocolate chip covered caramel apple (I still dream about it). Can you guess who is who? Now that we're about the same weight we definitely look similar! Also, there's a picture of Caleb with his airbrush-painted face from the pumpkin patch and Amelia on his lap.


Have a great autumn weekend!