Hello, friends. I'd like to introduce you to a new character at Surrender, Dorothy. Meet DJ Nibbles.

The little angel introduced me to DJ Nibbles last night when she was getting ready for her bath. He was rocking it old school on the manual turntable/hipster baby belt buckle I got when I used to review stuff for the ever-fabulous Liz and Kristen at Cool Mom Picks.

DJ Nibbles didn't even know what he was excited about last night, but he knew it was going to be big enough to bring back-up dancers.

Would you like to hear why DJ Nibbles is excited? He's excited today because it's my sister's 35th birthday, because it's the little angel's last day of second grade and because the pathology report says The Lump is BENIGN, baby. Which is good because I couldn't handle one more day of wondering if I was going to have to reschedule summer plans around my chemotherapy. 

It may happen someday. BUT TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY.

What is DJ Nibbles celebrating for you today?

We moved to Chateau Travolta in 2007. Memorial Day. Which means we're coming up on our five-year anniversary here. 

I'm sitting on my deck finishing up work and watching my girl ride bikes in the cul-de-sac with her two neighbor friends.

I never imagined I'd be suburban. 

The boom box spewing nineties music is vintage, though. I got it when I was 16. Way to go, JVC.

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I remember how much work it was when we moved in. We're still not done, but I understand this is very common. 

A friend came over recently when I was staking my lilies and took in the deck we've festooned with bubble lights and hanging baskets and vegetable plants. She watched her daughter and my girl collecting worms for the terrarium, and she looked at me and said, "You've got yourself quite an oasis here."

It was one of the highest compliments I've been paid. 

I never set out to be a gardener.

I never set out to be suburban. City, yeah. Rural, I could see. But not a CUL-DE-SAC. Of course, I didn't realize that for an eight-year-old, a cul-de-sac means freedom.

Honestly, I tried to get my tubes tied when I was 18.

I never even set out to be a mother.

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Somewhere along the line, I learned the value in things that come back. Neighbors that return the favor. Flowers that sprout back reliably, year after year. Birdfeeders that don't break. Friends who write me after months of silence. Books that continue to fascinate me when my eye catches their spines on my shelves. Songs that bring me back to a golden moment.

I just don't see the point in planting anything that won't last.

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I used to see so many of these things as horrifyingly banal.

Now I see no point in doing anything that won't leave a mark, that won't come back after I'm gone and whisper with its existance she was here.

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)

I feel ... pummeled. I went back to work too soon on Friday, still high from hydrocodone, glued together, sore. Ma and Pa left for home on Friday, then I realized I needed them to come back because Beloved had to make a last-minute trip. They turned around and came back, bless my wonderful parents. It got better, then it got worse, then it got better, then it got worse. This morning I had pain of a new kind, a more normal kind, but pain all the same. I hobbled downstairs at six to get ibuprofin then back to bed to apply counter-pressure and wait the twenty minutes for the Advil to kick in so I could stop moaning and get out of bed, because today is Monday and I need to go back to work and Beloved has another two-day trip. The poor guy stood there this morning no doubt wondering if I would indeed get out of bed and get the little angel on the bus and go to work or if I would just lie there and moan all day. I admit I was wondering, too.

I don't find out what was in my leg until a week from today. Until then, I'm not supposed to exercise, which I shouldn't want to do because it would hurt and might tear the glue and stitches, but that is how I regulate my anxiety easier. 

So I'm sort of sitting here looking at this list of shit I have to do and giving myself the best pep talk I can, because there is no one else here to do this life for me. I want nothing more than to lie down and dissolve into a puddle of needs, because there is nothing like having the guy in the coffee shop ask you if you got bit by a spider while gesturing to the black bruise on your hand and having to tell him, no, that was just where they put the IV two days ago to make you feel old and tired and sore. It wasn't major surgery, but the in and out and the forced ejection back into normal life before the shock even wore off has spun me around and left me wandering, disoriented, through my house, wondering if the cat has been fed. 

