Packet-free.

Oh, man. My world is full of changes right now. Good changes! Just changes, in the middle of which is a busy schedule, so though things are fabulous right now -- really! -- I still find myself looking forward to August when all the dust settles and the changes can become routine. I've been discovering recently that I do better with routines, and when they're thrown off, so am I.

(If you're curious: I started two new jobs, the little one started preschool, the husband is out of town for training, and next week I will be out of town being a hippie at the Great Lakes Retreat in Michigan.)

And none of that has anything to do with what I actually wanted to jot down today.

Today, I am doing just a little more to do just one more little thing to help us eat a little healthier and save a little money.

My son -- I love him -- asked to make "that bean soup I like" (and I like that I have a 4 year old who specifically asks for bean soup), so I promised him I'd look at the recipe, make sure we have everything we need for it, and that we would make it tonight. I knew we had all the beans, but I knew we did not have the packets of taco seasoning or ranch mix. And I also knew I didn't want to buy them; the reason we don't make the bean soup more often anyway is that I don't like all the chemical ingredients in the packets of seasonings, not to mention that they're $1-2 for basically 3tbsp of cheap spices plus all the crap added in.

So today I decided that instead of going to the store and cringing at myself as I bought more maltodextrin- and MSG-ridden flavoring packets, that I would look up homemade recipes for them myself.

I have done this. I've emailed myself a few versions of each recipe just in case we want to experiment and see which one we all like better. Also, I'll admit it, I specifically picked one of two of the combinations to save because I knew we already had all the ingredients for those at home and I wouldn't have to stop and buy anything else. This may sound like a money-saving adventure, and sure, I guess, it is, but really? I just don't want to have to stop at the grocery store on the way home from work.

Have you ever done that? Everyone stops at the grocery store after work. It takes at least three times more time than I'd normally spend just running to grab something at the store, when I go there after work, and I'm hot and I'm tired and the people make me overstimulated and I feel like I have to rush even more to get out of there relatively quickly and that makes me stressed and forgetful and frankly? It's not worth it.

So now I don't gotta. I'm saving us the MSG and fake ingredients, I'm saving us a few dollars, I'm saving the trash I'd throw away from using a packet of seasonings, and I'm saving myself the hassle of stopping at the grocery store.

Hey, motivation is motivation, right?

In the mean time, I'm learning to be less dependent on one more unnecessary convenience. And my kid will get his bean soup.

Once in a lifetime.

I'm sure most of you have heard or read about the tornado that destroyed most of Joplin, MO, this past weekend. That's only about 45 minutes away from where we live, though we were lucky enough only to get some wind and rain. And some beautiful skies.

After the rain had passed us by and the sky was absolutely beautiful, I was doing laundry while my husband was in the living room, keeping an eye on the news to see what was happening in Joplin, and yelling in my direction occasionally about how I needed to come look at the sky; it was changing every second, and I was missing it, he said. "This is a once in a lifetime sky!"

It occurred to me that every sky is a once in a lifetime sky. Never again will we see that exact color scheme with those exact cloud patterns laying on top of it. And I wondered, why don't we stop to appreciate every once in a lifetime sky?

As tends to happen, my thoughts broadened. Not only is every sky a once in a lifetime sky, but every moment is a once in a lifetime moment. Never again will we be at this exact place in this exact moment being exactly who we are right now; we are ever-changing, the world is ever-changing.

How many beautiful moments do we pass by in our lives because there's something to distract us from it? Or because something boring or aggravating or terrible is still on our mind from a moment previous? Or because we're in a hurry to get to the next moment?

What would it take to pause and find the beauty in every moment, the way we can pause and find the beauty in an orange and blue sky with a double-rainbow after a devastating storm?

I challenge you to stop, once, in the middle of your day -- especially if it's a busy day -- and find something once-in-a-lifetime around you, or within you.

Thoughts as a medicine cabinet.

