A great start to 2016.

So I cleared out the house this weekend. Mark and Mylo exited, leaving me with 12 months of accumulated crud to tackle, with a huge side helping of Christmas presents and and holiday icing dirt to finish. What an appealing prospect. Well, from the point of view of being an autie it was. One of the things I get genuine pleasure from is restoring order from the chaos, and man things had got chaotic over the last 2 weeks.

We live in the same building as my partner runs his business from, as well as having a toddler, our living space has to be multi-functional. We have a fairly modern house which includes a through living room cum diner so can’t even designate one of two spaces for working and the other for living. Over 48 hours our living room is a lounge, dining space, photographic studio, office, exercise room, playroom, and dispatch bay. Keeping the oasis of calm I relish is all but impossible, so we have all had to compromise a bit. The main one I ask is that we practice toy rotation. At any time about 60% of Mylo’s toys were packed away, but we still had too many. Christmas was just the straw that broke the camel’s back so, everything came out, got sorted, and packed into plastic storage boxes (a bargain from Aldi, half the price of Homebase). It was a strange feeling of space having a house with no toys in it – a phenomenon not experienced in over 3 years.

I decided to go for it and tackled a few more jobs. Everywhere has been spring cleaned – no dust balls. I took all of the extra stuff that has been stored in the main bedroom when we moved my son into his new room 10 months ago. We were still co-sleeping until recently, but have made the decision to let him have his own room, and on the whole it has been a success. Now all his clothes, treasure and books are organised. The wardrobes have been turfed out and a few hideous shirts belonging to my partner have gone to a better place in the charity shop down the road. Luckily he rarely reads this blog and would give up before this point so I should be safe. Two sets of drawers have been moved downstairs, one to store the business odd and ends in the living room, the other TBC. My son’s room has been cleared and I’ve bought the paint to decorate; a lovely shade of blue called Javan Dawn 2. I also found an indoor Jasmine looking forlorn in the reduced section which smells divine –  now located on my desk whilst I type. So much nicer than a Glade plug-in. I also put together a bunch of stuff from around the house that will really brighten up the living room. It ended up being a bit brown and beige – not a look I rate excessively.

I’ve been spending a bit more time on myself recently. I have been growing my hair. It just reached my shoulders and I think that it has brought out more of my femininity.  I put some earring in for the first time in age and have even found time for make-up! If you see the image in the side panel you can see how short my hair was 3 years ago. I think it was just a reaction to being so busy, with moving house and being really ill, renovating a property with a 3 month old, anti-social neighbours for 2 years. You name it, we did it.

My last treat to myself was a BurgerKing. Real food resumes tomorrow and I haven’t done a scrap of shopping since Christmas Eve. I’ll leave you with the hilarious proofread fail I spotted on the menu.

Happy New Year!