Friday, August 26, 2011

How did that get there?

I was cleaning up the kitchen and I had an empty bottle of creamer, so I stepped outside and tossed it into our recycling bin.

Then my children finished both the lemonade and the juice, so I had two more bottles for the recycling bin. I walked over to it and put them in and...

there was a dead mouse lying in the bin.

This is not something you expect to find in your nearly-empty recycling bin. I haven't seen any mice, live or dead, since we moved in. No mouse poop, no mouse noises, no mice. And now there was a dead one inexplicably lying in my recycling bin. Some water was in the bin... did it drown? It was about a millimeter of water. If it didn't die in the bin... who put it there? There's a random cat who wanders through our yard...

I need my daughter to get her magnifying glass out and look for clues, because I'm baffled.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Oh, There You Are

So when you pack, you're always trying to find all the pieces of something, or all related items, etc., so you can put them in the same box and put on a nice label: Hair Accessories; Little People (the Fisher Price kind!); Napkins.

Then, 15 minutes later, a related item makes an appearance. What! Another hair tie? Where were you 15 minutes ago??

Now, you have a hair tie. But the Hair Accessories box is already sealed, taped, done. You could untape it, put the hair tie in, and retape it... but that seems like too much work for one hair tie. So you put the hair tie in a remotely-related box - Bathroom. You seal up Bathroom and... an hour later... a headband shows up. What! Where WERE you for the last hour and fifteen minutes??

But the latecomer needs to get packed, too. Do you start a box for random items? Do you start a new box for Hair Accessories? Do you just give up and start packing everything in one big mess? Now you're going to have hair accessories in THREE boxes. Gah!

This is the worst part of packing.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Last Weekend

It's our last weekend in the condo. And it's starting to look less and less like my home and more like one of the houses I see on Hoarders. There are boxes from floor to ceiling, the kids' toys are strewn about in between piles of packing materials, and we can't use our kitchen table. I ate my dinner off of a box while sitting on the couch.

My baby finds boxes to be the best!toys!ever! and pushes them, opens them, inspects them, carries them... all over the condo. This keeps him occupied while I try to pack (or make dinner, since I'm trying to use as much food up as possible from our freezer). This evening, however, he thought it would be a good idea to unpack one of my half-packed boxes. Fortunately it was just dry food, and once he had completely unpacked it, he decided that linguini in a box was now the best!toy!ever! and proceeded to drag it around the kitchen for five minutes. I was able to repack the box while he did this (less the linguini).

The really interesting thing about packing is finding out what tiny percentage of your items you actually use on a regular basis. For us, it is frightening that we packed an entire storage unit full of items at the end of February and have missed only 3 things:

-my shorts (all of them)
-some special t-shirts
-the baby's 12-month outfits (I thought we'd be moved in before he turned one)

Then we get into the last month before the move, and I'm packing everything that I think I won't need in the next month. I do a few bags of clothes and boxes of crap and think, "I'm doing pretty good." Flash forward to present and I have yet to wear or use about 80% of the remaining items. Fortunately, now we're into the last week, and I'm capable of discerning what we'll use in a week. I think. Especially now that I've come to the realization that I won't be making that pudding pie or mailing any thank you notes that got lost in the shuffle during January.

In summary:
-babies love boxes more than toys
-I own too much stuff
-Thank you for the Christmas present.