SWEET BABY JEESUS & OPRAH, this is the truth.

You know you’re lazy when you get excited about cancelled plans.

via Pleated Jeans

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2012. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cancelled plans, Lazy, pleated jeans

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Though it’s not indicative of her size, when she was about 8 months old and crawling, we nicknamed our 2nd baby, Claire Kong.

It should be obvious why (see: destroying everything in her path, creator of messes, pre-hoarder, beating her chest in protest of things she does not agree), and she’s never outgrown her name.

Our living room isn’t huge, but it has a large, open space between the ottoman for the couch and the TV, which to little children means, “LOOK AT ALL THIS SPACE WE CAN COVER WITH ALL THE THINGS!” Our living room floor is clean for 1-2 weeks a year, and that’s when our girls visit their grandparents in the summer.

We marvel at the non-mess of our living room floor. We take pictures of the cleanliness and send it to the girls to prove it can be done. I post pictures on the interwebs to brag about our empty space.

Wide open, clean spaces in MessyHouse are few and far between.

This morning has been like most other Sunday mornings: Sunday Morning on the TV, girls dragging us out of bed to microwave their breakfasts, each of us doing our own things all together. Basically, lazy, and exactly the way I like it.

It was announced yesterday that today would be CLEAN ALL THE THINGS DAY after a lazy morning. I’ve started my laundry-slash-”work”-on-the-internet task, Anna has started her sneak-in-reading-during-cleaning-her-room task, Patrick started his clean-his-area task, and Claire continued being Claire. “Being Claire” means doing her avoiding-all-requested-tasks-while-making-bigger-messes task.

As I do several hundred thousand million times a day, I told the girls to clean the floor you see below, that JUST YESTERDAY was clear of ALL THE THINGS.

Claire’s response to me: “But Daddy made this mess.”

That “mess” labeled “Patrick’s ‘Mess’” is his mid-task-sorting of cleaning the table next to where he sits.

The rest is the result of what Claire Kong can do on one Sunday morning.

And in the middle is her feeble attempt at hiding her handiwork.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: She’s lucky she’s so cute.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: claire kong, messy house

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I was a Girl Scout until I was in 11th grade.

… let that sink in …

Moonbeam: Not your average Girl Scout troop leader.

Because my mom was Super Volunteer Woman! and my troop leader my whole life, she signed me up for Girl Scouts until I finally sat her down and told her I wasn’t going to go to any more meetings. (I could have remembered the “sit down” differently and it was more of a shouting match that ended me storming to my room, but that teenage period of time in my life is hazy.) It wasn’t cool anymore for me to lie to my friends and tell them I wasn’t a Girl Scout. I’d been doing that for at least 3 years before that and not attending meetings or doing anything Girl Scout-related.

Let’s consider me using this photo of you payback for signing me up against my will, Mother.

The years from 1st grade through 7th grade were pretty much EPIC for me as a Girl Scout. My mom, otherwise known by her camp name, Moonbeam, made every campout, every meeting, every field trip extra super fun and extra super Awesome.

This, I cannot do.

I realize this about myself. I do not have a creative mind, I’m scatterbrained and messy, and I, unlike my mom, have the opportunities to make money from home, I work too much to be the Super Volunteer Woman! she was for me.

I am OK with that.

I have two girls, and my oldest was a Brownie last year for all of about 6 weeks. Anna attended 3 meetings and walked in the Christmas parade, but her anxiety was overwhelming her to the point that she had to stop last year. She says she wants to be in Girl Scouts again this year, but I’ve put off enrolling her long enough, that I think she’s forgotten.

For the first time in over 25 years, the Girl Scouts have updated their badges and badge requirements. No longer are the days of Candle Making and Fashion, Fitness and Makeup badges. The Girl Scouts are adding in Website Design, Geocaching, and The Science of Style into the badge projects for girls.

Smack my ass and call me Sally. Little girls may actually now grow up with starter life skills that would propel them into delving deeper into a chosen field of study. I may have to sign my girls up for Girl Scouts so they can earn these new badges plus it gets them out of the house one night a week!

Luckily for my own girls and the imaginary troop members I’d be leading if I were to be a troop leader, I will not be a troop leader. If it were up to me to develop new badges and interests, the requirements would be way short and the earnings would be way easy.

I came up with 5 badges I’d add into the mix if I were my girls’ Girl Scout troop leader:

Programming Your DVR – An in-depth study on choosing the right television service for your home, setting up your DVR, and scheduling program recordings to maximize viewing pleasure.

Foraging For Lunch – Don’t have a leftover’s from last night (or the week before) to heat up for lunch? Make yourself a microwave cheese rollup or three!

Closing The Door On The Cleaning – Cleaning house is for other people. For this badge, you’ll learn how to shove everything into rooms with doors, and how to make up excuses to tell people not to go in those closed-door rooms when you have visitors.

