Thank you for bearing with my through yesterday's whining. Despite waking up at 3 am realizing I might still be at a doctor's appointment when the school bus arrives outside my door today and not being able to go back to sleep for an hour, I feel better today than I did yesterday. I've even already solved for the school bus problem! Yay, me.

As I'm currently moping around wishing I had an energy level commiserate to vacuuming, it's funny that this is the week that I've been selected to write about keeping up with kid clutter for BlogHer's Life Well Lived series. Ha ha ha ha ha. But actually, I do normally hate clutter with a passion, and as soon as I feel better for realz, I'm going to attack the following.

The Question: What are your best tips for keeping the clutter at bay with kids in the house? How do you help your kids develop good organizing skills?

The Answers:

1) Have one kid. I'm sort of kidding. On the serious side, kids bring home a steady stream of papers, pencils, wads of gum, extra shoelaces and various cheap plastic crap they will declare essential to their existence. This stuff multiplies exponentially per child. If you haven't started your family yet and you seriously hate clutter, just be aware of how your personality may or may not jibe with a big family. Kids are cluttery. Yes, we can try to combat it, but a certain amount is normal and reasonable and it's not fair to try to contain them within the bounds of an adult. 

2) Make sure everyone has containers for his or her stuff. Downstairs where the school-related clutter backs up most, we have a homework box and a crate we use to house all the library books. Yes, there are two things sitting on the kitchen floor at all times, but at least the piles are minimized. We have a few other baskets for my husband and me -- one is for bills that haven't been opened yet and another is for bills that need to be filed or shredded. 

3) Act on piles every day. My husband and daughter get sick of me walking around the house, picking up their shoes and tossing them in the hall closet. See also removing recylables to the garage immediately, tossing school assignments not keep-worthy and demanding my daughter decide if yet another wacky wall-walker is necessary or expendable. However, I've noticed in the weeks I don't do that, the piles take over every surface of the house within a mere three days, putting algae to shame.

4) Make garage sales pay off for the child(ren). In exchange for ruthless clean-outs, I let my girl keep the proceeds from our yearly garage sale/lemonade stand. It's her version of watching us sell stuff on Craigslist and use the money for something else.

5) Find a personal hand-me-down recipient. If your kids know where their outgrown clothes are going -- to which specific kid -- they're much more likely to relinquish something than if it's just going in the Goodwill pile. At the first sighting of a too-high hemline or extra ankle exposure, remove said item of clothing and put it in a sack for your favorite little neighbor or relative or friend. 

6) Hang shelves. My girl has a snow globe collection that made it so frustrating to dust in her room that I finally begged my husband to hang some shelves on her walls. It's so freeing to be able to access the surface of her dresser -- I can't even tell you what this does for my soul. For some reason, clutter on the floor is infinitely more annoying to me than clutter on a shelf. Why? I do not know.

7) Group like objects. We have spaghetti jars full of googly eyes, pipe cleaners, beads, paint brushes, etc. in the basement, along with an old dresser full of craft stuff. Being able to see what you have makes it less likely you'll buy the same thing twice. I try to teach my girl to look first before we buy anything. Nobody needs 42 tubes of Elmer's Glue. No, you don't. Back away.

That's pretty much it. I feel like my house is overcome with clutter most days, even though it's not as bad as it could be. I find making a swoop around the house every afternoon before dinner does a lot to calm my soul. How do you handle kid clutter? 

Here's what Alicia from Get Buttoned Up had to say at BlogHer.

As always, I want you to win some stuff. This time you can win an iPod Touch and a $50 iTunes gift card. So go enter! (and hurry, I was late on the pick-up and the sweepstakes ends TOMORROW MAY 16)

This weekend we went to a Royals game. And we got our seats moved. 

Her name, we think, was "Liz." Our middle-aged, shorts-around-the-armpits savior, who noticed the ten or so wasted twentysomethings in front of us smoking cigarettes in their stadium seats, dropping the f-bomb every other word and almost coming to blows when each of the large man-boys were armed with the souvenir mini-bats.

Liz was an usher/ass-kicker.

The kids, as I see them, even though they were probably early twenties, weren't all that bad until it came to the near-fight. Yes, their language was horrible, but hello, I'm me. It's not as though the little angel has never heard a driving word before. It would be great if it weren't used as EVERY OTHER WORD IN THE SENTENCE, but yes, it's baseball, I get it, I'm not a total prude. The smoking in the stadium was asshattery at its finest, but again, it didn't blow my mind. We were outside. 