Our house has been up for sale for quite some time now, and though we really haven't had any activity recently, we've become restless with the state of limbo we've been in. Our new house, which belonged to my husband's late grandparents, is just sitting there waiting on us. We've put some work into it here and there -- refinished the hardwood floor we discovered under the living room carpet, started painting what will be Raiden's bedroom -- and have moved some of our extra stuff over in various spurts, but we have finally grown restless with the restlessness. We're moving there. For real.

Though at times it feels like this process is really dragging out (and, let's face it, after almost-three years, it really is) we're lucky, in a way, that we get to take our time with it. There's no mad flurry of WE HAVE TO PACK RIGHT NOW OR ELSE and that allows us a little space to really go through what we have while we're packing it. Keep; yard sale or donate; trash. We've had several moments of "I forgot that even existed" and "So that's where that went! How did it get in there?!"

The most significant for me, so far, came yesterday afternoon. Raiden had become a holy terror and it was very obvious that it was because he was tired (though he refused to admit this, of course), so after getting him down for a nap, which pretty much never happens anymore, Rich and I were able to get some packing done without having to 1) stop a million times to entertain a three year old, or 2) feel guilty ignoring our three year old. Rich took to the bedroom; I stationed myself in the bathroom.

My first stop: the medicine cabinet above the washer. Storage tub in front of me and trash can to my side, I started going through all the stuff we had piled in our bulging-at-the-seams cabinet, deciding what to keep at the house we're still living in, what to go ahead and take over to the other house, and what to get rid of entirely. My being a pseudo-hippie came in two-fold in this scenario: 1) I had at least a couple dozen bottles of Standard Process supplements in the cabinet that have been there for who knows how long and for who knows what purpose, and 2) this made me think. It occurred to me, especially after a recent conversation with my fabulous coach (her website, her blog), that it was an analogy for thoughts.

I had all this stuff stored in my cabinet and though I knew vaguely that it was there and that I wasn't using it, I hadn't taken the time before then to really look at what the stuff was, how it was serving me by staying in my cabinet, when I picked it up in the first place, when it outlived its usefulness, or if I would ever use it again.

What about thoughts? What thoughts do I have sitting in the back of my mind that I know are there but don't really pay any attention to? How can these thoughts be serving me (or even "serving" me by allowing me the freedom to stay stagnant when moving forward is scary)? Where did they come from? Do I still need them? Will I ever need them again? Could someone else I care about benefit from me keeping them around?

I recently discovered the power in letting a thought go and replacing it with another, and even the power in realizing I could let it go.

What was funny to realize while cleaning out my cabinet was that if something was full, I had a hard time throwing it away. It was taking up a lot of space and I knew I would never use it again, but the thought of getting rid of something that hadn't really been utilized still bothered me. It made me wonder what big, full, useless thoughts may be occupying my mind, keeping me from replacing them with something I felt better about.

---

Later in the adventures of bathroom tidying, we removed a shelf we had never liked. There had been a built-in cabinet when we first bought the house, and I don't remember when we removed it or why, but the section of wall behind where it had been was painted a different color than the rest of the wall. We even color-matched the paint and picked up a quart a while back, but never painted it. Instead, we got an ugly shelf and decided that hopefully the clutter on it would cover up the ugly wall. It was functional, but it's always bugged me.

After the shelf was out, the wall was painted and the new shelf was in, I wondered aloud, "Why didn't do do this when it was for us??"

One of my favorite questions on my new-coaching-client questionnaire is, "What are you tolerating?" I was reminded again that I ought to ask it of myself occasionally, too. And then move on it. It didn't take that long to move the shelf or paint the section of wall. There was no reason to let it sit there bothering me for however many months or years it has been that way, when an afternoon took care of fixing it.

What else am I tolerating? How much energy am I giving the annoyance it's causing me, compared to how much energy it would take to do something about it and then be happier with it?

---

So what about you? What's hanging out in your brain's medicine cabinet? What is your unpainted bathroom wall that you're hiding with clutter on an ugly shelf? And when will you do something to change it?