Dog Biscuits To Dog Food – When your mom forgets to buy dog food for your dogs, you need to know the proper ratio of dog biscuits to dog food when you feed them until she she goes to the store tomorrow.

Making Social Media Your Job – Step one: Quit your career. Step two: Spend all day on the computer. Step three: Tell people you’ve made spending all day on the computer your job. Easy!

Clearly, I have a future in Girl Scout badge creation.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: badges, girl scouts, mom, moonbeam, new

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One of my most favoritist people on the internet, jenbshaw, is a master organizer. She shows off her prowess on her blog and gives away tips for free. Rather than actually doing what she suggests, I sit in awe of how someone like her with 2 kids under 3 can manage to keep an organized house.

jenbshaw is the the exact opposite of me. She’s the Kobe beef to my ground chuck. The Oprah to my Maury. The Lexus to my Yugo.

It’s no secret that housekeeping is not my best quality as a human. It’s not even in the Top 50 Best of Pangie. I’d put my housewifing skills in the Top 10 Ways Pangie Procrastinates.

Recently, jenbshaw showed off her laundry room in a post on her blog about how to properly organize a laundry room. I? Am in awe. Even in her small space, she’s able to organize everything and make it pretty.

Me? Think the opposite.

I just cleaned out the laundry room last week, so what you’re seeing here is a cleaned-out laundry room at MessyHouse. Just believe me when I say that this is the laundry room post-clean up.

1. Hanging rack over the a/c door being used improperly as a drying rack.
2. The Tweety Bird I had in my nursery when I was a baby because every room needs something on the wall.
3. Vacuum cleaner being used as a drying rack.
4. Basket of folded laundry waiting for me to carry to the bedroom to stay a basket of folded laundry.
5. Pile of folded towels that will stay there until one of us comes out of the shower wet and naked, the to run wet and naket through the house to get a towel.
6. Pile of out-grown kids clothes and 1/2 pairs of socks.
7. (Apparently I can’t count, so there is no #7, but there is a 2nd #6.) I could lie and tell you that’s a backup laundry detergent bottle, but really, it was bought because the other laundry detergent bottle was lost in the pile on top of the dryer before I cleaned the laundry room last week.
8. Hanging trash bag, just one lint trap collection away from falling.
9. Air-drying bra.
10. Bleach precariously placed above my head amongst random things that have been there since we moved in to the house in 2002.
11. 14-year-old Kenmore washer and dryer set given to us as wedding presents from my parents.

It’s definitely not a dream laundry room like the ones I see on Pinterest, but every time I pass by a laundromat, I thank the Sweet Sweet Baby Jeebus and Oprah that I have a place to do laundry in my house. Otherwise, we’d be buying new underwear every week and doing the college boy sniff test every time we got dressed.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: jenbshaw, laundry room, unorganization skills

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Today starts the 2nd week of Camp Gramma where my kids have been swimming, taking golf lessons, going to movies, having sleepovers, riding bikes, and being spoiled non-stop by their grandmas and grandpa. The past two summers, the girls have gone to my parent’s house for a week by themselves, but this summer, Claire insisted that they stay for 2 whole weeks without us. She wanted to stay the whole summer because “our house isn’t fun,” but between my mom being too old and me and Patrick missing them too much, we compromised on just 2 weeks at Camp Gramma.

I had grand plans of doing grand things to MessyHouse while the girls were gone. From cleaning out my bedroom to rearranging the living room to taking a blowtorch to their rooms, I was GOING TO GET SHIT DONE.

We’re on Day 8, and about 1/16th of what I wanted to do in this house has been done. I have a strong feeling (see: I know for sure) that only about 1/16th more will get done between now and Sunday when we get them back. I don’t consider this a failure of accomplishment on my part because we’ve totally accomplished stuff.

• Saw Horrible Bosses.
• Saw Harry Potter 5.
• Saw Harry Potter 6.
• Saw Harry Potter 7 pt 1.
• Saw Harry Potter 7 pt 2.
• Had 3 cocktails at Tilted Kilt on a Saturday afternoon.
• Watched my brother-in-law drink himself into a stupor at their hotel pool.
• Ate a dessert made with crystalized Root Beer.
• Watched the Women’s World Cup Final game.
• Learned we are a very boring couple when we have nothing to do.
• Started using Spotify.
• Caught up on work.
• Cleaned the family room floor.
• Thought about doing dishes and cleaning my bathroom.

Just typing all of that is wearing me out. Imagine what I don’t get done when the children ARE around.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: camp gramma

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“I don’t have any clean shorts to wear,” Anna says, holding back her tears as she walks into the living room, holding the shirt she picked out to wear for the day.

