Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for some blog surgery.
I have been in the mood to write stories of my life. Since this blog is devoted to achieving the life of my dreams today, I decided to start another blog for those ramblings about the past.
If you want to check it out, you are very welcome!
It’s called “Tell Stories. Play Games.” Click here and come visit.
(Update: I have now fixed the link. Thanks, Whitney!)
xo – Lori
We got up bright and early on April 13th, ready to hit the streets to raise funds for MS research. It was a family reunion of sorts! My sister-in-law, Heidi, got there first with my niece, Kaitlin. My cousins Craig, Katie and Kelly were also on the team, along with Kelly’s husband Keith and their seven-month-old, Katelyn. Quinland had rounded up her friends Molly and Emma, too, so our official count was 10 walkers (and a stroller).
When you check in for the Walk, you are offered colored beads to wear: orange if you have a family member with MS, blue if you have a friend with MS, and purple if you have MS yourself. Instead of race numbers, there were piles of blank ones that said “I’m running for…” It was so amazing to have my friends and family around me and to see “LORI,” “My cousin Lori,” and “My Mom.” Mine said I was running for “MYSELF – and for a breakthrough in treatment for PPMS.”
In the chilly pre-race time, we nibbled on the granola bars and bananas that were so kindly provided by the race sponsors and passed baby Katelyn around from arm to arm. She is the most expressive baby, all big eyes and long eyelashes, and so cuddly!
The Walk, I must admit – and for this I am very thankful – was pretty much a Stroll. We MSers, while an intrepid lot, are not as a group known for being fleet of foot. I was very fleet of lips, though, as I got in some serious chatting time with my family along the way. They are – every one of them – AWESOME, and it kills me that we don’t see each other more. This. Must. Change. And now that I have proclaimed that to one and all, it shall.
I was the last of our team – of course – to cross the finish line. I have no idea what I am shouting, but by that point I was just feeling fantastic. Not physically – I think you can tell I was dragging the bad leg, and I felt pretty wonky for a few days – but I was hyped up.
We finished the morning with an early lunch at Laughing Planet, with healthy food, healthy conversation, and a healthy dose of babytime.
We’ve already started strategizing for next year. We’ll get a more MS-appropriate name! We’ll wear costumes! Tutus! We’ll have balloons! Signs! I don’t know if we’ll do any or all of that, but it was fun to look at the other teams and see what they had come up with to promote themselves.
The most important thing to do, of course, is thank everyone who joined our team, everyone who donated to Walk MS on behalf of our team, and all those who volunteered to make the day such a success. (Look at those folks cheering me across the finish line! I’m sure they were cold, but they never missed a beat.) Thank you, thank you all!
xo – Lori
As it does so often, aspirational clutter is rearing its ugly head. So many of the boxes I need to sort through are filled with stuff I have been saving for “someday.”
I need to get honest with the fact that the first two “somedays” – quilting and journaling – are under my control… but I do not have control of what Quinland will do someday.
She may want to wear a dress in the future, but she may never want to wear one again. She will never, EVER, want to wear my old cotton jumpers, though they did come from Brass Plum at Nordstrom and one has the cutest lace collar. She just won’t. Nor will anyone else, probably. (I will never fit into them again, or I’d be parading around like it was 1986 in a heartbeat.)
This all came to a head about a week ago. My friend Deb was over and noticed that – in the wall of boxes currently stacked outside my bedroom – I had a box labeled “80′s drop-waist jumpers.” Yes, a boxful. (Am I excused if I point out that it was neatly organized and labeled?) We dug in. Deb discovered that she had personally handmade half of the jumpers back in our college days, and we had a bit of reminiscing over each one. She took one jumper to use as fabric for a future project and then advised that I take photos of the rest and get rid of them. They sat out for this entire week before I have decided this afternoon that she was right. I’ll take a photo or two, and the jumpers can go.
The pioneer stuff is another story. I mean, there has got to be a way I can get that child to wear a coordinating sunbonnet with me, no?
What are you embarrassed to admit that you have saved? Any long-cherished dreams that you have to admit will never be fulfilled? Comment and commiserate!
xo – Lori
How often do you get together with your friends?
Is it enough to watch each other’s Facebook statuses, get the occasional email. or bump into each other and lament the fact that you hardly get together anymore?
I think not. I want to see the people I care about. I want to talk with them, laugh with them, eat with them… and I’m not opposed to drinking with them, either. But, as I mentioned, I am had been terrible about actually making the call and setting something up.
I have decided to make a plan with someone every week for the month of May. I’ve already got the first two weeks booked: I’m going to Boston with my sister next week, and going out with my friends Lorraine and Donna Lyn the week after. National Scrapbook Day I’ll get a whole day with Deb. By then, I’ll be able to go out to dinner with my dad!