When the one guy in front of me kept screaming THE FUCKITY FUCK, the girls directly in front of us kept shushing him, saying "there are little kids behind us" -- we were there with friends who had a six-year-old. He didn't listen. I remembered being the twentysomethings, shushing my fuck-yelling friends, smoking in the stadium, trying to keep my man-boy friends from fighting over something ridiculous, and being wasted enough that even if I did notice kids nearby, it didn't really compute. Kids nearby inspired a vague guilt akin to eating ice cream for dinner.

And now I'm that parent, sitting behind the kids, seeing them for what they are, what I was -- complete douchebags.

Someone in front of the kids complained and our savior Liz came up asking who had the lit cigarette and assuring us we'd be moved, stat. And she made good on it. We watched our old section and one by one, most of the kids got thrown out of the stadium.

Score one for the old people. Thanks, Liz.

I believe the last time I actually showed y'all something I made was the diaper cake. And I just saw that baby last weekend, and she is now two.

However, I tweeted a picture of the little angel's new handband holder and someone wanted to know where I bought it, which was hilarious to me. 

First: The Hair. My daughter has really, really long hair. That she hates to have brushed. But yet, every day it must be brushed, because I have a thing about her going out looking like a member of 1989 Bon Jovi. She screams, even when I use a Blondie-approved amount of conditioner when I wash it.

I've been trying to come up with a way to get her to take more ownership of her own hair. I've also been trying to come up with a way to get the drawers in her bathroom open. They are (were) crammed with hair accessories that she never ever wears.

Then on Sunday it rained.

The culimination of the rain and the hair accessory issue led to the creation of a few items.

First! The headband holder of Twitter fame.

I made mine out of a roll of paper towels covered in scrapbooking paper. I have tons and tons of scrapbooking paper even though I have never scrapped in my life. It's pretty and my girl loves it and it comes in big, yummy books. I love paper, all kinds of paper, I'm sorry, trees. 

The problem was how to get the pretty paper to stick to the paper towels. I tried taping, no luck. Then (and trust me, it made total sense at the time), I tried stapling, with the staple open up like elementary teachers do with their bulletin boards (they do still have those, right?). It looked AWESOME! And then I took the pressure off and all the staples went shooting out. But then I realized I had a hot glue gun! So I hot glued the paper to the paper towel roll and that worked and there was great rejoicing. Unfortunately, I had no cover for the part on top, so I stuck that flower in there and glued the petals down. Then that looked like shit, so I hot glued a pink ribbon around the top. Now, if you are in my house and you look closely at this thing, you will see it looks like a second-grader made it. However, once you load it up with all the headbands, no big. CRAFTS!

Next, I took all the combs and brushes and soft head bands and put them in a box that used to hold greeting cards. I buy a lot of greeting cards in bulk, because I always forget people's birthdays or events until the day of, and then I have to run downstairs and search for something appropriate. I also love the boxes they come in, which are super sturdy and usually pretty, too. This green one was a little blah so the little angel stuck another one of those pretty pieces of scrapping paper to it, and then I hot glued some more junk on the front to bedazzle it.

Finally, I made two of these hairband holders out of paper towel rolls. Since the little angel requires hair bands not only to put in ponytails but also to tie back her tshirts so they look correct with her skinny jeans (don't ask), she needs two a day and we can never find them. Now we have one of these hair band holders upstairs and one downstairs and please stop asking me where you can find a ponytail holder, child.

Of course it is covered with more pretty scrappy paper. Just because!

So this morning, my girl was almost late for the school bus because she was messing with her hair. And when she came down, her hair looked like Marcia Brady had brushed it 100 strokes on each side. She had used two different hair brushes to get out all the tangles. And she was wearing a headband that hadn't seen the light of day in months.

I WIN!

The little angel went to school today after puking for two days. Puking, then feeling great and wishing I wasn't working. Of course, I felt horrible for her, but I also felt horrible for me because it is so hard to try to write and meet deadlines and participate in meetings while simultaneously entertaining/caregiving of a sometimes-feeling-sick-but-mostly-not eight-year-old who insists on playing Zhu Zhu pets while bumping into your laptop because she must sit RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU. 

This morning, she cried for almost an hour because she didn't want to go back to school and be in the school musical this afternoon that I worked late last night to be able to take off work to attend. She'd missed a bunch of rehearsals due to being sick and is worried because she has a speaking part. Beloved tried one approach and I tried another, and either way she was wound for sound five minutes before the bus came. Finally, she calmed down to sniffles and sat on my lap while we waited and I seriously considered just declaring it Saturday and being done with everything.

Because I am so done with this week.

I'm done with the four-day headache. I'm done with the doctors' visits for me -- I found out this week I have to get new doctors and more tests for two different health problems. The tests will be uncomfortable and expensive and I'm so done with that. I'm done with cleaning up barf. I'm done with my cat who won't stop sneezing in my face. I'm done with my endless lists. I'm done with the laundry and the house that has grown dingy again and the thought of spending my entire Saturday cleaning it, again. I'm done with the tears and the fears and the effort of dragging myself through this week. I'm done with wishing and praying about my novel. I'm done with trying to be upbeat and stop whining. This is my blog, and today, it's a whinefest. 

