MOTHERWISE....
A Humorous Look at Life With Kids
  While I’m Thinking About It…..                                                
                                          Kim McLapp                                             

 One of my most-used sayings these days is, “While I’m thinking about it.”  If I don’t do something right away or give myself a reminder to do it later, it will leave my mind completely until it’s too late.  I guess that’s because I’m too busy going in all directions, so I’ve overloaded my brain and used up all of my memory space. 

                If you could see my kitchen, you’d think I decorated it in sticky notes.  Like Cruella  Deville, I leave memos to myself everywhere-buy cat food, call Grandma, pick up dry cleaning…and the list goes on.

                 I try to organize my notes and “stuff”, as if neat piles of papers would somehow blend in and no one would notice the clutter.  I even bought a dry erase board to hang by the phone to cut down on all the sticky notes, but somehow it ended up looking like a big collage of sticky notes on the wall.  Then I utilized baskets to collect stuff on the counter but I couldn’t find anything that I put in them, and the “out of sight, out of mind” theory came into play.  The baskets eventually came to be known by my husband as the “Baskets of Doom.”

                One day I broke the record for organizing.  I couldn’t sleep, so I got up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning and set out to conquer the clutter. I made coffee and got a burst of energy.  I was so excited that I had time all to myself while everyone was asleep; no interruptions for at least two and a half hours.  I could start something and actually finish it in the same day.  Maybe I could organize the whole house.

                First, I started with the baby’s bottles.  I put all the pieces in a pan on the stove to boil so they would  be sterilized for the day.  Then I set about organizing all the kitchen drawers.  I ran across something that belonged in the office area in the basement, so, while I was thinking about it, I took it right down stairs. 

Once down in the office, I noticed the desk was a big mess, so I started to straighten up.  One thing led to another, and I got side-tracked.  Finally, the desk was clean and ready to get cluttered again.

                On the way back up the stairs, I heard something sizzling.  I wondered what it could be.  The only thing I could think of was that my husband must be making breakfast and thought, “How sweet of him.”  I quickly came back to reality, though, and realized he would never get up that early on a Saturday morning.

                As I ran up the stairs, I saw smoke filling the kitchen.  My next thought was, “The coffee pot must have caught on fire.”  But once the smell of burning rubber surrounded me, I remembered: I forgot to set the timer for the baby’s bottles.  Needless to say, the water had boiled down to nothing.  The house smelled like a stock car race track and the fire alarms went off.

                My husband woke up.  My son woke up.  The dog barked.  The cat hid under the bed.  We opened the windows (in February) to air out the house.  The baby woke up and wanted a bottle, so I had to go to the grocery store to buy more bottles.

                I guess I should have set the timer on the stove “while I was thinking about it!”  Here’s to doing 10 things at one time!

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