So I suppose I am officially nesting because I have been working hard on our house.  I’ll admit the baby is a major motivation – indirectly and directly.  I of course want a nice, clean, well-prepared home when the baby arrives.  But I also want the house to be somewhat presentable for the midwife and anyone else who may come to assist after the birth of the baby :p

I’ve also been working on it just because I want a neat and clean home.  To my credit I got most of the moving boxes gone within a couple of weeks of moving in.  We still have a few around in out-of-the-way spots.  But I dislike boxes unless they’re being used for storage. Even with the boxes gone, though, our house was (and is) cluttered.

I do not like clutter.  Even if we had a bigger house I still wouldn’t like clutter.  And if you move to a bigger place and you have clutter, your clutter just gets bigger too.  So I’ve been focusing on some really bad spots and it has really helped.  The kids’ room was the first place I got straightened up.  Since then I’ve been working mostly on our upstairs landing and some in the bedroom and office.

The house has improved a lot of the past few weeks and I’m really pleased.  I still have a lot to do (I haven’t touched the kitchen!)  But it’s a lot neater, more open, and functional.   If we’re going to have these things, we should be able to use them.

I’ve done all this by working about 30 minutes a day.  On the weekends when Scott is here to help me with bigger things we spend a bit more time on it.  But I usually work about 30 minutes each weekday and I’ve been surprised at how much gets done and how satisfied I feel with it.  There’s still a bunch to do and the never-ending mountain of paperwork to take care of.  But every week the house is looking better, and I’m able to take care of household paperwork faster and more efficiently (I mostly work through papers and budget issues on Fridays, and each Friday it has been a little easier as I’ve tackled the backlog).

So if you’re “nesting” and want to organize your house give short increments a go.  It’s good for the first and third trimesters when your energy may be lower.  And it’s great because you see definite progress towards your goal but you don’t get so overwhelmed that you quit altogether!

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.