Cleaning House and Beads

It's been 5 weeks and 2 days since my little Josie was born.  This morning my sister Thawivann and my nieces Grace and Joy flew back to Chicago after spending a week with my family.  They were the last of the post-partum family help.  I was blessed this pregnancy to have help for nearly 5 weeks straight.

Today, Taylor started back on his night shift.  These days are typically the hardest, so I never know what to expect.  Today went by almost without a hitch.  I even managed to be a cleaning machine.  Granted, it helped that over the past few weeks my MIL, mom, and sister helped me chip away at the clutter and develop more systems for organization.  Since my mom was in town, nearly 3 weeks ago, I have successfully washed, dried, folded, and put away my laundry.  This is HUGE!  Thawivann got me a butt load of containers and laundry baskets to help me manage my clutter.  The beauty of this system is that I don't necessarily have to change my tendencies: collector and not quick to clean up.  So, I have tons of bins that are labeled: toys, baby items, coupons, crafts, items to go up stairs, etc.  Rather than let the items clutter the flour or surfaces I can drop them in the bins and contain the chaos.  Then when I get chance I take the bin and put things back in their proper places.  BEAUTIFUL!  Here is a glimpse:

Something I realized I need to do now that I am a mother of 3 under 3, with all of them at home, is to try and have something planned each day.  It would be great if I could have that "something" planned in advance, but I won't hold myself to that.  I have SO many empty egg cartons and have been thinking of something to do with them.  I also have a grocery bag full of beads from an Economics lesson I taught.  Lucy loves stacking, putting things in and out of containers.  Evie is beginning to show interest in sorting and counting.  So I emptied 4 different colors of beads into egg cartons for each of them.  Lucy just had fun picking the beads up and putting them in another section of the carton.  Evie asked me how to play with them, so I directed her to try and separate them into colors.

  I noticed they were starting to lose interest so I gave Evie 4 small containers and showed her how to separate each color into its own container.  I gave Lucy larger containers and she just enjoyed pouring the beads back and forth.  I also gave them spoons so they scoop the beads into the various containers.  OnceEvie sorted her beads she was basically done.  Lucy stayed intersted much longer, but then she started to play with them by Josie and I was worried that she would try to feed them to her.  Ending her play with the beads and containers came with some resistance, but it was worth keeping all my children alive =)

I am proud to say that we all survived the day.  Actually  I think today we more than thrived.  Thank God!