Last night we tried Mister Ole off bed again. He’s good about sleeping next to the bed but without fail, every time he has a good night sleeping, he still ends up having a potty regression in the house at some point the next day. Also, when I woke up, I took them both outside and then let him come up onto the bed to snuggle/snooze for a lazy morning with Esteban, Avi and I, and at one point, I rumpled the duvet near him and he freaked out like he was being attacked again and went for Avi, who reliably freaked out and then everyone was upset, so that was the end of lazy morning snuggles for everyone. Oy.
Today I went to war with the bedroom. Ole had some destructive fun with a discarded tissue, a toilet paper tube and also some cardboard he pulled out of the trash, so there were confetti of varying shades and qualities around the bedroom and bathroom. I also have been trying to do the (fucking) laundry when the bin is full rather than waiting until I run out of clothes, because let’s face it, I will never run out of clothes. Actually, that’s not true — we eventually run out of clean bath towels and I run out of pajama pants (I wear them two days in a row and also am picky about my pajama pants, so I have a dwindling stock of boxer shorts that feel soft and don’t bind and are made out of cotton stretchy fabric), but that takes about two weeks, and if I let more than a week’s worth of dirty stuff collect, I WILL run out of patience while I suffer through the mountain of stank.
I also mopped part of the bathroom, filled two more bags to go to charity (although it occurs to me that there may not be anywhere accepting donations given the pandemic, so it may just go out into the garage for now), and vacuumed the bedroom. We bought a Dyson cordless vacuum as an early Christmas gift to ourselves during the Black Friday sales and oh my god, if you need any kind of cleaning motivation, the Dyson will supply appropriate feedback. The hair. My god the hair. I mean, I knew that the animals are constant shedders because you can see little tumbleweeds collect in the corners of rooms, so it’s hard to ignore, but oh my god, when you swoop the Dyson over areas that aren’t corners and boom, tons of hair? I feel like the most disgusting slovenly person in the world. Just what I needed — reinforcement of my belief that I’m barely functioning as an adult.
I also gave into my inner fussbudget and sorted some of my shirts by color. I’ve resisted this in the past, but good golly, I may never go back. The order! The choices! The ease of getting dressed!
Plus, if plain white t-shirts were currency, I would be a very rich woman. It helped me feel better about tossing two of them which have shrunk to be unflatteringly short, and one black t-shirt I’ve been holding onto because it has a cute zipper detail but it was a bad cutting error and is so laughingly disproportioned that I feel like I’m baring my bosom every time I wear it.
(Why do things always shrink up? I never notice t-shirts shrinking tighter/less roomy around but they always get shorter. I also have a pair of yoga pants that started as regular long pants and then gradually got shorter and shorter until they became cropped pants and now they are literally just below my knees. That’s weird, right? That shouldn’t happen?)
Hopefully I will continue my sense of purpose tomorrow and will tackle some of the finer cleaning, along with my skin care and beauty vanity, which is atrocious and also, dusty. The saddest thing is that I’ve basically reduced my entire regime down to face cleaning followed by two moisturizers at night and in the morning — hair goes into a messy bun at night, and a different messy bun or maybe a ponytail in the morning. Meanwhile hundreds of dollars of product sit languishing, drying out and oxidizing.
I’ve been trying to use UP stuff during this quarantine — it’s a good time to take a chance on various hair products and skin care stuff, shampoo and leave-ins. I went through a big wave of buying the bundles of smaller travel size curated collections for awhile, so I have probably three tiny bottles of Moroccan Oil, four different tiny sprays of the same Invisible Primer from Bumble and bumble, etc. I managed to kill a giant bottle of Kiehl’s conditioner (one of those half gallon jobs) three weeks ago and I’m trying to kill the end of a similar giant conditioner from Living Proof. Every time I throw another little bottle into recycling, I pat myself on the back but then I look back at the serious dragon’s hoard of bottles, tubes, tubs and jars and feel ashamed for the pitiful vain crone I am.
What are your mini projects this week? How are you keeping yourself occupied? Tell me how you’re doing in the comments!
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Keeping busy: 1) my kids are 3 and 5 years old, so… 2) last year, we bought what had been my grandparents’ farm and are sloooowly renovating the house and property after squatters basically destroyed it for five years.
Oh, I so relate to using stuff up! I have all these curly hair products that I keep buying, and most of them don’t work. (Uncle Funky’s Daughter is the only brand my hair seems to like.) So I’ve been using all these hair products that leave my hair frizzy and undefined, because who’s going to see? And that way I don’t have to feel guilty for tossing them. I’ve been rocking some unruly big hair these days!