3 Suggestions for Organizing with ADHD

I've had ADHD forever and organizing for me is really hard. I tend to lose everything if I don't keep things clean AND organized, and that can be a lot of work! Over the years though, I've found three things that help me function.

1. Get rid of as many things as possible. The less stuff there is, the less stuff there is to distract and stress. That's actually why I'm so drawn to minimalism. It is a way of life that helps me keep my life in control.

2. Define the space. For example, my bedroom currently is for sleeping, dressing, and reading. Anything else cannot be in my bedroom because it distracts from those objective. Now that I'm married there are a few more things in there, but for the most part we stick pretty closely to those things.

Another example is that when I was younger, I had a designated space for homework outside of my room. That space was specifically designed just for homework and had other distractions minimized. It was actually right by the laundry room, so that I had white noise and my siblings would usually leave that part of the house alone. In college, I did the same thing by finding a place that I can focus that had no other big distractions. Each room, closet, and drawer in our home has a very specific purpose. By defining the spaces and using them only for those purposes helps me a lot!

3. Walk through your routines. One of the worst experiences I had in college was having a roommate "help" pack my closet after I asked her not to. When I came home and found everything in boxes, I sat on my floor and cried. I felt so overwhelmed because I seriously didn't know what to do with everything out of place. I ended up pouring out all the boxes and redoing everything, so that when I moved to my new apartment (with a new roommate) that I could set up my routines.

Every time I move to a new house I do this. It is that important.  

So what I mean by walk through a routine?

Let's take walking into my house after going some where. (This is probably the most important one I have).

So when I walk in, I open the closet closest to the door. I dump everything in my purse into my necessity baskets, hang up my purse and coat, and then put away my shoes. 

What this does...

a) keeps stuff from getting accidentally lost in my purse

b) gives my keys a designated spot

c) keeps me from buying duplicates of things that I lost

d) keeps my shoes and coats off the floor and together

e) helps getting out the door quickly

Necessity Basket

When I get ready to leave again, I can pick out what purse I want. Grab whatever I need, and put my shoes on. It's all there. If I need sunscreen or a full diaper bag, I have it all in my necessity basket.

It's not how most people organize there coat closet, but even if I get distracted, tired or sick this routine is so solid that I never lose my keys or wallet. Everything has a place and it's easy and convenient for me to follow it. If your kid has ADHD, you can walk through it with them! The way I graduated college was I had a counselor at BYU who did this with me once a week with my homework and backpack. It saved my grades and my sanity.

So I hope this isn't too complicated and answers any questions about organizing with ADHD.

Some questions about food

I'm starting to get in the swing of things with this new job. It only took a month. :) But I'm watching a two month old baby in my home every morning, so for now I have 2 small people in my home for half of the day. In a month, I'll have him full time.

 It's really different having them both. I forgot how demanding newborns are on my time, and Madeleine wants my attention still, so juggling them both has been a learning curve. Over the last week though I started getting into a routine. :) He comes usually asleep. Madeleine plays with me. At 10, he wakes up and plays with us. 11, Madeleine goes down for nap, then I feed him and he goes to sleep until his mom picks him up. 

Anyway, one of the big perks of having a little one in the house is more time to read and watch movies. I read two new books this month, Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson and We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler this month. They were both excellent reads, and I highly recommend them both.

As far as movies...I've watched plenty, but this last week I've been going through all of Amazon's food documentaries. Documentaries is a weird genre to begin with, since they are usually extremely biased. Ex. Matt and I watched one at the beginning of the month about the history of Britain's aerospace engineering...and we were chuckling about which planes they selected to make England look the best.

But back to the food documentaries, these are kind of disturbing and I can't get enough of them. For starters, I find any footage of animals being killed horrifying, but add the evil corporation stuff too and I am pretty upset by the end of the movie. The weird thing is I watch these documentaries already knowing a lot of what they are presenting. I know how bad animals are treated, and yet I consciously still eat meat. I know a lot of the organic food research. I've seen people struggle with feeding their families. Yet, I keep watching them, and for some reason...now it's actually changing a bit how I buy food.

For example, I'm making more of an effort to buy locally grown. We already eat vegetarian every other day. I'm passionately working on my garden. (We have small tomatoes and strawberries growing!) And just
yesterday I was making buttermilk pancakes, and on my buttermilk it said, "Go to upstatefarms.com for more information." So I did! And I found out about some farmers. I just want to add that it wasn't organic buttermilk, yet it was from grass fed cows that were treated humanely. Just saying.


