Struggling to Get Regular....

As a pregnant person, I can't tell you how that means soooo many things to me right now, LOL! Seriously, I do want to get back to posting regularly - like I was, only better. And I may actually have the opportunity to get back on track with many things this week. See, Sweet Pea turned 6 on Thursday, and we had a party for her yesterday. Today, she left with my mother to visit in Mississippi for the week over spring break. She will loooove hanging out with Mom and her friends (who love to spoil little girls and let them pretend like they are grown!), as well as hanging out with my dad, kicking around in his gardens, and being a Tractor Girl.

My parents are both retired, and Dad has gotten into finding old tractors and restoring them - which is great since he's a mechanic by trade and is one of those people I want around me if the Apocalypse ever actually occurs - and he tells Sweet Pea that these are THEIR tractors. So the week for S.P. will include entertaining and being entertained by Proper Southern Ladies, as well as learning the finer points of self-sufficiency and riding around on my parents' property on whichever John Deere she and Dad decide upon at that moment. Life is good for the Pea. :)

So while we have a quieter home for several days, some of the goals on my neverending list of Stuff I Have Got to Get Done are:

• Get the freakin' laundry caught up and put away (instead of frantically digging through the pile on the couch every morning)!
• Get the freakin' dishes cleaned in totality and put away (instead of wishing that we could just eat off of paper plates until Jesus comes)!
• Get the floors clean - swept, mopped, and vacuumed (instead of wishing a street cleaner could fit through our front door and scrape off my floors)!

Clean, clean, clean....everything clean! Beat Hubby and make him clean! Yesss!

As well as:

• Catch up on organizing. What to organize, you ask? Ha! What's NOT to organize?! OK, really...if I can just get things cleaned cleaner than they have been in the last long while, I really won't focus on this very much as I will have earned myself some "ME" time.
• Catch up on my scrapbooking. With Baby Sister on the way, I must-must-MUST get farther along on Sweet Pea's stuff than I have gotten over the last 6 years. It's shameful - if I actually thought about it - and I have this table behind me with hundreds of $$ worth of scrapping things that has been neglected for so long that Hubby thinks it is now a storage place for some of his crap, as well as the old printer he replaced and that I have no idea what he wants to do with. Inconceivable!
• Get back into the baking that I have been missing. Really. Missing. With the job I started last summer (stupid crazy job that I regret taking, except that the other one bored me to tears, but where my perpetual "not using the gifts God gave me" lament continues) I've been thrown off even more than I ever thought I could be. It's been a struggle to just do the things that MUST be done....much less the things that I enjoy and that make me ME, that make me HAPPY. Yes, it's been a sad little hole I've been sitting in, folks, and I'm trying my best to crawl out of it. By darn. So cooking and blogging and writing about food, and my amateur attempt at food photography - I'm doing it all.
• Just doing things I like to do. Window- and mini-shopping at Tuesday Morning-type stores. Over-shopping at Whole Foods. Playing my guitar. Writing. Pondering. Spending time outdoors. And the like.

So those are my plans for the week. Sure, I don't expect to strike 100% of that off as completed, but just knowing that I'm going to focus on these things that have been all but forgotten kinda gives me a lift. There's a hopefulness that's been gone for a while that I'm gonna get back, by gosh. And I'm really looking forward to doing it and putting it on here.