Favorite things of the week...

In the spirit of finding happiness in an otherwise uneventful life, here are the things that made me smile on the inside this week:

The Elimination of Laundry Piles
I finally tackled the laundry monster today. Not the dirty laundry monster. I am blessed by having a clean freak of a husband (talk about kismet...) who normally does the washing and drying while leaving the folding to me. (The truth is that he gives folding a valiant effort, but I have begged him to let me do the folding duties on several occasions. If you're not going to do it right, don't do it at all, right? I don't mind.) I have a horrible habit, though, of living out of laundry baskets. I haaaaaaaaaate putting laundry away. The drawer-clothes are not so bad. It's the hanger-clothes. I hate them. I don't know why; it doesn't consume that much time. And I know very well that trying to find a particular outfit every morning from the abyss of a full laundry basket of (expertly) folded clothing is in all actuality much more time consuming and annoying than putting the clothes away in the first place... but there they sit, in the corner of the bedroom. Before you ask, I DO in fact have a system of putting away clothes and it involves sorting them into piles according to their final destination... and then walking downstairs to play on facebook and leaving them in piles on the bed until Matt puts them back in the laundry basket when he goes to bed 10 minutes before I do. I forced myself to play the "let's see how many piles I can put away during THIS commercial break" game tonight, and I WON! I'm feeling very accomplished, much more organized, and less cluttered.

Apples & Jif (crunchy, please)
It's an old standard, but it has new meaning in my life. Thanks to Oprah of all people, I'm paying much more attention this week to what goes into my body and where it comes from (from a health perspective, not so much a dieting perspective, though I conjecture that they will eventually overlap) and basically what that meant for me this week is that I didn't eat frozen meals for lunch or mac and cheese dinners. (For the record, I didn't miss them.) I doubted the potential for filling-quality, but I've found great joy in Fuji apples, quartered and covered in crunchy PB... and cheese with a few Flipsides crackers. Flipsides (the Townhouse cracker with pretzel on one side) would totally be on my list of happy things, but they're made with enriched white flour and I feel guilty and hypocritical about that, given my intent to ingest healthy things.

Driving Miss Vivienne
I've been lucky to be able to pick Vivienne up from kindergarten several times this week. I not-so-secretly enjoy it. They release the kindergarteners from the cafeteria one by one and we walk to the car, her miniature hand in mine. I know I'm making more of it than it is, but it's nice to be able to be the one who takes care of her for an hour and a half until Matthew gets home from work. I really want her to know how much I care about her and like to have fun with her; it's not always easy to show her those things when Daddy is home... but who can blame her for being distracted by her 'real' parent. Anyway, that hour and a half might not sound like a long time, but I look forward to it all morning/afternoon.

Afternoon Naps During Football Games
Enough said.