Spring Cleaning

Last weekend was the most productive and organized weekend I can remember in my family's history. It was preceded by the most unproductive and disordered two weeks I can remember in my family's history. About 2 weeks ago, on a Friday, they gave us warning that on Monday (and over the course of the entire week) they would begin work on our patio privacy walls, and that we needed to remove every single item not only from our storage shed, but also from our entire patio. Oh and Guinness? Locked inside each day while work is being done. Great. Good thing we didn't have any plans that weekend (like a birthday party,a kid's Easter egg hunt, and packing for our Santa Cruz Trip) otherwise I would have been really stressed about getting all of it done!

Meanwhile, I have still been nursing my leg injury (remember the groin injury which led to a shin splint that caused knee pain...), which has caused me to be completely useless after work, since my leg starts hurting from being on it all day long by then and I pretty much need to stay off of it in the evening besides essentials (like bathing the kids - bathing myself has been sidelined.) On top of all of it, we returned from Santa Cruz to find that they STILL were not done and needed last week to do finishing work.

So needless to say after two weeks of having our patio and shed contents strewn about the house in mayhem and me not really being able to do a damn thing about any of it, I was about to lose my mind. Then, the light at the end of the tunnel. (Literally since they opened up all the windows that were boarded up during work on the patio).

I went to my chiropractor on Wednesday, and he adjusted my leg, which was the kicker to my healing. On Friday, they finished up finish work on the privacy wall. We had a rare weekend that was mostly clear. I decided to cancel swim classes for the quarter (very sad about this but we just didn't have room in our schedule and it was going to stretch us too thin), so besides a family photo shoot with Pam (who has shot both girls' 1st Birthday Parties) on Saturday afternoon we were free to put our lives back together.

I took the girls to visit with my mom for a while on Saturday morning, which left Ryan free to organize and put everything back in the shed and patio and put together the girls new toy storage rack. We came back and got ready for our photo shoot. Sunday Ryan drove up to Ramona to borrow the shop of some guy off of craigslist to put spacers on the jeep to give us a temporary mini-lift. While he was gone, I shifted into full on mommy multi-tasking and efficiency mode (don't you wish all appliances and husbands had that mode?) and blasted through the house like a tornado. I moved the plants in the patio back into place, reorganized the storage closet, did the laundry, cleaned out the girl's closet, redistributed our sports clothes/gear into better and more accessible areas, and prepped the front yard by collecting all the dingly-balls that come from the Gum Trees planted out there. And might I add that I accomplished this all without the use of TV or other electronic child attention capturing devises, and by noon to boot. Yeah, I'm tooting my own horn. Suck it. I rocked that day.

Ryan came home and the awesome day of spring cleaning continued. I put him and Abby down for naps, and took Rory with me to Lowe's to get soil, grass seed and some other gardening odds and ends. We came back, and finished work on the front yard, and moved to the back yard for some bush pruning and jasmine training up onto the patio cover. After the sun went down we went through all of their toys, decided which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of and organized them into the new toy storage rack.

We decided that we deserved a special treat so we rented Skyfall, set the girls up with a kid movie in the game room, and set ourselves up with big bowls of ice cream for ours. Abby fell asleep during theirs, and Rory and us went to bed far past our bedtimes but it felt so darn good to accomplish so much and have such a nice treat at the end of it all it was well worth it.