The thing is I still have a lot of questions that these documentaries are missing. So if you know any of the answers...let me know. :) If not, I'm going to be researching a lot.

My list of questions
 I'm still not sure about all the farming companies being evil. Are there some good big guys right? They mentioned them during in this organic film. There are organic food being grown by very large corporate farms. Why does no one really talk about them?

GMOs aren't all evil right? That seems like a very broad term.

How is non-organic broccoli grown? All of the documentaries talk about soy, wheat and corn being evil, yet there is little mentioned about non-organic vegetable farms. This is a huge gap for me.
 
Are all other non-organic food being flown from other countries?

Should I be concerned that it comes from other countries? t sounds like many other countries have stricter rules on pesticides and GMOs than our country.

Organic doesn't equal humane animal treatment right? That seems to be a quiet secret.

Anyway, this is something that I'm looking into a lot. I've already decided that we aren't eating organic in our family. I think with our limited budget that it's better that we are eating more fruits and vegetables right now, than only one or two organic fruits or vegetables. I'll let you know what I find though as I research. You can be it will be done during nap times.

DIY Accent Wall

So this is before...

and this is after.

And here another angle.

What do you think?

Like it? Don't like it?

When I first put it up, I actually really hated it. The room felt so busy and cluttered, but the wall definitely what you look at first when you walk in the room.

Then I cleaned the room up and started really liking it. And now after a few days, this is what I figured out. I can't stand accent wall with a messy room. It looks 100x messier if there is almost anything on the floor. Madeleine was playing with her doll house and legos this morning and it felt a bit too cramped. Luckily the living room only takes about 5 minutes to clean (we shaved off about 5 minutes) thanks to our new shoe organizer!!!  

I don't think I've been this in love with an organizer before. Madeleine can reach the bottom 2 rows, so that's where her toys go, and then the rest is all of our shoes.  It's so easy just to shove toys into a hanging pocket then putting them away in Madeleine's room.

It cost $11 on amazon. :) And the wall was not my DIY. It's actually done with paint sharpie and you can find a great tutorial on how to do it here at Vintage Rival. I'm in love with her blog. The sharpie "wall paper" goes great with our sharpie Calvin and Hobbs posters. By the way, I just want to point out that Matt has come a long way with trusting me on projects. If I pitched this idea of drawing on the walls 6 months ago, he would have said no. This time he let me. Yay for trust. :)

So do you like it? Is it too busy? Would you ever draw on your walls? And any other sharpie DIY...it seems like we are big on them.

6 Ideas for Cooking with a 1 year old

I spend hours of every day cooking. Yesterday my sweet Chinese neighbor saw me outside at 6:00PM. She looked at me really confused, "But don't you usually cook dinner inside now?" I laughed. It's true...every stay-at-home-mom seems to go inside at 5:30 to cook. It just happens that yesterday we got dinner at the chemistry building. :)

So what do I do with Madeleine during these hours that I spend cooking? Well, sometimes I let her scream at me the whole time. Sometimes I put on Curious George. Sometimes she'll "cook" at her kitchen, but frequently I have her cook with me. She started helping me right before she turned 1. From my own googling, I know that there isn't a lot of advice for cooking with a 1 year old, so here is mine. 

1.  When baking, substitute bananas for eggs if possible.
 Madeleine is really good at smashing bananas with a pastry blender. When she gets sick of that she uses her hands.

*Bonus: Without eggs, the dough is safe to eat!*

2. Have your toddler hand you the produce out of the bags. 

I prewash as much as possible when we get home from the store. She loves this, especially if there is a rubber band she has to get off.

3. They can peel off the skin of an onion and rip apart lettuce and celery.

Madeleine is awesome at ripping things up. She rips up mushrooms too. 

4. Make a sample plate of as many ingredients as possible.

While I'm chopping, I put aside a few pieces of each thing and place it on her plate. While I'm on the stove,  Madeleine sits on the counter or her stool and tries the different foods. I love this for several reasons. 1. It gets her out of the way when I really can't have her around. 2. It keeps her from screaming while I'm ignoring her. 3. It introduces and exposes her to foods more times. Isn't there some rumor that after you try something 20 times that you don't like, you'll learn to like it?  Well, if that's true, there is two exposures to each food. Once while cooking, and again at dinner. 