I don't want to push off the little angel, who wants to have all her friends over tonight for a Play-Dough party in the driveway. I will let her have it, of course, but there is a huge part of me that would prefer to scream FUCK PLAY-DOUGH. LIFE, PLEASE JUST STOP AND LET ME CATCH UP, THANK YOU. 

I know the truth is that I'm just allowing myself to have these few minutes wallowing in my pity party because I'll hit publish and open my email and dry my tears and maybe go take a shower so I don't feel like such a worthless blob and try to find some pants that don't squeeze my incisions and figure out how to haul myself through today and tonight and tomorrow when I have another doctor appointment to try to figure out what's been going on with my gut for the past three years. 

I feel so old and so tired today. Accomplishing something will probably help a lot. God, I can't even stand to read my own writing, I sound so whiny.

However, I don't know how I thought I'd be able to manage the pain without narcotics. So today is passing in a confusing haze of hydrocodon. But yay! More Mon.

So, my surgery is tomorrow. At long last, The Lump will be gone. I can't wait. But I also can't let my mind focus on anything other than work right now or I will start getting anxious. Back Friday!

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've had a rough few weeks in terms of ego. The self doubt creeps in, the why-am-I-doing-this, the what-if-this-happens-what-if-that-happens-what-should-I-do-next. Yesterday Beloved pointed out I'd forgotten an entire conversation with him because I was secretly stewing over something else. 

I recently read Vanessa Williams memoir with her mom, Helen Williams, for BlogHer Book Club. I admit to never following Vanessa's career, and so I probably would not have picked up this book on my own. What I took away is that Vanessa has some serious fire in the belly. She never doubted herself, not when she was blocked from Broadway after the Miss America thing, not when she faced numerous professional obstacles that would've sidelined most actresses. Or singers. Or dancers. She apparently is all of these things. She wrote: 

I knew it would be tough, but I also never doubted I would succeed. When you know this, you don't have dark days, you don't hit rock bottom. You just have days when you want to scream at people: "You have no idea what I can do!"

You need that kind of confidence, and of course talent, and a truckload of luck to succeed in any creative field. Creative fields are tough. Those in charge give your work (or good Lord, if you're an actress, your actual self) a cursory glance and make a snap decision, usually based on gut and whatever hole they're trying to plug that day. It's inevitable you will only be the right fit in certain situations, but in order to get yourself into the situations where luck might smile on you, you have to have the confidence to keep going, keep picking yourself up off the floor and resubmitting the work to the next gallery or agent or editor or producer. 

I'm in a place where the next few weeks will result in euphoria or the need to pick myself up off the ground. I feel the need to start kindling the fire now, but I'm looking around my writing cave and finding very little firewood. I've been riding the wave of amped-up anxiety since January, trying to pack it back so I can read to my daughter or make dinner or attend meetings. It pops up at the most unexpected times, the ohmygodwhat'sgoingtohappennext, and sometimes it kills me that I have to keep on living normal life when creatively I'm hanging in such a big career balance, just swinging waiting to see if luck and talent will coincide with someone who needs something just like mine at this particular place in time in history and in publishing. It's been three years since I started dreaming this particular dream. Three years is a long time to keep a fire stoked, through rewrites and feedback and agents and writing partners and readers.

I'm looking hard at myself as I wait to hear what will come of this particular ride. If it doesn't pan out the way I hope it will, I'm going to have to start over, take another tack. Do I believe the world doesn't know what I can do?

I have to.

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Congratulations to the winner of the Midwest Dairy Council's Get Mooooving gift pack on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

My Octopony post has found new life at BlogHer now that Nadya Suleman has gone and sold nude pictures and then still gone bankrupt. I resized the pics so it's better now. Something about a stuffed animal close-up makes me laugh really hard. If you didn't see it the first time, please to enjoy Dr. Phooh's interview with the Octopony. For the whole Paging Dr. Arens series, check the link in Categories in my right sidebar. 

Dude, I miss that series.

WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???