WanderingAmylessly 2.0

I would be the first person to admit my housekeeping quirks. Perhaps that's a nice way of saying I'm a slob. I haven't always been that way. When I was a kid, I loved having a clean bedroom, with everything in its place, the decorative pillows stacked neatly on a freshly made bed. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided not to sweat the details. I started tossing junk in drawers, underneath beds, in corners of the closet. Since the kid was born, the clutter has increased 100 times, it seems. What to do with the piles of clothes, toys, school papers, craft projects, baby teeth, and so on? All those LEGOs! They are everywhere. They seem to multiply like sewer rats. And they seem to find the bottoms of my bare feet like magnets to sharp, jagged metal. This fall, I've decided to do something about the mess. I created a spreadsheet to organize a plan for cleaning, color coded by room and divided into particular tasks within each room to break down the monstrous tasks ...

The past few months have been a blur. From the moment, in February, when we found out Tim's mom had a brain tumor, everyone was focused on her treatment. Little did we know that by the time her treatment ended in April, her bone marrow would be annihilated by it, and she would spend most of the rest of her days in the hospital, fighting infections and slowly slipping away. She died on Monday, Sept. 23, at around 5 p.m., and we celebrated her life at a service at her church a week later. We did manage to have a family vacation this summer, just the three of us, but much of our time was spent traveling back and forth to St. Louis to visit her in the hospital. I'm not sure where the time went, but it flew past. Hobby projects were put aside. So was most housework. Most noticeably to our neighbors, I'm sure, we did very little to our yard. By the time we came back from the funeral, massive weeds had overtaken the flower beds, which never got planted with annuals last sp...