Spring Approaching

It's March now, and around this time every year I become obsessed with the concept of spring cleaning. Note that I didn't say I actually clean. I just obsess about it, then feel guilty when I realize it's July and too late for it to count as spring -- it's just cleaning. Then it turns 100 degrees in the Valley for three months and I can barely be arsed to get off the couch, much less clean the house top to bottom.

This time around, I'm giving myself a couple of projects. Scott leaves for a month next Monday, and I'm trying to be realistic about what I can accomplish while he's gone. So much about daily life when he's away is just about maintaining -- maintaining my sanity, maintaining Sadie's daily schedule, maintaining my own health and medical needs and occasionally, my eyebrows and bikini line. Those last two are the first to go if anything goes wrong.

This week, the project I've committed myself to is converting the old, ugly card table in our kitchen into a crafts table for Sadie. She's discovered the joy of Play-Doh and coloring, and Ana is the one who discovered that if you put her in her high chair and adjust the height to the level of the card table, it makes a perfect surface. Today I'm going to Lakeshore Learning to buy a cheap plastic tablecloth, some coloring and stickerbooks, watercolor paints and brushes. I'm also hoping to find some flat, wide shelving units to hold books and paper, and maybe a couple of bins for art supplies. I know she's too young right now to use things like scissors and glitter (I shudder to imagine, actually), but that time is right around the corner so I'd like to be prepared for it. I'm also hoping to find some sort of shelving unit or board that I can use to display her finished work.

One reason Ana, our nanny, is so great is because she has crazy amounts of energy and is always driving me to find new ways to entertain Sadie. Other nannies would march her to the playground every day, or sit on the floor with her toys and play with her on the play mat. With Ana, I'll come home to find them making animals out of Play-Doh or using wooden blocks to learn her ABC's. That's the biggest reason why I want to get this crafts table done -- I think Sadie's going to surprise me by how quickly she'll be ready to start using it and how much fun she's going to have with it.

Today we had a tiny triumph: usually I hide in the house if Sadie and Ana are also home, so she doesn't see me and yell for me. Today by accident I walked into the living room while Ana was there by the door, holding her. I told Sadie I was going to work and kissed her goodbye, and naturally she learned into my arms saying, "Up!" But after Ana explained that I was leaving, and I told her I'd be back later, she seemed to understand that. She even said "bye bye" to me as I left, and didn't cry at all. It made my heart so glad to know that she's past the phase of being upset by my leaving her, at least with Scott and Ana.

If I get really ambitious during Scott's absence, I might even try to tackle touching up the paint in Sadie's room. There's a really ugly gash on the wall where her crib is, which is from her damn animal nightlight. I don't know why Fisher Price designed this thing to have an arm which sticks out four inches from the side of the crib, but it does and so we can't put the crib flush against the wall; this stupid gap exists there and eats up many, many pacifiers. And the arm rubs away the paint on the wall.

This is part of a larger project of reconfiguring Sadie's bedroom. Currently we have a guest bed in there, which -- I don't know why it's in there. It never gets used. Awhile back we bought a pillow-top for the mattress to give it padding, but it has no way of staying on the bed, so when you sit on the bed the pillow top sloooooowly slides off onto the floor. I don't use it to sleep on, because Sadie and I wake each other up if we sleep in the same room, and we don't often have houseguests, so it just sits there and takes up space. This weekend we're moving the bed into the garage and transferring the rocking chair from the family room into the bedroom. I plan to put it in the corner next to her bookcase, add a pillow or two, and make it a nice cozy reading nook.

This is necessary, because Sadie has decided that she no longer wants to go to sleep. I'm surprised it took her this long to figure out that going to bed sucks, but now that she knows it, she screams her fool head off for at least two or three minutes once we put her in there. I've begun easing her slowly into a bedtime frame of mind by taking her into the bedroom and reading some books with her with the lights dimmed and her nightlight on. This would be a lot easier to do if we didn't have to worry about constantly sliding off the bed onto the floor.