5.  If you're really patient, you can let them wash the veggies.

I've only done this a few times, but you can put a big bowl on the floor and let them "wash" the fruits and veggies. It's a mess, but it keeps them quiet.

6. You can let them pour stuff in.

I don't usually let Madeleine do this yet, since she's only 16 months, but I do let her pour in less messy things like chocolate chips. (And if she misses the bowl a bit, I know she'll find the ones she drops and eat them.)

She helps me enough that we made her own apron.

I definitely don't have her help with every meal, but I do aim for one meal a day.

Do you have any tips or like any of these ideas?

Decluttering

Back when I wrote this blog post, my goal for our home was to be able to clean each room in the house in fifteen minutes...even at it's messiest.

We actually have achieved that goal with every room but the kitchen. I've decided that the kitchen is a losing battle. Without a dishwasher, even the dishes from just one meal take at least twenty minutes. But since we are moving at some point, (Princeton keeps switching when) I started tackling the closets. We aren't expecting to have much closet space in our next home, so I'm trying to become less dependent on closets. 

It was pretty amazing how much stuff we were able to get rid of just going through the large closet in the living room. Almost none of it went to the trash. Some of my neighbors took the bigger items, and the rest were taken by people on freecycle. We've decided having stuff just leave our home is better than waiting for someone else to buy it, and usually on freecycle, it will be gone sometime that day. 

We still have two more closets to tackle this week, but I feel satisfied by what we have already done. When the last bit was picked up, Matt gave me a hug and thanked me for doing this. I think that's one of the best encouragements, and I'm so glad that he is on board with me about how many things we need.

For birthdays, we are gravitating away from presents and instead working on cool experiences.

This is a recap of Matt's birthday. He got one gift...and one experience. I have my fingers crossed about the experience. He still doesn't know what it is, so we get to surprise him on Thursday.

Sweet Gifts

Last year for Mother's Day, Matt was so good at surprising me that I had a break down and cried because I thought he had forgot. Madeleine was five months old, and I told Matt that I did deserve some recognition because this motherhood thing was just so hard. And even if Mother's Day was just a halmark holiday, I still wanted extra love and attention so that I knew that someone appreciated me, because Madeleine sure didn't act like she did.  (Little did I know that Madeleine would become a much easier baby in a matter of days. haha)

Looking back at those thoughts just make me smile. I've grown so much in this last year. This year mother's day really was a celebration. Madeleine is a cute little sixteen month old who is happy and usually pretty sweet. Having a celebration for Mother's day wasn't nearly as important this year as last year, but Matt still surprised me and went out of his way to make it a great day. 

Matt was such a sweet husband. Despite the fact he didn't get to sleep til 6:00AM, he still woke up at 9:30 and made french toast for me. (Probably my very favorite breakfast foods). He then dressed Madeleine up in her Easter dress and had her carry my present to me. 

She did a great job of bringing to me, but she wouldn't give it to me. She sat next to me on the bed clutching it and not let me touch it, so I had to wait a while to open it. In the mean while I "read" my card.

I was thrilled. I think most women would be pretty excited to get a Tiffany's necklace for Mother's Day, but I was even more touched because it crossed off an item on my 20's bucket list. 

"Own something from Tiffany's"

Okay, so maybe a bit shallow for a bucket list item, but I really wanted something from there. I was planning on running the Nike's Women half marathon to get something from Tiffany's. (That's what you get instead of a medal.) Matt thought that was a bad idea and wanting to save me the pain just got me this instead. He also said that it was really from Madeleine for being her mom.

No matter what the reason, it's lovely.

We ended the day skyping with our siblings that are all over the world. Mollie is in Chile. Anna is in Brazil, and Riley in LA. :)

It was wonderful day.

I hope yours was too!

Mother's Day Cards

 We've been doing digital cards for different holidays.

These are the ones for Mother's Day.

Garden

Anyone that follows up on facebook probably saw this picture of Madeleine gardening. We (Madeleine and me, Matt wants nothing to do with the garden) have been working on the garden.

On the day that Madeleine looked like that, the garden looked like this.

And on top of that, it was flooded so she sat in the water and splashed in the muddy water.

Now...there is just mud! w00t!!!

This is what it looked like tonight when I left. There is still a lot for me to do, but we have plants growing. Matt is concerned that I'm going to kill most of the plants, but if we get one piece of produce per plant, then we'll break even. That's not hard to beat, right?

