I use a lot of canned tomato products and I use a lot of canned coconut milk as well.  I also use canned chicken or tuna if I need a quick meal and I like keeping canned beans on hand to throw together a meal in a pinch, or add some protein to a meal.

And I like having a decent supply of food on hand so I won’t have to run to the store if someone is sick, or if something were to happen like a big storm.  It’s a little security feature for me to have a full cupboard

So what I’d really love is to have a great way to organize my canned goods.  Preferably something that will keep my Brennan happy too… and amazingly, I’m not alone.  I’ve found something that would be 100% perfect.  On Friday I have a chance to win one – and so do you.  I thought I’d share the wonder that is the Shelf Reliance Harvest unit.

You know those marble toys you played with as a kid (or jealously watched your brother play with as you got yet another pair of plastic high heels)? You dropped the marble in at the top and watched it roll down the levels.  Well the Shelf Reliance shelves do that for your cans – keeping them neat, and automatically rotating them so you’re using them in a “first in, first out” order.  It’s very nice!

Go to the Shelf Reliance Blog and enter to win this wonder of human ingenuity for yourself.

And in the meantime, you can see what the kids and I have been rigging up for a summer project – homemade can rotating racks   Scott got inspired and built us a wooden one too, which will probably last long after our cardboard ones.  But it’s fun and the kids are loving it.  If only they were front-loading like the Shelf Reliance System :p

The children are loving being outside though, and I’m loving them being outside!  It gives me some peace.  Right now parenting has gotten overwhelming so it’s a relief to let them be outside.  Today they are enjoying playing with sidewalk chalk.  And Scott has given them the task of keeping the sticks in the yard picked up.  As soon as the rest of the snow is gone from the front yard we’ll be able to rake some of the leaves up – they’ve been sitting there under the snow since the fall.  There’s only a tiny bit of snow at all in the back yard.

I am tired today.  Didn’t get a nap yesterday and I’ve worked hard yesterday and today.  I finally got this blog where it’s supposed to be – http://blog.naturalbirthandbabycare.com – and I’m so happy about that.  Change your bookmarks!  I’m still working on getting links to it integrated into the main Natural Birth and Baby Care.com site and you can see that the look and feel is quite different from the blog to the main site.  That will probably be the case for awhile.  I don’t forsee the time to do a redesign of the blog or the main site before summer comes.  But I am working on the blog little by little as well as the site.

I’m still trying to do spring cleaning which is challenging, to say the least, when I still have a lot of nausea going on.  I’m really hopping this will end soon.  But I’ve gotten much of the office done (though it’s getting cluttered again and I need to work on that).  I’m working on the kid’s room now.  My current secret is to get everything that doesn’t belong in the room OUT.  Then I organize what’s left that actually goes there.  This means my office is pretty clean (except for the hamper because we can’t figure out where to put that…).  It also means the landing upstairs is piled high with “stuff.”  But I like this strategy because I actually see results.  The front rooms (our dining room and den which kind of connect together) have also stayed pretty clean.

We’re going to order a little bookshelf for the kids and some closet organizing things soon.  I’m waiting to get the kid closet clean so I can decide what components of the organizer I want, then we’ll do that.  I think it will improve the organizing situation for both the den and the closets.

So spring cleaning and nesting.  And sprucing up my websites a bit.  A nice pastime for this season.  I’m just hoping I’ll have more energy to accomplish all of my goals soon.  Our little Peanut sure tuckers me out.