I know I have many blessings and should be happy my body is mostly working. But right now, WHINING FEELS GOOOOOOOOOOOOD. 

Thank you for indulging me. I feel better already.

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One thing I'm not cranky about: notebooks. See my share of Miro notebooks on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.

Today my co-worker Denise pointed out this post on the unimportance of stuff. This was my favorite line:

 I chose not to mourn stuff and save all my sorrow for people. 

My family has always been rather divided on the importance of stuff. There are some of us who hold items very near and dear and are devestated if anything happens to them because the stuff reminds them so much of a good memory or a lost beloved. And then there are others of us -- like me -- who delight in getting rid of stuff and actively work toward not forming attachments to it.

I wasn't always like this. I had very stong attachments to stuff as a child and young adult. A few months after my grandparents died, my roommate in Chicago threw away a blanket from their house. (He claims it was an accident; I claim it was part of his oversight issues.) I freaked out on him. FREAKED OUT. I remember spending hours searching through all sorts of apartments and houses when I would randomly remember a possession and didn't know where it was. Oh, how I cried when I couldn't find (insert possession here -- there were many). I was very, very, very upset a few years ago when I lost my wedding ring. I kept my grandmother's extensive shoe collection for years after she died, even though I never wore one pair. I used to carry a day planner around in Chicago filled with quotes and pictures and cards -- one of my friends actually expressed amazement that I would haul around so much with me every day. I couldn't imagine going anywhere without it.

Somewhere along the line, I became concerned about my attachments to stuff, especially my writing. I made back-ups of back-ups (and still do) and worried so much about what would happen if I lost all those poems and short stories and novels. Right now I have all my notes on my next novel in one notebook that I have ferreted away behind my printer. I haven't typed them up anywhere, and it would be pretty bad if I lost that notebook. 

But I'm actively working on not forming an attachment to it, or to those exact notes. I'm not ready to start that novel yet, not when the one I'm on is out with editors now.

I think it was my grandparents' blanket that got me. Before I left Chicago, I sold the antique three-quarters bed of my grandmother's that I'd been sleeping on to a friend. I realized the depth of my despair over the blanket was really my grief for the people I loved so much. Their stuff is just their stuff, even the stuff made by them. I love the stuff, I cherish the stuff, I place the stuff in positions of honor around my house and celebrate the stuff, but I actively work not to get too attached to the stuff, because something could happen. A tornado. A fire. Just an accident in which said stuff gets broken. A robbery. I just don't ever want to feel that hurt by the absence of a thing again. 

I understand this is just me working against my anxiety, and it's  perfectly fine for other people to feel a different way about stuff. My daughter is so attached to her stuffed animals that she mourned a bunny she gave away for months until I finally asked for it back from the neighbor and offered to replace it with something else. She's displaying a super-strong attachment to stuff, and who knows, maybe she will always feel that way. That's not wrong, and I won't discourage her from attaching to stuff. Especially when you're a kid, I think it's really helpful to have comfort objects.

I'm constantly reminding myself every time the sky turns green that the Corolla was just stuff, and now I have Vicki the convertible. If something happened to Vicki, something else would appear in her place. If my computer's hard drive gets wiped or I lose that notebook behind my printer, my writer mind will come up with a new story, maybe a story even better. I can't worry about losing things all the time. I have to trust I can create anew every lost story, I can replace every lost possession, I can grow and change to fit any new scenario. My people have to be the most important, and all my energy is going into them, because they cannot be replaced.

I will save my sorrow for them.

This morning, I was starting to think I was imagining the vise around my head and general body cramps as a virus. I decided to blame some new medication.

Then school called. The little angel had been in the health room twice, but she didn't have a temperature and the nurse suspected there was actually nothing wrong.

This is the kid who has never asked to stay home sick in her entire academic career. 

And I still felt like shit.

"I actually think I know what is wrong," I said. "I'll come and get her."

When I got there, the school nurse still looked puzzled. She looked, actually, as though she suspected we were both playing hooky (working from home means I'm often still in yoga pants at 11 am, and guess what? I was still in yoga pants at 11 am). I put my arm protectively around the girl and guided her outside. 

"You know this means you can't play with friends, right? You're really sick?"

When she met my eyes, it was like staring into my own aching self.

About five minutes ago, she threw up for the first time since she was about four years old. It's been so long since she's been sick, I think we'd both forgotten what that was like. I remember always bawling after barfing, but she just asked for a Kleenex and said she was hungry now that her stomach felt better. 