I am not a sitcom.

I've been wanting to write about yesterday since yesterday, but I really need to finish this one project. I just have to wrap a template around a security form and then I'm good! Except for the other millions of things I need to do and the millions of FrontPage troubleshooting emails I need to respond to and the millions of political bullshit situations I need to pull Delegated Supervisor into, but the security form is the most important so I have to finish that before I can write about yesterday even though I srsly want to get to that because, you guys will laugh.

... Okay, that's done. Much better. It was just black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now you know why they asked me to pretty it up.

So!

Yesterday. It all started with Raiden waking up - well, half waking up - at about 6:00 to start squirming and fussing and tossing and turning and making noises like his stomach hurt, flopping around from the head of the bed where he would occasionally bypass the pillow barrier to bonk his head on the headboard, down to the foot of the bed where there was no pillow barrier so Mommy would grab him and move him back to the head of the bed, despite his protests, to keep him from falling off. Meanwhile, I was just hoping he would calm down enough to let me sleep another 45 minutes. After a half hour of this routine, he finally flopped to just the right location for my nose to be close enough to his butt to detect a hint of stink. Okay, okay, I figured, I didn't realize he was dirty and he's squirming away from poop. Even though it doesn't bother him during the day. Whatever, maybe it's squishy and uncomfortable. Fine. Diaper change. He's already pissed off anyway, I thought to myself as I grabbed one squirmy fussy baby-slash-toddler and tossed him onto the changing table. Maybe "laid" is a better word than "tossed," but "tossed" has more character. Anywho, after I got past what was, at the time, a major decision of the dim light that wouldn't wake Raiden as much or the brighter light so that I could actually see, I opened the diaper to discover only a very small amount of poop. And here I'd thought he was swimming in it. Whatever, process started, let's just change the diaper. After I wiped his bottom and pulled the diaper off, I noticed, too, that the diaper wasn't nearly as wet as an overnight diapers should be, which clued me in that I should probably hurry it up with the whole 'putting the clean diaper on' part.

Yeah, too late. I look over to see a nice calm stream of baby pee. At least it isn't hitting the ceiling, I thought, as I reached over to cover the pee stream with the fresh diaper. Not a big deal, pee is easy to clean up.

Except that then, I saw that he wasn't just peeing. Oh, crap. Literally. The gushy, gooey kind. The gross kind that one does not want to deal with being all over her child, her child's clothing, a towel that was laid across the changing table and the changing table itself at 6:30 in the morning.

So, I did what any amazing mommy would do: I yelled into the baby monitor for help from Dad. And then waited to hear footsteps as I was trying to keep a squirmy' baby's feet out of a puddle of poo. Wait. Wait. No footsteps. "Seriously, I could really use an extra pair of hands down here!" I yelled a second time. My plan was, fuck the nightshirt and when Rich got downstairs, ask him to just hand me a pair of goddamn scissors so I could cut the shirt off and not have to make the mess even worse than it was trying to get my child out of it. Wait. Wait. Still no footsteps. Still holding baby feet out of a puddle of poo. Fuck, I'm doing this alone.

I decided to see just how far a onesie could stretch to get sleepy baby arms through the holes and the neck of the shirt over the head without smearing poo more places than it was already smeared. I didn't do too bad - the shirt pulled up his back a bit, but the puddle generally stayed put. Since the shirt was already, shall we say, soiled, I figured using the clean part to wipe up the bulk of Raiden's body wouldn't do any harm. After I got the bulk of it with the shirt, I grabbed a couple of wipes to get the rest of the large chunks, just enough to be able to carry him to the bath.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I yelled "Help!" in the direction of the baby monitor again, just to make myself feel better.

Raiden, of course, decides that while I'm cleaning him off, it would be fun to grab the shirt and drag it up his side, to the head of the changing table, and then when I took it away from him, to grab the wooden slats on the changing table and spread the poo around a bit to the places it hadn't already made it. Okay, so the cleaning him up to carry him to the tub just wasn't going to work. His legs and feet were still clean, and so was his right arm and hand, and part of his left arm, so I picked him up by the latter two, stood his dirty naked body down on the floor, held his clean hand and told him, "Let's walk to the bath."