Like a knife in my heart, this is one of the times of the day when my motherly instincts collide with my lack of housekeeping abilities.

I’m not a good mother.
My children don’t have enough clean clothes.
What am I teaching my girls about being a mother when I can’t keep clean clothes in their drawers?

I send her back to her room to find something else to wear, maybe a dress or the jean shorts she wore yesterday. I head to the laundry room to dig through the clean clothes pile that accumulates while I re-evaluate my life choices.

She’s disappointed in me.
They see my laziness in their empty drawers.

Every week, their clothes hamper is washed, dried, and folded by me while the girls’ responsibility is to put their own clothes away. I’ve organized their drawers and taught them what goes where.

So when they come out of their rooms letting me know that they don’t have shorts to wear with their shirts, I can’t help but feel like I’m failing them as a mother.

UNTIL TONIGHT.

Tonight, I thought I’d make up for not having a clean pair of shorts for Anna by putting away some of her clothes that were clean.

This is what I found in her drawer:

Ten.

Pairs.

OF SHORTS.

It turns out, I am a good mother.

I’m just raising my crazy-smart daughter to be an airhead.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clothes, kid

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I’m not a fancy cook. I take that back – I’m not a cook at all.

Long-time readers and fans* of my blog know this already. I can fix food, I can whip together a dinner of hot dogs and canned pears like a champ, and I have an arsenal of approximately five good meals I can put together. Cooking and even “fixing food” stresses me out to the point that panic attacks prevent me from learning new recipes that include more than four ingredients. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want my kids to have well-balanced meals and develop healthy eating habits, but it surely puts the list of what I’ll serve on the short side.

I have a feeling that my trepidation in the kitchen has put my kids in the “picky eaters” category. Anna (the one with anxiety) has a “thing” that she has to have a Nutella and peanut butter sandwich every single day. Every. Day. If she realizes she hasn’t had her N&PB sammich by dinnertime, she stresses out to the point of crying an wants one as her dessert. It’s not the worst habit to have, but it’s surely one that helps limit her food tastes.

Claire, on the other hand, loves pizza and pretty much anything dipped in ketchup. Beyond that, bread & butter sandwichs, dry cooked pasta, and pancakes are her food of choice.

I’m one step into preparing my girls for prison food. Except I don’t think there’s ketchup in prison which is a real tragedy. I’ve seen Lockup enough times to know just being in prison with other prisoners is punishment enough. The fear of getting ones teeth knocked out so he can’t bite down when being forced to do bad things to bad prisoners is torturous. Give those criminals some ketchup!

I digress.

I need some ideas on what to feed my children for lunch that goes beyond yogurt, butter sammiches, and microwave pancakes. Whatever it is cannot have more than four ingredients or take longer than 5-1/2 minutes to prepare.

Please & thank you.

*I say this as if I have “fans.” Oh, I crack me up.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: food, picky eaters, prison food, recipes

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Claire slept until 9:45.

I got out of bed at 10:10.

We ate breakfast at 10:30.

Right now it’s 11:30, I’m not wearing a bra, one kid wearing only underwear, and the other in just a swimsuit top.

Summer has officially begun.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bathing suit, school, summer

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© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clean house, housewife, photo

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UPDATE BELOW. *sigh*

Unlike my mother, I’m not known for my laundry-doing abilities. My mother’s passion for laundry was not passed down to me, the same way her ability to whip up a meal out of the contents of her pantry and fridge was skipped over me and stayed with my sister. I did, however, get her Wide Butt and pretty face genes, so at least there’s that.

When I actually do get around to doing the laundry, one measly load a day, I find clothes at the bottom of the dirty clothes pile that I forgot I had. It’s really my way of un-shopping in my own house.

The other day, I washed AND DRIED a load of darks, and when pulling out the jeans, black shirts and PJ pants, I also pulled out a black sweatshirt hoodie.

This is not my black sweatshirt hoodie.

This is not Patrick’s black sweatshirt hoodie.

I have no idea to whom this black sweatshirt hoodie belongs.

It’s obviously worn. It obviously belongs to someone.

I have no idea to whom this black sweatshirt hoodie belongs.

None. No idea.

Even more bizarre, the next whites load I washed AND DRIED, had a white tall sock that does not belong to anyone in our house. Even MORE MORE BIZARRO? I now can’t find the sock. I made sure to keep it on top of the dryer so I could take a picture of it for just this post, but this morning, it was nowhere to be found.

I need to file a grievance with the union because I’m doing more laundry than my housewife contract states I should be doing.

UPDATE: A dramatic turn to this story unfolded today when my husband left this comment below. Even more proof that my housewifing skills are sorely lacking.

© Angie [A Whole Lot of Nothing] for A Whole Lot of Nothing • Your Favorite Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 16 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: found, laundry, lost

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