I'm really excited. Our kitchen looks right out to the garden, (so it's like 5 feet from our house) and Madeleine can practice her pouring skills. We have strawberry plants that were left over from last year that are blooming already, so we'll have fresh strawberries in the next few weeks!

Some DIY in Goobie's room

So last time I posted, (Matt did the last post) I talked about putting a twin bed in Madeleine's room and hating it. Since then we all have added our own talents to the room to help it feel more homey.

I made the pillows.

This pillow was made from fabric I already had. I bought it at a garage sale here in Princeton for a quarter. Can't beat that!

This pillowcase was already made, but I freezer stenciled the design onto the pillow. It was my first time trying it, and I love how it turned out!

Matt's and Madeleine's contributions are on this side of the room.

Madeleine's was clearly the art work. It photographed a little weird since the windows were open, but Madeleine was reading a book so I didn't want to shut them. I really love having these finger paint paintings on the wall. They are so bold and really brighten up the room.

Madeleine's favorite part of the room (and every other kid or baby that goes in there) is Matt's DIY.

He made these space shuttles models and hung them on her ceiling. He loved putting them together and seriously all the kids love looking at them. Even the two month old baby who was over this morning couldn't stop staring at them. Madeleine points to them whenever she is eating, and she frequently tries to trick me into picking her up by them so that she can touch them. What I like about them is that they are so light that if they fell on any baby or kid, the child would be fine. That's actually a big criteria for anything that goes into Madeleine's room, so I'm grateful that Matt put something that was safe and really cool.

Matt post: how I learned to love chemicals

A Matt post:

One trend that I find a little disturbing is a growing misunderstanding of chemistry. I have encountered people who range from being wary of synthetic chemicals in the environment (which isn't a bad idea) to being downright militant in insisting that all 'chemicals' are an affront to both humanity and nature and should be banned henceforth. I'd like to take a few minutes to throw in a good word for chemistry and to explain why removing all commodity chemicals from society would be neither desirable nor even feasible.


1) To begin, what is a chemical? To me, a chemical is any substance composed of atoms, which in turn are stable arrays of protons, neutrons, and electrons. By this definition, most of the observable universe is made of chemicals. This includes our planet, our oceans, our atmosphere, and most importantly to us, our bodies which are in essence mobile, self-replicating chemical reactors made of proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates.

(beware of self-replicating chemical entities)

I believe that to many people, a chemical is more narrowly defined as a substance that has been prepared artificially, such as in a laboratory. This definition is fine with me, but one should be aware that chemicals made in a laboratory and chemicals found in nature are fundamentally the same. For example, if I were to synthesize Vitamin C in a laboratory, it would have identical properties to Vitamin C found in nature. Regardless of the origin, it would provide the same nutritional benefits.

         

           (natural vitamin C)                               (synthetic vitamin C)

You get it. It's the same thing. Now, someone who has taken organic chemistry will point out that in a gram of synthetic vitamin C (which contains trillions upon trillions of molecules) there are statistically bound to be impurities, regardless of the purification method. This is true, but I'd just like to point out that nature isn't immune to this either, in fact it is often less efficient. In any biosynthesis, there are byproducts. Translation: Any food you eat, no matter how natural the source, has random crap in it, some of which could very well be bad for you, except there's usually not enough for that to happen.

2) Are chemicals dangerous? Yes! Synthetic and natural chemicals alike. Take water for instance. You need it to survive. But too much of it will kill you. I work in a chemistry lab, so I spend much of my time surrounded with bottles with all sorts of funny symbols on them:

This one means "don't get this stuff on your skin or stuff you care about" (corrosive).

To me, this symbol looks like some one getting in touch with their inner self, but in fact it means "don't inhale this stuff" (respiratory hazard).

These chemicals apparently kill fishes and trees (environmental hazard).

This symbol, which means "harmful" or "irritant" usually just gets put on every bottle, no matter how innocuous, because, hell, it's a chemical so it's probably bad for you in some way.

Despite these terrifyingly rendered symbols, the truth is that I don't receive much if any harmful chemical exposure at work. Part of this is due to the proper use of personal protective equipment, such as gloves, goggles, and a fume hood, but part of it is because these chemicals are not as sinister as they are made out to be. What these symbols don't convey is that the danger depends on the type of exposure and the dose. Some nerve agents are lethal in milligram quantities through skin contact. Surprisingly, I don't make these. Some chemicals you could take a bath in and be none the worse for wear--but you probably shouldn't be drinking them.