Luckily, there were no mishaps along the way. I was sad for him, though, because he really likes to snuggle a while when he wakes up and I was really not going for that at this point because, ew.

So, we got to the bathroom, I got the water going and decided to just hose him off under the faucet. He was still sleepy and clingy, so I sat on the edge of the tub with my legs/feet in there with him so he could hug my leg as I washed him (and my own arms/hands) off under the water. Eventually he started waking up and warmed up to the idea of the tub, and around the same time, MIL showed up so I asked her to stand there with him while I went to clean up the changing table. Everything went straight in the washer. I later remembered that I forgot to put in soap.

Raiden pooped more in the tub, but given the rest of the morning, I was pretty okay with that.

Getting Raiden dressed and ready was accomplished with no further trauma. I hopped in the shower immediately after MIL left with Raiden. Rich came downstairs right as I was finishing up, and after he kissed me good morning, I told him, "I think from now on, when I come downstairs to be with Raiden in the middle of the night, I'm turning the baby monitor all the way up before I head down, so that way you can hear me when I yell for help three times." He agreed. I don't expect anything to come of it.

He got ready for jury duty as I got ready for my dentist appointment, both of which started at 9:00. (Thank God I had that appointment or I would have been very late for work.) He had to get there early and get gas on the way, so he left about 15-20 minutes before I needed to. I was proud of myself, I'd actually gotten ready on time for my appointment. I had my purse, my phone, my glasses, my shoes on and everything by 8:45. I reached to grab my keys to leave and... saw Rich's keys on the table. Don't panic, I told myself, as the fact that he'd took my keys to drive his car reminded me that we'd had the spare keys made, finally, so I could just take his keys to my car and be fine. Except when I looked, my key was not on his keychain. This really didn't surprise me; he does stuff like taking random keys off his keychain if he doesn't use them often, or taking random cards out of his wallet if he doesn't think he'll need them, because, you know, keys and cards take up so much room anyway, and we really need to be efficient like that. However, not surprising me and this being a pattern of behavior, did not exactly get me a means with which to drive my car. Fuck.

It was only 8:45, so I called Rich hoping to catch him before jury duty had started. And I did. When he answered, I said, "Well, apparently my key for your car works beautifully." "Uh, okay? Why?" "Because you have my keys." "...Ohhhh craaaaap." "So, do you know where my spare key is?" "No? Unless maybe in the drawer?" "I'm looking in the drawer. Stop losing things!" We brainstorm ways that he could leave my keys at the front desk or something, but all ideas had the flaw of me having to have transportation to get them and there being no way to have this happen before my 9:00 dentist appointment. The key, of course, was not in the drawer. He suggested calling his mom, but between her yapping, the fact that she was at least 15 minutes away, and my general complaint that she drags Raiden around in the car too much, anyway, I didn't see that as a feasible option. Rich had to get off the phone. We hung up. I swore. And then I remembered that Rich's brother, Tony, works just a mile or two away from my house, and has a company car that he can use instead of his own for work errands during the day.

So, I called Tony. "Hey, what are you doing right now?" "Trying to take a nap." "Oh. Are you at home again today?" "No." "... Well, my next question was gonna be 'are you really busy at work right now' but I guess that answered that question." I gave him the gist of the story and asked if there were any way I could borrow his car for just part of the day, and he had no problem with that at all. Suh weet. He was at the house to pick me up within 5 minutes, during which time I called the dentist office to let them know that Rich wouldn't be there at all due to jury duty, and, funny story, he took my keys and I'd be late. I thanked Tony profusely and made plans to meet with him on lunch to get his car back to him. I also made mental plans to buy his lunch because he really pulled through for me.