She is sometimes so me, and sometimes so her father. This would be inherited from her father, who would probably barf and then go chop down a tree if he were here. Lucky for him, he's traveling for work and gets to avoid the stank that is now our living room.

My poor little duck. And I also feel a little vindicated for moping around the house all week groaning as though I might die.

As promised, a photo gallery of the little angel's eighth birthday cake.

This was obviously not made by me.

I chopped off the top because it had her name on there and I'm still not into sharing that online. I'm bad with photos, but not that bad.

The number was made from white chocolate, I think.

Mr. Octopus sits on a bed of brown sugar sand. The entire cake was edible except for the toothpicks holding in the treasure chest. Note the suckers on the underside of his legs.

Coral and shells

The treasure chest was made from cocoa Rice Crispie treats.

Nemo. I know -- when she brought it over I just sat and stared at it for twenty minutes, asking her how she made all the parts.

Absolute best part: how much she loved it. Happy birthday to my sweet girl.

I'm still feeling pretty gross, so this is all I've got today. If you're a Kansas City local and are interested in contact info for my amazing baker friend, email me at ritajarens(at)gmail(dot)com.

Over at BlogHer my interview with Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess) is up -- Jenny's book comes out today, I think, and I'm so excited for her! 

My daughter still takes a bath every night. She thinks she should probably be showering because the older kids shower, but I reassure her it's for me as much as her. It's our time to talk about the day and what's going on in her head. I sit on a little stool next to the bathtub, and we discuss the finer points of hairwashing (I got schooled over Easter by my sister regarding the proper amount of conditioner to use if you don't have duck fuzz for hair, which is a third of a bottle instead of my pea-sized drop) or what happened in art class that day or what we should do on the weekend. 

Inevitably, I beg her on nonhairwashing days to keep her locks dry, and instead she immerses herself up to her chin in bubbles and soaks the bottom half of her head.

Recently I tried a shower cap. I had one from a business trip, the plastic clear kind they give out at HoJo. Of course, she soaked it, and I was annoyed. I turned around to get something and heard a weird ShushShushShush noise. 

She had the shower cap over her face and was sucking in and out against the plastic.

She was in no danger, but my brain registered in nanoseconds child with face and nose covered in plastic and freaked the fuck out. I completely lost it, tearing the shower cap from her face and screaming DON'T YOU EVER PUT PLASTIC OR RUBBER OVER YOUR NOSE AND MOUTH OR HIDE IN AN EMPTY FREEZER OR DO ANYTHING THAT WILL CAUSE YOU TO RUN OUT OF OXYGEN BECAUSE YOU COULD SUFFOCATE!

And she burst into tears immediately. 

Of course she didn't realize. She was just messing around; it's what kids do. She also has inherited my lack of common sense. My husband somehow instinctively knows which way is north and whether a piece of string is long enough to go between two poles and whether you should eat that food that's been in the refrigerator for that amount of time. I have so little common sense I have to think academically through everything, which takes a long time, so usually I just skip it, which results in me putting a metal travel mug filled with coffee in the microwave and nearly burning the house down.

Because I know how I am and how she is, I didn't feel bad about my overreactive outburst, though. I didn't want her to forget what I said. She and I tend to be daydreamers, half paying attention to the world while thinking through whatever is going on in our heads. I wanted her to be completely shocked out of whatever game she was playing with the shower cap so she would never, ever forget the bit about the impermeable materials and the breathing orifices. 

When she got out, we went and sat in her bed and played with her stuffed animals and cuddled, and I dried her tears and told her why I reacted that way, that I never, ever wanted to lose my Baby Duck and it scared me. Then she realized an animal was missing and dove under the covers to find it.

"It's okay, Mommy!" came her muffled voice. "The bed is not covered in plastic! I CAN BREATHE!"

Phew.

Tomorrow is the little angel's eighth birthday. There is no school, because it is Good Friday. I'm sure the school doesn't call it that, what with the separation of church and state, but not only is there no school, there's no emergency childcare, either, so I think we can all agree there is something going on here that's not teacher in-service.

I admit to thinking yay, no classroom treats! 

Then this morning, fifteen minutes before the bus came, she asked if she could bring treats TODAY. 

It really wasn't a choice. What kind of an asshole refuses her kid birthday treats? I thought I was getting off, but no, she noticed. There's no getting anything with sugar in it past this one.

There were a few more reasons why I walked into an elementary school this morning and paraded all the way through all the halls past all the teachers carrying 32 pastel cupcakes properly labeled with all their ingredients for allergy reasons.

1. She's my daughter, and I love her with all my heart.
2. She's my daughter, and I love her with all my heart.
3. I am a sucker.

I'll be away tomorrow, celebrating said birthday. However you celebrate it, happy Easter, everyone!