The Middle

Well, here we are.  In….The Middle!

My life currently resembles Jerome K. Jerome’s famous tale of his friend Harris leading people through the Maze at Hampton Court.  Collecting all the people in the maze as he goes and insisting he can find the way out, Harris eventually leads them to….The Middle.  It turns out that try as he might, he can’t find the way out and eventually, they have to call for the old maze keeper to climb up a ladder and direct them.  That’s where we are.  I’ve boldly led us this far insisting that it’s all quite simple, really.  You just keep turning to the left.  And now we’re inextricably lost.  Except that there is no old gardener to be fetched to direct us out of this.  And the crowd isn’t getting surly exactly but the charm of being in the maze is not enough to distract anyone from their problems anymore and in fact, there may be problems with being in the maze, even, although everyone is still feeling too polite to say so. But at least we’re not alone.  If I have to be lost, I'd rather be lost in a group.  As long as they aren't throwing things at me and blaming me for their being lost.

The open house is looming large this upcoming weekend.  There is so much that won’t be done in time.  BUT I am going to go ahead and take comfort in the things that are going well.

The kitchen:  Shockingly, it is actually workable and relatively clean.  My kitchen-counter-paper-ban has worked fairly well.  It's not that paper never lands on the island, but when it does, everyone knows it really can't stay there, and it doesn't.

We have even managed to find workable solutions to having the kitchen as the main entryway of the house.  Everyone is allowed ONE coat on the coat tree.  If people are coming over, we put our own coats in the closet which is in the living room.  Mysterious but true.  There are shoe trays as well, and similar rules apply.  There is the bench for backpacks (previously shown) and now the purse/lunchbox landing/launch pad, which leaves room for the step stool (required by the shorter members of the team, such as myself.)

We have a routine for making coffee the night before and the new coffee/beverage station near the 2nd sink:

...is working well and minimizing the morning kitchen jumble (which I mostly didn't mind - it was like an elaborate dance, but the kitchen is definitely less congested now and the odds that someone will end up wearing hot coffee are at least somewhat mitigated.)

The dishwasher is consistently unloaded and reloaded, and running on a very frequent if not regular basis. We even have a child putting her own dishes in the dishwasher on a regular basis (10 points to Slytherin!).  There is a lot of cooking AND a lot of cleaning up going on.  Sometimes I’ll be cooking and someone will delightfully come along and start cleaning up the prep stuff while I am still making pancakes.  I love this.

There is also laundry.  How many times have I complained about laundry?  A lot, probably.  And yet we are managing to stay on top of it, even with clothes for 7 in the house.  Socks continue to be a challenge and those of us who are sorting and matching them on a regular basis (20 points to Hufflepuff!) are getting more ruthless about saying “Whose are these anyway?  I don’t know.  They’re going away.”  And putting them in the donation basket.  Because we need to be able to quickly decide whose socks are whose.  And as Scott said:  "Their drawers are overflowing."  That, as Scott also says, is a true story.  So we can say “These are too small.  These have a hole.  These are too ambiguous.  Off they go.” and feel like we are improving the situation rather than depriving anyone of socks that they will miss.

So far, there are not that many specifically assigned daily tasks.  I think mostly we are all assuming the responsibility for loading or unloading the dishwasher as we go and as we can.  It's a sort of "Shared Responsibility" philosophy that flies in the face of reason - I mean, if it is not someone's specific job, who is going to do it?  And the answer, so far at least is:  whoever is around, notices the thing that needs doing and is able to do it.  One of the reasons this is potentially a good thing is that the adults in the house take turns being just utterly swamped with various things.  In the past, if the person whose job it was to load the dishwasher or fold the laundry or make the dinner was too busy to do it...it just didn't happen unless someone else got fed up with their not doing "their job."  One of the reasons this is potentially a bad thing is that it's vague, not clearly delineated and doesn't teach accountability?  I don't know.  Maybe we're already on the way with getting the kids to sort their laundry into the system and put the dishes into the dishwasher as they generate them.  Step one, as it were?  We can't start where they ought to be, we have to start where each of us is.

I also took a day out this past weekend to crank out a little artwork for an exhibit that opens Friday in association with a play called "Intrigue With Faye," at nimbus theatre in Minneapolis.  It's produced by 20% Theatre Company (I am currently serving on their board) and includes artwork from people involved in the production and the company.  The assignment:  Start with a photo, then create an artistic interpretation of that photo.  The idea is to look at the idea of perception.

I asked my good friend, amazing photographer Austin Robinson-Coolidge (who also happens to be the husband of my co-blogger) if he would like to collaborate with me on this, and he agreed, sending me several photos from which to choose.  Maybe I'll post a photo of the pieces once it is all up.  I am dropping off for installation tonight!

Even though I don't have pictures of bad toiletries or kitchen things or whatever for you today, I will share with you one of my Pathetic Ongoing Resolutions:  Use the lotion.  Seriously.  Cleaning out the cabinets in the old house makes me realize:  If I have this lotion, I'd better use it.  I have hand lotion pumps in the kitchen that I have always used, and some wonderful Burt's Bees hand creme (A gift from Dorian when I was spending a little time with her cat while she was on a trip) that I use on a regular basis, but the other lotion...well, usually I am just out of the shower, dry, dressed and out the door.  I gotta take a minute to put on some lotion or else the rest of the lotion is never going anywhere except the trash.  So there we go:  Use All the Lotions!!!

Generally, in spite of the chaos and the daily challenge of figuring out who is picking up whom from which schools and activities...there is, it feels like, some sort of rhyme and reason to a lot of life now.  And that? That is kind of nice.