The best part of the day was that I made it to the dentist appointment only 11 minutes late. The dental assistant was waiting for me when I got there, and on the way back to the room, the other assistant grinned at me and giggled, and the dentist asked if I needed an extra set of keys. "Luckily my brother-in-law works very close to my house," I said. The other good news is that I have healthy teeth.

Next on the agenda was to head up to the clinic and get my blood drawn for all the lab work I'd had ordered. On the other end of town, of course, but not a big deal, just a time consumer. And of course, the first time she stuck me, she missed, then dug around until I said ow, but after she switched arms and used the butterfly needle, all was well. So, moving on.

Rich called about 45 minutes after I got to work, while he was on lunch from jury duty, to try and figure out a way to get our keys switched out. His idea was, he'd tell me where he was going to park, put my keys in the console and leave the car unlocked, then I could somehow get a ride there - from Tony, maybe - to get my keys, leave his in the console with the car unlocked, then have Tony take me to the house to get my car. My plan had just been to have Tony bring me back to work on lunch and have MIL bring me home, which was a lot simpler, but Rich thought unnecessary due to his brilliant plan. As he was trying to explain to me which building he'd be parked at, I asked how long his lunch break was, anyway. "One of the witnesses didn't show, so I actually have like an hour and a half." "...If you have an hour and a half break, why don't you swing by here and give me my keys?" "...Oh. I guess I could do that." *headdesk*

He stopped by later to swap keys, and while he was here, he ate two of the rice krispy treats The AS had made for my birthday, and helped fix a server issue. It worked out nicely.

When lunch time rolled around, Tony called and we decided to meet for some Japanese food (along with Toby) to get his car back to him. I mentioned earlier I was gonna pay for his lunch, right? I of course realized as I was pulling out of the parking lot that I forgot to check our spending account to make sure I had enough money to even pay for myself, let alone a second person. Fuck. I text messaged Google to get the number for the bank's customer service, and paid a $2 charge to transfer over $30 (which was about $10 more than I thought I needed, but just in case), and ended up with a balance that indicated I had plenty of money to start with and the transfer + $2 charge to do it were completely unnecessary. *Sigh* Oh well, at least I could eat my hibachi chicken without worrying if the card would clear.

Tony dropped me off at the house after lunch. I got my car. I got back to work. No further problems.

Except don't get me started on The Tool who likes stepping on my toes where the Web site is concerned, but that's an entirely different story.

---

This morning, Raiden woke up at 5:00 a.m. and immediately climbed out of bed ready to play. I should add that he slept from 9:30 until 5, by himself, and when he fussed at 2 a.m. he was back asleep before I even got downstairs, so that's a positive, but still, being bright and awake at 5:00 is not. He ran to the doorway, turned back to look at me and I heard a splat sound. At least it was in his diaper this time. I sighed and rolled out of bed and glared at the baby monitor because, really, what was the point, and chased Raiden around to get him to let me change his diaper. He was having none of that, so I figured it couldn't hurt just to let him play for a few minutes before we attempted The Diaper Change. About two minutes later he squatted, felt of his diaper for a second, stood up, and had leaked poo-goo onto the carpet. And then immediately stepped in it.

Sssoooooo... to the changing table we went, I rolled up the very small portion of his shirt that got dirty and pulled it off of him, cleaned him up, grabbed his sippy cup, a towel and the carpet cleaner and went back into the living room. I sat him on the couch with his water and asked him to stay there while Mommy cleaned the floor. He did, and I caught it fresh enough that it came right up. Much better than yesterday, though I wish I had any idea what's causing him to have runny stools again.

I washed my hands and made him a bottle, thinking we could lay back down and at least I could get some more rest while he drank it, even if he didn't fall back asleep. He did, but I didn't, though at least he was quite snuggly. He was even still asleep while I had to get up and ready to leave for work. Little jerk. :)

And before I let Rich leave for work, I checked to make sure my car keys were still in the same spot on the table as they were last night when I put a sticky note next to them that said, "Karyn's."