So are synthetic chemicals inherently bad for you? No! Let me give a shot at a metaphor. Consider the ocean:

(the ocean)

The ocean is beautiful, a source of life, a great place to take a date, but it can also be dangerous, for example, when you are heading full speed through a field of icebergs. Does that mean you stay away? No! Does that mean you go swimming by yourself? No! Just be smart about it.

3) What would life be like without synthetic chemicals? Well, food would be a lot more expensive for one, although it would be a bit more natural I suppose. Would it be healthier? Well, if you only ate Banquet microwave meals, Pepsi, and Snickers, it might be, but this isn't the fault of the chemical additives, it's those dastardly carbohydrates which are quite natural, but a problem if you eat them by the shovel-load. The shelf-life would suck, and without agrochemicals, the resulting hunger wars would probably make for some interesting reading in another galaxy. Would there be less industrial waste in the environment? Well, yes, but that kind of begs the question. Believe it or not, synthetic chemicals show up in a lot more than just groceries and groundwater. The largest production commodity chemicals are polymers, which are produced by the billions of tons. Without these, you wouldn't have any plastic. This would include most of your clothing, all of your appliances, a lot of the building materials in your residence, and most of the junk you keep there. You wouldn't have a car or a computer or a phone, and the internet and global communications wouldn't exist. You wouldn't be able to blog about the evil chemical industry. There wouldn't really be any viable modern manufacturing. Welcome to the nineteenth century. Oh, and metallurgy is technically chemistry, so I guess we are back to caves and rocks.

(plastic for sale)

I'm not trying to say that all chemicals are harmless, or that all chemical manufacturers are guiltless, but seriously, you do not want to live in a 'chemical-free' world.

4) Can chemicals actually be good sometimes? Yes! Metallurgy allowed the construction of the first civilizations. The advent of vaccines and antibiotics caused a substantial increase in life expectancy. (Vaccines were invented by Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, and the first commercial antibiotic was discovered by Gerhard Domagk who worked for the infamous German chemical company IG Farben.)

Believe it or not. Chemistry can save the world. In fact it did already (sorry physics and biology!) In 1798, a man by the name of Malthus published An Essay on the Principles of Population. Malthus described how in a period of exponential population growth, the population can rapidly exceed the available resources (food) leading to a catastrophe that usually involves starvation, war, etc. He didn't predict exactly when humanity would run out of food, but in 1798, Earth hosted approximately 800 million humans, and now we have surpassed 6 billion. Some are inclined to make fun of Malthus, but I think he was right. We should have run out of food by now, but we didn't, and at the moment at least, we do produce enough food to feed everyone, even if geopolitics prevents its full distribution. What happened?

Fritz Haber. That's what happened. In 1905 (which is incidentally the same year Einstein published the theory of special relativity), Fritz Haber figured out how to make ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen using a heterogeneous iron catalyst. 

                (err... maybe this helps?)

Why was this important? Well, in World War I, it allowed Germany to keep making bombs and prolonged aggressions by over a year. BUT AFTER THAT, it was used to make fertilizer. FERTILIZER = FOOD. This was so important that one of the first things the allies requested after the war were plans to build a functioning Haber process plants. (Prior to implementing the Haber process, the United States imported most of its fertilizer in the form of seagull droppings from Peru. That's right, you heard me correctly.) Currently, Haber plants are capable of producing one ton of ammonia per minute. That's a lot of fertilizer. And it feeds more than half of the world.

Now before you get comfortable. Here are some tidbits. Fertilizer runoff is a big problem. I don't know much about it, but apparently it causes algae blooms and such. Also, where does the hydrogen gas come from? Weeeelllll... it actually comes from the water gas shift reaction (see below again):

  

You see that CO2 thing on the right? Yea... that's carbon dioxide. You know what's making a lot of that carbon dioxide that people are complaining about? It's not your car. It's not even your power plant. It's the Haber plant that is making all of the fertilizer that is allowing the 6 billion people on the planet to survive.

