Putting Santa In His Place

You know, as jaded a parent as I am, I have managed to take the kids to the pool 4 days in a row. That's 4 times I have endured the humiliation intrinsic to wearing my swimsuit in public, just so my girls could have fun.  I would like an award, thank you.

I am still attempting to reconstruct my bedroom closet.  Larry emptied it so he could tear the walls out, and then the handyman put up new walls and painted and installed some rods and organizers and extra shelves and I had a good, oh, 2 hours of looking at the empty closet and envisioning how beautiful it would be, once I put everything in there properly. But then I went out, and Larry - thinking he was helping - took all the bins he had shoved closet stuff into and piled those bins in the closet.  He also took a bunch of boxes and stuffed them onto the high shelves.  I could have wept. Really.

So the other day I took most of the things out AGAIN and have slowly been sorting and deciding where things go.  Now the bedroom is a mess, with half-empty Rubbermaid bins scattered all over the place.  But hey, the closet looks great!  I've decided that we will NO LONGER use it as a catch-all area for items that have no home.  I'll use David's closet for that, if he would just hurry up and go to college already.

No rush, David! Kidding! Ignore those empty suitcases I just piled in your bedroom!

Yup, we have the cookie jar, too.

In other news, I finally managed to get the last bin of holiday items put up in the attic - you know, things like the Santa salt and pepper shakers and the Santa matroshka doll and the Santa towels from the powder room. They've been floating around the upstairs in a laundry basket for months, along with the Santa cocktail napkins from our New Year's party, because we didn't notice them before we put all the official holiday storage bins away last January.

This is normal, right?  I wouldn't know, since I was raised Jewish.  All we had to put away was the electric menorah, which we kept in the upstairs linen closet.  I guess we weren't very festive, actually.

And...that's all I've got today, folks.  Maybe tomorrow I will talk about the injustice that is having to share my birthday with Father's Day, but not today.  Today I will just sit here and revel in my newly Santa-free home.  I think I've earned it.



[Cookie jar image: Cracker Barrel]