Get in touch with me soon; I have a calendar to fill.
I’m so looking forward to May!
xo – Lori
What are you passionate about? What people, places or things really move you? What do you want to be… or do… or have?
I’ve been tossing these questions over and over in my mind for the past few weeks. What are my passions? At first glance, my passions seemed to be “try to get to work on time,” “dig out the horrible pile beside my bed,” and “don’t eat all this candy.” But I was trying to get a bit deeper, so I decided to ask some of my close friends: what are the things I am interested in, that I talk about and obsess over?
Most of the answers really felt like me, like when you put your feet into a pair of shoes and know that they are yours. Some made me smile; I am obsessed with Pride and Prejudice, the book and the movies, and I do compulsively research every little thing, no matter how obscure. Others made me a bit sheepish. When I encouraged her to be as honest as possible, my friend Patti responded that I am “obsessed with trying to do EVERYTHING without limiting yourself even though you have MS and limits are necessary… hence you make yourself sicker than you need to be sometimes…” It is absolutely true that I do not give my body the rest – and the lack of stress – that would be best for me. She is right to be concerned, and it’s something I need to think about.
But most of the things people said were things I know I am passionate about. My family and friends. Health and fitness. Self-improvement. Getting my home organized. Books and music and travel and telling stories.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized I should consistently blog about the things I am passionate about. Why? To help myself do the things I want to do by giving myself a place to articulate what I want, why I think I don’t have it yet, and what I need to do to get it. If I am passionate about my family and friends, then I need to figure out how to spend more time with them. If I want a beautiful, functional home, I need to come up with a plan to make it so – and then work the plan.
If I want a blog that I am excited about writing for, I need to figure out what I have to say… and then say it.
Here are the things I’m focusing on: Life. Love. Home. Health. Happiness. Fun. Faith.
What are you passionate about?
xo – Lori
I have decided that I no longer want to live in a messy house. Most of the mess, I admit, is mine. I’ve been putting my mind to work to figure out why things are messy.
But this is not a blog of beating myself up; it is a blog of action!
I have been asking myself FlyLady’s three questions this week about every single thing in my bedroom. I am not shuffling things around; I am either finding each thing a home or else it is leaving the premises. I am already on my second Goodwill box and I have another box standing by.
I’m proud of myself. Some of the stuff has been easy to let go of: duplicate books (I found two), old papers I no longer need, magazines that had one key article removed. Other stuff has just needed to be processed: papers filed, magazines read. The last stuff has been trickier. These are the things I really need to decide if I love enough to make a place for them. In some cases, I have decided to keep things – a small mantel clock we got for our wedding, a cushion my grandmother brought back from a trip to her native Australia – and I have made space for them. But a fair number of things are being let go.
Soon I’ll have the entire room cleared out, in a good way. I’m getting impatient for it to be finished, but I am trying to be thoughtful and not rush the process.
I am also trying not to get down on myself for needing the process. Decluttering may not be a natural skill of mine (though I am getting better with practice), but I am good at things that don’t come easily to others. We all have our strengths… or so I keep telling myself. Hopefully, that “self” will hurry up and listen!
Is decluttering one of your strengths? Are you able to just let things go if you don’t love them or have room for them, or do you agonize and longer over every decision?
xo – Lori
I’ve been listening to a FlyLady CD in my car this week. It’s from a talk she gave to Ohio farm women about ten years ago, where she explains the FlyLady system and how (and why) to implement it.
I was particularly struck by one section, where she indicates the three questions to ask every item in your home:
We should not have anything we do not love in our homes. I started decluttering this morning with this in mind. It turns out that I have quite a few things that I just “like,” and a few more that I’m not fond of at all! Those went quickly into the Goodwill box and will be donated tomorrow.
Ah, this one is tougher. There are certain things that I keep because I love them, but when I see them, it is not love I feel, but disappointment (in the item, or in myself for keeping it) or anger (because I spent so much money on it and have never used it) or even, perhaps, sadness (because it reminds me of a loss of some sort). But FlyLady points out that life is too short to beat yourself up and feel guilty. If something has bad emotional ties, you can cut them. Just pass the item on or throw it away.
And… here’s the clincher. Quite frankly, I have WAY more stuff than I have space… and I have quite a bit of space. I need to pick up each thing that is out of place and find it a home, if it doesn’t have one already. No home? No room? Adios!
I’ve let go of some interesting things today – some clothes, many greeting cards, stacks of magazines – and made a pretty good dent in the pile of stuff beside my bed. I’ll take a break from it for Easter, but I’ll be back to decluttering on Monday! Go, me!
Do you have a place for everything? Do you have everything in its place? Do you put things where they belong right away, or do piles of “stuff I need to put away” develop all over your home as they do in mine?
xo – Lori