Conclusion? I hope the next time someone feels compelled to attack the chemical industry, they'll remember that it's also what's keeping us alive. Are we slowly dying from chemical poisoning? I don't know, but I do know that prior to the industrial revolution, life expectancy was somewhere around 30 years, and now it's about 70 or so. Are there unsolved problems? Yes. And if you are interested in solving them, become a chemist! (just fyi, jobs are kinda hard to get right now)

A Sappy Mom Story of Lasts

Life has been so busy with so many wonderful things. Life is good, and I can't wait to share all that has been happening. But right now I want to quickly share something that has been on my mind for the last week before it disappears.

Last week we upgraded Madeleine to a twin bed. It was time. Matt and I had been discussing it for a month or so. We noticed she was falling out of her bed all the sudden. Partly because of all the toys that she insist on sleeping with and partly because she really just has grown that big. I was dragging my feet a bit with it. I love the size of the baby mattress and once we move up a size...there really isn't any going back. I bought her two pairs of twin sheets but didn't do anything about the mattress for another month or so.

Finally one day I got enough nerve to switch out the mattresses. I was ornery whole time I moved the twin mattress into her room. When I put it down in her room, it immediately felt out of place. It was so large compared to everything else in the room. I grumbled and complained as Madeleine sat in my room watching Tangled. I hated the room and decided everything had to be changed. I was so annoyed. Madeleine must have felt my frustration, because she came out to "help" by trying to organize her toys. After reorganizing all of the closets in the house and Madeleine's room I was finally kind of satisfied with the change. 

That night as I stuck her in bed, she was so excited. She jumped onto her mattress laughing. She drug every single one of her musical instruments next to her on her bed. As I tucked her in with her normal baby blankets, they seemed so tiny and out of place on the large mattress. She didn't seem to care as she snuggled right into the blankets and happily fell asleep on her new bed.

Her new twin size bed

A few hours later when Matt came home, we checked on her. She was peacefully sprawled across her bed. In that moment, we knew made the right decision. She had been sleeping curled up in a ball on the smaller mattress so that she wouldn't fall off. This was better for her.

I didn't really think much about the mattress again until I was doing the laundry. I sat there on my bed folding her baby sheets for the last time. The tears hit me immediately. When I was pregnant I read this article about remembering the lasts as you celebrate firsts. I knew that this would be the last time I would fold and washed these sheets for her. It was sad for me. It might sound corny, but her bedding was a such big deal for me.

 In our first apartment, she didn't have a nursery, since we only had a one room apartment. All she had was a corner with a crib. I was so excited to make her bedding, since that was one of the few ways I could actually prepare for her coming. I agonized over the fabrics for her quilt. I squealed when we put the sheets on for the first time. I first laid her on them when she was small enough that her tiny chest could fit easily in my hand. Over the last fifteen months, I have laid and then later tucked her on that bed hundreds of times. As I tucked her into her mattress for her last nap in her bed, my heart broke a bit. That era of the tiny mattress is over, and it's one I'm going to miss. 

Last nap in tiny bed

Lasts are funny things. It's a lot easier to celebrate firsts. They are exciting and new. But with lasts, I've noticed that I have to give myself a bit of time to pause a recognize them, otherwise I find myself a bit angry when the changes start. But once I grieve for the sweet moments that are ending, I have more room to celebrate the moments that are coming. 

I think that's one of the hardest parts of being a mom. Mothers do the same small things over and over again. Sometimes you love it, and sometimes you really resent it. It always seems like that stage will never pass, but when it does, you suddenly you miss it. And after many stages I guess you become one of those well-meaning ladies in the grocery store check out line that are telling you that "It goes by so fast." Moms seem to resent those comments when their kids are screaming in the grocery store, but I think those ladies just understand the importance of lasts and are telling us to enjoy those along with the firsts.

A Ragtime Morning

Good morning!

We all got up bright and early this morning. Matt gave a presentation yesterday and got all excited about chemistry again. So he got up early so he could get back to work. Madeleine has allergies pretty bad from all this rain we've been having, so she got up earlier than usual. And it's my first day of work! So I got up because I couldn't sleep. (A cranky baby might have helped with that too.)

We had a bit of time to kill before campus opens from flooding, so we turned to the piano. We started with Beethoven and end with some ragtime. We all took turns playing. Having a piano in the home has been wonderful.

And ragtime I think was made to make people dance, so we did. I got all my new job jitters out doing the jitterbug, while Matt and Madeleine swung around the living room.

How do you like to start your morning? Any favorite songs to wake up to?