Suzy Q Homemaker

Let’s take a look at last week’s list:

Mop the kitchen–so didn’t happen.  Gross, I know.  It’s seriously discouraging, though, when every time the kitchen gets mopped, about five more things spill on the floor in the first thirty minutes .

Dust my dresser & jewelry box collection–happened today!  Nothing like waiting till the last minute, right?

Sort through clothes–didn’t happen.  I think it will make me depressed, so I keep procrastinating.

Finish reading books–done.  {check out the review & giveaway here}

Start birthday garland–done.  I picked out fabric and cut out my templates.  Yay!

Stick to the list!–um.  See above.

I managed to get dog sick on Sunday, so I’m a day behind on a lot of stuff, but now that I’m on the mend, I’ve got to get the ball rolling.

This week:

• Keep working on the birthday garland
• start seeds for the vegetable garden
• read the book club book–I haven’t participated in book club in three months.  It’s quite sad.
• BUY DEODORANT–I ran out of deodorant and have been using Jamie’s for the past two days.

And if I’m feeling adventurous:

• Wash the curtains in the house
• Mop the kitchen.  Seriously, you have no idea how big my kitchen is and what a huge undertaking it is to get that entire floor mopped.

With four little people following me around undoing everything I’ve done {a quote from a friend of mine}, it’s really a wonder why I even bother cleaning at all.

I thought I had a relatively simple list made up last week, and I did manage to get some stuff done.  Thing is, stuff happens.  I’m now going to examine last Tuesday’s list and give you a play-by-play:

√  Clean out my email inbox

I successfully unsubscribed to a number of newsletters that I never, ever read.  A lot of them I had been signed up for for more than ten years, so like a typical hoarder, I had some emotional attachment to these virtual papers.  It feels good to have a less cluttered inbox, though.  That’s fo’ sho’.

X  Dust the house before Saturday’s crop

There’s no excuse for this other than I just didn’t feel like it.

√  Put together a Creative Memories order

That’s self-explanatory.  Along with some paper and an album for a big project, I ordered the new rotary trimmer which I am very, VERY excited about.

√  Do yoga!! Or go jogging!! Or do something by way of exercise!!

I didn’t do yoga, but I did manage to drag myself out of the house twice with Timothy in the Didymos and Simon underfoot for a walk down the road and back.  Then it rained during the last half of the week, so I went to the gym on Thursday to run on a treadmill for about thirty minutes.

½  Incorporate beans into at least one meal a day

I’m giving this one a half because I didn’t take into consideration the Wednesday night supper at church (LASAGNA HELLO!) or the fact that I might forget.  Ha!  So we had beans a few days out of the week.

Are you ready to see this week’s list?  Here we go:

• DUST!
• Go to the post office
• Take the pile of clothes by the front door and the pile of stuff in the back of the van to Goodwill
• Go for more walks with Simon & Timothy (weather permitting)
• Try the recipe for roasted chickpeas I saw in one of my cookbooks
• Clean up the convertible car seat and graduate Timothy out of the infant car seat!!

See more To-Do Tuesday and add your own over at Crazy Adventures in Parenting!

Hey you guys! My cleaning confession video is up on the Kenmore Youtube channel.  I’ll embed it here so you can watch it and if I’m chosen as a finalist, voting will begin next Friday.  Enjoy!

For the past two days, our family has been tearing the house apart looking for three things:

1. My sewing machine manual
2. The manual for the serger I’m trading for some other stuff
3. The threading diagram for said serger

The last time I saw them, they were on my sewing table, most likely near the serger.  I remember seeing them when I took a picture of the machine in order to post it for sale on Diaper Swappers.  That was quite a while ago, and the sewing room/play room has seen several shades of clean since then.  In the process of organizing the boys’ toys, my table became a catch-all for whatever the boys didn’t know what to do with.  I cleaned off the table yesterday and still didn’t find it.  I went through the bags of “trash” that they had lying around after their major cleanup on Sunday.  I looked in every conceivable and inconceivable place where these objects of interest may have ended up.

No dice.

This isn’t the first time things have mysteriously disappeared in the house, and it won’t be the last.  We often joke about having an imp in the house.  The boys are in on the joke, too, and have taken to blaming this imp for misplaced shoes and other toys that get “lost” in their room.  This imp was also blamed for the temporary disappearance of my basal thermometer, an event that lead to the birth of Simon.  The only thing that has gone permanently missing from our house was a journal that I had about six years ago.  We looked everywhere for that thing and the only trace of it was the bookmark I kept in it; the bookmark was found in a kitchen drawer where I would never have put the journal.

If I could, I would download a diagram from the great and mighty Interwebs, but after searching far and wide, no diagram was found.  The overlock machine in question is a Zoje  FN2-4D-B, which was probably used in a sweatshop somewhere.  Jamie bought it for me off of ebay a couple years ago for Christmas but I’ve never been able to use it because it’s too fast.  Not ever having a serger before, I should have specified that I wanted a more familiar brand that isn’t quite as speedy.  If you do a google search for this particular machine, my listing on diaperswappers is in the first page of the results and most other pages for it are in other languages.  It’s frustrating.

I don’t know who to blame.  My housekeeping skill need work, yes, but it’s not like we’ll end up on “Hoarders” any time soon.  My fear is that these things got accidentally thrown away in one of my husband’s neurotic cleaning fits and they’ll never be seen again.  Until then, I’m just going to have to put on my big girl panties and keep trucking.  If it’s any consolation to me, all the things that I’ve been meaning to organize will now have a proper home.

Hey check this out!

Ecostore USA (remember my laundry detergent review?) is having a really awesome contest to spread the word about their new Lemon Cream Cleanser.  All you have to do is follow their instructions here.  The winner will receive a $500 Visa Card, a link to the ecostore USA website and blog to the winner’s blog, video or both, and a link to the winner’s video, blog or both that will be used for a coupon at coupon.com to promote the lemon cream cleanser at Meijer stores. Read more…